Thinking with Kierkegaard: Existential Philosophy, Phenomenology, and Ethics 9783110793895, 9783110793574

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Arne Grøn Thinking with Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard Studies

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

Monograph Series 44 Edited by Heiko Schulz

Arne Grøn

Thinking with Kierkegaard Existential Philosophy, Phenomenology, and Ethics Edited by Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen and René Rosfort

ISBN 978-3-11-079357-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-079389-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-079418-2 ISSN 1434-2952 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946197 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Tabula Gratulatoria

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Thinking with Kierkegaard: Introduction and Chapter Overview Arne Grøn’s Bibliography Editorial Comments

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Acknowledgments and Sources Abbreviations

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LI

Part One: Existential Philosophy Chapter 1 The Concept of Existence

3

Chapter 2 Existence and Dialectics

23

Chapter 3 The Human Synthesis Chapter 4 Self and Identity

37

44

Chapter 5 Spirit and Temporality in The Concept of Anxiety

77

Chapter 6 The Embodied Self: Reformulating the Existential Difference in Kierkegaard 88 Chapter 7 Temporality in Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses

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Chapter 8 Mediated Immediacy?

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Chapter 9 Ein Leben zu führen: Kierkegaard und der Begriff des Lebens Chapter 10 Zweideutigkeiten der Angst

134

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Chapter 11 Subjektivität und Un-Wahrheit

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Chapter 12 Religion und Subjektivität – in existenzieller und pragmatischer Perspektive 185 Chapter 13 Paradox des Denkens – paradoxes Denken

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Part Two: Phenomenology Chapter 14 Self-Givenness and Self-Understanding: Kierkegaard and the Question of Phenomenology 217 Chapter 15 Phenomenology of Despair – Phenomenology of Spirit

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Chapter 16 Time, Courage, Selfhood: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s Discourse “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience” 255 Chapter 17 The Relation Between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness Unto Death 270 Chapter 18 Transcendence of Thought: The Project of Philosophical Fragments

286

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Chapter 19 Der Begriff Verzweiflung

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Chapter 20 Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?

330

Chapter 21 Phänomenologie der Subjektivität. Überlegungen zu Kierkegaards Ab355 handlung über die menschliche Freiheit Chapter 22 Zeit und Transzendenz

371

Chapter 23 Das Transzendenzproblem bei Kierkegaard und beim späten Schelling 384

Part Three: Ethics Chapter 24 Ethics of Vision

405

Chapter 25 Ethics of In-Visibility

418

Chapter 26 The Dialectic of Recognition in Works of Love Chapter 27 Dialectics of Recognition: Selfhood and Alterity Chapter 28 Repetition and the Concept of Repetition

452

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Chapter 29 The Ethical Demand: Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas

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Chapter 30 Subjectivity, Interiority, and Exteriority: Kierkegaard and Levinas

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Chapter 31 Time and History

530

Chapter 32 Future of Hope – History of Hope Chapter 33 Kierkegaards „zweite“ Ethik

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Chapter 34 Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun?

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Chapter 35 Un-sichtbar. Den Nächsten sehen

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Index

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Tabula Gratulatoria Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Søren Kierkegaard Selskabet, Denmark Svend Andersen, Aarhus University, Denmark Emil Angehrn, University of Basel, Switzerland Günter Bader, University of Bonn, Germany Søren Kjær Bruun, Frederiksberg Campus, Denmark Pierre Bühler, University of Zürich, Switzerland Marianne Christiansen, Denmark Ingolf U. Dalferth, Claremont Graduate University & University of Zürich, USA & Switzerland Iben Damgaard, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Hermann Deuser, University of Erfurt, Germany Troels Engberg-Pedersen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Niels Nymann Eriksen, Apostelkirken, Denmark Hans Fink, Aarhus University, Denmark Henrik Vase Frandsen, Aarhus University, Denmark Joakim Garff, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Dorothea Glöckner, Farum Kirke, Denmark Niels Henrik Gregersen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Niels Grønkjær, Philosopher of Religion, Denmark Mads Gram Henriksen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Eberhard Harbsmeier, Løgumkloster, Denmark Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen, Aarhus University, Denmark Isak Winkel Holm, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Hans Raun Iversen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Mads Peter Karlsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Markus Kleinert, University of Erfurt, Germany Johanne Stubbe T. Kristensen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark José Justo Miranda, University of Lisbon, Portugal Marius Timmann Mjaaland, University of Oslo, Norway Kirsten Busch Nielsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Anne Louise Nielsen, University of Basel, Switzerland Carsten Pallesen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Josef Parnas, University of Copenhagen, Denmark George Pattison, University of Glasgow, Scotland (UK) Birgitte Kvist Poulsen, Holmens Kirke, Denmark Wenche Marit Quist, PhD in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, Denmark Sverre Raffnsøe, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Anders Moe Rasmussen, Aarhus University Press, Denmark Joachim Ringleben, University of Göttingen, Germany Ettore Rocca, University of Reggio Calabria, Italy René Rosfort, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Hans Ruin, Södertörn University, Sweden Herman Schmid, PhD in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, Denmark Borut Škodlar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-001

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Elisabete M. de Sousa, University of Lisbon, Portugal Werner Stegmaier, University of Greifswald, Germany Anna Louise Strelis Söderquist, St. Olaf College, USA K. Brian Söderquist, St. Olaf College, USA Pia Søltoft, Christians Kirke, Denmark Asger Sørensen, Aarhus University, Denmark Morten Sørensen Thaning, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Claudia Welz, Aarhus University, Denmark Jakob Wolf, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Thinking with Kierkegaard: Introduction and Chapter Overview This book is a collection of Arne Grøn’s English and German essays on Søren Kierkegaard written over a period of more than three decades, from the early 1980s and well into the 21st century. Grøn’s work on Kierkegaard represents a rare strand in the reception of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Contrary to predominant approaches in Kierkegaard studies, Grøn’s engagement with Kierkegaard is not primarily concerned with interpreting particular themes of the authorship, exploring Kierkegaard’s life or the literary character of his writings, examining Christian motifs or interpreting Kierkegaard’s focus on central concepts in the history of philosophy and theology. He is more interested in thinking with Kierkegaard than about Kierkegaard. This is not to say that Grøn does not acknowledge the importance of analyzing the textual and historical dimensions of Kierkegaard’s authorship. However, while being firmly rooted in Kierkegaard’s texts, Grøn’s engagement with Kierkegaard takes Kierkegaard beyond Kierkegaard and even sometimes against Kierkegaard. The recurrent argument in Grøn’s approach to Kierkegaard – and a guiding theme throughout the essays collected in this volume – is that a human being is not simply who she is. Human identity is both an existential problem that we struggle with and an ethical task that demands something of us. Existence is a key concept in Kierkegaard’s authorship, and Grøn wants to show that Kierkegaard’s texts not only explore existential phenomena that are important to human life, and yet easily overlooked, but also explicitly address the reader who struggles to understand such phenomena in becoming the self that she is. The multiplicity of themes, polyphony of even contradicting voices, polemic pathos, reflective trajectories, and rhetorical devices make Kierkegaard’s texts exciting to read, but difficult to work with. The textual universe is so rich and suggestive that the reader can easily be seduced into the world of Kierkegaard’s authors. Despite the alluring character of Kierkegaard’s authorship, making his texts susceptible to so many different interpretations, what Grøn attempts to explore in thinking with Kierkegaard is the existential challenge at play in the texts themselves. When Kierkegaard repeatedly writes that a human being is an existential individual who must come to an understanding of herself in existence, the reader first has to ask herself about what existence means. What Grøn sees in Kierkegaard’s texts is an invitation to think with him about human existence, rather than merely accepting, repeating, or even clarifying his arguments. Kierkegaard’s texts speak to the reader, as it were, allowing her to reflect on the problem of making sense of her life. Reading Kierkegaard https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-002

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is therefore an opportunity to confront oneself with the existential concerns that have sustained the interest in Kierkegaard for two centuries. It is this insistence on the existential urgency of Kierkegaard’s authorship that best characterizes Grøn’s approach to Kierkegaard, and sets it apart from other approaches to the Danish thinker. What is at stake in thinking with Kierkegaard is to rediscover the existential urgency at play in Kierkegaard’s texts. Especially important in this rediscovery is the combined effort of close reading and a systematic approach that aims at uncovering phenomena, questions, and problems that have been forgotten or neglected in the reception of Kierkegaard’s authorship. This rediscovery is not concerned with uncovering the “actual” or “true” Kierkegaard or establishing the correct interpretation of some aspect, concept or theme of the authorship. It is also not an attempt at applying Kierkegaard’s thought to topics unrelated to his texts, let alone an awkward attempt to make his authorship relevant today. Grøn’s argument is that Kierkegaard’s texts point beyond themselves by opening perspectives for the reader to acknowledge and appropriate the existential challenges that the texts deal with. Kierkegaard’s treatment of key concepts such as anxiety, love, despair, hope, joy and so on encourages the reader to reconsider those concepts in such a way that the reader employs these texts as challenges to one’s own self-understanding. We are, in other words, confronted with ourselves in the texts, and appropriating the texts is to engage in self-understanding. On Grøn’s reading, Kierkegaard is first and foremost an existential philosopher. While Kierkegaard is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of existential philosophy and existentialism, the existential character of his work is neither straightforward nor self-evident. In fact, Grøn spends much effort on detaching Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy from the existential tradition that he inspired. Categorizing Kierkegaard as an existential philosopher, or even an existentialist, risks paralyzing the existential urgency of his work by trying to fit his texts into a tradition with preconceived ideas about what existence means. In this way, we fail to notice that existence is not only a concept or a philosophical approach, but also a way of relating ourselves to the world, other people, and ourselves. Trying to make sense of the Kierkegaardian corpus, placing it in a tradition or interpreting it, entails the risk of forgetting that reading texts also is an existential endeavor of coming to understand oneself in existence. Grøn proposes a radical reading of the texts that we thought we knew or understood. Thinking with Kierkegaard does not primarily consist in thinking about what others have thought about Kierkegaard, but is a return to the questions at work in Kierkegaard’s texts. The hermeneutical tension between text and existence becomes fruitful in that the texts make us question our existential con-

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cerns, while those same concerns guide and challenge our reading. Allowing the texts to question us, while questioning the texts can help us to rediscover or discover what we have forgotten, overlooked or neglected in reading Kierkegaard, namely that the texts concern us, that is, the aforementioned existential urgency at work in the texts. Grøn identifies the existential character of the texts with a fundamental phenomenological motive in Kierkegaard’s thought, namely that we need to return “to the things themselves” (“zu den Sachen selbst”). This return to the things themselves puts into question that which has come in between us and those very things we want to understand. For Grøn, Kierkegaard’s phenomenology is concerned with the dialectics – and at times explicit conflict – between concepts and phenomena at work in Kierkegaard’s way of doing philosophy. His texts are populated by figures in movement, and as texts they are in movement themselves. They are also texts that move us, because the movements they instantiate, describe, and analyze are movements we do with ourselves. A critical feature of the phenomenological character of Kierkegaard’s texts consists in the way they challenge our self-understanding by questioning the way we experience the world, other people, and ourselves. Our experience is dependent upon conceptual structures and inherited knowledge that we have a tendency to take for granted, which – as already mentioned – make us blind to the existential challenges at stake in those very structures. Grøn wants us to read Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist who can help us to become aware of the ways in which we have become or even made ourselves blind to serious problems in our self-understanding. We therefore not only have to read beyond or against Kierkegaard to think with Kierkegaard. We must also be willing to read with, about, and against ourselves when reading Kierkegaard. Grøn is of course aware that Kierkegaard not only (re)discovers existential questions that we have forgotten, neglected or chosen to disregard or phenomenologically analyze the tension between concepts and phenomena in our self-understanding. The authorship also possesses a deep-seated ethical character, and it is safe to say that the ethical dimension of Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy and phenomenology is fundamental to Grøn’s approach. To think with Kierkegaard is, for Grøn, to take seriously the ethical demands involved in our existential questions. Our sense for questions is, or at least must be, ethically accentuated because the other person is at stake in our attempt to understand our own existential concerns. Kierkegaard is a Christian writer, and his ethics is perhaps the most explicitly Christian elements in the authorship. While being sensitive to the Christian dimension of the authorship, Grøn is a philosopher who is primarily interested in bringing out the philosophical implications of the Christian foundation of Kierkegaard’s thought.

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There are two principal aspects to Grøn’s take on Kierkegaard’s ethics. The first aspect concerns the normative character of Kierkegaard’s approach to subjectivity and selfhood. The existential urgency of his work springs from the normative character of human experience. Human experience is not normatively neutral or objective, but always entangled with existential concerns and as such subjective. My experiences challenge me as the individual person that I am. I am not simply who I am or who I conceive myself to be. I must become the person I am. This first aspect of Kierkegaard’s ethics is concerned with the fragile character of human identity, which in turn is connected with subjectivity. We experience ourselves, and our experiences are constitutive of our identity, which means that objective approaches to our identity are constantly disturbed by subjectivity. As Kierkegaard – and in particular Johannes Climacus – never tires to repeat, our existential task is to become subjective. Becoming subjective is to acknowledge the normative challenges that constitute human existence. To exist is not only to become subjective, however, but also to become the self that we are. The relation between subjectivity and selfhood is constitutive of human identity in the sense that we are constantly trying to become the self that we are by relating to ourselves in our relation to the world and other people. The notion of selfhood brings out the second aspect of Grøn’s approach to Kierkegaard’s ethics. To become the self that we are is an explicit ethical task. Our identity is neither a fact nor a choice, but an ethical task that involves both possibilities and demands. We have to become the self that we already are, that is, an embodied and situated self immersed in a history we have not chosen, but that we are obligated to take upon ourselves in our existence. While the first aspect of Grøn’s approach deals with the normative character of human subjectivity, the second is concerned with Kierkegaard’s ethics, especially as it is formulated in Kierkegaard’s work on ethics, namely Works of Love. Grøn interprets Kierkegaard’s radical reformulation of neighbor love as an ethics of vision. Self-understanding is a question of understanding or, as Grøn emphasizes, to see the other person as an other, that is, different from me in her similarity to me. My existence is inescapably entangled with the other person, and my identity depends upon the other. This collection of essays has been organized into three parts corresponding to the three major themes in Grøn’s work on Kierkegaard: existential philosophy, phenomenology, and ethics. These three themes are more or less explicitly present in most of the essays because of the complex interplay of existential, phenomenological, and ethical aspects of Grøn’s endeavor to think with Kierkegaard. The threefold structure reflects the thematic emphasis in each essay acknowledging that a strict division between these three strands in Grøn’s work is not possible. The existential urgency of the texts is inherently related

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to the ethically accentuated character of human experience. Ethics is not possible without phenomenology because of the experiential character of ethical demands, and ethics is inherent in phenomenology in virtue of the normative character of experience. Arne Grøn’s reading of Kierkegaard does not tell us what to think about Kierkegaard, but invite us to think about the experiential concerns and ethical demands at stake in human existence.¹ Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen and René Rosfort

Chapter Overview Part One: Existential Philosophy Chapter 1. The Concept of Existence This essay looks at Kierkegaard’s existential approach examining his conceptualization of human existence, that is, the intertwinement of the difficulty of existence and that of thinking (existence). It defines the concept of existence features: to be in becoming, to be oneself – in becoming, and, finally, to exist is to appear as oneself, to stand forward. It argues for a double movement: understanding the concept of existence through the question of the human condition, and clarifying the conceptuality of this concept in terms of a formal indication. We ourselves come to appear in stepping forward in what we do. To exist in the decisive, existential sense is to stand or to step forward in the world into which we are born, and to stand out from the world in which we are situated. Or to put it in more Kierkegaardian terms: it is to exist situated in existence. We are the ones to exist. In existing, we face an open question and the task of becoming manifest in what we do. Situated in existence we ourselves are to step forward. This means that, for Kierkegaard, existential thinking is concerned with what it means to exist, and we as existing individuals must take into account that existing makes – or should make – us think.

 For a more comprehensive treatment of Arne Grøn’s work (also the parts of his work that do not deal with Kierkegaard), see Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen, Mads Peter Karlsen, and René Rosfort, “Arne Grøn’s Existential Hermeneutics: Existence, Ethics and Religion,” Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, vol. 53, 2020, pp. 108 – 132.

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Chapter 2. Existence and Dialectics This essay attempt to clarify Kierkegaard’s existential approach by analyzing two key concepts in the authorship: existence and dialectics. A detailed analysis of central paragraphs in the Postscript attempts to define the two concepts and their interrelation in Kierkegaard’s work. The opposition between existence and thought is a primary concern for Kierkegaard, but the significance of this opposition is complex and manifold. To be human is both to exist and to think, and the difficulty of human existence resides in the tension between these two foundational aspects of being human. There is a decisive difference between thinking oneself away from the difficulty in existing or maintaining it. This difference has an existential significance. The problem of existing becomes a question about understanding myself as the existing being that I am. Existence is particularly difficult because of the peculiar circumstance that I can forget what it means to exist while I exist. It therefore becomes an urgent existential task to appropriate one’s existence. Human existence is dialectical and as such doubly accentuated. First, existence is subjective meaning that to exist is not merely a fact, but a normative requirement. The self must become itself, which is something that it already is. Secondly, the self is not merely a problem, but also an explicit ethical task that I cannot avoid in my existence. Chapter 3. The Human Synthesis This essay examines the significance of Kierkegaard’s definition of the human being as a synthesis. It is generally recognized that the definition of the human being as a synthesis is a critical dimension of Kierkegaard’s anthropology, and much research has been done on the relation between the two central formulations of the definition of synthesis: a synthesis of soul and body and a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal. A more basic question, however, concerns what it actually means that the human being is a synthesis. The human being is a synthesis because she is an “intermediate being,” that is, a being who relates herself to herself as finite and infinite. Moreover, the synthetic character of the human being points to the problematic structure of subjectivity. This problem concerns the fact that the human being is confronted with the challenge of being herself in the sense of being one with herself. Most importantly, however, this existential problem entails another dimension of the synthesis, namely the fundamental experience of oneself as an other. The human being exists in time, and this temporal character of human existence entails that we experience ourselves through bodily change. We become separated from ourselves over time meaning that we experience ourselves as an other in time. The synthesis is thus the expression of the fragile character of human identity

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Chapter 4. Self and Identity This essay deals with the problem of self-identity. This question is explored as a problem of the identity o f a self, focusing on the very approach to the issue of self-identity. The argument is that the problem of self-identity is part of being a self. The difficulty in approaching the problem of self-identity tells us something about what it is to be a self. The problem of identity leads back to the problem of time changing our world, others, and ourselves. It becomes a question of what it is like to be a self. We cannot account for what it is to be a self without taking seriously the problem of identity. What we describe as a self is what it is through the problem of identity. This means that the problem of identity is not simply a matter of description, which we could resolve if we were to describe what we observe in an adequate manner. On the contrary, an adequate description would have to deal with the problem of identity. Self-identity is a matter of self-understanding meaning that the problem of being oneself is intrinsic to selfhood. This means that examining the problem of self-identity needs to take into account the ways in which the concepts of self and identity complicate not merely the relation between them, but also each other. Chapter 5. Spirit and Temporality in The Concept of Anxiety This essay delves into the relation between spirit and temporality in The Concept of Anxiety. Although Kierkegaard did not write a book called The Concept of Spirit, references to the concept of spirit play a crucial role in The Concept of Anxiety. Spirit is not a theme in itself, but it is implicit in the main themes of the book such as anxiety, the human being as a synthesis, and sin. In fact, the concept of spirit connects the main themes. If The Concept of Anxiety is not a book on the concept of spirit, it is a book showing the significance of the concept of spirit. However, the references to the concept of spirit do not explain its significance. They often have an almost enigmatic character. A radical notion of human finitude is at work in the book, as it is in all of Kierkegaard’s writings. A human being is exposed to time, but she is exposed to time as spirit. The key problem can thus be indicated as the problem of spirit and temporality. This means that finitude is a human condition, but human finitude has an infinite significance that complicates the finitude that we are. As spiritually determined, a human being is not simply finite, but spirit itself is, on the other hand, bound to finitude because it has a history.

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Chapter 6. The Embodied Self: Reformulating the Existential Difference in Kierkegaard This essay discusses challenges and problems of human embodiment by reformulating elements of Kierkegaard’s theory of subjectivity. Kierkegaard critically develops a Hegelian model of the human mind that exteriorizes itself in history and language as well as in action and speech. The human self is out there in the world and not to be found in some inner core. This does not, however, make the notions of self and interiority obsolete. On the contrary, in order to understand human exteriority, we need to readdress our understanding of a human self. It is here that we can find critical resources in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the human self as self-relation. To be a self is to relate oneself to others and to a world in between, and to relate to oneself in those relations. This means that human consciousness is embodied in being embedded in a social, historical, and cultural context. A human being lives her life by relating herself to herself as an embodied and temporal being. Another insight from Kierkegaard is that human embodiment with its intrinsic history is a matter of concern. Human beings are concerned with their embodied existence in the world. The existential challenge of being in the world lies in the critical difference between being present and not being present, and being ourselves requires that we appropriate ourselves as embodied and temporal beings. Chapter 7. Temporality in Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses This essay investigates the peculiar way temporality features in Kierkegaard’s 1843 – 44 edifying discourses. Temporality does not appear to be a prominent theme in the discourses in that they are not discourses on temporality. Implicitly, however, the edifying discourses deal with the problem of time. They describe phenomena such as patience and anticipation (forventning) as ways of relating to time. They also represent characters who experience the problem of time and temporal processes that elicit existential challenges. The edifying discourses represent an indirect approach to temporality, dealing with the experience of time and not a theory of time. This indirect approach concerns both the relation between subjectivity and temporality and the relation between faith and experience. The description of the experience of time shows, that the problem of time is ethically defined. The edifying works reveal that time is not something we simply experience. Time does not simply happen to us. Time is something we use. Human existence is temporal, and the existing person lives her life in time, and is as such a finite being. Time defines us according to the things, which make us human: passion, love, hope, and faith. And it is precisely these universally human characteristics that are at the core of the edifying project.

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Chapter 8. Mediated Immediacy? The Problem of a Second Immediacy This essay focuses on the relationship between immediacy and reflection in Kierkegaard in order to reflect upon the problem of a second immediacy. At first sight, second immediacy may appear to play a straightforward role in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Faith is a second or new immediacy. But then again, faith is not simple in Kierkegaard, but connected with the dialectics of immediacy and reflection. If a second immediacy is a later immediacy, an immediacy after reflection, what then is the role played by reflection in this second immediacy? Immediacy points to the limit of reflection, and yet immediacy is itself a reflective category. This dialectics of immediacy and reflection discloses the dialectical constitution of human selfhood. The primitive character of the first-person perspective manifest itself as an immediacy that cannot be thought, and yet being a self requires appropriating the first-person perspective. Selfhood is at the same time immediately given and something we must reflectively appropriate. Second immediacy thus assumes a normative qualification concerning how we look at the world and especially how we see the other person. The immediacy of vision is changed through reflection becoming a second immediacy through an ethical transformation of self-understanding. Reflection is broken in the sense that our vision is redirected. Second immediacy thus has to do with the indirect and receptive character of becoming oneself. Chapter 9. Ein Leben zu führen: Kierkegaard und der Begriff des Lebens This essay explores how the concept of life challenges our preconceived ideas of what life is. Trying to understand what it means to live one’s life changes our life. Taking its point of departure in Kierkegaard’s concept of existence, it is argued that life cannot directly be translated into the register of existence and vice versa. Life only plays an indirect role in the understanding of what existence means. We exist against the background of life or, more precisely, we exist by standing out from the life that we have been given trying to understand our life while living it. This does not mean that life is secondary to existence, but that we do something with life when we try to understand it. Through an exegetical and systematic engagement with a wide variety of Kierkegaard’s works, the essay attempts to show how the concept of existence does not deem talk about life irrelevant or unimportant, but rather allows us to develop surprising perspectives on what it means to live a human life. It also makes us aware that one of the dangers involved in our philosophical interest in the concept of life is the risk of forgetting what it means to exist. In other words, thinking existence and life together brings out the concerns and demands that come with our endeavor to live our lives as existing beings.

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Chapter 10. Zweideutigkeiten der Angst This essay reflects upon Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, and why he dedicates an entire book to this concept. The argument is that the concept of anxiety is intimately connected with Kierkegaard’s theory of subjectivity, and that examining this relationship allows us to reopen the question about what it means to be a subject. Kierkegaard defines anxiety as the experience of freedom, and he uses the concept of anxiety to explore ambiguities and problems of human freedom. Of particular interest is the peculiar circumstance that a human being can be of two minds, that is, wanting something that she does not want. This experiential ambiguity discloses human identity as a fragile identity consisting of heterogeneous elements that the individual tries to hold together in existing as a human subject. Kierkegaard’s famous definition of the human subject as a synthesis allows him to explore the existential challenge expressed in the experience of anxiety, namely the ambiguity of passivity and activity in human freedom. This ambiguity is critical to Kierkegaard’s reflections upon the leap as the difficult realization of human possibilities. We are not immediately who we are. We only become ourselves through choices, and our choices often prove to be mistaken or insufficient. In our ambiguous possibility to be free, we are therefore confronted with the limits of our human condition. In this way, anxiety becomes the subject’s self-disclosure as a subject of anxiety. Chapter 11. Subjektivität und Un-Wahrheit This essay examines Kierkegaard’s definition “subjectivity is truth” by emphasizing the twist to the definition that Kierkegaard adds, and that seems to contradict the first, namely that “subjectivity is untruth.” A detailed analysis of these definitions shows not that the second definition suspends the first, but that the second is the way in which the first definition is to begin. The argument is that the relation between truth and subjectivity is complex because the two concepts depend upon and modify each other. Analyzing the interplay between “subjectivity as truth” and “subjectivity as untruth” in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript allows for taking a step backwards to another beginning to the question of subjectivity. The question of subjectivity is reopened in the connection between the two sentences disclosing how subjectivity escapes itself in the confrontation with the problem of truth. The essay seeks to answer whether Kierkegaard here offers a theory of truth. It is argued that while theories of truth encounter the problem of subjectivity, for Kierkegaard, subjectivity itself is questioned through the question of truth.

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Chapter 12. Religion und Subjektivität – in existenzieller und pragmatischer Perspektive This essay explores the ways in which subjectivity and naturalism challenge each other as philosophical approaches to human nature. The argument is that when we understand ourselves as nature, and when we reflect ourselves in the eyes of others, our lives are being transformed. This transformation, it is argued, is our decision only indirectly. The transformation takes on an existential-pragmatic dimension in that what we do when we understand ourselves either against or through nature, opens itself to us as a question in such a way that our subjectivity can no longer be taken for granted. This existential-pragmatic dimension entails that even when we do not take an active position towards who we are and our life in a world shared with other people, we still relate to ourselves. This dimension of relating-oneself-to-oneself discloses itself only in a radical, hermeneutical questioning of our understanding ourselves as being part of nature. With this hermeneutical dimension, the issue of subjectivity takes on a complexity that bears on how we think philosophically about religion as a human concern. The essay addresses the crucial question about what the subjective character of religion reveals about human subjectivity. Chapter 13. Paradox des Denkens – paradoxes Denken This essay explores the concept of paradox as a crucial moment of thinking about human possibility, which we as humans tend to forget. Rather than seeing paradox as an obstacle to thought, it is argued that the paradox becomes a countermove of thought itself. The paradox becomes a reminder that humans are able to forget what they do – even when thinking about the absolute or God. As a countermove, the paradox means that the absolute can be thought only indirectly. The absolute shows itself as being put into question for the one who attempts to think the absolute. The argument is that the demand of understanding that which cannot be understood shows itself as a question of understanding directed towards the human condition. The demand of understanding has to do with the human ability to forget. Another aspect of the human condition disclosed by the paradox is that the human being exists in time in such a way that time becomes a problem for human life. This opens the question of metaphysics as a way of thinking beyond time, which presupposes time as a problem to be thought.

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Part Two: Phenomenology Chapter 14. Self-Givenness and Self-Understanding: Kierkegaard and the Question of Phenomenology This essay examines the crucial, but often overlooked, relation between Kierkegaard and phenomenology, and especially the problem of subjectivity not merely as a foundation for our relating to the world, but also subjectivity as relation. The question of phenomenology is a question of beginnings and of how to get back to the things themselves (die Sachen selbst). Kierkegaard has played a pivotal role in twentieth-century phenomenology, especially for Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutical development of phenomenology. Kierkegaard’s texts examine negativity in terms of the ways in which we have forgotten what human subjectivity means, and Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology explores this negativity as that which comes between us and the things themselves. Subjectivity is not given as an object among objects, but as a relating ourselves to that which is given to us. Subjectivity is experienced as self-givenness in the twofold sense that I am both given to myself as the self that I find myself to be (passivity), and given to myself as the task to live with myself through the changes of my life (activity). What is surprising in Kierkegaard’s analysis is that he brings attention to the peculiar fact that self-understanding is a task because the self resists self-understanding. Accordingly, one can characterize Kierkegaard’s phenomenology as a negative phenomenology that examines the ethical and religious dimensions of self-givenness and self-understanding. Chapter 15. Phenomenology of Despair – Phenomenology of Spirit This essay undertakes to show the existential character of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology. Kierkegaard’s existential thinking has in a critical sense formed philosophy after Hegel, and yet it also reflects and critically develops central motifs in Hegel’s thought. What this means is an open question that cannot be answered in such a way as to be left behind. We should rather look at the negative approach in Kierkegaard’s existential thinking, first and foremost in his analysis of despair, and focus on how question and method are intertwined. In what sense are the figures of despair (Fortvivlelsens Skikkelser), described in The Sickness unto Death, figures of spirit, and can The Sickness unto Death be read as a phenomenology of despair in the context of a phenomenology of spirit? The essay is a re-reading of the negative analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death against the background of what is taken to be the negative point of departure in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The argument is that both in terms of method and question negativity becomes the key issue at

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stake in Kierkegaard’s phenomenology. This negative character of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology makes it a hermeneutical phenomenology that is existentially oriented in that it examines the ways a human being relates to herself in relating to the world. Chapter 16. Time, Courage, Selfhood: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s Discourse “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience” This essay is a reading of Kierkegaard’s discourse “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience” with the aim of showing that time is a general concern in Kierkegaard’s edifying discourses. In and of itself, time does not reveal what edification means, but there is a crucial connection between edification and the problem of time. What edification means can only be understood in the light of the problem, which time presents to human beings in their being human. The discourses seek to make sense of experiences of time in which time presents itself as a problem. This indirect method may be called phenomenological in that the edifying discourses describe experiences of time by describing and, to some extent, analyzing ways of relating to time. In order to bring the problems in question closer to the reader, the discourse seeks to bring into view what it talks about. There is method in Kierkegaard’s work in the edifying discourses. He endeavors to bring into view that we humans tend to overlook what is closest to us, namely our own ways of relating. The edifying discourse on preserving one’s soul in patience challenges a philosophical account of selfhood. It discloses that the question of selfhood concerns what we can do and actually are doing to ourselves. The critical insight is that one only preserves one’s soul against oneself. Chapter 17. The Relation Between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness Unto Death This essay looks at the structure of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, which is an overlooked aspect of the interpretation of this main work in Kierkegaard’s authorship. The argument is that the structural composition of the book, in particular the relation between the first and the second part of the book, has a crucial bearing upon the conception of selfhood developed in the book. The reception of the book often disregards or at least downplays the second part of the book, and when this part is included in the interpretation of the book, it is often characterized as a merely theological requalification of the philosophical analysis of despair carried out in the first part. It is worthwhile, though, to look more carefully at the relation between the philosophical and theological analysis of despair. Of particular interest is the fact that while the second part might seem to mirror the development in the first part, on closer scrutiny some-

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thing important happens to the analysis in the latter part. While the notion of spirit is present in both parts of the book, the critical role of the spirit as criterion (Maalestok) for the development of the consciousness of the self is elucidated in the second part. The intensification of despair that is developed in the second part makes it clear that Sickness unto Death is a phenomenology of spirit against the polemical backdrop of the spiritlessness of the age. Chapter 18. Transcendence of Thought: The Project of Philosophical Fragments This essay explores the thought-project concerning the absolute paradox that a human cannot think or imagine as it is developed by Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments. The project embodies the thought it seeks to transcend. The essay unfolds and discusses the implications of this project of a radical transcendence of thought. The argument is that transcendence and immanence are not two spheres. Transcendence is not a position that one can take, but announces itself in the untruth of subjectivity, in the limit where we encounter ourselves, and in the reversal of perspective where we ourselves become the addressee. Thinking embodies subjectivity inasmuch as it also carries the subjectivity that we are. The absolute paradox challenges human understanding, pointing to the human condition as the condition that must apply among humans, the condition of being human. It is argued that the transcendence of thought can be understood as a dialectics of the limit in the sense of the limit of the human. Transcendence, as the limit of the human, does not take us into a sphere that imagination or thought cannot enter. On the contrary, the dialectical point is that we can only be contradicted in the very act of imagining and thinking. The critical importance of understanding is emphasized in relation to the possibilities of non-understanding. If the paradox is not to be understood, it is still possible to misunderstand the paradox. Chapter 19. Der Begriff Verzweiflung This essay analyzes Kierkegaard’s figures of despair in The Sickness unto Death through an in-depth interpretation of Michael Theunissen’s seminal contributions to Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair, as well as to the discussion of how to read Kierkegaard. The essay critically discusses Theunissen’s critique that Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair does not pay sufficient attention to the passivity involved in despair. The argument is that Theunissen does not sufficiently recognize that Kierkegaard’s negativistic approach despair does in fact acknowledge a basic passivity in its analysis of fundamental forms of despair. Critical to this analysis is the role that passivity (Erleiden) and activity (Handeln) plays in the account of the human self as a self-relation. Kierkegaard’s argument

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that we must not despair is not neglecting the passivity involved in human suffering. It is possible to acknowledge this passivity of suffering, the fact that life happens to us (Widerfahrnis), and still argue that human beings have to live with suffering without falling into despair. The essay also addresses Theunissen’s claim that the phenomenological approach to despair does not pay sufficient attention to history. This claim is countered by indicating how history plays a decisive role in the experience of anxiety, as well as the phenomena of spirit and spiritlessness in Christianity serve to indicate the meaning of history in Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair. Chapter 20. Kierkegaards Phänomenologie? This essay raises the question whether it is possible to find a phenomenological method in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Through an examination of key aspects of phenomenology, the essay individuates two meanings of the word that are relevant to reading Kierkegaard. It is argued that phenomena such as courage, jealousy, hope, forgiveness, joy, anxiety, worry are described both in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous and edifying writings. A reading of The Concept of Anxiety demonstrates how his phenomenological method plays a role throughout the authorship, and not merely in the theoretical works. Kierkegaard’s descriptions are phenomenological in that they examine the constitutive tension between the conceptual and experiential dimensions of phenomena central to human life. This becomes particularly evident in Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with “negative phenomena” as both description and analysis of human self-relation. Moreover, it is argued that in Kierkegaard’s authorship there are elements of Hegelian phenomenology that describe and analyze forms of human consciousness. The Sickness unto Death is the most cogent example of Kierkegaard’s adoption and critical development of a Hegelian phenomenology. This attempt to connect Kierkegaard’s phenomenology with Hegelian phenomenology is not only to shed light on the relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard, but also to clarify the original phenomenological method that Kierkegaard deploys most prominently in his analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death. Chapter 21. Phänomenologie der Subjektivität. Überlegungen zu Kierkegaards Abhandlung über die menschliche Freiheit This essay examines the philosophical potential of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. Through a detailed investigation of the analysis of anxiety, two levels of the analysis are spelled out: anxiety has to do with freedom as possibility, while also concerning unfreedom. Through its negative form, it is argued that our unfree or limited freedom reveals something about the human condition: even

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when we are not free, we do something with ourselves. The argument is that the relationship of activity and passivity appears as a complex relation that requires a differentiated conceptual clarification. At the core of this challenge is the question of subjectivity of freedom. Insofar as subjectivity is defined as relating-tooneself, freedom is inevitable and ambiguous, in that being unfree is a phenomenon of freedom. Anxiety discloses the ambiguity of freedom as both passivity and activity and as such proves to be a key category in understanding the phenomenon of freedom. The argument is that Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety can be interpreted as a phenomenology of ambiguous subjectivity. Chapter 22. Zeit und Transzendenz This essay takes its cue from Michael Theunissen’s book on Pindar in which the notion of transcendence of time is unfolded. Considering Theunissen’s transcendence of time as a turning of time, the essay discusses the question concerning the human condition in two ways. First, with reference to Kierkegaard, and second, in a discussion of its implications for philosophy of religion. While time and transcendence are being thought together in a transcendence of time, the question remains what transcendence of time means. The essay begins with showing how transcendence is a problem. When seeking to address the problem of transcendence, the question emerges as to what transcendence is transcending, that is, what it is a transcendence of. The claim is that to think transcendence means not only to think it in relation to a transcendence of beings, let alone of the world, but rather to think it as detached from what it is transcending. Investigating this absolute sense of transcendence paves the way for a discussion of the aporetic structure of transcendence. Chapter 23. Das Transzendenzproblem bei Kierkegaard und beim späten Schelling This essay attempts to define the place and meaning of the problem of transcendence in Kierkegaard’s existential dialectics. Even though the concept of transcendence is a crucial element of such dialectics, the essay approaches transcendence as a question in two ways: through an understanding of human existence and through the movement of existence. The essay explores the question of what it means to conceive of transcendence as an existential movement, that is, what is it that it is transcending, and in what direction. This clarification of the concept of transcendence enables an analysis of the problem of transcendence in Schelling’s late philosophy. It is argued that the problem of transcendence becomes a central motivation for Kierkegaard’s coming to grips (Auseinandersetzung) with German Idealism. The problem of idealism as a problem of self-medi-

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ation in the subjectivity of thought is, however, also an issue in the late Schelling’s encounter with the problem of transcendence. The essay is structured around three thematic focal points: paradox and history, thought and paradox, and the structural synthesis of human existence.

Part Three: Ethics Chapter 24. Ethics of Vision This essay proposes a reading of Works of Love as the book in Kierkegaard’s authorship that provides us with the most elaborate and cogent account of his ethics. Situated at the intersection between the early and late part of the authorship, Works of Love develops and reconfigures the problem of the ethical at work in the early part of his production, while articulating the fundamental ethical character of his mature account of subjectivity. It is a key work that has a bearing upon the reading of Kierkegaard’s other works. In order to capture its import for the corpus as well as its own intrinsic merits, which challenge ethical reflection today, the essay advances two conjoined arguments: that Works of Love represents Kierkegaard’s so-called “second” ethics, and that this ethics is an ethics of vision. The first argument implies that Works of Love responds to the problem left open by the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety: What would ethics look like after the breakdown of ethics traced in the movement from Fear and Trembling to the Concept of Anxiety? The focus of this essay, however, will be on the second thesis, namely that we can interpret Works of Love as an ethics of vision that articulates the ethical significance of vision or the act of seeing. Chapter 25. Ethics of In-Visibility This essay examines the ethics at stake in vision. What does it mean to see and not to see, and what is the relation between visibility and invisibility. The argument is that although human beings share the condition of becoming visible to each other, there exists an asymmetry between the one and the other in our seeing each other. There is an ethical significance of vision that concerns what it means that one is the one seeing the other (singularity), and seeing that the other is other than the other we see (alterity). An ethics of vision is therefore an ethics of invisibility. We may overlook or become blind to the other in our “seeing” the other. The other is made invisible in her visibility, and the invisible in turn questions us in seeing what can be seen. Seeing the other as the other is a matter of seeing that she is in-visible and thus beyond us seeing her. In our seeing the other, the ethical demand is that we are turned against ourselves in the

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way we see the other. It is up to us to see the other as the other. Responding to the ethical demand in vision, we are to let ourselves be questioned in our ways of seeing. This does not mean that the ethical is of our making. The ethical is not a point of view that we may choose, but integral to vision itself. Chapter 26. The Dialectic of Recognition in Works of Love This essay explores the question of recognition in Works of Love. We do not find an explicit theory of sociality in Kierkegaard. What we do find has an indirect character in that Kierkegaard does not focus on, but presupposes the social world. Kierkegaard describes this world mainly negatively as a world in which we evaluate and judge each other. In seeing wrongly, one fixes the figure (skikkelse) of the other person so that she only is what we see her as. Vision plays a crucial role in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love by virtue of its normative or ethical significance, and Kierkegaard’s “second” ethics as an ethics after the breakdown of traditional ethics can be interpreted as an ethics of vision. The argument is that we can find a remodeled dialectic of recognition in this ethics of vision. In Works of Love, the dialectic of seeing others seeing oneself is viewed through negative phenomena such as arrogance and envy that make us blind to the other person in her individual otherness. This negative detour, however, points to the problem of recognition as an ethical one. It is our task to affirm the distinctiveness of the other. It is argued that ethical asymmetry allows for a positive concept of reciprocity, and that this ethical asymmetry not only presupposes a social world, it also challenges our world of vision. Chapter 27. Dialectics of Recognition: Selfhood and Alterity This essay discusses the complex, and at times strenuous, relationship between dialectics and recognition in the Hegelian legacy in modern philosophy. Kierkegaard is a controversial figure to bring into the discussion of Hegel, but the argument of the essay is that Kierkegaard’s work on the dialectics of recognition constitutes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Hegelian tradition. In fact, the dialectics of recognition is more than simply an instance of dialectics. It turns dialectics itself into a question. To bring Kierkegaard into this discussion is controversial because of the peculiar character of Kierkegaard’s dialectics. In fact, while dialectics is a prominent Kierkegaardian theme, as a dialectics of existence, it does not appear to be a dialectics of recognition. The problem of recognition, however, is of critical importance in especially Works of Love. Unfolding the dialectics of recognition as a dialectics of vision turns identity and difference into critical issues that affect and question dialectics itself. The challenge is to make sense of the role of vision in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the

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relation between recognition and dialectics. Recognizing the other person as another plays a critical role in the constitution of human selfhood, and the argument is that this dialectics of selfhood and alterity at work in recognition can be reformulated as a problem of human subjectivity. Chapter 28. Repetition and the Concept of Repetition This essay investigates the concept of repetition at work in Constantin Constantius’ book Repetition and in other pseudonymous works in Kierkegaard’s authorship. It is generally acknowledged that Repetition is a work complete in itself to a lesser extent than the other books in Kierkegaard’s authorship. The explicit aim of the book Repetition is to present and discuss the concept of repetition, and Repetition does discover a category, which is of decisive significance for the rest of Kierkegaard’s writings. One could ask, however, whether repetition as a concept developed and used in the authorship is inconsistent with Repetition as a book. This question, however, is not the primary topic of this essay. The argument is rather that in order to understand repetition as a concept, we must include other works than Repetition itself. Constantin Constantius himself uses repetition as a concept of epoch-making significance, constituting a boundary between the Greek and the modern world. Moreover, the concept has an ethical bearing. It is connected both with what Johannes Climacus in the Postscript calls “ethical despair,” and to what Vigilius Haufniensis calls a “second ethics” in The Concept of Anxiety. This ethical character of the concept discloses how the discovery of repetition as a new category is also (re)discovery of what Kierkegaard calls the category of spirit. Chapter 29. The Ethical Demand: Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas This essay examines the normativity of the ethical demand as a question of the ethical in the ethical demand. Two questions in particular are at play in the essay: How should we understand the position of the subject in the ethical demand? And how does the subjectivity implied go into an account of the normativity of the ethical demand? These questions structure the authorships of Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas, and looking at the similarities and differences in how these thinkers articulate the ethical demand allows for a detailed analysis of what the ethical actually means. While the three authors articulate the ethical in different ways (Kierkegaard as duty, Løgstrup as demand, and Levinas as appeal), common to all three is the argument that the ethical binds us against ourselves. We do not choose the ethical, but through the ethical demand we discover ourselves being committed beyond ourselves. Subjectivity, in other words, is not the source of normativity. Rather, normativity concerns the subject by re-

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directing the subject towards the other. The self is addressed by the ethical demand, and through the passivity of demand, the self draws itself into question. I can – and often I do – fail the ethical demand, and this very possibility of failure is integral to the demand itself, and as such how I relate myself to myself, that is, my subjectivity, is at stake in the ethical. Chapter 30. Subjectivity, Interiority, and Exteriority: Kierkegaard and Levinas This essay discusses the relationship between interiority and exteriority at stake in human subjectivity. Against the backdrop of Levinas’ critique of Kierkegaard for wanting to go beyond the ethical, the argument is that Levinas misunderstands or at least disregards Kierkegaard’s complex account of ethics. In fact, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on interiority is not neglecting exteriority, but rather an attempt to articulate the ethical challenges of subjectivity. Subjectivity is subjectivity in interiority and exteriority. In relating to others, we are working with ourselves, that is, our interiority. We are ethically separated from others, but the other is not simply on the other side. Her exteriority discloses her interiority. She is exterior to me, in herself and beyond my grasp, which Kierkegaard is particularly clear about in his theory of indirect communication. In relating to the other, we encounter interiority in exteriority. This means that, contrary to what Levinas seems to imply, in Kierkegaard we find both ethical asymmetry and separation, and subjectivity defined in terms of responsibility, but we do so in the context of subjectivity being in question. Kierkegaard’s argument is that it is precisely in the problematic character of subjectivity that ethics makes itself known. Human subjectivity is ambiguous, and it is this sense of ambiguities that we are called into question by the other revealing that interiority and exteriority, selfappropriation and responsibility, are intrinsically linked. Chapter 31. Time and History This essay examines the ways the concepts of time and history structure important aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought. The argument is that while time and history do not figure prominently in the works of Kierkegaard, the implications of his key concepts can only be understood through the questions of time and history, particularly his ideas about selfhood, existence, and the ethical. The essay discusses the different notions of time and history at work in the authorship, and considers how time and history come into play in the various writings. In Kierkegaard’s texts, we find descriptions of phenomena that are human ways of being exposed to and relating to time and history. These descriptions are basic in the sense that they disclose what is implied in Kierkegaard’s key concepts. At a first glance, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the moment, eternity, and the individual

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may seem to work against the idea of history. But thinking against history implicitly places a weight upon time and history. It indicates that time constitutes a danger. This suggests that time and history concern humans in what they are, namely existing beings relating to themselves in leading a life. This means that the task set by time and history plays a critical role for Kierkegaard’s key issues about what it means to be a human being, and what it is to become a Christian. Chapter 32. Future of Hope – History of Hope This essay reflects upon the existential challenges of hope with a particular regard to the question of the history of hope. Life gives us reason to give up hope, but in hopelessness, we often live past hope in still hoping for more life. The question is what becomes of the past we live past in the hope for more life. Hope is essentially linked to the future. We hope for something to come, and yet we carry with us a history of hope in our hope for the future. The entanglement of the future and the history of hope opens up the question whether the future of hope is part of a history of hope. This can also be framed as a question about the temporality of hope. Although the temporality of hope might appear simple in that the future is the primary characteristic of hope, the argument explored here is that existing as a human being, we live time in – and as – the intertwinement of past and future. The temporality of hope does not simply fit into it, but rather complicates the apparent interplay of time-dimensions. Past and future are intertwined in the double movement of turning away from a past in the shadow of death and yet commemorating the past in a hope past hope. Thinking about the history of hope can make us aware that we live in a present of unfulfilled hopes, of other perspectives that have never to come to exist, which we can acknowledge and give significance in commemoration. Chapter 33. Kierkegaards „zweite“ Ethik This essay examines Kierkegaard’s notion of a “second” ethics by taking into account the significance of the distinction made in The Concept of Anxiety between “first” and “second” ethics. This distinction and the significance of Kierkegaard’s various uses of ethics in the authorship is still an open problem in Kierkegaard studies. The essay traces through a close reading of The Concept of Anxiety the movement from first to second ethics. It is argued that second ethics is not just a special kind of ethics (Sonderethik), but rather concerns the nature and status of ethics itself. First ethics strands on the reality of sin. Second ethics acknowledges that human freedom is more complex and problematic than presupposed by the so-called first ethics. This transformation of ethics from a first to a second ethics amounts to a critique of ethics, that is, through challenges of

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moral self-consciousness and ethics by virtue of what is beyond the ethical demand, being an ethics of forgiveness and love. The argument is that the outlook of ethics, that is, the view that phenomena are ethically relevant, is transformed into an ethics of vision, which, for Kierkegaard, is what “second” ethics as an “other” ethics embarks upon. Chapter 34. Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun? This essay discusses Kierkegaard’s notion of neighbor love in Works of Love in view of the notion of recognition. The central question of the essay concerns the question of reciprocity (Gegenseitigkeit) in Works of Love? Rather than being a possible link between neighbor love and recognition, reciprocity becomes a problem to the notion of love. The human conception of love entails a self-critique insofar as at the core of this is the determination of reciprocity as having something in return. Through a detailed reading of Works of Love, the essay proceeds in three steps. First, in order to emphasize neighbor love as a demand it seeks to draw out a negative concept of reciprocity as having something in return. It traces out notions of preferential love in contrast to neighbor love. Second, it argues that Works of Love distills another concept of reciprocity, which with its inherent asymmetry is characteristic to neighbor love that goes beyond the intentions of reciprocity. Despite the problematic notion of reciprocity, the essay thirdly attempts to show how reciprocity remains a decisive problem throughout Works of Love between, on the one hand, the sovereignty of love, understood as being independent from the other, and, on the other hand, the fundamental equality that demands that the relation is a relation between its constituents. Chapter 35. Un-sichtbar: Den Nächsten sehen This essay examines the complex relationship between visibility and invisibility. Visibility is often understood as that which is visible and before one’s eyes. The power of seeing and being-seen makes vision into a matter of mastery, which identifies and reduces the other into the same. That the power of vision is determined in such a way that we do not understand what it means to see the other. The essay seeks to trace out a double potential within the notion of vision – of seeing and yet not seeing – according to which the invisible is not only not-seen, but rather is a question about what we see when we see. Given the double potential of vision, and given that seeing an other can also mean that one does not see the other as other, the essay examines what it means to see the other that one sees. In this sense, seeing achieves an emphatic significance by focusing on what it really means to see an other.

Arne Grøn’s Bibliography 1979 “Ricoeurs fortolkningsteori,” in Paul Ricoeur, Fortolkningsteori, trans. by Henrik Juhl, Copenhagen: Vinten 1979, pp. 7 – 104. “Transcendentalfilosofi, historie og kunst i Schellings System des transzendentalen Idealismus,” Filosofiske Studier, vol. 2, 1979, pp. 77 – 127.

1980 “Praktisk viden og fortolkning: Aristoteles’ ‘phronesis’-analyse og Gadamers filosofiske hermeneutik,” Studier i antik og middelalderlig filosofi og idéhistorie, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum 1980, pp. 289 – 323. “Das Transzendenzproblem bei Kierkegaard und beim späten Schelling,” Text und Kontext. Sonderreihe, vol. 7, 1980, pp. 128 – 148.

1981 “Phénoménologie, herméneutique et historicité,” Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 86, 1981, pp. 69 – 87.

1982 “Fransk filosofi i det 20. århundrede,” in Vor tids filosofi: Engagement og forståelse, vol. 1, ed. by Poul Lübcke, Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag 1982, pp. 280 – 395, 419 – 427.

1983 “Dialektik og dialogik,” Fønix, vol. 7, 1983, pp. 252 – 264. “Historie, værdi, fortolkning. Nietzsche og historiefilosofien,” Nyere dansk filosofi, med indlæg fra Dansk Filosofikongres 1983, ed. by Keld Brikner, Aarhus: Philosophia 1983, pp. 53 – 59. Various articles in Politikens filosofi leksikon, ed. by Poul Lübcke, Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag 1983.

1987 “Fransk filosofi under 1900-talet,” in Vor tids filosofi, ed. by Poul Lübcke, Stockholm: Forlaget Forum 1987, pp. 277 – 398, 762 – 778.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-003

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1988 “Den unge Hegel og religionen,” Kristeligt Dagblad (Teologisk Forum 9), September 19, 1988. “Livsform og normativitet,” Philosophia, vol. 1 – 2, 1988, pp. 77 – 87. “Religion, sprog, subjekt,” Kredsen, vol. 54, 1988, pp. 97 – 104.

1989 Frihed – idé og virkelighed, ed. by Arne Grøn and Hans C. Wind, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 1989. “Frihed i religionsfilosofisk perspektiv,” in Frihed – idé og virkelighed, ed. by Arne Grøn and Hans C. Wind, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 1989, pp. 9 – 30. “Splittelse og forsoning: Filosofisk romantik og tysk idealisme,” in Kaos og kosmos: Studier i europæisk romantik, ed. by Hans Boll-Johansen and Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum 1989, pp. 51 – 74. “Subjektivitetens tænker,” in Kierkegaard spejlinger: Søren Kierkegaard Selskabets Populære Skrifter, ed. by Birgit Bertung, Paul Müller, Fritz Norlan, and Julia Watkins, vol. 19, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1989, pp. 24 – 29. “Le problème de la subjectivité,” Les Cahiers de Philosophie, vol. 8 – 9, 1989, pp. 41 – 54. “Existence and Dialectic,” Kierkegaard – Poet of Existence: Kierkegaard Conferences I, ed. by Birgit Bertung, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1989, pp. 49 – 58.

1990 “Det elementære og det normative,” in Naturlig teologi: Luther-Agricola-Sällskapets Skrifter, vol. 18, ed. by Hans-Olof Kvist, Åbo: Åbo Akademis Förlag 1990, pp. 140 – 151

1991 “Anmeldelse af C.H. Koch: En flue på Hegels udødelige næse eller Om Adolph Peter Adler og Søren Kierkegaards forhold til ham,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15, 1991, pp. 157 – 159. “Kærlighedens gerninger og anerkendelsens dialektik,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, vol. 54, 1991, pp. 261 – 270. Articles in Philosophielexikon: Personen und Begriffe der abendländischen Philosophie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Anton Hügli and Poul Lübcke, trans. by Wilfried Greve, Eberhard Harbsmeier, and Ulli Zeitle, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1991.

1992 “Hvad det hele (ikke) er for noget. Om det sandt religiøse hos Sløk,” Fønix, vol. 16, 1992, pp. 2 – 21. “Kierkegaard og ‛Subjektivitets-Theorien’,” TEOL-information, vol. 5, 1992, pp. 11 – 13.

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“Teologiens rationalitet? Om Pannenbergs Systematische Theologie (1),” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, vol. 55, 1992, pp. 123 – 141. “Französische Philosophie,” in Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 1, ed. by Anton Hügli and Poul Lübcke, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1992, pp. 407 – 536,

1993 “Angstens tvetydighed. Begrebet angst i Kierkegaards filosofi,” Psyke & Logos, vol. 14, 1993, pp. 46 – 62. “Anmeldelse af Bruce H. Kirmmse: Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 16, 1993, pp. 142 – 146. “Anmeldelse af Wilfried Greve: Kierkegaards maieutische Ethik,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 16, 1993, pp. 140 – 142. “Frihed og valg – valgfrihed?,” in Kierkegaard 1993 – digtning, filosofi, teologi, ed. by Finn H. Mortensen, Odense: Odense Universitet 1993, pp. 87 – 101. “‛Repetition’ and the Concept of Repetition,” Topicos. Revista de filosofía, vol. 3, 1993, pp. 143 – 159.

1994 “Anerkendelse,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 1, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1994, p. 411. “Begrebet Angest,” TEOL-information, vol. 10, 1994, pp. 17 – 20. Begrebet angst hos Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1994. “Dannelse og karakter,” Kritisk Forum for Praktisk Teologi, vol. 58, 1994, pp. 19 – 35. “Følelsens verden. Forord til Jean-Paul Sartre: Skitse til en teori om følelserne,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, Skitse til en teori om følelserne, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel 1994, pp. 7 – 18. “Selv hos Kierkegaard,” Psyke & Logos, vol. 15, 1994, pp. 235 – 249. “Subjektivitet og livsytring,” Fønix, vol. 18, 1994, pp. 194 – 212. “Suverænitet og negativitet. Løgstrups opgør med Kierkegaard,” Kredsen, vol. 60, 1994, pp. 32 – 51. “Der Begriff Verzweiflung,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 17, 1994, pp. 25 – 51. “Liebe und Anerkennung,” Kerygma und Dogma, vol. 40, 1994, pp. 101 – 114.

1995 “Analogiens teologi?,” Præsteforeningens Blad, vol. 27, 1995, pp. 590 – 594. “Jørgen K. Bukdahl,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 3, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1995, p. 463. “Kierkegaards forudsætning,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, vol. 58, 1995, pp. 267 – 290. “Problemet subjektivitet,” in Denne slyngelagtige eftertid. Tekster om Søren Kierkegaard, vol. 1, ed. by Finn Frandsen and Ole Morsing, Aarhus: Slagmark 1995, pp. 123 – 137. “Sokrates og Smulerne,” Filosofiske Studier, vol. 15, 1995, pp. 97 – 107. “Synligt og usynligt,” Vinduer til Guds Rige. Seksten forelæsninger om kirken, ed. by Hans R. Iversen, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 1995, pp. 135 – 154.

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“C. Stephen Evans: Passionate Reason. Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 18, 1995, pp. 209 – 211. “El concepto de la angustia en la obra de Kierkegaard,” Thémata. Revista de Filosofía, vol. 15, 1995, pp. 15 – 30. “Moralsk autonomi,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 2, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1995, p. 197.

1996 “Det dæmoniske,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 5, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1996, p. 326. “Eksistens,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 5, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1996, p. 443. “Fortvivlelse,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 6, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1996, p. 586. “Næsten og ‛de Andre’,” Fønix, vol. 20, 1996, pp. 170 – 176. “Der Begriff Verzweiflung,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 33 – 60. “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 91 – 116.

1997 “Anerkendelsens dialektik og begreb,” Teologi og modernitet, ed. by Anders M. Rasmussen and Peter Thyssen, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag 1997, pp. 50 – 65 “En teori om subjektivitet,” TEOL-information, vol. 15, 1997, pp. 14 – 18. “Fortvivlelse som ‛Sygdommen til Døden’,” Omsorg: Nordisk tidsskrift for Palliativ Medisin, vol. 14, 1997, pp. 48 – 50. “Gudsbeviser,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 8, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1997, pp. 61 – 62 “Religionsfilosofi,” TEOL-information, vol. 16, 1997, pp. 33 – 36. Subjektivitet og negativitet. Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1997. “Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun?,” in Kierkegaard Revisited, ed. by Niels J. Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1997, pp. 223 – 237. “The Relation Between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness Unto Death,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1997, pp. 35 – 50.

1998 “Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye” (with Niels J. Cappelørn and Joakim Garff), Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 10, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1998, pp. 478 – 481. “‛Anden’ etik,” in Studier i Stadier. Søren Kierkegaard Selskabets 50-års Jubilæum, ed. by Joakim Garff, Tonny A. Olesen, and Pia Søltoft, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1998, pp. 75 – 87. “Anmeldelse af Joachim Ringleben: Die Krankheit zum Tode von Sören Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 19, 1998, pp. 179 – 182. “Anmeldelse af Merold Westphal: Becoming a Self. A Reading of Kierkegaard’s ‛Concluding Unscientific Postscript’,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 19, 1998, pp. 205 – 206.

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XXXVII

“Kierkegaards ‘zweite’ Ethik,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, pp. 358 – 368. “The Dialectic of Recognition in Works of Love,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, pp. 147 – 157. “La ética de la repetición,” Enrahonar, vol. 29, 1998, pp. 35 – 45.

1999 “Det onde,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 14, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1999, pp. 485 – 486. “Menneskesyn – synets menneske,” Helsingør Stiftsbog, 1999, pp. 28 – 40. “Paradokset,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 15, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1999, p. 43. Angst bei Søren Kierkegaard. Eine Einführung in sein Denken, trans. by Ulrich Lincoln Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1999. “Strange Meaning: Response to Isak Winkel Holm,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 20, 1999, pp. 159 – 167.

2000 “Religionsfilosofi,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 16, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2000, p. 100. “Teodicé,” Den Store Danske Encyklopædi, vol. 18, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2000, p. 640. “Temporality in Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2000, pp. 191 – 204. “The Human Synthesis,” in Anthropology and Authority. Essays on Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Poul Houe, Gordon D. Marino and Sven H. Rossel, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2000, pp. 27 – 32. “Kierkegaard: Ética de la subjetividad,” El garabato, vol. 12, 2000, pp. 3 – 5.

2001 “Kierkegaards ‛anden’ etik: Kjerlighedens Gjerninger,” Religion. Tidsskriftet for Religionslærerforeningen for Gymnasiet og HF, vol. 4, 2001, pp. 14 – 24. “Die Aufgabe der Religionsphilosophie,” Kerygma und Dogma, vol. 47, 2001, pp. 111 – 125. “Spirit and Temporality in ‛The Concept of Anxiety’,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2001, pp. 128 – 140.

2002 “Det uhåndterligt gode. Om værdier og det uvurderlige,” Kritisk Forum for Praktisk Teologi, vol. 87, 2002, pp. 50 – 67. “Etikkens metafysik – metafysikkens etik,” in Spor i sandet. Bidrag til forståelse af K.E. Løgstrups forfatterskab, ed. by Mickey Gjerris and Jakob Wolf, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 2002, pp. 9 – 21. “Replik til Niels Grønkjær,” Spor i sandet. Bidrag til forståelse af K.E. Løgstrups forfatterskab, ed. by Mickey Gjerris and Jakob Wolf, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 2002, pp. 29 – 30.

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“Kærlighedens sakramente. Kierkegaard og nadveren,” in Nadver og folkekirke. Tolv forelæsninger fra Københavns Universitet, ed. by Kirsten B. Nielsen, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 2002, pp. 67 – 78. “Subjektivitet i centrum” (with Dan Zahavi), TEOL-information, vol. 26, 2002, pp. 10 – 13. “Subjektivitet og selvforhold,” Psyke & Logos, vol. 23, 2002, pp. 186 – 199. “Zeit und Transzendenz,” in Der Sinn der Zeit, ed. by Emil Angehrn, Christian Iber, Georg Lohmann, and Romano Pocai, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft 2002, pp. 40 – 52. “Ethics of Vision,” in Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards “Taten der Liebe,” ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002, pp. 111 – 122. “Imagination and Subjectivity,” Ars Disputandi, vol. 2, 2002, pp. 89 – 98. “Imagination and Subjectivity,” Religion, Aesthetics and the Concept of Imagination. Proceedings of the 14th Biennial European Conference on the Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge: Clare College 2002, pp. 25 – 34. “Religion as a Philosophical Challenge,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, vol. 78, 2002, pp. 134 – 139.

2003 “At forestille sig. Fantasi og subjektivitet i religionsfilosofisk perspektiv,” in Subjektivitet og Videnskab: Bevidsthedsforskning i det 21. århundrede, ed. by Dan Zahavi and Gerd Christensen, Frederiksberg: Roskilde Universitetsforlag 2003, pp. 237 – 257. “Idealism,” in Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, vol. 1, ed. by Jacobus W. V. v. Huyssteen, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003, pp. 445 – 446. “Truth, Theories of,” in Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, vol. 1, ed. by Jacobus W. V. v. Huyssteen, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003, pp. 901 – 904. “Imagination and Subjectivity,” Theologische Literaturzeitung, vol. 128, 2003, pp. 717 – 726. “Mediated Immediacy? The Problem of a Second Immediacy,” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. by Poul Cruysberghs, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, Leuven: Leuven University Press 2003, pp. 87 – 95.

2004 “Kierkegaard, Hegel og danske hegelianere,” TEOL-information, vol. 29, 2004, pp. 37 – 40. “Ambiguous and Deeply Differentiated: Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 23, 2004, pp. 177 – 200. “Self and identity,” in The Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness, ed. by Dan Zahavi, Thor Grünbaum, J. Parnas, Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2004, pp. 123 – 156. “Transcendence of Thought: The Project of Philosophical Fragments,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2004, pp. 80 – 99. “The Embodied Self: Reformulating the Existential Difference in Kierkegaard,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 11, 2004, pp. 26 – 43.

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2005 “Kjerlighedens Gjerninger læst af Arne Grøn,” in Den udødelige. Kierkegaard læst værk for værk, ed. by Tonny A. Olesen, and Pia Søltoft, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 2005, pp. 253 – 268. “Livsytring, person, situation. Løgstrup og subjektiviteten,” in Løgstrups mange ansigter, ed. by David Bugge, Pia R. Böwadt, and Peter A. Sørensens, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 2005, pp. 27 – 42. “Jenseits? Nietzsches Religionskritik revisited. Zum Stand der Forschung in Sachen Nietzsche und die christliche Religion,” Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 34, 2005, pp. 375 – 408. “Reconocimiento y comunicación. La ética entre Hegel y Kierkegaard,” Estudios de Filosofia, vol. 32, 2005, pp. 27 – 40.

2006 “Im Horizont des Unendlichen. Religionskritik nach Nietzsche,” in Kritik der Religion, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Hans-Peter Großhans, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2006, pp. 145 – 162. “Phänomenologie der Subjektivität. Überlegungen zu Kierkegaards Abhandlung über die menschliche Freiheit,” in Theologie zwischen Pragmatismus und Existenzdenken. Festskrift für Herman Deuser, ed. by Gesche Linde, Richard Purkarthofer, Heiko Schulz, and Peter Steinacker, Marburg: N.G. Elwert Verlag 2006, pp. 487 – 498. “Subjektivität und Un-Wahrheit,” in Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard. Subjektivität und Wahrheit, ed. by Niels J. Cappelørn, Richard E. Crouter, Theodor Jørgensen, and ClausDieter Osthövener, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2006, pp. 13 – 28. “Subjektivität: Begriff und Problem,” in Krisen der Subjektivität. Problemfelder eines strittigen Paradigmas, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Philipp Stoellger, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2006, pp. 317 – 332.

2007 “Subjektivitet i kontekst,” TEOL-information, vol. 35, 2007, pp. 20 – 23. “Forskellens teologi: Ingolf U. Dalferth,” TEOL-information, vol. 35, 2007, pp. 40 – 43. “Die hermeneutische Situation – die Hermeneutik der Situation,” in Heidegger und die Griechen, ed. by Martin Steinmann, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2007, pp. 233 – 260. Subjectivity and Transcendence, ed. by Arne Grøn, Iben Damgaard, and Søren Overgaard, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2007. “Introduction,” in Subjectivity and Transcendence, ed. by Arne Grøn, Iben Damgaard, and Søren Overgaard, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2007, pp. 1 – 8. “Subjectivity and Transcendence: Problems and Perspectives,” in Subjectivity and Transcendence, ed. by Arne Grøn, Iben Damgaard, and Søren Overgaard, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2007, pp. 9 – 36.

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“La temporalità del pentimento – La temporalità del perdono,” in Kierkegaard contemporaneo: Ripresa, pentimento, perdono, ed. by Umberto Regina and Ettore Rocca, Brescia: Morcelliana 2007, pp. 215 – 228.

2008 “Det onde,” in Filosofisk leksikon: Den vestlige verdens erkendelsesteori, metafysik, etik, logik, videnskabsteori og samfundstænkning, ed. by Knud Michelsen, Søren H. Klausen, and Gert Posselt, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2008, pp. 350 – 351. “Filosofihistorie, filosofi og historie,” Filosofiske Studier, vol. 24, 2008, pp. 103 – 115. “Subjektivitet, spontanitet, suverænitet,” in Lidenskab og stringens: Festskrift til Svend Andersen, ed. by Kees K. Niekerk and Ulrik Nissen, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 2008. “Søren Aabye Kierkegaard,” Filosofisk leksikon: Den vestlige verdens erkendelsesteori, metafysik, etik, logik, videnskabsteori og samfundstænkning, ed. by Knud Michelsen, Søren H. Klausen, and Gert Posselt, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2008, pp. 244 – 245. “Kommunikation: Entre nous,” Hermeneutische Blätter, vol. 14, 2008, pp. 75 – 86. “Un-sichtbar: Den Nächsten sehen,” Hermeneutische Blätter, vol. 14, 2008, pp. 5 – 12. “Religion and (In)humanity,” Florida Philosophical Review, vol. 8, 2008, pp. 1 – 12. “Subjectivity, Interiority and Exteriority: Kierkegaard and Levinas,” in Despite oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas, ed. by Claudia Welz and Karl Verstrynge, London: Turnshare 2008, pp. 11 – 30. The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Jeannette B. L. Knox, Macon: Mercer University Press 2008. “Comprensione di sé e dialettica della comunicazione,” in Søren Kierkegaard: L’essere umano come rapporto, ed. by Ettore Rocca, Brescia: Morcelliana 2008, pp. 103 – 118. Vrijheid en angst: Inleiding in het denken van Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Frits Florin, Budel: Damon 2008.

2009 Grøn, A. and Welz, C. “Etik og Religionsfilosofi,” Fønix, vol. 32, 2009, pp. 190 – 198. “Intet andet end – Andet end: Religionskritikkens nødvendighed, problem og mulighed,” in Religionskritik efter Guds død, ed. by Mads P. Karlsen and Lars Sandbeck, Frederiksberg: Forlaget Anis 2009, pp. 49 – 76. “Religionsfilosofi efter metafysik?,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, vol. 72, pp. 122 – 139. “Jenseits,” in Nietzsche-Lexikon, ed. by Christian Niemeyer, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2009, p. 167. “Amour et reconnaissance dans Les Œuvres de l’amour,” in Søren Kierkegaard. Pensée et problèmes de l’éthique, ed. by Anne-Christine Habbard and Jacques Message, Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion 2009, pp. 97 – 116. Dialectics, Self-Consciousness, and Recognition: The Hegelian Legacy, ed. by Morten Raffnsøe-Møller, Asger Sørensen, and Arne Grøn, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag 2009.

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“Dialectics of Recognition: Selfhood and Alterity,” in Dialectics, Self-Consciousness, and Recognition: The Hegelian Legacy, ed. by Morten Raffnsøe-Møller, Asger Sørensen, and Arne Grøn, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag 2009, pp. 113 – 139. “Introduction: Hegel, History and the Hegelian Legacy,” in Dialectics, Self-Consciousness, and Recognition: The Hegelian Legacy, ed. by Morten Raffnsøe-Møller, Asger Sørensen, and Arne Grøn, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag 2009, pp. 9 – 12. “The Limit of Ethics – the Ethics of the Limit,” in The Religious Responses to Mass Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Thomas Brudholm and Thomas Cushman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, pp. 38 – 59.

2010 “At forstå – og at forstå,” in At være sig selv nærværende. Festskrift til Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, ed. by Joakim Garff, Ettore Rocca, and Pia Søltoft, Copenhagen: Kristeligt Dagblad 2010, pp. 100 – 115. “Beyond? Horizon, Immanence, and Transcendence,” in Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers, ed. by Jonna Bornemark and Hans Ruin, Södertörn: Södertörn University 2010, pp. 223 – 241. “Self-Givenness and Self-Understanding: Kierkegaard and the Question of Phenomenology,” in Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment, ed. by Jeffrey Hanson, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2010, pp. 79 – 97. Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, ed. by Arne Grøn and Claudia Welz, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010. “Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,” in Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, ed. by Arne Grøn and Claudia Welz, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010, pp. 13 – 30. “Introduction: Trust in Question,” in Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, ed. by Arne Grøn and Claudia Welz, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010, pp. 1 – 9.

2011 “Krop og selv: Om inkarneret fejlbarlighed,” in Kroppens teologi – teologiens krop, ed. by Kirsten B. Nielsen and Johanne S. Teglbjærg, Copenhagen: Forlaget Anis 2011, pp. 63 – 93. “Das Bild und das Heilige,” in Präsenz im Entzug: Ambivalenzen des Bildes, ed. by Philipp Stoellger and Thomas Klie, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, pp. 431 – 444. “Homo subiectus: Zur zweideutigen Subjektivität des Menschen,” in Seinkönnen: Der Mensch zwischen Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, pp. 19 – 33. “Religion und Subjektivität – in existenzieller und pragmatischer Perspektive,” in Instinkt Redlichkeit Glaube: Zum Verhältnis von Subjektivität und Religion, ed. by Heiko Schulz, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck 2011, pp. 89 – 107. “Picturing Forgiveness After Atrocity” (with Thomas Brudholm), Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 24, 2011, pp. 159 – 70. “‛Nachdenken’” (with Thomas Brudholm), in On Jean Améry: Philosophy of the Catastrophe, ed. by Magdalena Zolkos, New York: Lexington Books 2011, pp. 193 – 215

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“Subjectivity, Passion and Passivity,” in Passion and Passivity, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Michael C. Rodgers, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, pp. 143 – 155.

2012 “Ein Leben zu führen: Kierkegaard und der Begriff des Lebens,” in Das Leben, vol. 2, ed. by Stephan Schaede, Gerald Hartung, and Tom Kleffmann, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2012, pp. 81 – 106. “Time, Courage, Selfhood: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s Discourse ‛To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience’,” in Kierkegaard in Lisbon: Contemporary Readings of Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments and the 1843 and 1844 Upbuilding Discourses, ed. by José M. Justo and Elisabete M. de Sousa, Lisbon: Universidade de Lisboa 2012, pp. 85 – 95.

2013 “Menneskerettigheder og den etiske fordring,” Herrens Mark, vol. 7, 2013, pp. 83 – 95. “Grenzen des Vertrauens: Kritische Bemerkungen zur Rede von ‛Grundvertrauen’,” in Grundvertrauen: Hermeneutik eines Grenzphänomens, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Simon Peng-Keller, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2012, pp. 145 – 157. “Time and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. by John Lippitt and George Pattison, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 273 – 291. “Time and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. by Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 435 – 455. “Time and Transcendence: Religion and Ethics,” in Impossible Time: Past and Future in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Marius T. Mjaaland, Ulrik H. Rasmussen, and Philipp Stoellger, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2013, pp. 117 – 135.

2014 “Natur og transcendens,” Kritik, vol. 47, 2014, pp. 111 – 119. “Erinnerung und Nachdenken,” in Elazar Benyoëtz Korrespondenzen, ed. by Berhard Fetz, Michael Hansel, and Gerhard Langer, Wien: Paul Zsolnay 2014, pp. 229 – 243. “Paradox des Denkens – paradoxe Denken,” in Gott denken – ohne Metaphysik? Zu einer aktuellen Kontroverse in Theologie und Philosophie, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2014, pp. 79 – 94. “Phenomenology of Despair – Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Kierkegaard im Kontext des deutschen Idealismus, ed. by Alex Hutter and Anders M. Rasmussen, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2014, pp. 241 – 257.

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2015 “Erfaring, passion, livsytring,” Fønix, vol. 2, pp. 141 – 159. “Unanschaulich. Tod, Zeit, Antlitz,” in Bild und Tod, vol. 2, ed. by Philipp Stoellger and Jens Wolff, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 727 – 744. “Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,” in Hermeneutik der Transzendenz, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Pierre Bühler, and Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 47 – 59. “Ethics of In-visibility,” in Ethics of In-Visibility: Imago Dei, Memory, and Human Dignity in Jewish and Christian Thought, ed. by Claudia Welz, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2015, pp. 21 – 51.

2016 “Handlen og væren: Paul Ricoeurs polytetiske refleksionsteori,” in Og teologi: Festskrift til Carsten Pallesen, ed. by Mads P. Karlsen and Lars Sandbeck, Copenhagen: Eksistensen 2016, pp. 335 – 350. “Menneskelig selvforståelse og frigørelsens dialektik: Kierkegaard og Sokrates – og Platon,” in Platon: Værk og virkning, ed. by Jakob Fink and Jens K. Larsen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, pp. 574 – 602. “Zweideutigkeit der Angst,” in Angst: Philosophische, psychopathologische und psychoanalytische Zugänge, ed. by Thomas Fuchs and Stefano Micali, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber 2016, pp. 56 – 69. “Eindruck – Ausdruck,” in Fremde Spiegelungen: Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur Sammlung Prinzhorn, ed. by Sonja Frohoff, Thomas Fuchs, and Stefano Micali, München: Wilhelm Fink 2016, pp. 11 – 20. “Future of Hope – History of Hope,” in Hope, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2016, pp. 139 – 152.

2017 “The Concept of Existence,” in Kierkegaard’s Existential Approach, ed. by Arne Grøn, René Rosfort and K. Brian Söderquist, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2017, pp. 71 – 90. “The Ethical Demand: Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas,” in What is Ethically Demanded? K.E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life, ed. by Hans Fink and Robert Stern, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2017, pp. 130 – 148.

2020 “Phenomenology of Invisibility,” in In-Visibilis: Reflections upon Visibility and Transcendence in Theology, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. by Anna Vind, Iben Damgaard, Kirsten B. Nielsen, Sven R. Havsteen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Rupecht 2020, pp. 13 – 29.

Editorial Comments The texts have been edited and typeset with respect to this publication. This involves correcting typos in the earlier version and aligning orthography, spelling, notes, references. Moreover, all references to Kierkegaard’s works have been converted to the standard critical edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), and the references to the English and German editions have been converted into the authoritative translations in those languages, and in texts where this was not already the case, the references to translations have been supplemented with references to SKS.

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Acknowledgments and Sources We would like to express our gratitude to Albrecht Döhnert and Waldemar Isak at Walter de Gruyter. The book would not have come into being without their initial invitation and their patient advice and always highly competent help during the editorial process of the book. We would also like to thank the KSMS series editors, Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart, and Karl Verstrynge, for accepting the book into their series. We thank our respective institutions, the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University, for granting us the necessary time to embark on this project. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the many persons and institutions who have made this book economically possible by acquiring a copy before the publication of the volume. Their names are listed in the Tabula Gratulatoria. Finally, we are grateful to the journals, editors, and publishing houses that generously have granted permission to republish the present essays: Chapter 1

Chapter Chapter

Chapter

Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter

Chapter

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“The Concept of Existence,” in Kierkegaard’s Existential Approach, ed. by Arne Grøn, René Rosfort and K. Brian Söderquist, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter , pp.  – .  “Existence and Dialectic,” Kierkegaard – Poet of Existence: Kierkegaard Conferences I, ed. by Birgit Bertung, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel , pp.  – .  “The Human Synthesis,” in Anthropology and Authority. Essays on Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Poul Houe, Gordon D. Marino, and Sven H. Rossel, Amsterdam: Rodopi , pp.  – .  “Self and identity,” in The Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness, ed. by Dan Zahavi, Thor Grünbaum, and Josef Parnas, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp.  – .  “Spirit and Temporality in ‛The Concept of Anxiety’,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, , pp.  – .  “The Embodied Self: Reformulating the Existential Difference in Kierkegaard,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. , , pp.  – .  “Temporality in Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, , pp.  – .  “Mediated Immediacy? The Problem of a Second Immediacy,” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. by Poul Cruysberghs, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, Leuven: Leuven University Press , pp.  – .  “Ein Leben zu führen: Kierkegaard und der Begriff des Lebens,” in Das Leben, vol. , ed. by Stephan Schaede, Gerald Hartung, and Tom Kleffmann, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck , pp.  – .  “Zweideutigkeit der Angst,” in Angst: Philosophische, psychopathologische und psychoanalytische Zugänge, ed. by Thomas Fuchs and Stefano Micali, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber , pp.  – .

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Acknowledgments and Sources

Chapter  “Subjektivität und Un-Wahrheit,” in Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard. Subjektivität und Wahrheit, ed. by Niels J. Cappelørn, Richard E. Crouter, Theodor Jørgensen, and Claus-Dieter Osthövener, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter , pp.  – . Chapter  “Religion und Subjektivität – in existenzieller und pragmatischer Perspektive,” in Instinkt Redlichkeit Glaube. Zum Verhältnis von Subjektivität und Religion, ed. by Heiko Schulz, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, pp.  – . Chapter  “Paradox des Denkens – paradoxes Denken,” in Gott denken – ohne Metaphysik? Zu einer aktuellen Kontroverse in Theologie und Philosophie, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp.  – . Chapter  “Self-Givenness and Self-Understanding: Kierkegaard and the Question of Phenomenology,” in Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment, ed. by Jeffrey Hanson, Evanston: Northwestern University Press , pp.  – . Chapter  “Phenomenology of Despair – Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Kierkegaard im Kontext des deutschen Idealismus, ed. by Alex Hutter and Anders M. Rasmussen, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp.  – . Chapter  “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  and  Upbuilding Discourses, ed. by José M. Justo and Elisabete M. de Sousa, Lisbon: Universidade de Lisboa , pp.  – . Chapter  “The Relation Between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness Unto Death,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, , pp.  – . Chapter  “Transcendence of Thought: The Project of Philosophical Fragments,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, , pp.  – . Chapter  “Der Begriff Verzweiflung,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, , pp.  – . Chapter  “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, , pp.  – . Chapter  “Phänomenologie der Subjektivität. Überlegungen zu Kierkegaards Abhandlung über die menschliche Freiheit,” in Theologie zwischen Pragmatismus und Existenzdenken. Festskrift für Herman Deuser, ed. by Gesche Linde, Richard Purkarthofer, Heiko Schulz, and Peter Steinacker, Marburg: N.G. Elwert Verlag , pp.  – . Chapter  “Zeit und Transzendenz,” in Der Sinn der Zeit, ed. by Emil Angehrn, Christian Iber, Georg Lohmann, and Romano Pocai, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft , pp.  – . Chapter  “Das Transzendenzproblem bei Kierkegaard und beim späten Schelling,” Text und Kontext. Sonderreihe, vol. , , pp.  – . Chapter  “Ethics of Vision,” in Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards “Taten der Liebe,” ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck , pp.  – . Chapter  “Ethics of In-visibility,” Ethics of In-Visibility: Imago Dei, Memory, and Human Dignity in Jewish and Christian Thought, ed. by Claudia Welz, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck , pp.  – . Chapter  “The Dialectic of Recognition in Works of Love,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, , pp.  – .

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Chapter  “Dialectics of Recognition: Selfhood and Alterity,” in Dialectics, Self-Consciousness, and Recognition: The Hegelian Legacy, ed. by Morten Raffnsøe-Møller, Asger Sørensen, and Arne Grøn, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag , pp.  – . Chapter  “‛Repetition’ and the Concept of Repetition,” Topicos. Revista de filosofía, vol. , , pp.  – . Chapter  “The Ethical Demand: Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas,” in What is Ethically Demanded? K.E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life, ed. by Hans Fink and Robert Stern, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press , pp.  – . Chapter  “Subjectivity, Interiority and Exteriority: Kierkegaard and Levinas,” in Despite oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas, ed. by Claudia Welz and Karl Verstrynge, London: Turnshare , pp.  – . Chapter  “Time and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. by John Lippitt and George Pattison, Oxford: Oxford University Press , pp.  – . Chapter  “Future of Hope – History of Hope,” in Hope, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck , pp.  – . Chapter  “Kierkegaards ‘zweite’ Ethik,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, , pp.  – . Chapter  “Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun?,” in Kierkegaard Revisited, ed. by Niels J. Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter , pp.  – . Chapter  “Un-sichtbar: Den Nächsten sehen,” Hermeneutische Blätter, vol. , , pp.  – .

Abbreviations Danish Abbreviations Pap. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1909 – 48; second, expanded ed., vols. I to XI–3, by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968 – 78. SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1 – 28, K1-K28, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1997 – 2013.

English Abbreviations KW Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vols. I-XXVI, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978 – 98.

Title Abbreviations (KW) CA

The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, KW VIII. CD Christian Discourses, KW XVII. CUP1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW XII,1. EO1 Either/Or, Part I, KW III. EO2 Either/Or, Part II, KW IV. EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, KW V. FT Fear and Trembling, KW VI. P Prefaces / Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, KW IX. PC Practice in Christianity, KW XX. PF Philosophical Fragments, KW VII. R Repetition, KW VI. SBL Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, KW II. SUD The Sickness unto Death, KW XIX. TD Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, KW X. WL Works of Love, KW XVI.

German Abbreviations DSKE Deutsche Søren Kierkegaard Edition, hg. von Heinrich Anz (bis Bd. 2), Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, Joachim Grage (ab Bd. 3) und Heiko Schulz, Bd. 1 – 11, Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin und New York/Boston 2005 ff.

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LII

GW1

GW2

Abbreviations

Gesammelte Werke, übers. und hg. von Emanuel Hirsch, Hayo Gerdes und Hans-Martin Junghans, 36 Abtlg. in 26 Bdn. und Registerbd., Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Düsseldorf und Köln 1950 – 69. Gesammelte Werke, übers. und hg. von Emanuel Hirsch, Hayo Gerdes und Hans-Martin Junghans, 2. Aufl., 36 Abtlg. in 30 Bdn., Gütersloher Verlagshaus (GTB Nachdruck 600 – 629), Gütersloh 1986 – 95.

Title Abbreviations (GW1/GW2) AUN1 – 2 Abschließende unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift zu den Philosophischen Brocken, GW1 10 – 11; GW2 13 – 14. BA Der Begriff Angst, GW1 7; GW2 9. DRG Drei Reden bei gedachten Gelegenheiten 1845, GW1 8; GW2 10. EC Einübung im Christentum, GW1 18; GW2 22. EO1 Entweder/Oder, 1. Teil, GW1 1; GW2 1 – 2. EO2 Entweder/Oder, 2. Teil, GW1 2; GW2 3 – 4. ERG Erbauliche Reden in verschiedenem Geist 1847, GW1 13; GW2 16. FZ Furcht und Zittern, GW1 3; GW2 5. KT Die Krankheit zum Tode, GW1 17; GW2 21. LF Die Lilie auf dem Felde und der Vogel unter dem Himmel, GW1 16; GW2 20. LT Der Liebe Tun, GW1 14; GW2 17 – 18. PB Philosophische Brocken, GW1 6; GW2 8. SLW Stadien auf des Lebens Weg, GW1 9; GW2 11 – 12. W Die Wiederholung, GW1 4; GW2 6. Z Zeitungsartikel (1854 – 55), GW1 24; GW2 28. ZKA Zwei kleine ethisch-religiöse Abhandlungen, GW1 16; GW2 20. ZS Zur Selbstprüfung der Gegenwart anbefohlen 1851, GW1 19; GW2 23.

Part One: Existential Philosophy

Chapter 1 The Concept of Existence 1 Reconsidering In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard seeks to conceptualize existence as specifically human existence. “Thinking” human existence has, in various forms, been an important endeavor in twentieth century philosophy. Although perceived as a way of reflecting upon modernity, existential philosophy – and existentialism in particular – nonetheless seemed out of tune as early as the 1960s. This might not just be a matter of the changing times, but might also show an inner difficulty in existential thinking. The endeavor to think the “weight” of human existence can easily turn the pathos of existence into a rhetoric about existence. That which is said to be existential thinking then fails as thinking: it does not reflect upon the problems inherent in key notions such as authenticity and self-choice. Instead, it resorts to a jargon of authenticity and choosing oneself. This failure in itself is an argument for reconsidering what it means to think existence as human existence. What kind of thinking is existential thinking? In what sense is it existential? This twofold question leads us back to the concept of existence. However, if existence cannot be thought but makes us think, what is the conceptuality of this concept? In this essay, we take a road in search of an answer to the following difficulty: we only understand what existence means, as human existence, through “the difficulty of existence” (as it is called in Kierkegaard’s Postscript).¹ This has to do with the difficulty of “thinking existence,” which is not “added to” human existence, but concerns its human character. I suggest making yet another move in order to understand the concept of existence through the question of the human condition: how should we understand this condition if we are ourselves to take part in it? This leads to a further suggestion: if existence is at play in the concepts by which we try to understand our existence, we can only give a formal indication of what existence means. We know what it means in and by existing – and yet we can forget what it means.

 SKS 7, 275 / CUP1, 302. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-007

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2 Existence, Death, Oblivion Human existence has the peculiar feature that something may be so important to us that it concerns our existence. It is of “existential” importance. What does that mean? Would it be an answer to say that it concerns the character of our existence? Such an answer leads us back to the concept of existence. What is it in human existence that makes it possible for us to ask the question about the character of our existence? The very operation in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript – bringing human existence “to concept” – is difficult. Conceptualizing existence requires us to “think” existence, but, in a critical sense, existence cannot be thought. In thinking, while thinking, we exist. We lack the distance to turn existence into an object of thought. Yet, we do not simply exist. First, existence is marked by the possibility of death breaking into existence. This is not one possibility among others belonging to existence, but defines existence as this existence between birth and death. As Kierkegaard notes, death is both certain and uncertain. The in-certainty of death turns existence itself into possibility for us while existing.² Does that give us the distance needed to ask what it means to exist? If it does, thinking the earnest thought of death is only possible in being turned back to existence: what does it mean to exist in the face of death? However, there is a second possibility that in fact seems to belong to human existence, namely, the possibility of being able to forget what it means to exist – thereby forgetting to ask this question. This is the underlying motif in Kierkegaard’s Postscript. In fact, it is implied in what Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the Postscript, describes as his “main thought”: “My main thought was that, because of the copiousness of knowledge, people in our day have forgotten what it means to exist, and what inwardness is.”³ Our oblivion of existence comes to mark our own existence. It affects the character of the life we live. This is not something that happens to us as a sort of destiny. It does come to us, but in and through what we do (to) ourselves. Giving an account of what it means to forget leads us into the question of subjectivity. In what sense is forgetting active – something we do – and in what sense is it passive – something that happens to us? Accounting for the possibility of forgetting is complicated because activity and passivity seem intertwined in ways that concern us as

 SKS 7, 153– 158 / CUP1, 165 – 170.  SKS 7, 227 / CUP1, 249.

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subjects seeking to lead the lives we live. Subjectivity is not to be accounted for without existence and vice versa. Thus, in contrast to Heidegger’s oblivion of being,⁴ Kierkegaard’s oblivion of existence opens the question of human subjectivity. In fact, it leads us back to the issue of “thinking” existence. Could we argue that forgetting is already a way of thinking? If what we have forgotten concerns us in our very existence, it should have made us think. The second motif of oblivion of existence concerns us in our subjectivity. We are able to forget what it means to exist. When we realize that this is our possibility, we can seek to think what this means. Formulating for ourselves the thought of forgetting, we acquire a distance to the fact of existing – a distance in which we can ask what this fact means as a fact, which we, in a critical sense, cannot go beyond. Although we cannot go beyond it, we should think something by the very fact of existing. Existence should make us think. We are the ones – existing. Forgetting what it means to exist is then a form of thoughtlessness and, as such, a form of indifference. It is thinking “without thinking,” or existing “without existing.” When this strange negative possibility is brought into the picture, we may come to think differently. Although we cannot “think existence,” we may seek to give an account of the concept of existence. Existential thinking then is a counter-move. We can ask ourselves what it means to exist – precisely as something, which we can forget. Maybe this negative approach makes it possible for us to give a positive, yet formal, indication of the concept of existence.

3 Existence, Becoming, Thinking Let us take our point of departure in Climacus formulating the difficulty of thinking existence in the opening quote above. What is thinking? We can speak of a movement of thought. This suggests that in thinking we move ourselves. We do so, however, because, in thinking, we are set in motion. Something makes us think. Thinking is not something, which we must first produce ourselves. Thinking is an undertaking, yet we only undertake to think by the fact that we already find ourselves in thinking. We are thinking already by existing. What then does

 “This question has today been forgotten [Die genannte Frage ist heute in Vergessenheit gekommen]” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, p. 1 / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1972, p. 2).

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the beginning of the quote mean: “Existence, like motion, is a very difficult matter to handle”?⁵ In what sense is existence motion? Climacus answers that existence means to be in becoming (i Vorden). But to be in becoming cannot just be explained by giving various examples of becoming.⁶ Rather, it concerns the character of human existence. It is how we are situated: we “are” in becoming. “Becoming” then is not to be understood from a fixed point of departure where we can delimit what is changing. This would presuppose a more basic notion of “in becoming,” indicated by the phrase: to be in becoming. “In becoming” we are on our way, not toward a specific undertaking, but toward ourselves, not as a sort of telos, but as the ones seeking to come to ourselves in becoming. This notion of “in becoming” is fundamental insofar as it indicates the condition of being human, namely, that we cannot view our existence from a point outside existence, as if this existence were concluded. We can only “view” existence in existing. We are “in the middle” of existence, between birth and death. We do not have an existence that makes “seeing from eternity” our point of view. In this sense of existence, “becoming” is beyond the classic divide between substance and becoming. “In becoming” has to do with the character of existence. Looking for a way to define existence we might again be struck by Climacus’ remark: “Existence, like motion…” What attracts us might be the alternative: substance or becoming. We may argue that existence is not something fixed or stable, not substance, but motion. But again, why then does Climacus’ sentence read: “like” motion? Existence is not just motion, but to be in motion, and this we are ourselves. This is not just a feature added to “in becoming,” as if we were ourselves “added on” to existence. On the contrary, we are ourselves “in becoming.” We have then the following two defining features of existence as human existence: First, to exist is to be in becoming, in the middle of life, on one’s way; second, it is to be oneself in becoming, that is, relating to oneself as the one becoming. Existence is not just motion, but like motion in that we are ourselves in becoming.

 SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 308.  SKS 7, 73 – 92, 174– 181, 278 – 281, 363 – 383, 412, 531 / CUP1, 72– 93, 189 – 199, 306 – 309, 399 – 421, 454, 583.

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4 Existence, Subjectivity, Thinking For some decades, it has been fashionable to criticize the idea of the so-called “stable subject.” Such a critique does not help us understand what subjectivity means but, rather, hinders us in asking the very question. If subjectivity is understood as movement, it is movement as subjectivity. If the subject is set in motion, it is so as a subject. This does not mean that we first have a subject, which is then set in motion. Rather, the task is to give an account of what it means to be a self in motion, relating to oneself in being moved. The opening of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death offers a processual definition of selfhood. To be a self is to relate to oneself. Again, this is not to say that selfhood is movement but that it is a self in becoming. The processual “relating to oneself” implies that there is one who relates to oneself. Existing takes a subject in the sense of the one who exists. She exists as a subject: standing out from herself, as herself. That is implied in relating to herself. She relates to herself in what she is doing in response to what happens to her. As a self relating to herself, she has a history in which she begins having already begun. She is herself in becoming. It is easy to be fascinated by movement, but if we seek to take ourselves in terms of movement, how do we understand ourselves? Can we account for ourselves as the ones taking ourselves in this way, as the ones to whom our existences are motion? If we see ourselves as beings that are changing, we probably take this in terms of possibilities we have. We do not let ourselves be dissolved into what happens to us, but rather seek to maintain ourselves to the point of pretending that we define, or construct, ourselves through what happens to us. The idea of a narrative identity can function as a construction of identity this way. But if we are ourselves changed this should concern us as the ones changing. We are ourselves the ones to relate to ourselves undergoing or suffering the changes that may change us. We are not simply changed, but we are the ones being changed, that is, the ones who must live this change. We do something to ourselves in being changed. If existence means to be in becoming, what about thinking? It is a movement too. We are moved in thinking, we come to think, something makes us think. Yet, in thinking we think. For example, being under the impression of what happens to us, we may seek to withdraw ourselves; we may offer resistance, not accepting that we are defined by the circumstances we appear to be subjected to. Thus, in thinking, we may pause or even stop. Something may bring us to a halt and make us think, but that depends on us stopping and thinking. This brief outline may indicate what it means to think while existing. Although existence cannot be thought, thinking belongs to human existence.

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“Just as existence has joined thinking and existing, inasmuch as an existing person is a thinking person,”⁷ Climacus observes, leaving to the reader to answer the implicit question: how does thinking take part in human existence? In order to find an answer we should go back to the twofold definition of existence just given above: existing, we are ourselves in becoming. Being subjected to change, how do we maintain ourselves? Preserving ourselves requires us to stop and think. In what we do in order to maintain ourselves there is thinking in this sense of pausing or even breaking off. Existence “has joined thinking and existing,” Climacus says. How is thinking of existential importance? Of course, if it is about so-called existential issues, it has the appearance of being existential, but this does not concern thinking as an existential movement in itself. The existential significance of thinking has to do with the question of what it means to exist: to be oneself in becoming. How is this intertwined with the question of what it means to think? 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. It concerns the one thinking, that is, it concerns what it is to be a subject. However, there seems to be more implied in the formula: “If I think it [existence], I cancel it, and then I do not think it.”⁸ Why do I cancel existence when thinking it? I do not stop existing when thinking. What then is the point? Kierkegaard lets Climacus make an extraordinary claim: The difficulty is “the difficulty of thinking the eternal in a process of becoming [at tænke det Evige i Vorden].”⁹ The eternal is no more an object of thought than existence is. Rather, it concerns the one thinking; it asks what it is to think existence as oneself in becoming. In existing, do we truly do so? Climacus indicates that truly to exist is truly difficult: “But truly to exist, that is, to permeate one’s existence with consciousness, simultaneously to be eternal, far beyond it as it were, and nevertheless present in it and nevertheless in a process of becoming – that is truly difficult.”¹⁰ What is important for now is the tension indicated: “simultaneously to be eternal, far beyond it [one’s existence] as it were, and nevertheless present in it and nevertheless in a process of becoming.” This is simultaneously a tension in existing and thinking. It has to do with the

 SKS 7, 286 / CUP1, 314.  SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 308 – 309.  SKS 7, 280 / CUP1, 308.  Ibid.

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extraordinary claim of thinking the eternal in a process of becoming, which Climacus even formulates as the claim that thinking is eternal: “But since [Forsaavidt] all thinking is eternal, the difficulty is for the existing person.”¹¹ Obviously, thinking is thinking “in time.” While thinking we exist. How then is there something eternal to thinking? Let me propose that we link temporality and subjectivity that is implied in thinking. How do we exist in thinking? Where are we when we think?¹² The person thinking what it is to be in becoming is herself in becoming. This existential fact is not part of, or an element in, the process of becoming, but it is what makes it what it is: becoming as being in becoming. The person thinking the movement cannot reduce herself to the movement. If she does, she does something to herself: she lets herself be led by what leads her. She becomes someone who just follows, but this – the just following – is still something she herself does. Thus, in order to understand the existential we need to take the temporality and subjectivity of thinking into account. Climacus does not explicate his point. It remains an indication. The notion that there is something eternal to thinking seems at first to run counter to the insight Climacus insists on, namely, that in thinking we are not moved to a position of sub specie aeterni. What then is the point? If I think existence, I cancel it. Why? Is it because there is something eternal to thinking, and that, in thinking, I am somewhere far beyond existence? I am moved to a position in which I can see this existence as if from somewhere else, beyond, but precisely because it is mine, I am the one to live it. Still, what is “the eternal” in thinking? The argument I have outlined suggests that it concerns the existential character of thinking. What the difficulty of “thinking existence” brings into view is the difficulty of existence, which is to be carried in existing. In existing, the character of our existence is itself at play. There is an infinite possibility accompanying us in existing: that of losing oneself, of not preserving oneself, in the life one leads. Thinking itself is tense. In thinking, we are far beyond and yet in the middle of existence. This tension to be carried in thinking reflects the tension that we exist between two features that define human existence: being oneself in becoming. How is this existential tension reflected in thinking? In a critical sense, human existence itself is at stake in thinking despite the fact that thinking is at distance from existing. In thinking, it is as if we are outside existing. This

 SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 308.  See Hannah Arendt’s question in Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, San Diego: Harcourt 1978, pp. 197– 216.

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gives us the possibility of resisting – but also of forgetting the fact that we ourselves exist. Does the possibility of our failure in thinking show the existential importance of thinking?

5 Abstraction – Distraction – Making a Show of It I have emphasized the existential import of thinking, which is to some extent contrary to the movement in the Postscript. The negative possibilities of thinking are in the foreground of the Postscript: abstraction and distraction, which culminate in forgetting to ever ask what it means to exist and in thoughtless thinking. However, the negative possibilities of thinking do not just fall on the other side of existential thinking, but rather concern the question of what it is to think. In order to see this, let us first try to establish the link between the positive and the negative possibility of thinking. We think under the impression of what comes to us in being in the world. We are ourselves beings in becoming. Thinking is the possibility of not just letting ourselves be absorbed in being moved, but of stopping and reclaiming ourselves as the ones thinking. This requires us to put up resistance and that again demands that we abstract. Thinking as abstraction, however, might turn into the distraction that is thematized in the Postscript, which culminates in the figure of the abstract and absent-minded (distrait) thinker. The need to abstract may turn into a power of abstraction that occupies us to the point that we become absent-minded. Becoming absent-minded is something that happens to us. Yet it concerns us in what we do. We distract ourselves and let ourselves be distracted. What we let ourselves be distracted from is the fact that we are the ones thinking. Failure to think on our own is existential. We fail as we are the ones thinking, thereby letting ourselves be captured by distraction. Being the one who has failed indicates the existential import, or even character, of thinking. Thinking is something we ourselves do – not something that “thinking” does to us. Yet, abstraction is a power that may capture us, as Kierkegaard points out in A Literary Review, published shortly after the Postscript. It is a social power that we ourselves lend power to, coming under its spell ourselves. It is a human, all too human, power, enabling us to become inhuman. The existential import of thinking then has to do with the possibility that we will fail in thinking. It is a failure to think ourselves, that is, a failure to take into account that we are the ones thinking. Thinking is an activity in which we are – or at least should be – “by” ourselves. But there is a danger “from within,” as it were, namely, that thinking changes character. Here we come back to the nega-

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tive possibility noted in the foreground of the Postscript. Thus, Climacus notes, thinking has become “something secondhand [noget Tillært].”¹³ Precisely because thinking should make us begin on our own, we can even make a show of it: “What, if anything, does it mean to think in such a way that one always merely makes a show of it because everything that is said is absolutely revoked?”¹⁴ In thinking, there is a claim that we are thinking. This makes it possible for us to pretend to be thinking. We can make the movements of thinking as if it were something to be performed. In the negative a strong notion of thinking is indicated here: thinking that does not make a show of thinking. Thinking in this emphatic sense is to think against one’s own possibility of pretending, of being thoughtless in thinking.

6 Situated in Existence No less than Heidegger’s Being and Time, Kierkegaard’s Postscript is a countermove to oblivion. It is also a book on existence and time, which opens the question of the existential and the ethical. The oblivion of existence takes place in thinking as abstraction and distraction, which makes us absent-minded in existing. We come to exist in distraction as we become absent-minded to the life we live. What is it that we ignore? A first answer is the difficulty of existence: In the language of abstraction, that which is the difficulty of existence and of the existing person never actually appears; even less is the difficulty explained. Precisely because abstract thinking is sub specie aeterni, it disregards the concrete, the temporal, the becoming of existence, and the difficult situation of the existing person because of his being composed of the eternal and the temporal situated in existence.¹⁵

A human being, as a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal, is “situated in existence” (bestedt i Existents). This is “the difficulty of existence.” Thinking as abstraction seems to be able to disregard time and see things sub specie aeterni. But thinking is temporal in a radical sense: “whether it will be manifest when everything is settled in eternity that the most insignificant circumstance was absolutely important – I do not decide. I can truthfully say that time does not allow me to do that – simply because I am in time.”¹⁶

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 7, 7, 7,

280 / CUP1, 308. 286 / CUP1, 314. 274 / CUP1, 301. 374 / CUP1, 411.

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To be “in time” goes to the core of our existence. “In time” means to be situated in existence. We are ourselves in time, even when we think. In thinking, time comes between. ¹⁷ It does so even in our relating to ourselves. The definition in the opening of The Sickness unto Death of the self as self-relation relating to itself can be read as indicating the temporality of selfhood. We are to begin, but we only begin having already begun. To be situated “in existence” is to be “in time” – even when we are not in time but too late. Let us briefly look at the following key passage in the Postscript: In existence, the individual is a concretion, time is concrete, and even while the individual deliberates he is ethically responsible for the use of time. Existence is not an abstract rush job but a striving and an unremitting “in the meantime.” Even at the moment the task is assigned, something is already wasted, because there is an “in the meantime” and the beginning is not promptly made. This is how it goes backward: the task is given to the individual in existence, and just as he wants to plunge in straightway (which can be done only in abstracto and on paper, because the garb of the abstracter, the big spender’s trousers, is very different from the existing person’s straitjacket of existence), and wants to begin, another beginning is discovered to be necessary, the beginning of the enormous detour that is dying to immediacy. And just as the beginning is about to be made here, it is discovered that, since meanwhile time has been passing, a bad beginning has been made and that the beginning must be made by becoming guilty, and from that moment the total guilt, which is decisive, practices usury with new guilt.¹⁸

This passage is about the character of existence. We are situated “in existence.” Existence requires us to step forward, in deciding and choosing, but we only do so situated. Being “in time” we have already begun. Something is already wasted, as Climacus puts it. We exist in possibilities, but this means that we have already wasted some time in which we could have acted. Time is not only about possibilities coming to us, but also about possibilities that are gone, which makes it possible for us to see that we have failed to respond. However, the phrase “dying to immediacy” does not capture what it means to come to understand that we are “in time.” We cannot interpret ourselves by invoking immediacy, not even immediacy lost. As The Concept of Anxiety observes, what is lost is innocence, not immediacy. The movement “backward” to existence is radical in a twofold sense, joining existing and thinking. Although we can, in thinking, abstract from time and move, as it were, beyond existence, we do so while existing. This is not just an obvious fact to be noted and then left behind, but rather a matter of what it

 SKS 7, 286 / CUP1, 314.  SKS 7, 478 / CUP1, 526.

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means to think. As the ones thinking, it is demanded of us that we give an account of ourselves. The demand of autonomy is existential. In thinking, we ourselves are to begin – as the ones already situated in existence, having already begun. Giving an account of oneself is to take oneself – as the one existing – into account. Let us call this the second sense of the movement “backward” to existence. What about the first? The first sense is indicated by the remark made by Climacus in the Postscript that the backdoor to eternity is closed. The movement “backward” to existence turns the movement of transcendence around. It shows existence to be the horizon for the movement beyond existence “as it were.” In the movement “beyond” time, we are “in time.” This opens up into the second sense, namely, to the demand that we give an account of ourselves. Situated in existence we are to situate ourselves in existence, but it is difficult to take ourselves into account as the ones thinking while existing. However, this difficulty only intensifies the demand that we give an account of ourselves. Our point of departure was the observation that existence “is a very difficult matter to handle.” Climacus also took this to be a difficulty in thinking: “If I think it, I cancel it, and then I do not think it. It would seem correct to say that there is something that cannot be thought – namely, existing. But again there is the difficulty that existence puts it together in this way: the one who is thinking is existing.”¹⁹ Existing and thinking are joined in the fact that we, in thinking, are “situated in existence.” This means that we discover that we are beings that are what we are in thinking, beings that can abstract from existence to the point of situating ourselves in a point of view outside of existence, as it were. Existence is difficult to handle in thinking, but the difficulty in thinking becomes one in existing. We are not first called to join existing and thinking. As Climacus notes, existence does that – i. e., it joins existing and thinking – before we do. That is implied in our being situated in existence. Existential thinking concerns the “joining” of existing and thinking. Up to this point, I have focused on the difficulty of existential thinking in terms of structure: giving an account of what it means that existence joins thinking and existence. But the difficulty itself is existential – it is a matter of what we do in thinking. What does it mean that we exist while thinking? There is something existential to thinking, also when it takes the form of abstraction and distraction. In thinking, we do something to ourselves, without being compelled to notice it, namely, that we situate ourselves. Thus, in abstracting from time we may place ourselves in position as if sub specie aeterni were our position. We ab-

 SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 309.

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stract from our being human, situated in existence. The existential import of thinking begins here, in the negative. Being situated in existence means that we, in thinking, do something that we have to live with in existing. We situate ourselves. Abstraction may come into the life we are to live. Even if thinking takes the form of avoiding the task of existing in time, it takes place in this life. The avoidance itself testifies to the difficulty and the task, but that does not change the fact that it is avoidance. The existential is not first and foremost to be found in an existential act of decision or choice. It is rather that which gives weight to such an act in the first place. The existential in this more basic sense concerns our “being situated in existence,” and this comes to the fore in the question: what we do in and by what we do. Thus, thinking is a doing in the sense that we situate ourselves in the world. We do something to ourselves as the ones thinking. We exist while thinking. What does “exist” mean here? It is more than being oneself in becoming (the twofold definition given above). Do we encounter a deeper, third sense of existence here? How does this come into view? “Existence without motion is unthinkable,”²⁰ Climacus states. This may be rephrased as: Existence cannot be thought without existence. From here, we could move to the notion of formal indication, but let us first further clarify the character of the existential. Even when we move beyond our existence, we are situated in existence. We move beyond – as it were. The movement beyond existence in thinking bears witness to this very existence. This is the existence we think by. Existing and thinking are intertwined – in existing and in thinking. In thinking, we can stop and pause, resist and respond for ourselves, even while existing, being ourselves in becoming. But in thinking, we can also encounter ourselves as situated in existence. We exist while thinking. At first sight, thinking is the move beyond time and existence, in abstraction, but in this very move we carry ourselves along, whether we want to or not. That is, in thinking we then appear to ourselves. Do we have a view here of what it means to exist while thinking?

7 To Exist – and to Exist The concept of existence seems to carry its own impossibility. As Climacus has it: “Existence, like motion, is a very difficult matter to handle. If I think it, I cancel it, and then I do not think it.” As it appears, existence cannot be thought, and yet

 SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 308.

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existence itself joins thinking and existing. The difficulty of “thinking existence” concerns existence itself. This nevertheless opens the possibility of defining existence by focusing on what makes the definition difficult. Thus, as we have seen, Climacus conceptualizes human existence by accentuating two features: existence means to be in becoming and to be oneself. To be oneself in becoming is a tense structure. At first sight, the definition seems to confirm the divide between existence and thinking. While existence is movement, thinking is abstraction. If I try to think existence as movement, I stop and do not take part in the movement. Yet, thinking is a kind of movement too, and existence is like motion, that is: it is not just motion. Therefore, Climacus takes walking as a metaphor for existing: Existing is like walking. When everything is and is at rest, it deceptively looks as if everything is equally important, that is, if I can attain a view of it that is equally quiet. As soon as motion commences, however, and I am along in the motion, then the walking itself is a continual differentiating. But this comparison cannot state the absolute differentiating, because walking is only a finite motion.²¹

Existence is “like” walking, as it is “like” motion. What is it more than motion or walking? The quote suggests that it is the significance of the fact that “I am along in the motion [jeg [sættes] med i Bevægelsen].” If walking is only a finite motion, what is then an infinite? The infinite is indicated by the tense structure of existence: to be oneself in becoming. The one existing is not reduced to the movement of becoming. This comes to the fore in thinking as pausing, resisting, and responding. Thus, thinking is not just abstraction from movement, but is itself a movement: collecting oneself, relating to oneself as the one in becoming. As such, thinking concerns the tense structure of existing. But the infinite movement is a matter of thinking only as a matter of existing. If thinking is collecting oneself, if it refuses to let oneself be reduced to time and the movement one is subjected to, if it instead asks what this movement means to oneself, it is nonetheless still a movement in time. How then should we understand thinking as movement? This answer would likewise answer another question: what does it mean that we exist while thinking? Thinking is not only a movement we make, but also a movement of coming to appear – as the one thinking. We may turn it into a movement we make. If we do, thinking becomes something we perform. We may even make a show of it. But such negative possibilities testify to the existential import of thinking. In

 SKS 7, 375 – 376 / CUP1, 413.

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thinking, we ourselves can begin. In coming to appear, we can collect ourselves and step forward as the one thinking. Does this bring forth what we have been looking for: a third way of defining existing, which is more fundamental in the sense that it makes it possible to better understand the twofold definition we have given so far: to be oneself in becoming? The twofold definition leaves open the question: how are we ourselves in becoming? If we accentuate both – to be in becoming and to be oneself – we may reach the answer: to be oneself in becoming is to appear as oneself. We then have the answer to the following question too: what does “exist” mean when claiming that we exist while thinking or even in thinking? To exist is to appear in the sense that one’s self appears. In fact, we do not have three features of existence, but rather the unfolding of one complex, tense structure that opens the question of the existential. Existence means to be in becoming, and to be in becoming as oneself, and that means: to come to appear as oneself. In the decisive sense then, i. e., in terms of the existential, existing means: to appear as oneself, to step forward, to stand out. If being human is defined as being a self, relating to oneself, the way in which it is a self is to be in becoming oneself, and that is to exist in the sense of stepping forward. There is a subject in this “stepping forward.” It is to be determined in determining oneself. If existence means to be in becoming, how should we account for this being? To “be” in becoming is to “exist,” and to exist means to be oneself in becoming in the sense of coming to appear as oneself. This is not something that just happens to us, it depends on what we do ourselves. We ourselves come to appear in stepping forward in what we do. To exist in the decisive, existential sense is to stand or to step forward in the world, into which we are born, and to stand out from the world in which we are. Or to put it in more Kierkegaardian terms: it is to exist situated in existence. How is this sense of existing existential? If we define existing as standing or stepping forward, it appears as something we do, and yet existing is not a specific act, but rather something we do in what we are doing. Even more, it may be an underlying suffering in what we do. Still, existing as standing or stepping forward concerns us. We are the ones to exist. In existing, we face an open question, a task, that of becoming manifest in what we do. Again, to become manifest is not a doing in the sense of a specific act, but concerns us in our doings. Do we ourselves become manifest in what we do? Of course we do – or do we? In question here is the existential. On the one hand, the existential is existence as condition, articulated in the formula: we are situated in existence. We cannot move beyond existence – in thinking we can, “as if we could,” we move beyond existence, having existence as a condition or horizon. In thinking,

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we exist. On the other hand, the existential means appearing, stepping forward. In thinking, we stand out from the world, but do so in the world. The formula is then expressed as follows: we exist (in the sense of standing out, standing forth), situated in existence. We “are” situated – we exist situated. If the decisive sense of existing is to appear as oneself, to stand forth as oneself, there is a difference in existing, indicated by the phrase: truly to exist. The difference opens up to a decision in existing. As quoted above: “But truly to exist, that is, to permeate one’s existence with consciousness, simultaneously to be eternal, far beyond it as it were, and nevertheless present in it and nevertheless in a process of becoming – that is truly difficult.”²² Truly to exist is truly difficult. Yet, the quote may indeed be misleading. It suggests that to permeate one’s existence with consciousness is something we can do, as a separate act, as it were. It has the look of a decision to be taken. But permeating one’s existence with consciousness can only be done in existing, questioning the character of one’s existence: do I truly exist? As noted above, the weight then lies on the tension indicated: “simultaneously to be eternal, far beyond it [one’s existence] as it were, and nevertheless present in it and nevertheless in a process of becoming.” The tension is existential. It has to do with the question about what it means to exist in the sense of standing forward as oneself. Remarkably, this again concerns thinking, or the existential significance of thinking: to exist as we think. “Existing in relation to thinking is not something that follows by itself any more than it is thoughtlessness.”²³ Truly to exist is not a separate act we can perform and then take ourselves into view, thinking: now we truly exist. It is not something we can perform – any more than thinking is. Or to be more precise, we can in fact perform thinking, even make a show of it. Maybe we can make a show of existence too? In the last quote, Climacus brought into view the possibility of thoughtlessness – that is, the possibility of forgetting to ask what it means to exist. It is the possibility that the fact of existing does not force us to think. This suggests that to exist in the emphatic sense of “truly” existing should be understood by way of the possibility of not doing so. Climacus makes a figure out of this possibility, in particular the figure of the abstract thinker, who is so absent-minded that he does not see that his “own existence contradicts his thinking.”²⁴ The way Climacus then figures human existence operates with the possibility that one’s own existence is not contradicted by one’s existence. This is the possibility of redupli-

 SKS 7, 280 / CUP1, 308.  SKS 7, 231 / CUP1, 254– 255.  SKS 7, 276 / CUP1, 304.

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cation. But can we imagine that our existence would not contradict our thinking? Or rather, can we understand ourselves in this possibility? Climacus accentuates the fact that existing in the eminent sense is a task by stating: “To think is one thing and to exist in what has been thought is something else.”²⁵ Is this “something else” our own possibility (in Heidegger’s sense)? To exist in what we think – is that something we can do? To permeate one’s existence with consciousness requires thinking. To exist in what has been thought is not to apply thinking to existence. Rather, it requires that we understand in existence, that is, that we understand what it means to be situated in existence. Thus, the relation of thinking and existing is complicated – in thinking and existing. This concerns what it means to exist in the sense of appearing as oneself, standing or stepping forth, standing out (as) oneself. This is to unfold what it means to be oneself in becoming. In thinking, we are ourselves in becoming. It is a matter of beginning, of thinking on our own; said differently, the fact that we exist in thinking should make us think. In what sense is existing in the eminent sense – truly existing – a possibility we have? It is not a possibility that can be realized in a distinct act, as a task to be solved. Even if we were to say that it is a continuing task that we must solve in existing, we probably fail to capture how radical the possibility is. It requires that we understand ourselves situated in existence. “Situated in existence” indicates the existential as an inescapable condition that accompanies the existential as the “act” of appearing or standing out as oneself. This is the act we can perform in all acts. As such, it can only be thematized in calling ourselves into question as the ones acting. Ironically, the radical character of existing in the eminent sense is to be seen in the constant possibility of failing by making “truly to exist” into something we perform. This is the danger inherent in existential thinking, namely, the danger that we will turn the pathos of existence – the burden of carrying the weight of existing – into a rhetoric of existing. In that case, truly existing then becomes “truly existing,” that is, a performance of the movements or gestures by which we define what it is to exist in the eminent sense. The danger is present in Climacus’ Postscript, for example, when he operates with alternative versions of the figures we might encounter: the abstract, absentminded thinker on the one hand, and the subjective thinker on the other, the latter defined by the act of reduplication. Or when he defines the joining of thinking and existence by way of different media:

 SKS 7, 231 / CUP1, 254.

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Just as existence has joined thinking and existing, inasmuch as an existing person is a thinking person, so are there two media: the medium of abstraction and the medium of actuality. But pure thinking is yet a third medium, very recently invented. It begins, it is said, after the most exhaustive abstraction. Pure thinking is – what shall I say – piously or thoughtlessly unaware of the relation that abstraction still continually has to that from which it abstracts.²⁶

Speaking of the “medium” of actuality is misleading. It may lead us into thinking that we face an alternative between actuality and distraction, with pure thinking as the third option against which we can define ourselves. Pure thinking, however, affects the very act of existing: to appear as oneself. It is radical not in the sense of a third “medium,” but as a possibility accompanying us in thinking and existing, the possibility of being thoughtlessly unaware of the fact that we exist while thinking. In thinking, we do something to ourselves: we situate ourselves. To be thoughtless does not take much – avoiding the possibility of being thoughtless does.

8 Existence – the Human Condition To exist is to appear (as) oneself, to step forward. It is to begin, and that requires us to think on our own. In thinking we – should – come to appear as ourselves. But how do we begin in thinking? Being under the impression of our own reflection, we may come to think that we begin by making ourselves think. This impression is not unfounded, because thinking is an activity in which we are present to ourselves. Yet, thinking for ourselves does not imply that we think by ourselves. Rather something makes us think. We come to think not least by encountering difficulties, but we do so in thinking. Existential thinking deals with existence preceding thinking. Remarkably, however, existence precedes thinking in thinking. What sets us in motion – making us think – is existence, but how can existence be thought? The difficulty of “thinking” existence does not leave thinking and existing on two sides of an alternative we face. Rather, it has to do with the difficulty of existing, which Climacus brings into focus. My suggestion is that existential thinking concerns the human condition to which thinking itself belongs. We exist in thinking. Although existential thinking has the look of reflecting the experiences of modernity, it reassumes classic philosophical motifs, first and foremost by asking what it means to think while existing. Philosophically, thinking begins with questions in which

 SKS 7, 286 / CUP1, 314.

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thinking itself is in question. Even when it is established, thinking in this emphatic sense is still a matter of beginning anew, with the questions in which it originates.²⁷ Human existence is such a question. More than that, it is not one question among others. Rather, it is the primary example of a question that turns thinking itself into a question – precisely as that which cannot be thought. Existence cannot be thought inasmuch as we exist while thinking. Existence makes us think. If, however, thinking should lead to insight, what kind of insight is thinking that concerns human existence? Is it insight into the questions defining human existence? Thinking in this emphatic sense may appear as an answer to the question it harbors. However, thinking in which an insight originates may lose its original motif. It may turn into repetition in which thinking is just performed again. This is a form of forgetting. Although thinking is an activity in which we are present to ourselves, there is also inertia in thinking. This even seems to be a feature of thinking that makes it human. It is part of the human condition making us face the task of beginning anew. We encounter the question of what it means to exist in a remarkable form of temporality: existence as a matter of thinking in the deep sense that the very fact of existing should make us think; in thinking, we exist but realizing this should change our ways of thinking. We encounter this intertwinement of thinking and existing in the form that we should have changed our ways of thinking. Existential thinking then is not a special sort of thinking dealing with “existential” issues. Rather, it concerns the human condition, including the fact that thinking is part of our being human. This leads us to the notion of the existential as both the condition, situated in existence, and the existential as the task to exist in the sense of appearing as oneself. Situated in existence we ourselves are to step forward. That is, existential thinking concerns what it means to exist, taking into account that existing makes – or should make – us think. Existential thinking is a second reflection in that it seeks to clarify the existential character of thinking. As such it is still performative in that it must also show what it is about. In Kierkegaard’s Postscript, this is done by letting existential thinking be a counter-move to oblivion. However, as such it also reflects on the human condition: what it is to be human so as to be able to forget to ask what it means to exist.

 It is in this sense Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is existential. See the introduction to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Donald L. Landes, London: Routledge 2012, pp. 1– 65.

8 Existence – the Human Condition

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Seeking to understand the concept of existence through the question of the human condition, however, implies reconsidering this question. What does it mean that the human condition is existential? The condition is given to us as human, but not in the sense that it is the condition on which we then exist, as if to be human were to enact or perform what it is to be human. Rather, the human condition presents us with radical possibilities of becoming inhuman – in the Postscript primarily in the form of forgetting what it is to be human. If we forget to ask ourselves this question, we change. The human condition means that we are situated in existing as human beings. In existing, we are ourselves part of the condition. This does not mean that we can change the condition as we can change our environment. Being a part of the human condition we cannot change the question of what it means to be human. To exist in the full sense means to appear as oneself, to stand out as being oneself in becoming. It is something that we ourselves do – although it is not a specific act, but rather the act in everything we do. To exist separates or isolates the individual as the one who exists. It singularizes each and every one of us and, by that radical move, which we can never catch up with, it unites us as human beings. This move is indicated in the Postscript when Climacus links the existential to the ethical. The ethical singularizes and yet it is the breath that makes it possible for us to relate to each other. We share the condition of being separated in existing. What it is to exist as a human being can only be understood alone – in existing. How then is it possible to communicate with each other about what it is to be what we are? This is the difficulty of existential thinking in the double sense: what makes existential thinking difficult and what it addresses. The focal point of the difficulty is the concept of existence. What is the conceptuality of this concept? If existential thinking points to existence as the human condition, how does this “pointing” function? My suggestion is to look for the answer in reconsidering the notion of formal indication.²⁸ A formal indication depends on the one addressed: only she understands what is in view by “filling out,” as it were, what can only be indicated. The notion of formal indication can be developed by bringing the questions implied in Kierkegaard’s indirect communication into a philosophical account of the human condition. The concept of existence is a formal indication in an extra or intensified sense inasmuch as the concepts we use in order to understand what it is to exist are formally indicative. Here,  To the notion of formal indication, see especially Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer A. Gosetti-Ferencei, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2004; see also Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Being and Time, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993.

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understanding requires us to understand for ourselves, to “fill out,” as it were, what can only be indicated. In understanding what existence means, we should be able to walk on our own. We only understand what it means to exist in existing. Existence separates us as the ones who exist – and as the ones having to understand what this means. But the formal indication only offers an outline to be filled out by presenting us with the task of understanding. We share the condition of being situated in existence, and we can understand that precisely by encountering the difficulty of thinking what it means to exist. Furthermore, we also gain resources to understand by experiencing failures to understand, and even by facing possibilities of forgetting, not to mention our capacity to pretend that we speak the language of human existence.

Chapter 2 Existence and Dialectics 1 Introduction When one wants to discuss the conflict between “the medium of poetry” and “the medium of existence” in Kierkegaard, it is appropriate to ask what is meant here by existence. It is evident that existence in some sense or other is being stressed. When one is going to investigate what existence in such a stressed sense means, yet another fundamental conflict appears, namely between “the medium of abstraction” and “the medium of existence.”¹ One could say that just as Kierkegaard’s attitude to poetry is ambiguous, so is his relation to thought. He even seems to place poetry and speculation beside each other, through opposing them both to actuality or existence. From both comes a danger that can be called the “fantastic” or being “fantastic,”² in that through wanting to “bestow actuality” they in fact lead away from the concrete task existence presents.³ In what follows, I wish to make my point of departure the problem of the relation between thought and existence. At first sight, it may seem that there is no problem, for Kierkegaard’s clash with speculation can seem seductively simple. But what may appear as a simple opposition between thought and existence turns out to be complicated. And this more complicated opposition is indicated in the relation between existence and dialectics. The task is, in short, to define these two concepts in relation to each other: Why link existence and dialectics together? What does dialectics mean here? And what kind of a definition of existence is it that makes this linking together of existence and dialectics possible? Is existence itself dialectical? It is not my ambition here to give a comprehensive survey of the two concepts in Kierkegaard. Instead, I want to give an outline of what I view as being the central definition (Bestemmelse), “the dialectics.” I relate this definition to what Kierkegaard calls the “difficulty” of existence, more closely defined  In addition to the media of “abstraction and actuality” is named a third, namely pure thought (SKS 7, 285 – 286 / CUP1, 313). But this third medium must be understood as a making independent or a hypostatization of abstraction. It results from letting abstraction be without relation to that which it is an abstraction of.  See, for example, SKS 7, 115 – 116, 275 / CUP1, 120; or pure thought works in “a fantastic medium: pure being” (SKS 7, 277 / CUP1 304; and also SKS 7, 298 – 299 / CUP1, 327).  SKS 7, 290 – 291 / CUP1, 319. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-008

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as the problem of becoming subjective. With this point of departure (the question of the relation between thought and existence) and with this problem (that of becoming subjective), I keep chiefly within the universe of Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

2 Thought and Existence The clash with speculation in Concluding Unscientific Postscript can seem seductive precisely because it is supported by a seriousness, or a reference to what is serious, namely, existing. The attack seems to be made without reservation, does not seem to gain anything from the opponent. Apparently the relation is simple enough: it is one thing to understand – another thing to exist. On the one hand, one has speculation, on the other, existence: “existence and existing are the very opposite of speculation.”⁴ These opposites appear, it seems, to be alternatives. At any rate, there is question of two spheres: thought and actuality, or thought and freedom. I select one quotation from many: “The only an sich that cannot be thought is existing, with which thinking has nothing at all to do.”⁵ Kierkegaard’s concern here is of course – with the passion of making distinctions⁶ – to define the limit, the limit of reason. Already here it is possible to see Kierkegaard’s dialectical method at work: Instead of speculatively keeping the different spheres together so that the result is a mixture, it is necessary to make distinctions, to keep them apart in order to keep them together in their difference. There is thus a more general point in making distinctions between the different spheres. But the point – and with that the dialectical⁷ – is intensified by the absolute paradox. Here we encounter a radical limit of reason itself: The absurd neither can nor should be understood. On the contrary, the task is to maintain the non-comprehension. The paradox is inaccessible to thought. Here there is no task for thought.⁸

 SKS 7, 346 / CUP1, 380.  SKS 7, 300 / CUP1, 328.  SKS 4, 288 / PF, 91.  “Even if I were a better dialectician than I am, I would still have my limits. Basically, an unshakable insistence upon the absolute and absolute distinctions is precisely what makes a good dialectician” (SKS 4, 304 / PF, 108).  SKS 7, 506 / CUP1, 556; see also SKS 4, 149 – 150 / FT, 55.

2 Thought and Existence

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But, the defining of limits turns out to be more dialectical than would appear to be the case.⁹ Generally speaking, one can say that it is with the help of reason itself that reason is demarcated. The suspicion entertained of the reality of thought is itself a way of thinking. This dialectical element is clear in Kierkegaard, even in the definition of the absolute paradox. The believing Christian “here uses the understanding – in order to see to it that he believes against the understanding.”¹⁰ The task is to maintain what cannot be understood, but this means in an understanding of it as that which cannot be understood. To this extent, the paradox is to be understood – as paradox.¹¹ More precisely, the task in hand is not to understand the paradox, but to understand that it is the paradox.¹² Thus, to maintain and even “to accentuate incomprehensibility”¹³ calls for passion: “the passion with which one understands that one cannot understand,”¹⁴ a passion with which one lets “thought collide with the unthinkable”.¹⁵ This passion is thought or reason’s own passion: “The dialectical aspect of the issue requires thought-passion – not to want to understand it but to understand what it means to break in this way with the understanding.”¹⁶ With Climacus in Philosophical Fragments we can even say that “the paradox is the passion of thought.”¹⁷ Yet there is, however, a relation between paradox and understanding, a relation, which consists of their colliding together. But the collision can succeed or fail. If they collide in a mutual understanding – “in the mutual understanding of their difference” – the collision is a happy one; if the collision is not in mutual understanding, then the relation is unhappy.¹⁸ The understanding is thus decisive. The incomprehensibility is in fact to be understood. And the understanding lies in “that happy passion,”¹⁹ in faith.²⁰

 See Arne Grøn, “Das Transzendenzproblem bei Kierkegaard und beim späten Schelling,” Chapter 23 in this volume.  SKS 7, 516 / CUP1, 568.  SKS 7, 207– 208 / CUP1, 227– 228; see also SKS 4, 165 / FT, 74.  SKS 4, 261 / PF, 58.  SKS 7, 512 / CUP1, 563.  SKS 7, 507 / CUP1, 558.  SKS 4, 334 / CA, 27.  SKS 7, 517 / CUP1, 569.  SKS 4, 242 / PF, 37.  SKS 4, 253 / PF, 49.  SKS 4, 257 / PF, 54.  SKS 4, 261 / PF, 59.

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The absolute paradox constitutes “a break with all thinking,”²¹ but this break is not simple. The radical limit is a limit for reason. It is to be understood as limit. It is to be understood what it means that there is this limit. But not merely that. The dialectical is also on the other side of the relation: The absolute paradox is itself defined by this break, namely by “the dialectical contradiction.” The break is precisely that “[b]ut that the by-nature eternal comes into existence in time, is born, grows up, and dies.”²² The dialectical lies in the fact that the eternal itself is “made dialectical by additional qualifications.”²³ Thus understood the dialectical is that “which is the decisive part for the issue” – which is “an existence-issue.”²⁴ What then is left of the original opposition between existence and thought? We are now left with a division into, on the one hand, “the inwardness of existence in order to grasp the pathetic,” on the other, “the passion of thought in order to grasp the dialectical difficulty” – and the task is to put them together: there is required “concentrated passion because one is supposed to exist in it.”²⁵ The relation between thought and existence thus turns out to be more complicated, as a relation between dialectics and existence. Let us now try to do a thorough investigation of how the relation is complicated, by looking at, not the dialectical difficulty, but at that of existence. In doing this, I go back to the apparently simple clash with speculation. Speculation is a form of abstract thought in the particular sense that there is an abstraction from “the difficulty of existence and of the existing person.”²⁶ The difficulty of existence is the problem of existing, namely as problem for oneself, the one existing. With this difficulty the concept of existence is emphasized: Existence posits itself as problem for the existing person himself. To this corresponds the concept of an infinite interest: “the existing person is infinitely interested in existing.”²⁷ The decisive – infinite – applies to the self-relation. I will come back to this later. What is now strange is that thought provides a possibility of a lack of interest. One can think abstractly, i. e., think the difficulty – which exists for oneself – away. We thus have two assertions: on the one hand, that “the difficulty of existence is the existing person’s interest, and the existing person is infinitely inter-

      

SKS 7, Ibid. SKS 7, SKS 7, SKS 7, SKS 7, SKS 7,

526 / CUP1, 579. 351 / CUP1, 385. 505 / CUP1, 555. 351 / CUP1, 386. 274 / CUP1, 301. 275 / CUP1, 302.

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ested in existing.”²⁸ On the other hand, abstraction is “lacking interest,”²⁹ in that it is abstraction from the difficulty. The two assertions stand side by side, connected with a “but.” And they are to be read in Kierkegaard (Climacus) in the opposite direction: First comes what I have set down as the second assertion, that abstraction is lacking interest. The reference to the interest of the one existing comes then as an objection that seems to make abstraction groundless. To quote a parallel passage coming a little later in The Postscript: “Abstraction is disinterested, but to exist is the highest interest for an existing person.”³⁰ In this lies the conflict between the two media: The problem, which is an existence problem, miscarries in “the medium of abstraction, which ignores existence.”³¹ But let us ask the other way round: what does the second assertion – the possibility of lack of interest – mean in relation to the first? Climacus certainly contrasts the two assertions, but he places them beside each other without letting the second disturb the first. But even if our question is not asked, the problem turns up in Climacus’ text. The relation between existence and thought is complicated in that existence itself places to think and to exist together: “Existence, like motion, is a very difficult matter to handle. If I think it, I cancel it, and then I do not think it. It would seem correct to say that there is something that cannot be thought – namely, existing. But again there is the difficulty that existence puts it together in this way: the one who is thinking is existing.”³² And – it must be added – “inasmuch as an existing person is a thinking person.”³³ Climacus formulates the problem then in this way: “If existing cannot be thought, and the existing person is thinking nevertheless, what does this mean?”³⁴ And he answers: “It means that he thinks momentarily; he thinks before and he thinks afterward.”³⁵ Before and after what? The obvious answer is: action. But this is how Climacus corrects the answer: If there is to be a distinction at all between thinking and acting, this can be maintained only by assigning possibility, disinterestedness, and objectivity to thinking, and action to subjectivity. But now a confinium is readily apparent…The actuality is not the external ac-

       

SKS 7, Ibid. SKS 7, SKS 7, SKS 7, SKS 7, SKS 7, Ibid.

275 / CUP1, 302. 285 / CUP1, 313. 505 / CUP1, 556. 281 / CUP1, 308 – 309. 285 / CUP1, 314. 300 / CUP1, 329.

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tion but an interiority in which the individual annuls possibility and identifies himself with what is thought in order to exist in it. This is action.³⁶

The opposition between existence and thought therefore seems complicated thus, that the difference that is decisive turns out to be a difference in thought: existing or not in what is thought. So Climacus opposes two forms of thought: abstract and concrete thought. Concerning the first I quote: “What is abstract thinking? It is thinking where there is no thinker. It ignores everything but thought, and in its own medium only thought is.”³⁷ One could conclude from this that the claim is then that thinking is not in its own medium, that is, does not close itself within itself. The continuation goes as follows: “Existence is not thoughtless, but in existence thought is in an alien medium.”³⁸ The difficulty is “to think in the medium of existence.”³⁹ Have we thus got as far as a definition of the second form of thought? At first sight concrete thought is defined as merely opposite the abstract: “It is thinking where there are a thinker,”⁴⁰ the thinking person himself. But what does this mean? As implied already, there is talk of a requirement, namely, to exist in what is thought or understood. It does not mean that we first think something in order then to exist in it. The demand must already apply to thought, namely, to think in such a way that one can exist in what is thought, that is, to include oneself in what is thought. The requirement is then “to understand oneself in existence,”⁴¹ to include oneself in what is thought as an existing person. What is required is an accentuated self-understanding. It is expressed in the concept of the subjective thinker. The subjective thinker in all his thinking “has to include the thought that he himself is an existing person.”⁴² Thinking, he is “also present to himself in existence.”⁴³ This is elaborated in an earlier formulation in The Postscript: “One who is existing is continually in the process of becoming; the actually existing subjective thinker, thinking, continually reproduces this in his existence and invests all his thinking in becoming.”⁴⁴ The opposition, then, lies between: to be an ex-

        

SKS 7, SKS 7, Ibid. SKS 7, SKS 7, SKS 7, Ibid. Ibid. SKS 7,

309 – 310 / CUP1, 339. 303 / CUP1, 332. 287 / CUP1, 316. 303 / CUP1, 332. 321 / CUP1, 351; translation modified. See also SKS 7, 323 / CUP1, 353.

85 / CUP1, 86.

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isting thinker and to be “a speculative thinker who forgets what it means to exist.”⁴⁵ The two forms of thought are described thus: “Whereas objective thinking is indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence, the subjective thinker as existing is essentially interested in his own thinking, is existing in it.”⁴⁶ Interest concerns one’s own thinking, but is an interest in reproducing existing in one’s thought – and with this, in one’s thought an interest in existing.⁴⁷ But can we not go a step further? Up to now I have tried to bring out how thinking can be determined by the interest in existing. What role, can we now ask, does thinking play in the medium of existence? Is the difference in thinking bound up with a difference in existence?

3 The Concept Existence As I noted at the beginning, it is evident that the concept existence is stressed in Kierkegaard. There is already an emphasis in the fact that we are dealing with human existence, existence as a human being. Existence is, however, further accentuated twice. To follow Kierkegaard’s own suggestions I will call these the first and second accentuations of existence. The emphasizing of existence as human existence comes in advance of this. Or rather, human existence is precisely what is now accentuated twice. In the remainder of the essay, I will attempt to bring out these two accentuations. First I will return to the “difficulty” of existence, that which abstract thought ignored. The difficulty is the problem, which existing poses the existing person himself. It posits itself as problem for the one existing. In other words, the existing person relates himself to existing. Existence implies the self-relation. But with this, thought seems to acquire an existential significance. There are different ways of existing – and these ways are different ways of relating oneself to existing. And is there not in these different ways of relating oneself, question of thinking or understanding? The difference in thinking turned on this: to understand oneself in existence, to think oneself in the picture as an existing person, to understand oneself as existing. But is it not this self-understanding, with the different ways of relating oneself to existing, that is of vital significance?

 SKS 7, 188 / CUP1, 205.  SKS 7, 73 / CUP1, 72– 73.  SKS 7, 90 – 91 / CUP1, 91– 92.

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What does the task, which posits itself for the one existing consist of? The answer is: of an appropriation of the existence, which is already one’s own. With Climacus we can interpret it as follows: “But truly to exist, that is, to permeate one’s existence with consciousness.”⁴⁸ Appropriation involves self-understanding. One’s own existence is already to be understood as a problem or a task, as something that is to be appropriated. There is, however, something strange about this movement: to appropriate the existence that is already one’s own. Why is this appropriation or repetition necessary at all and even decisive? The answer must be: because it is possible to misunderstand or even to forget what it is to exist. Here I can return to what was strange with the two assertions: 1. that the one existing is infinitely interested in existing, 2. that abstraction lacks interest. Abstraction provides the possibility of looking away from precisely one’s own existence. This second assertion must mean that it is not correct without further ado to say that “to exist is for an existing person his highest interest.”⁴⁹ On the contrary, it is possible to forget what it is to exist. One could now reply that it has to do with only an abstraction in thought. The one speculating is still “an existing human being, subject to the claims of existence.”⁵⁰ Whether one wants to or not, one exists. Yes indeed, but abstraction functions as an existential threat. It must signify something, existentially. Otherwise, the passion in the clash would be without meaning – and likewise with the task: that of maintaining that one is an existing person.⁵¹ The strange thing is not that the existing person exists whether he wants to or not, but that he can forget what it is to exist.⁵² Abstraction does not, then, become merely a possibility of speculation. On the contrary, one must say that speculation is not itself the problem – the problem arises in that existence itself is characterized by abstraction. The problematic speculation – speculation that abstracts the difficulty of existence away – indicates or goes back to an existential poverty: the distance to one’s own existence, the lack of inwardness. This appears in a perspective that criticizes or diagnoses the time: “The age and human beings become less and less real.”⁵³ The age itself can almost be characterized as speculative – Climacus thus speaks of “the observing nine-

     

SKS 7, 280 / CUP1, 308. SKS 7, 285 / CUP1, 313; my italics. SKS 7, 188 / CUP1, 206. Ibid. SKS 7, 116 / CUP1, 120. SKS 7, 291 / CUP1, 319; translation modified.

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teenth century.”⁵⁴ This must even be understood to mean that “the deviation of speculative thought” is not something accidental, but must “be located far deeper in the orientation of the whole age.”⁵⁵ Moreover, “because of the copiousness of knowledge, people in our day have forgotten what it means to exist, and what inwardness is, and that the misunderstanding between speculative thought and Christianity could be explained by that.”⁵⁶ That speculation becomes a threat is due to this poverty of the time. The relation is even turned around. The poverty of speculation is a consequence of the time. “While the ethical in our day is ignored more and more, this ignoring has also had the harmful result that it has confused both poetry and speculative thought”⁵⁷ The poverty manifests itself in that thinking “in our time” has become “something strange.”⁵⁸ To appropriate one’s existence is thus a task, in that it is possible to forget what it is to exist. And in this appropriation there lies – as antidote to oblivion – an understanding, namely, “to permeate one’s existence with consciousness.”⁵⁹ Indeed, appropriation means to take charge of one’s existence with understanding of it. What is essential is to exist – as is said polemically against speculation.⁶⁰ But the understanding comes back in existing, namely with the difference between existing with understanding of this existing or not. The decisive difference in the mode of existing involves this question of understanding. But when the understanding comes back in existing, what is it, then, that is to be understood? On the basis of the above, the answer should be: what it is to exist. But what does this mean? The answer must be more explicitly defined as the problem or difficulty in existing. And this problem is not a problem to be solved in the ordinary sense of the word. It is not there to be got rid of, but on the contrary, to be maintained, since it constitutes a constant task. The understanding acquires a fundamental significance, namely, that of maintaining the problem. I attempted to bring out this fundamental significance already in the discussion about the absolute paradox. It is now elucidated with the understanding as antidote to oblivion. The opposition between existence and thought showed itself above to be complicated in that there is a decisive difference in thinking: between thinking

      

SKS 7, 125 / CUP1, 133; translation modified. See also SKS 7, 345 / CUP1, 279 – 280. SKS 7, 220 / CUP1, 242. SKS 7, 226 / CUP1, 249. SKS 7, 290 / CUP1, 319. SKS 7, 280 / CUP1, 308; translation modified. Ibid. SKS 7, 188 / CUP1, 206 – 207.

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oneself away from the difficulty in existing or maintaining it. This difference has an existential significance, but such that the problem of existing itself becomes a question about understanding. Thought is not an extra element tacked on to existing. As Climacus himself comments, existence is not “thoughtless.”⁶¹ On the contrary, thought or understanding returns in existing. The difference in thinking is decisive, since it is possible to forget what it means to exist. But this is a possibility in existence: the possibility of existing such that one forgets what it means to exist. The decisive difference concerns existing with understanding of what it is to exist. Now what does this mean for the concept of existence? The task – of appropriating one’s existence – refers back to a decisive difference in existence or the mode of existing. The difference can be formulated as the difference between, on the one hand, “just any sort of existing,”⁶² which reminds one of “thoughtlessness,”⁶³ and on the other, to exist “in an eminent sense” as a person.⁶⁴ Regarding the latter, there is talk of existence in an emphatic, accentuated sense. But existence is already stressed as human existence. Climacus now adds an extra stress to this. Thus, he says in the clash with speculation that “the thinker has never existed qua human being.”⁶⁵ It is tempting to reply that of course he has existed as a person all the time; but not in this extra, stressed sense “as person.” This accentuation of human existence we can call ethical. Climacus himself says that “the ethical accentuates existing.”⁶⁶ He speaks of “the requirement of the ethical,” namely “to be infinitely interested in existing.”⁶⁷ This self-relation – the infinite interest – is, as already suggested, not a fact, but a requirement. The difference in existence is decisive: It is that which matters. It has a normative significance. This normative element in the concept of existence becomes clear with the qualifying addition “truly to exist.”⁶⁸ In an obvious sense we all exist without further ado. But at the same time there lies in existing a task that can go wrong. I have attempted to bring out the significance of this movement: to make the existence one’s own that is already that. I will shortly say a little more about the task lying in this.

       

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

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

303 / CUP1, 332; see also SKS 7, 231 / CUP1, 254. 283 / CUP1, 311. 231 / CUP1, 255. 277 / CUP1, 303. 277 / CUP1, 304. 302 / CUP1, 331. 288 / CUP1, 316. 280 / CUP1, 308.

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To exist as person – with stress on this “as person” – is to exist with understanding of what it is to exist as person. What is emphasized by this is, in the first instance, what is unconcluded about this existence: “The one existing is constantly becoming.”⁶⁹ But with what is unconcluded or undecided is also emphasized the task of deciding, of determining oneself. Thus far, the requirement can be said to be a requirement to do with autonomy, self-determination, but with an intensified meaning of self-determination, given with a more radical possibility of losing oneself. Self-determination means an appropriation of this particular life as one’s own. With this clarification of the requirement, we touch upon the second accentuation of existence. In order to bring this out I will return to the dialectical difficulty. Above I quoted Climacus’ dictum, that the dialectical is that “which is the decisive part for the issue” – that is itself “existential.” There is, however, more to say on the subject: “The problem” is not only an existence problem, it itself means an intensification of the problem existence poses, an intensification of the difficulty of existence.

4 Dialectics and Subjectivity Let us therefore take the question of the relation between existence and dialectics up again. What does the previous shading and qualifying of the concept of existence mean for this question? What does dialectics come to mean here? This question can be misunderstood, for it has to do with not one meaning of dialectics among several, but is about “the dialectical.” Already in my first section, I touched upon the question of what dialectics is. On the basis of what was said there, it seems reasonable to understand dialectics as a method: it has to do with thinking the different spheres of existence in such a way that they are kept together in their qualitative difference. Certainly the relation between existence and thought showed itself to be complicated, precisely as a relation between existence and dialectics, but the dialectical seemed, however, to fall within the area of thought. But can one not also describe existence itself as dialectical? Let us make our point of departure the following quotation where Climacus himself speaks of existence as the dialectical element: “Actuality, existence, is the dialectical element in a trilogy, the beginning and end of which cannot be for an existing person,

 SKS 7, 85 / CUP1, 86; translation modified.

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who qua existing person is in the dialectical element.”⁷⁰ How is dialectics to be understood in order that existence can be characterized as dialectical? Dialectics must concern the relation between two parties that enter into a dialogue with each other and can actively disagree with each other. In this, one can emphasize the very movement between the two parties. In this movement something is at stake, the movement is (idealized) a movement to and between two viewpoints in the matter. The movement is a movement of decision: In the movement itself the matter is undecided, but the telos of the movement is the decision. Let us with this first definition look again at the concept of existence: Climacus links existence to movement and then qualifies this movement as becoming and striving: “Existence itself, existing, is a striving.”⁷¹ And so it is, since it is a task for the existing person himself. Therefore, Climacus in the above quotation can call existence “the dialectical element”: For the existing person existence is unconcluded and in an essential sense undecided – demanding decision.⁷² But in the decision lies the self-relation: One decides oneself. The undecidedness refers back to the decisive meaning of how we ourselves relate. Here I have reached my major proposition: “The dialectical” concerns the self-relation (understood in both senses: to relate oneself and to relate oneself to oneself). More precisely, it is the self-relation, which provides the dialectical. In the dialectical definition of the different spheres of existence it thus has to do with fundamental possibilities as existential attitudes. And basically, what one disposes oneself towards is the problem or the task of existing. In Kierkegaard, the dialectical is placed in opposition to the simple or straightforward. But what comes “between,” so to speak, and prevents the matter from being straightforward is that there is talk of a self that relates itself to the issue. We can find the point more directly expressed in the following quotation from The Sickness unto Death: “The self is freedom. But freedom is the dialectical aspect of the categories of possibility and necessity.”⁷³ The proposition can be filled out in the following direction: It is in the accentuation of existence that the latter shows itself to be dialectical. To express it in another way: That which is actually stressed is the self-relation.

 SKS 7, 287 / CUP1, 315.  SKS 7, 90 / CUP1, 92.  The finitude of human existence can be said to lie in this, that the ending cannot exist for the existing person. But here there is question of a positive concept of finitude in the sense that with the unconcludedness the task is posited: to decide oneself.  SKS 11, 145 / SUD, 29.

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The first accentuation is, as shown, normative. In existing lies a task, which can go wrong. The normative definition shows itself in the difference in existence, between merely existing and existing in truth. The task is, however, also expressed as: to become subjective. But in a certain sense we are of course all “a sort of subject.” This is “this little Socratically jesting and Christianly infinitely concerned distinction between being a so-called subject of sorts and being a subject or becoming one.”⁷⁴ The task is “to become subjective, that is, truly to become a subject.”⁷⁵ With this, the difference in existence is formulated in the concept of subject. What is accentuated is existence as a subject, i. e., subjectivity. To forget what it is to exist is thus to forget one’s self.⁷⁶ And, correspondingly, the antidote to this is self-understanding: to understand oneself as existing. That which is appropriated is actually the self. The task or goal comes to consist of a self-relation: to become oneself. However, there is more to the stress on the self-relation. The task posited by existing can go wrong – and go wrong precisely because of what oneself does. I quote again from The Sickness unto Death: “[D]espair is dialectically different from what is usually termed a sickness, because it is a sickness of the spirit.”⁷⁷ Despair is otherwise dialectics in that it is a misrelation or a sickness in the selfrelation. The possibility we have here is that of losing oneself – and to lose oneself through one’s self. With this we can repeat the definition in The Sickness unto Death: “The self is doubly dialectical.”⁷⁸ With this we have arrived at the second accentuation. At first sight there is again question of an accentuation of existence: “Christianity is an existencecommunication that makes existing paradoxical”⁷⁹ or “paradoxically accentuates existing.”⁸⁰ This second accentuation can thus be called paradox, “the paradoxical accentuation of existence.”⁸¹ It is, however more directly than the first, an accentuation of subjectivity. For what does it mean that existence is accentuated paradoxically? This qualifies the existing person himself. To use an earlier formulation by Climacus: Existence has now “marked the existing person a second time,” the

       

SKS 7, 123 / CUP1, 131. Ibid. SKS 7, 291 / CUP1, 320. SKS 11, 140 / SUD, 24. SKS 11, 175 / SUD, 61. SKS 7, 513 / CUP1, 562; translation modified. SKS 7, 550 / CUP1, 606. SKS 7, 483 / CUP1, 531.

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existing person is “marked in such a way that existence has carried out an essential change in him.”⁸² And this essential change is defined as, “subjectivity is untruth.”⁸³ Climacus adds: “Existence can never be accentuated more sharply than it has been here.”⁸⁴ Why not? Existence “is marked” – accentuated – a second time through the definition that the existing person is a sinner.⁸⁵ The existing person is as subject – through himself – in untruth. The point is thus this qualification of subjectivity as untruth. And that which is here stressed is the self-relation by which subjectivity is defined. It is the existing person himself who is stamped, changed, become “an other.”⁸⁶ There is question of a changed self-consciousness, a consciousness of one’s self as an other. The consciousness of sin is “a change of the subject himself.”⁸⁷ But one can also speak of change of existence itself – in Climacus’ words, a “paradoxical transformation of existence,” “the new existence-medium”⁸⁸– in and with that existence itself is “stamped”: qualified by sin. The self-relation that lies in existence is emphasized with the latter’s accentuation. The self-relation was stressed already with the first accentuation: the problem posits itself for the subject himself – and the problem is to become oneself. Now, for the second time, the self-relation is accentuated further in that the problem is precisely the self-relation. The problem shows itself through the task – which was emphasized with the first accentuation – being made difficult dialectically. The task of becoming oneself is not a straightforward project. On the contrary, it can go wrong precisely through what the subject himself does. The self-relation is thus doubly stressed in that it itself is now also the problem. It is emphasized – as that which we cannot get around. To that extent, existence cannot be accentuated more sharply. The problem is our self, not just becoming our self, but our self as that which “comes in between.”

      

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 190 – 191 / CUP1, 207– 208; translation modified. 7, 189 – 190 / CUP1, 207. 7, 192 / CUP1, 209. 7, 204 / CUP1, 224. 7, 531 / CUP1, 583; translation modified. 7, 531 / CUP1, 584. 7, 530 / CUP1, 583.

Chapter 3 The Human Synthesis 1 Introduction “That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns. Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit.”¹ I quote here the passage in The Concept of Anxiety where Søren Kierkegaard has his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis introduce the definition of man as a synthesis.² In summary form, it reads thus: “[M]an is a synthesis of psyche and body that is constituted and sustained by spirit.”³ It is generally recognized that the definition of man as a synthesis is an essential – if not the essential – point in Kierkegaard’s anthropology. It has therefore also been the object of much attention in the literature on Kierkegaard, but the attention has been concentrated on the different formulations of the definition of synthesis. A little later in The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard writes: “Man, then, is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.”⁴ Given this definition, it is natural to ask whether there are two different syntheses, a first synthesis of soul and body, and a second synthesis of the eternal and the temporal. What do the different formulations mean? My claim is that there is a question prior to this, namely what does it mean that man is a synthesis? If man is a synthesis, in what sense is the synthesis human? This question is fundamental in both the philosophical and exegetical sense, and by answering it we obtain a key to the subsequent question about the different formulations of the human synthesis. I will offer a three part response to the question: what does it mean that man is a synthesis? First, that man is a synthesis means that he is an “intermediate being.” Second, the definition of man as a synthesis explains what I will call the problematic structure of subjectivity. Third, and most importantly, the definition must be read as an expression of the fundamental experience of oneself as

 SKS 4, 349 / CA, 43.  Throughout this essay “man” and its derivatives are used for the sake of convenience and indicate s/he.  SKS 4, 384 / CA, 81.  SKS 4, 388 / CA, 85. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-009

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an other. While the two first parts of my response are very brief, I will make more of the third part, which makes this part of my response encompass the other two.

2 Man as an “Intermediate Being” In order to illustrate the first part of my answer, I will quote two passages, the first from The Concept of Anxiety, and the second from the Postscript. First Vigilius Haufniensis writes: “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.”⁵ Then Johannes Climacus writes: “Existing (in the sense of being this individual human being) is surely an imperfection compared with the eternal life of the idea, but a perfection in relation to not being at all. Existing is a somewhat intermediate state like that, something that is suitable for an intermediate being such as a human being is.”⁶ A little later Johannes Climacus changes this to a being, which is between the ideal and a thing, for example, a rose or a potato. Let us take these two quotations as points of departure. References to “intermediate being” (Mellemvæsen) and “intermediate state” (Mellemtilstand) play an important role in Kierkegaard. To be sure, when he claims that man is an intermediate being – Kierkegaard participates in a long tradition of philosophy that goes back to René Descartes and beyond. Just to give one example, Johannes Climacus in the Postscript in referring to Plato and Socrates defines existence as “that child who is begotten by the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal, and is therefore continually striving.”⁷ I will argue, however, that Kierkegaard puts an original spin on this idea. The originality shows in the first quotation as the possibility for a human being to be in anxiety, and in the second as the notion of existence as an intermediate state. How, then, should we understand the claim that man exists as an intermediate being? In Kierkegaard, we find a move that redoubles. Man is not merely a being between the finite and the infinite, nor is he a simple composite of a finite and an infinite part. He is, instead, an existing being standing out from himself by being between the finite and the infinite. It is in this sense that man is both finite and infinite. Here we see Kierkegaard’s redoubling: Man is an intermediate being by himself being an intermediate. While traditionally man is regarded as an intermediate being situated somewhere between the finite and the infinite, Kier-

 SKS 4, 454 / CA, 155.  SKS 7, 301 / CUP1, 329.  SKS 7, 91 / CUP1, 92.

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kegaard’s move is to see man as an intermediate being situated between himself as finite and himself as infinite. He is an intermediate by relating to himself as finite and infinite.

3 The Problematic Structure of Subjectivity As an intermediate being in this strong sense, man is a problem for himself. A being between himself as finite and himself as infinite, man is an intermediate being in the sense of being a self-relation. This is implied when Johannes Climacus in the Postscript refers to the fact of being in existence: “But if he is a human being, then he is indeed existing. Now, all in all, there are two ways for an existing individual: either he can do everything to forget that he is existing and thereby manage to become comic…because existence possesses the remarkable quality that an existing person exists whether he wants to or not; or he can direct all his attention to his existing.”⁸ The very attempt to forget being an existing human being is already a way of relating to oneself. In Johannes Climacus’ definition of subjectivity, man is posited as a being who is a problem or a task for himself. What this means is explained by unfolding the implications of the definition of man as a synthesis. A human being is “strangely put together [underligt sammensat].”⁹ Heterogeneous with himself; man is finite vis-à-vis infinite. As intermediate being, he is confronted with the problem of being himself in the sense of being one with himself. But as the opening quotation from the Postscript suggests, he cannot resolve this problem without acknowledging himself to be “this individual human being.” Kierkegaard’s definition of synthesis means that a human being’s identity with himself is fragile or vulnerable.

4 Body and Time: Oneself as an Other So much or so little for my second point, the problematic structure of subjectivity and the implicit task of achieving identity with oneself. This task presupposes, however, that the individual has experienced himself as an other, which brings me to the third part of my argument. The definition of synthesis is an expression of the crucial experience of a human being who receives himself as a problem because he is separated from himself.

 SKS 7, 116 / CUP1, 120.  SKS 7, 163 / CUP1, 176; translation modified.

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I take as my point of departure for this argument the first formulation of the synthesis: man is a synthesis of soul and body, sustained by spirit. When Vigilius Haufniensis describes this synthesis more fully, he speaks in terms of acquiring a history. At first glance, the temporal aspect seems to emerge with the second formulation of the synthesis: man is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. Temporality is, however, already implied in the definition of spirit as the “connecting” third component. Spirit is what makes the synthesis a synthesis, but spirit does not simply connect. The presupposition is that the connection between soul and body has become a problem. Vigilius Haufniensis describes this as a process: “In the moment the spirit posits itself, it posits the synthesis, but in order to posit the synthesis it must pervade it differentiatingly [adskillende], and the ultimate point of the sensuous is precisely the sexual.”¹⁰ Once again, this process of differentiation or separation is one of acquiring a history. Vigilius Haufniensis in a noteworthy manner links sexuality and history. He writes: “[W]ithout sexuality, no history.”¹¹ While an angel has no history, history belongs to man as an “intermediary being.” Vigilius Haufniensis’ explanation is as follows: “First in sexuality is the synthesis posited as a contradiction, but like every contradiction it is also a task, the history of which begins at that same moment.”¹² The synthesis is posited as a task in the moment when the individual is separated from himself. It happens as he experiences himself as an other, and it happens in relation to himself as body. A human being is in a strange way determined by himself: he becomes estranged from himself, yet remains himself as this other, this body. He is himself that which relates itself to the body and which then is other than the body, but this other than the body is precisely bodily determined. In the words of Vigilius Haufniensis, the sexual is the expression for the huge contradiction, “that the immortal spirit is determined as genus.”¹³ To be a synthesis is to be confronted with the synthesis as a task (at the second level called the problematic structure of subjectivity). But Vigilius Haufniensis also underscores the point that the synthesis is first posited as a task when the individual discovers himself as bodily determined. At that moment, his history begins. What is most remarkable about Vigilius Haufniensis’ account is not that he links corporeality and history together from within, but rather that he posits a moment in which the individual becomes conscious of himself as an individual who receives himself as a problem. Only at this moment, when con   

SKS 4, 354 / CA, 49. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 4, 373 / CA, 69.

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sciousness separates past from present, does the individual acquire a history. When I talk about this “the experience of oneself as an other,” it is in order to emphasize that consciousness is something, which happens to a human being. As I have already indicated, this experience is not merely grounded in the body, it is also an experience of time. A human being becomes to himself an other in time. Although this is a leitmotif in Kierkegaard’s authorship, there is here space enough only to adumbrate the connection between the definition of man as a synthesis and the experience of time. Time, according to Kierkegaard, is fundamentally a burden, a danger, and a test. The synthesis, which a human being is, is an answer to the demand, which time constitutes. Time “steps in between, “ and a human being becomes separated from himself and stretched out in time; hence the question: how does he endure the change of time, which is also a change of himself. The self-relation, which is fundamental to the definition of man as a synthesis, is both a relation in time and a relation to time. Time separates a human being from himself; he becomes an other from what he was. Both in relation to the body and in relation to time, man exists outside himself. His relation to the body – himself as an other – is a relation to time. As a relation in time, he is drawn or stretched out in relation to himself. In this sense, the human synthesis as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is a synthesis in time. Selfrelation is the self-relation of a synthesis. A human being can only relate to himself by being already a relation to himself in time. To relate to oneself is to relate to oneself as an other. I mentioned that time is a burden for a human being. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard writes: “The heaviest burden laid upon a person (because he himself laid the burden of sin upon himself) is in a certain sense time.”¹⁴ Time’s burden is, however, that it enables a human being to enslave himself by the manner in which he relates to time – and relates to himself in time. This is evident in particular from the negative significance of care or worry, which becomes dominant in Kierkegaard. The sixth discourse in the first part of Christian Discourses is especially informative here. “The Care of Self-Torment,” as the title of the discourse reads, is care or worry of the next day. Kierkegaard writes: “All earthly and worldly care is basically for the next day.” And he adds, “The earthly and worldly care was made possible precisely by this, that the human being was compounded of the temporal and the eternal, became a self, but in his becoming a self, the next day came into existence for him.”¹⁵

 SKS 9, 136 / WL, 133.  SKS 10, 80 / CD, 71.

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Self and time are so decisively tied together that in relation to time a human being must be concerned with himself. This concern is manifest in his anxieties about tomorrow and in his struggles with his own representations.¹⁶ But as a human being he can only relate to himself in time, because it is in time he becomes an other for himself or posited outside himself. The synthesis becomes a synthesis in time, and the definition of man as a synthesis is affirmed as a code for the fundamental experience of oneself as an other.

5 The Human Synthesis If man is defined as a synthesis, the next question is, what makes the synthesis human. As noted in the beginning, with his definition of synthesis Kierkegaard places himself in a long tradition that regards man as an intermediate being situated somewhere between the finite and the infinite. But in repeating this definition of man, Kierkegaard also makes the opposite point that the synthesis is the human synthesis. He is re-describing the human condition by re-defining finitude. Man as an intermediate being is finite, but his finitude consists not only in the fact that he has a finite part alongside an infinite one. He is an intermediate being by being himself intermediate, that is, by relating to himself as finite and as infinite. His finitude consists in the fact that he himself is stretched out in relation to himself. But this also implies that his identity with himself is fragile or vulnerable. It is in this sense that he has a history – where his identity with himself is at stake. The definition of a human being as a synthesis must therefore be understood as doubled. Man is a synthesis in the sense that he is already an aggregate, “strangely put together,” but he is also a synthesis in the normative sense that he has to achieve identity with himself. This reaffirms the claim that human synthesis is finite in itself. Finitude is not just a part of the synthesis, but its open character. What I have presented here is only the first gambit in a longer argument. As a synthesis, a human being is related to himself. In fact, he can only relate to himself by being himself intermediate: a self-relation. This means that human finitude is the finitude of a self. As a synthesis, a human being is related to himself as this particular, self-determined individual. Herein lies, however, the crux of the matter. In The Sickness unto Death, we find anthropology in its most conclusive version in Kierkegaard, i. e., anthropology in the negative form of an analysis of despair. Despair is defined as the attempt to get rid of oneself, but

 SKS 10, 86 / CD, 77– 78.

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despair also shows that this is impossible. The question to be asked is whether or not a human being is self-determined. The definition of man as a synthesis opens the analysis of The Sickness unto Death. ¹⁷

 See Arne Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet. Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1997. Special thanks to Jon Stewart who not only translated, but also gave valuable comments to my paper.

Chapter 4 Self and Identity 1 Concepts of Identity Imagine that I am in a hurry to catch a train departing at 7:52. It is early in the morning and it is rush hour, but I find my way to Copenhagen Central Station. I look at one of the screens that displays from which platform the train departs. I hasten to platform 5 where I find the train. I look at the car numbers, enter number 14, and finally I find seat number 62, where, according to the reservation ticket, I am supposed to sit during this journey. As this sequence of situations, events, observations, and acts indicates, we orient ourselves in terms of identity. In the situations described, identity is a matter of identifying something particular by picking it out, be it the Central Station, the train departing at 7:52 from platform 5, car 14, or seat number 62. When I find what I am looking for, I could say: “This is the train” or “This is the seat.” If I visit the city for the first time, it might be a problem to identify the Central Station, or maybe even to identify this railway station as the station from where the train departs (as, e. g., in Lille, where you might go to Lille Flandres just to discover that your train departs from Lille Europe). We identify this particular building or this particular train by distinguishing it from other buildings or trains. Thus, implied in my search for orientation is the identity question: “What is this?” It is easy to imagine that the train is delayed, so that when it arrives, I might ask: “Is this the train that was scheduled to depart at 7:52?” Maybe it even departs from another platform when it is delayed. In order to know if it is the same train, my question would have to make the destination explicit: “Is this the train for Hamburg that was supposed to depart at 7:52?” So, to push the sequence a bit further, as a mini narrative, imagine that I am heading for Berlin via Hamburg, and that I have not been in Berlin after 1989. If upon my arrival in Berlin, I now walk to Potsdamer Platz, I might ask myself: Is this really the same city? Here the issue of identity is no longer simply a matter of identifying something by picking it out, distinguishing it from other objects, as in our first instance of the identity question, but a matter of re-identifying or re-cognizing this city as the same city I visited many years ago. To change the story a bit, imagine that I had visited Berlin in the meantime, for example in 1997, and at that time seen that the whole area around Potsdamer Platz was turned into a huge reconstruction site. From that visit, I’ll carry with me a question as to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-010

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how this area will come to look in the future. This would now help me to realize that this part of the city has changed almost beyond recognition. Also, as I now walk from Potsdamer Strasse to Potsdamer Platz, I have some points of reference. If such points were missing, the situation itself would change. Either I would not be able to recognize what I now see again, and I would feel lost, or, knowing where I am, I would recognize it with an intense sense of change. To give an example that turns the direction of recognition backwards, a couple of years ago I saw same photos showing streets and places in Rotterdam before 1940. There were pictures of streets that I thought I knew, but which I could not recognize. There were no points of reference that made it possible to see what had changed. As other photos of the inner city being almost completely destroyed in 1940 showed, this was due to the history of the city itself. In the second instance, the identity question takes the form: “Is this the same as..?” Thus, we can distinguish between two concepts of identity. Corresponding to the first instance, we can speak of synchronic identity (for example, I face two options: Is the railway station where my train departs Lille Flandres or Lille Europe?). The issue is here to identify something by picking it out as this particular object, e. g., as this particular building, in contrast to other buildings or to other possible identifications of this building that imply that it is not the building I am looking for (e. g., the building turns out not to be the station from where my train departs, or it turns out not to be a railway station at all). In the second instance, the identity in question is diachronic. It is identity over time. ¹ The issue here is to identify something particular as the same: Is this (really) the same city I remember having visited some years ago? In both cases, the question of identity is implicit in our understanding of the situation in which we seek to orient ourselves.² The issue of identity is thus fundamental, but it is also puzzling. Identity implies difference. In order to identify

 To the distinction between synchronic and diachronic identity, see Dieter Henrich, “‘Identität’ – Begriffe, Probleme, Grenzen,” in Identität. Poetik und Hermeneutik VIII, ed. by Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1979, pp. 140, 173.  The problem of identification comes up in situations in which we are not sure whether we are talking about the same thing. See Peter F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London: Methuen 1959, pp. 15 – 59. We can then try to identify what we are talking about. But identification also becomes a problem in situations where we lose our orientation. We might then become aware of the identifications we have already made in orienting ourselves. The context of orientation where identification becomes a problem need not be a speaker-hearer situation. But in the case of personal identity, the problem of identification is intrinsically related to situations of communication. The other self is also the self involved in a speaker-hearer situation in which we seek to identify what we are talking about. One of the aims in the following is to trace different meanings of identification.

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something particular, we must distinguish it from something else (other buildings, cars, seats, etc.). And to identify something as this particular object not only implies that it is different from something else, but also that it itself can be described differently from what I now identify it as. I might be mistaken; the building might turn out to be something else than I anticipated. Or I might be looking for something else; for example, I might see the building as a piece of architecture. However, these various ways of describing the same object, e. g. the Central Station, need not complicate each other. It is the same object in question. Thus, in the first instance where we identify something as this particular object by picking it out, the issue of identity might not seem that puzzling. In the second instance, however, the relation between identity and difference turns out to be more intrinsic and thus problematic. Here, identity is not a matter of identifying something particular by picking it out, but of re- identifying it as the same, although it has changed. This might give rise to the question what it is in itself. In this move, the problem of identity is accentuated. If identity is what a thing is despite its change in time, how do we account for the fact that it is this particular thing that has changed? This way of accentuating the problem of identity seems pertinent when the particular something in question is itself a self. If it is a self, it should make sense to ask: Is it the same as itself when it has changed? Thus, we have finally reached the theme of this article. As the long prelude suggests, the title could have been different. In fact, it was first announced as a paper on “Concepts of Identity,” but as you can see, the title is no longer the same. The article will deal with self-identity, as the identity of a self, but it will do so in focusing on the very approach to the issue of self-identity. The main argument will be that the problem of self-identity is part of being a self. The difficulty in approaching the problem of self-identity tells something about what it is to be a self. Therefore, the title is “Self and Identity,” and not simply “Self-Identity.”

2 Two Approaches What is the problem of identity? It is often, without further reflection, taken as the problem of ascertaining or deciding the identity of something we observe, be that some thing, some event, or some other person. We then ask for criteria of identity. If what we are considering is the identity of a person, we may then discuss whether the specific criteria are mental (psychological) or physical. This discussion has as its locus classicus John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, Chapter 27, where the memory version of the psy-

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chological criterion of personal identity is put forward: personal identity “consists” in consciousness³ and reaches as far backwards as consciousness does.⁴ If we, for eaxmple, consult the entry on personal identity in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,⁵ the issue of criteria of personal identity – whether they are physical, psychological or mixed – seems to be all there is to it. The problem of identity then is how to decide that two occurrences are instances of the same. In the case of a person, the question is, to quote the article on personal identity in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “What enables us to say, in spite of the changes wrought by time, that person A, before us now, is the person B whom we formerly knew and that person C, also before us now, is not?”⁶ The identity question then runs like this: Is what we are observing now the same as what we have observed earlier? In the case of personal identity, how do we establish that the person before us now is the same as the person we knew before? However, this is only a problem because something else makes it a problem. What comes in between, making it possible to speak of two instances of the same, is time. The problem of identity leads back to the problem of time changing our world, oth-

 “[I]t is impossible to make personal Identity to consist in any thing but consciousness; or reach any farther than that does…personal Identity can by us be placed in nothing but consciousness (which is that alone which makes what we call self)” (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975, p. 343).  The central passage: “For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i. e. the sameness of a rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person” (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 335; see also p. 339: “[P]ersonal Identity reaching no farther than consciousness reaches”). The criterion of personal identity then is whether the individual in question can “repeat the Idea of any past Action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present Action; so far it is the same personal self” (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 336).  Brian Garrett, “Personal Identity,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward Craig, London: Routledge 1998, pp. 305 – 314.  Terence Penulham, “Personal Identity,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards, New York: Macmillan 1967, vol. 6, p. 95. The article reduces “the problem of the unity of a person through change” (Penulham, “Personal Identity,” p. 95) to the problem of criteria of identity. As there is no need for a hidden substance for the retention of a person’s identity, “all that seems to remain is the much harder question of what changes are allowed for in this concept – the problem of the criteria of identity” (Penulham, “Personal Identity,” p. 96). Thus, the issue is to know what alterations are and are not allowed for: “A man can change in more ways before he is destroyed than a chair can” (Penulham, “Personal Identity,” p. 99). In the following, I will argue that the problem of the unity through time is not a matter of identity of a substance, but part of what it is to be a person.

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ers, and ourselves. Identity then seems to be sameness over time or permanence in time. If this is what personal identity is, we can also look at ourselves in this way: How am I to decide that I am the same person now as I was one year or 10 years ago? What are the criteria for my identity as continuity in time? The rest of the article could be a discussion of the problem of criteria for personal identity. But let us ask the question once more: What is the problem of personal identity? Is it the problem we deal with when we are looking for criteria of identity? Is this the way we encounter the problem of personal identity when it in fact is a problem for us? I would suggest the following take on the problem. If we move in the opposite direction (not asking how to identify another person or ourselves as the same, but starting by asking what it is to be a self), the problem of self-identity turns out to be located at a more intrinsic level. It is a question of what it is like to be a self. The crucial point is that the problem of identity is part of being a self. We cannot account for what it is to be a self without taking into this account the problem of identity. What we would describe as a self is what it is through the problem of identity. This means that the problem of identity is not simply a matter of description (to be dissolved if we describe what we observe in an adequate manner). On the contrary, an adequate description would have to deal with the problem of identity. Self-identity is a matter of self-understanding. Consequently, we can distinguish between two approaches to the problem of self-identity. According to the first approach, the problem is how to decide the identity of a self, asking for criteria of identity, be that physical, psychological, or mixed. According to the second, the problem is intrinsic to selfhood. The second approach is more complicated, taking into account that to be a self is already to identify oneself.

3 Identity and Identification – and Self-Identification In the prelude, identity was taken as a matter of identification or re-identification. To the question, “What is this?” corresponds “This is…” and to identify “this” is to tell what the thing in question is. The question of identity was implicit in a process of identification through which we orient ourselves in a given situation. If we cannot orient ourselves, the question may become explicit. The situation might then become “reflected” in the sense that we ask what it is about. Let us now turn to the issue of self, identity, and identification. If what we orient ourselves in relation to is an other self, the situation itself can be at issue. The situation can be shared, but also questioned, by the other. This means that the relation between identity and identification is complicated. Is the identity of

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another person a matter of identification? Normally, we do not check the identity of others, unless it is our job to do so. If I am going to meet someone at the station where my train arrives and if I have not met her before, I’ll first have to identify her. In this sense, her identity would be a matter of identification: I identify her by picking her out, distinguishing her from others at the station. But if I am going to meet someone whom I met several years ago, I do not identify or reidentify her, I recognize her. As we have not met for years, this might be difficult. The difficulty, however, is most likely not a matter of identification. Instead, the situation is marked by a peculiar ambiguity: I recognize her and see that she has changed. This situation is probably shared by the other so that the same takes place on the other side. We might both say: “It is a long time ago,” but we might also add, “You have not changed. You are still the same…” The question of identity thus changes when we ask whether another person is the same. In most cases, it is not a matter of simply re-identifying the other as the same person we knew before, but of understanding her. If the other has changed almost beyond recognition, the difficulty consists in understanding that she is still the same person we can identify her as. We know her to be the same, but the problem is precisely to understand this – that she is the same and how she is the same. This is especially the case if she has changed in ways that we sense to be a change of character. The situation would then be marked by a more intense ambiguity. If she feels that we consider her to have changed beyond recognition, she might herself take this as a matter of identity in terms of self-understanding. Her sense of identity might be affected. To tell someone that she is no longer the same person she used to be would change the situation. As already indicated, the other can reverse the situation. She might question our way of seeing her, and even our self-understanding. We might then meet in a sort of reflective shared understanding. We know each other to be the same person we knew before, but for both of us it is difficult to understand how the other is the same. Recognition of others takes place in a context of orientation that is affected by our relation to others. The question is, then, what we are looking for when we ask whether something is the same. Take again the example of a city, or part of a city, that has changed dramatically. What is meant by asking whether this city, or part of the city, is the same? It can be a matter of simple re-identification, but this would probably only give the point of departure. The question would then be: Would it be quite another city to live in? Has the atmosphere changed? We might even say that the city has changed its character. What about one’s own identity? What is meant if I ask whether I am the same as I remember myself to be 10 years ago? Normally, it does not make sense to apply criteria, for example the criterion of psychological continuity in

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terms of memory, in order to identify or re-identify oneself. We do not take ourselves to be a particular object to be identified. The very act of applying criteria, and indeed the very act of remembering, presupposes what the criteria should establish. One could argue that in cases where a person suffers from a loss of memory, the sense of identity might be questioned by the person herself. But still, this act of questioning presupposes some minimal sense of identity. If this is the case, to remember would not be to re-identify, but to recognize or to appropriate oneself in the past. In this, however, the ambiguity can be a part of the sense of identity. One senses oneself as changed so that one is left bewildered (in not being able to remember). This means that a minimal sense of identity is not some sort of basis for recognizing oneself as the same. It is more a sense of what is at stake in recognizing oneself. A minimal sense of identity is already implied in recognizing oneself as the one that has difficulties in remembering, to the point of bewilderment. If one cannot remember past experiences one is supposed to remember, by others or even by oneself, and if this affects one’s way of living, this may even become part of one’s sense of identity (“I cannot remember”). The sense of identity can also be ambiguous when one actually remembers past experiences and past acts as one’s own. I can identify myself as the one who 10 years ago wrote the letter that I now read, and still I can have difficulties in understanding that it is me. I recognize that I am the same as the one who wrote this letter, but this is exactly what is difficult to understand. To recognize, then, is a more complex undertaking than to identify (in the sense of picking this particular one out) or to re-identify (in the sense of establishing this to be the same as): I can recognize in the sense of identifying myself as the same and have difficulties in recognizing this in the sense of understanding and maybe accepting this. One might even say that it is as if it was someone else who wrote the letter. The answer to this bewilderment is not a re-identification. On the contrary, the fact that I am the same, in the sense that I wrote the letter, is the point of departure in order to see the problem (if it is a problem – one might also be happy that continuity is in this sense lacking). What is required is a process of self-understanding or coming to terms with oneself. What is the sum of these preliminary reflections on self, identity, and identification? First, when we ask the identity question (“What is this?” and “Is this the same as?”) in relation to a self, other selves, or ourselves, the question itself is complicated. Identity is no longer a matter of simple identification or re-identification, but of recognition. If, however, we follow the first approach and look for criteria of identity, the identity question is taken as a matter of re-identification: How do we establish that this person is the same as the one we knew? What we then fail to understand is what it means for a person to change over time. If

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we are looking for personal identity over time, the issue is how we as persons change with time. We change through what we experience and do, and through how we, in this, understand the world, others, and ourselves. One basic feature is that we change over time through relating to time. This leads to the second, and crucial, point: What makes the relation between identity and identification complicated in the case of the identity of a self is the fact that the “object” to be identified already identifies itself. If in the process of orienting myself the situation becomes “reflected,” if my way of orienting myself is challenged, I encounter myself, not as yet another object, but as the one identifying, or as having already understood myself in trying to orient myself in the given situation. In relating to another person, I encounter her as someone who already identifies herself. This need not be in an explicit form as, for example, when she introduces herself to me. I can only understand her if I see that she already takes herself to be this person. This is part of what it is to be a self. She is identifying herself, maybe in ways in which she directly distinguishes herself from others. This also indicates that she is able to reverse the situation: maybe she is trying to figure out who I am. Consequently, the approach to the issue of self-identity, as the identity of a self, should reflect the fact that we as selves are already identifying ourselves. At issue is what it is to be a self. A human being is what she is in identifying herself. It might be argued that identification is not the right word. In a sense, this is what I have been arguing for. I do not identify myself as I identify or re-identify an object. But the reason for this is that self-identification is radical: taking myself to be this person implies that I am also the one to be what I take myself to be. In this case, identification is non-criterial. As a self, a human being individuates herself in thus taking herself to be what she is. This self-relation in self-identification is implicit when she distinguishes herself from others – or from their conceptions of who she is. The implication, however, is that self-identification can be problematic in ways that identification of others cannot. To identify oneself as has the ultimate implication to be accountable for (I should account for myself in ways I cannot, and should not, account for others). Furthermore, identification here can mean to identify oneself with. As selves, we can identify ourselves with and distinguish ourselves from others. Again, this need not take place in any direct manner; it might be implied in what we are doing. Thus, the approach to the issue of self-identity should focus on this critical point: to be a self implies self-identification. Identity is not something given, which one then relates to in a reflective, higher order mode. We are not what we are and then, in a second move, understand what we are. Understanding

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is part of being human,⁷ and it is so in the sense that we are what we are in understanding – and misunderstanding – ourselves. Self-identity is a matter of selfunderstanding. These reflections on self, identity, and identification are arguments for the second approach to the problem of self-identity. Self-identity is a problem for a self, and the problem is part of what it is to be a self. Thus, at issue is what it is to be a self. Let me propose the following definition: Self is to relate to oneself, and in relating to itself a self is self-relation.

4 Self-Relation (1) Self as self-relation is, I will argue, what is implied in the famous definition of the self in the opening section of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”⁸ Self is to relate to oneself. This definition is remarkable in at least two respects. First, it amounts to a de-substantialization. Self is not a substance, but a relation, or, to be more precise, self is a process: self-relating. Second, self is to relate to oneself in relating to others and to a more or less shared world. This relation is often ignored in interpretations of Kierkegaard. If self is to relate oneself, then a self is always a self before something, namely that which we understand ourselves in relation to. This can be taken from a less famous key passage in the second part of The Sickness unto Death: “The criterion for the self is always: that directly before which it is a self.”⁹ Self is self in relation to that before which it understands itself. The criterion is thus located at the level of self-relation. The two points, taken from the two quotations respectively, go together: self is to relate to oneself, and self is self in relation to. One relates to oneself in relating to others and to a world in between. In view of the problems of alterity and temporality, to be dealt with later, I would like to push the argument a bit further. One is only able to relate to oneself as another, and it is only possible to be oneself in becoming oneself. Both points

 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, pp. 138 – 143: “Da-sein as Understanding” / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1972, pp. 142– 148: “Dasein als Verstehen.”  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.

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underline the de-substantialization indicated in the definition. But if one is to become oneself, then becoming oneself implies relating to what one already is, in the mode of acknowledging: accounting for, taking responsibility for, be in charge of. And this presupposes that one already has oneself as a problem. In relating to oneself, one is already related to oneself. This is self as self- relation. If the second approach to the problem of personal identity is to take identity as a problem inherent in being a self, and if self is to be understood as self-relation, what are the implications of this approach? Let me unfold some of the implications by re-formulating the difference between the first and the second approach, and let me do so by discussing Locke’s grounding of the first approach. One might object that the first approach, where we look for criteria for personal identity, also concerns what it is to be a self. To decide whether someone is the same as we remember her to be is itself a matter of how this other person relates to herself and to others, including us. This, however, would be an argument in support of the second approach, to the effect that the problem of personal identity is to be located at the level where the other person relates to herself. To clarify this issue, let us have a closer look at Locke’s approach. The objection just mentioned may be strengthened by showing that, in Locke, the criterion of personal identity concerns the issue whether the other herself remembers past actions with the same self-awareness as she is now herself to herself. Thus, personal identity here seems to amount to self-identity. It seems that Locke starts in the same way as the second approach in that he considers “What Person stands for.” He answers that it “is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places.”¹⁰ The question implied in this is how it is “self to it self.”¹¹ Furthermore, Locke’s criterion for personal identity could also be interpreted as a way of de-substantializing the self: “This may shew us wherein personal Identity consists, not in the Identity of Substance, but, as I have said, in the Identity of consciousness.”¹² This could then be  Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 335.  Ibid., p. 336.  Ibid., p. 342; for Locke, self or person is neither immaterial substance (soul), nor material substance (body). Locke’s “wonderful move” (to use Simon Blackburn’s expression (Simon Blackburn, Think, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999, p. 128)) is the following: If we would place ourselves in some immaterial substance, we would have no idea of what this substance would be (if we had, this substance would be ourselves: that we remember, etc.). Still, for Locke, there is a substance, both immaterial and material, for being a person. A human being (man) is soul and body. Thus, personhood is related to substances, but in a contingent way (man is not as such a person). For Kierkegaard, in contrast, a human being is defined as a synthesis of body and soul united in spirit. Spirit means self: A human being thus relates to

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taken as follows: What a self is, is to be understood in terms of what it does, e. g., remembers. So where does the second approach differ from the first? It is only possible here to indicate some of the points at issue. First, if we take Locke’s memory version as a theory of what a self is, it is not clear what its claim is. If we extract that a person can “consider it self as it self,” then Locke explains that it does only so “by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking,” and “by this every one is to himself, that which he calls self.” Consciousness is that which “makes every one to be, what he calls self.”¹³ Self or person then seems to be what comes out of this consciousness, or consciousness is supposed to explain what a person or a self is. But consciousness itself “consists in” considering oneself as oneself, thereby distinguishing oneself from all other thinking things. In other words, consciousness is the awareness and the memory to be oneself. This is not only an argument to the effect that consciousness of personal identity “presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity” (as Bishop Butler argues),¹⁴ or that Locke’s memory version of the criterion for personal identity is circular. The argument is that it does not account for what self and memory are. Let us take memory as the second point. According to Locke, to be a person is to consider myself as myself, and I do so only by that consciousness that “can be extended backwards to”¹⁵ past actions or thoughts, thus remembering myself in the past to be myself. However, this means that memory does in itself not yield identity. Either I remember that I in the past had the same consciousness as I now have writing this,¹⁶ and in that case, the criterion for my personal identity is, strictly speaking, my self-awareness now (e. g., that I now write this), which then can be extended backwards.¹⁷ Or memory is the awareness of myself

itself as body and as soul; see Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Jeannette B.L. Knox, Macon: Mercer University 2008.  Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 335.  In his dissertation Of Personal Identity, quoted in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Alexander C. Fraser, New York Dover Publications 1959, vol. 1, pp. 449 – 450.  Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 335.  See, for example: “Had I the same consciousness, that I saw the Ark and Noah’s flood, as that I saw an overflowing of the Thames last Winter, or as that I write now, I could no more doubt that I, that write this now, that saw the Thames overflowed last Winter, and that viewed the Flood at the general Deluge, was the same self, place that self in what Substance you please, than that I that write this am the same my self now whilst I write (whether I consist of all the same Substance, material or immaterial, or no) that I was Yesterday” (Ibid., p. 341).  “For it is by the consciousness it [an intelligent being] has of its present Thoughts and Actions, that it is self to it self now, and so will be the same self as far as the same consciousness

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being the same now as yesterday or 10 years ago, and in this case, the criterion is memory as self-awareness.¹⁸ In both cases, identity is not established but presupposed. I remember myself doing and thinking, or rather having done and thought, that which I now remember.¹⁹ It could be argued that this is what Locke is aiming at. The issue is whether I can “appropriate” my past actions and thoughts.²⁰ However, to decide my identity using the criterion of memory seems, according to Locke, to be a simple matter. What I cannot “by my consciousness make my own Thought and Action” will not belong to me.²¹ But if memory is understood in terms of appropriation, the situation turns out to be more complicated. Locke’s memory version of the criterion for personal identity does not account for the role that memory plays for a human being as a person or a self. In remembering, we relate to ourselves. We do not just observe what we remember. What we remember might matter to us. This is especially the case if what we remember is something we have thought or done ourselves. Remembering is something we do as selves. This is not only to be seen from the ways in which we remember, but also from the possible ways of not remembering. The past might have an unacknowledged presence, which can turn the present into the presence of this past Therefore, the question is: What do we do when we remember – or forget? The problem of identity is to be located at this level, where we, for example in remembering, relate to ourselves in relating to others and to a world between us. Locke’s account of memory oscillates between simple re-identification and ethical appropriation. Or, rather, he does not see the difference, which means that he cannot account for what appropriation is. When I appropriate past actions and thoughts I relate to what I remember. I realize that I am the one having done and thought so. When it is established that I am the one having written this letter 10 years ago, the issue of identity is not settled. On the contrary, the problem of identity only begins at this point. It might be hard for me to realize what I have done. And if I cannot remember in the sense of appropriating my can extend to Actions past or to come” (ibid., p. 336). This poses a problem, that is, to account for the claimed fact that I can now remember how I was aware of myself yesterday or 10 years ago. That I can now remember myself doing what I did yesterday or 10 years ago could be taken as support for the second interpretation (memory as self-awareness).  The issue could also be the following: Am I the same by having the same memory, or is memory consciousness of being the same?  This could be taken as a further argument for the second interpretation of memory as selfawareness: What I remember is not only what I have done and thought, but also myself having done and thought so.  Ibid., p. 341.  Ibid., p. 345.

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past actions and thoughts, this does not turn me into another person (as Locke would have it). On the contrary, it is a problem for me being the person I am. What is at issue in remembering then is to recognize, to acknowledge, or to appropriate what I myself remember to have done, thought, or felt in the past. The problem is precisely to understand that I am the same as I remember myself to be. Memory is not simply a way of establishing that I am the same as yesterday or 10 years ago. It is more a matter of coming to terms with oneself. In this sense, to remember is part of what it is to be a self. It is not simply to observe one’s identity, but a way of being oneself. Third, we should then ask if what we find in Locke is really an account of what it is to be a self. At first it seems so. Locke’s question is “what makes the same Person” or what “makes a Man be himself to himself.”²² Self, he further states, is “a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit.”²³ Considering past actions and thoughts the question then is whether we are “concerned” and “accountable.”²⁴ The criterion for imputing or attributing past actions to oneself is consciousness or memory. On1y if we remember past actions as our own can we become “concerned and accountable.”²⁵ But “Whatever past Actions it [an intelligent being or agent] cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in, than if they had never been done.”²⁶ At first, Locke appears to hold that to be a person or a self is to be accountable. On a closer look, however, what he says is that I am only accountable, and thereby a person, if I can appropriate the past actions I consider as my own. But what if I have lost the memory of some parts of my life? Am I not still the same person that did those actions I have now forgotten? Locke answers that I am only the same man, not the same person. This distinction allows him to engage in counting more selves or persons, depending on the (lack of) continuity of consciousness. If I do not remember what I have done because I was sleeping or because I was drunk, I am, on this criterion, not the same person. But why then is the same man punished in both cases? This is, Locke answers, because, in these cases, it is not possible to “distinguish certainly what is real, what counterfeit.”²⁷ The same argument, however, would app1y to the very criterion of mem-

     

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

p. 336. p. 346. pp. 340 – 346. p. 346. p. 344.

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ory. It is not possible to distinguish certainly whether it is real or counterfeit when someone claims not to remember.²⁸ Again, Locke’s account reduces the complexity inherent in being a self, at least in three respects: a) If the same human being, on the memory criterion of personal identity, can be said to be different persons at different times, why does Locke not simply count these different persons as he would count other persons? Are they only numerically the same human being? Or does it actually matter that they are one and the same: oneself? To whom, we could ask, would it matter? To the human being who still is both persons: the one waking and the one sleeping, the one drunk and the one sober. It is, we could argue, one and the same life both persons relate to. The one sober is affected by, and maybe suffers from, what the one drunk does, and maybe the one drunk also suffers from what he himself does.²⁹ In this case, we might say that the same man is the same person: being concerned for himself. In contrast, if it is possible for “the same Man to have distinct incommunicable consciousness at different times,” this same man “would at different times make different Persons.”³⁰ Would we say that these different persons are only numerically the same, or is the point that our notion of personal identity is put to test before the case of apparent split of incommunicable consciousness? Would we say that it is as if the same human being were different persons? b) Locke’s distinction between man and person implies a distinction between person and body. Man is the living body, while a person can be vitally united to a body, but is in principle disembodied. The limbs of a self’s body are “a part of himself: He sympathizes and is concerned for them,” but if a hand is cut off, it is separated “from that consciousness he had of its Heat, Cold, and other Affections, and it is then no longer a part of that which is himself, any more than the remotest part of Matter.” Thus, Locke concludes, “we see the Substance, whereof personal self consisted at one time, may be varied at an-

 In Locke, references to God (ibid., p. 338) and to “the great Day” are not disquieting, but quite reassuring. ln “the great Day,” there is still no problem about consciousness: “But in the great Day, wherein the Secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open, it may be reasonable to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his Doom, his Conscience accusing or excusing him” (ibid., p. 344). Maybe already in the present day of remembering, conscience might disturb our consciousness.  For Locke, to be concerned has to do with one’s own happiness and misery. In the case before us, this criterion is both relevant and would lose the narrow interpretation given to it by Locke.  Ibid., p. 342.

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other, without the change of personal Identity.”³¹ The self’s body can be substantially changed without the personal identity being changed. This however affects the very notion of personhood. How is it possible to remember past actions without being embodied? It is difficult to see in what sense a person is “concerned” for itself when personhood is reduced to self-awareness, and self-awareness to self-perception.³² For Locke, a person is not concerned for itself as a “man,” i. e., for its whole embodied human being. Locke’s account of selfhood oscillates between appropriation and indifference. In this sense, his notion of self is “a punctual self.”³³ Locke’s own account presupposes a subject that is not accounted for. Who is it that “cannot reconcile or appropriate [past actions] to [the] present self”?³⁴ Is it not the same person as the one being accountable? Is it not the same person that can forget or pretend not to remember – and that is accountable for thus not remembering?

Let us then, as the fourth issue, consider Locke’s approach once more: (a) According to Locke, the criterion of the identity of a person is what “makes a Man be himself to himself.”³⁵ The criterion is the set of memories we have. But I do not use my memory as a criterion to decide whether I am myself or whether I am the same person now as I was 10 years ago.³⁶ Having memories, we are not in doubt about our identity in the sense that we are the ones having these memories. It does not make sense to ask: How do I decide whether I am the same as the one I remember myself to be? If Locke’s point is that I am myself when I remember myself to be so, this does not account for what makes me be myself to myself. If I ask myself whether I am the same person as I used to be, I am not looking for criteria according to which I can observe myself to be the same. The problem is to understand that I am the same that I can observe myself to be. The issue is to account for myself being the same. (b) If my con-

 Ibid., p. 337. The relation between self and body then is no longer enigmatic but contingent. This opens up puzzling cases such as, for example, “the Soul of a Prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the Prince’s past Life, enter and inform the Body of a Cobler” (ibid., p. 340). If I imagine that I could have my soul in different places and times, and different bodies from my own, what then would my soul be? It would be something, not me, asking this question.  Ibid., p. 336.  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989, pp. 159 – 176.  Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 346.  Ibid., p. 336.  See Bernard William, Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973, pp. 12– 18.

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sciousness of myself writing now is what makes me myself to myself, and if my memory (consciousness) now of having written this letter 10 years ago is what makes me the same person to me now, it is only so because, in writing now, I am already a self relating to others and to myself, and, having acted, thought, and felt in the past, I have already placed myself in relation to others and myself. Thus, when I remember I am already affected by my past. (c) Given this, let us consider the situation where we look for criteria of identity. How does Locke describe this? When I observe something past, the question is whether I can “upon recollection join [it] with that present consciousness, whereby l am now my self.”³⁷ The identity question, however, should not only be directed to that which I consider, but more radically to the “I” in the question (“whether I can …”), i. e., to the self relating to itself in asking the question. This is, in Locke’s examples, the subject presupposed, which is not accounted for. If I am to decide whether I am the same, this would presuppose that I am the one to decide. For Locke, the situation is one of observation and findings: “And thus, by this consciousness, he finds himself to be the same self which did such or such an Action some Years since, by which he comes to be happy or miserable now.”³⁸ But we do not happen to find ourselves in this way.³⁹ We do not in this sense come to be happy or miserable. We do not happen to be ourselves, but are ourselves in relating to ourselves. What we find ourselves to be, we are as selves, in relating, understanding, remembering, etc. What we find would not be ourselves if we were not already related to ourselves. The situation is one of searching for something. What are we looking for when asking about identity? If it is the assurance that “we may always be sure that we are the same persons, that is, the same accountable agents or beings, now which we were as far back as our remembrance reaches; or as far as a perfectly just and good God will cause it to reach,”⁴⁰ the situation would be awkward. For what would it mean that we are the same persons? That we relate to ourselves as the same persons. It is not something we happen to be. That we are the same persons is presupposed in the situation where we ask about our identity. We are already selves in finding ourselves to be the same persons. If, in contrast, self is made into an object of perception, it can be an object of self-control and self-remaking. In this, once more, a self

 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 345.  Ibid., pp. 345 – 346.  Ibid., pp. 339 – 340: Can I conceive myself the same person with Nestor or Thersites? Can I find myself the same person with Nestor?  Vincent Perronet, A Vindication of Mr. Locke, London: James, John, and Paul Knapton 1736, p. 21; quoted in Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, p. 353.

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unaccounted for is presupposed: the self that takes the self as an object of perception, control, and re-making. In sum, what is reduced in Locke’s approach to the issue of personal identity is self as self-relation. When the issue of personal identity comes up, I am already related to myself in what I have done, thought, and felt in relation to others and a world in between. Let me unfold some of the implications of self as selfrelation in three steps: alterity, temporality, and normativity.

5 Selfhood and Alterity The basic move (the definition of self as self-relation) involves a reinterpretation of otherness or alterity. This is a way of reformulating the problem of identity. As indicated, it is primarily described as the problem of how a person remains the same despite the passage of time. But there is more to the problem of identity in terms of otherness. The problem is not only to understand that the other is the same, over time, but also to understand that she is an other than oneself. Identity is also the otherness of the other. Furthermore, the problem of identity is also to understand oneself as another. If personal identity is a matter of remaining the same person although one has changed, the experience of oneself as another over time (e. g., seeing photos from one’s childhood when the world was different) is absorbed into identity as sameness. But to understand oneself as another is to understand identity differently. Thus, let us have a look at the issue of identity and otherness, and proceed in three steps: first self as an other, second the other as a self, and third dialectics of recognition showing the interrelation.

Self as an Other The issue of self and alterity is implied in the definition of self as self-relation: Self is to relate to itself, but a self only relates to itself in relating to others and to a shared world. A self is self before an other in relation to which it sees itself. The implication is that one can only relate to oneself as an other than this other. This opens up the problem of identity. In order to see this, let us once more consider the issue of self, identity, and identification. Being a self, one already identifies oneself. As noted, identification here changes its meaning. It suffices to distinguish among three forms. First, I identify myself as, not as an object, not in a reflective stance, but in taking myself to be myself (this is what I called radical self-identification). If I ask whether I am the same person now as the one who wrote this letter 10 years ago, I already relate to

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myself. I already take myself in certain ways in order to ask whether I am the same person. Thus, I have identified myself as the one now having the problem of appropriating my past action. Second, identifying oneself can also take a more indirect form, where I identify myself with something other than myself. In so far as I identify myself with this, I also identify myself as. This indicates that we identify ourselves in relation to others. When I relate to others, I am implicitly relating to myself. I place myself in relation to the others that I relate to. This is more obvious if the relation is a matter of values. To identify oneself with, can then mean taking oneself to belong to: a family, a group of friends, a religions or non-religious community, etc. Indirectly, I identify myself as (e. g., as a member of the community). Third, self-identification can take a more explicit form, in terms of appropriating or acknowledging what I have done or thought. The critical point is not only that one identifies oneself in relating to others, but that the way one does so is already a matter of self-relation. One can place one’s identity, in the sense of self-regard or self-esteem, in relation to an other in such a way that one needs the other to confirm it. If a person takes herself to be loved by the beloved, she might identify herself as the one loved by the beloved, so that to herself, she would not be herself if not loved.⁴¹ In a sense, she identifies herself with the other, but in identifying herself as the one seen in this way by the other. If self-identity can be at stake in relating to others, we need to reformulate the issue of selfhood and otherness. Identity is not to be understood as sameness, but as a way of relating to the other than oneself and, in this relation, to oneself as an other than this other. In this sense, the problem of otherness is intrinsic to selfhood.

The Other as a Self Let us now turn briefly to the issue of the identity of the other self. The problem is not only to understand that the other is the same despite our different experiences of her, but to understand that she is an other than we see her as. What it means that the identity of a self is its self-identity, we learn not only from ourselves relating to others, but also from others relating to us. If we speak in terms of identification, we relate to an other who already identifies herself: takes herself as herself in relating to us. What is more, the problem of identity is part of our life together. If identifying is part of sociality, what then is

 SKS 11, 135 / SUD, 19 – 20.

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meant by the identity of the other self? What is it to identify someone who already relates to herself: telling us who she is – and in doing so relates to us, telling us who we are? The identity of the other is a matter not only of cognition, but of re-cognition, which means not only of re-identifying the other as the same (self-identical), but of recognizing the other as an other than oneself (self-identical would here imply that the other identifies herself in relation to others, including myself).

Dialectics of Recognition This can be spelled out in a theory of recognition that is also a theory of self-consciousness and self-identity. It is only possible here to give a very brief sketch. Taking the lead from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,⁴² we can describe the intrinsic relation between selfhood and otherness as follows. The identity of a self depends on the recognition received from the other self, but what is to be recognized is the autonomy of the other. This means that self-identity is self-relation in relation to others. “Selbständigkeit,” independence or autonomy, implies “in sich stehen,” but this is realized in a relation to others, which is a relation of mutual recognition. Further, the structure of re-cognition in the sense of acknowledgement or appraisal (German “Anerkennung”) is double. To recognize someone as is not simply to re-identify him (e. g., “Oh, you are Mr. Stanley”). It is to affirm what one sees: the other as an other self. If re-identification is to confirm that the other we see is the same person as we knew before, this would in principle not concern the other as another person or self. In contrast, re-cognition means that we already have seen the other as an other self, and that we realize and affirm what this implies: that she relates to herself, has her own life, can reverse the situation in which I relate to her, and that it matters to me what she, as the other I relate to, does etc. Thus, a theory of re-cognition seeks to capture this interrelation between self-relation and relation to others. On the one hand, it is only possible to be oneself, independent, in relation to others (to be a self is to relate to others). On the other hand, the relation between ourselves, as a relation of mutual re-cognition, is to affirm that the other is independent.

 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by Arnold V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, pp. 111– 119 / Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg: Meiner 1952, pp. 141– 150 (on dependence and independence of self-consciousness).

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This interdependence of self and the other is also to be seen in the negative. This is what the dialectics of recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is about. The one, the master, seeks to be recognized without recognizing the other, the slave. But to be recognized by someone whom you do not yourself recognize is not recognition. The negative dialectics thus indicates the logic of recognition: recognition of self and the other is only possible as a reciprocal relation.⁴³ In our context, the double structure of re-cognition is crucial. The structure is also to be seen in the negative dialectics. As Jean-Paul Sartre once noted, it is impossible to treat a human being “as a dog” if one has not first seen him as a human being.⁴⁴ To deprive the other of significance implies that we have already seen him as a self. The identity of the other is then both seen and denied. If otherness is intrinsic to selfhood, how does this alter the issue of self, identity, and identification? In the dialectics of recognition, the two issues go together: first, to identify oneself with the implication that one distinguishes oneself from the other, and in this comes to see oneself as an other than the other, and, second, to see the other as an other self, that already identifies herself.⁴⁵ Re-cognition is not re-identification. What is at stake in recognition is the identity of the self – both the identity of oneself as another (in relation to the other) and the identity of the other self. To the double structure of recognition corresponds a double implication of identity: (1) Identity depends on recognition. Not only do we understand ourselves in relation to others (a self is self before an other, before whom it sees itself), our self- understanding is affected by our (lack of) understanding the other as an other. (2) In recognizing, but also  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 111– 112 / Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 142– 143.  “No one can treat a human being ‘as a dog’ if he does take him to be a human being to begin with. The impossibility of dehumanizing the oppressed turn around and become the alienation of the oppressor: It is he, he himself, who with his slightest gesture resuscitate the humanity that he wants to destroy” (Jean-Paul Sartre, “Préface,” in Portrait du colonisé, ed. by A. Memmi, Paris: Payot 1973, 2nd edition, p. 29; translation by the editors).  I can only ascribe personal predicates to myself if I also see others as self-ascribers. See Strawson, Individuals, p. 108. However, I should see others, not only as self-ascribers, but also as others-ascribers, as myself. The problem is that I do not simply see others as other selves, both in the sense of self-ascribers and others-ascribers. It might be that I see others without realizing what it means that they are other selves. I might see them in ways in which I ignore that they also ascribe the same predicates to themselves as I do to myself, and that they see me as I see them. What I overlook, then, might also be what I presuppose in taking others to be able to respond to what I do (see the quotation above from Sartre). This negative possibility (of ignoring or overlooking) points to the normative dimension of self-identification in relation to others. In this sense, the speaker-hearer situation is not only a matter of identifying whether we are talking about the same thing, but also of understanding each other.

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negatively in depriving the other of significance, we already relate to the identity of the other self. In this sense, identity is not what comes out of, but what is affirmed in, re-cognition. We need to take both implications into account in order to understand what identity is. Self-identity is not something inside the self, but is at stake in the relation to others in that it is a matter of relating to the other. However, it is also a matter of the identity of the self in this relation. This double implication is to be developed in interpreting the normative dimension of selfidentity. But before that, we need to consider the second part of the problem of self-identity: self as another in time. Until now, in discussing selfhood and otherness, I have abstracted from the issue of temporality. However, in order to understand how the notion of identity is changed, we need to take the temporality of the self into account. One is another in relation to the other self, and one is another in relation to time.

6 Selfhood and Temporality Although the issue of identity, as we have seen, is not to be reduced to the problem of time, still the problem of identity is, in a critical sense, time. The problem of personal identity reflects the problem of the temporality of the self. What it means to experience time and to live temporally, is to be seen through the problem of identity. In the first approach, however, when we ask for criteria of identity as sameness, the question is identity over time as permanence in time (what remains the same in time). In contrast, the second approach focuses on temporality as an intrinsic feature of selfhood. We cannot explain what it is to be a self without taking the problem of time into account. As selves, we live through the problem of time. In this sense, we might ask ourselves whether we remain the same over time, but this question has then changed its meaning. It is, to put it concisely, not a matter of observation, but of orientation and obligation. We do not observe ourselves to be the same, despite the change of time. The change of time affects us more basically, in our self-relation. We are ourselves in relating to time and we relate to ourselves in time. What are the implications for the notion of identity? Identity over time is not to be understood simply as sameness or permanence in time, despite of time, but, more intrinsically, as a matter of selfhood. If, as a self, a human being is only herself in becoming herself, then time is not just an obstacle to identity, something to be overcome, but a condition of identity. Memory is a way of appropriating ourselves in time changing us. In this sense, to remember is a way of being oneself across time. Character might then be reinterpreted as accumulated life history in the sense that it reflects how the individual has taken her history.

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Thus, character is not to remain the same in spite of time, but to deal with time’s change. Time would still be a challenge to identity, or, rather, personal identity is to be understood as challenged by time. Time changes us, but we change in time as selves. This is not only to be seen where we (if ever) seem to succeed in making time into our own, but also where we fail to do so. Time can change us, and we can change in time, so that we lose ourselves in forms of despair. But still, such negative forms of temporality are ways in which we as selves can change. If one’s life falls apart, it is still one’s life, it is still a way to be a self. Even if I have changed in ways that are difficult for me to appropriate or to reconcile (to use Locke’s words), I am the one who has changed. To see this might be the critical point in order to change myself. One could then say that identity is not something given, but a matter of becoming. I am only myself in becoming myself. This process of becoming, however, is itself a matter of self-relation: I am to become myself. But this opens up possibilities of not becoming oneself in the sense of appropriating oneself or reconciling with oneself. The implication is that identity is at stake in this process. This is part of what it is to be a self. The shift in the notion of identity, using Paul Ricoeur’s terminology, could be formulated as follows: Self-identity is not to be understood in terms of sameness (idem), but in terms of selfhood (ipse).⁴⁶ This, however, is only a first step. It must be followed by a second, explicating the normative dimension of self and identity.

7 Normativity The normative character of self-identity is crucial for understanding the issue of self and identity. However, it is not clear in what sense personal identity is normative, and what the implications are. First, the normative character is not to be taken as an ideal or a standard, “the true self,” but more basically as the normative dimension of selfhood in the sense that the identity of a self is at stake: it can be respected or violated, recognized or overlooked, affirmed or denied. What is respected or violated is not an ideal self, but the other as a self in the sense that she is already herself. But identity as self-identity is also something to be achieved. In this sense, it implies a standard, but this standard is only to be met, that is: identity to be ach-

 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. by Kathleen Blamey, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1992.

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ieved, if one appropriates oneself. I am to become myself. This means that identity also in this normative sense (as something to be achieved) is a matter of selfrelation. The standard itself concerns how I seek to realize it in relating to myself. Second, self-identity is at stake both in the case of recognition (in relation to the other) and in the case of appropriation (in relation to time). In the first case, identity is a matter of re-cognition, as we have seen. On the one hand, self-identity is affected by (lack of) recognition. This has to do with the nature of selfidentity: that it concerns what it is to be a self being oneself. To be a self is to relate to oneself. This means that one only has self-identity in self-understanding: identifying oneself in the sense of taking oneself as, and appropriating oneself. Thus, when one’s identity is affirmed and recognized, one can see oneself as a self recognized. On the other hand, identity is not simply what comes out of recognition. If it were, we would not understand what recognition is. Recognition is about identity. The normative dimension of identity comes to the fore in the demand of respecting and recognizing identity. What then are the implications for the notion of identity? In a sense, the identity of a self is something given: to be recognized, but it is not something given in the sense of a substance, an inner or true self. Instead, identity of a self is fragile and vulnerable. This has to do with what it is to be a self: a self already takes itself as a self. This implies that it can be affected as a self, in its self-understanding, self-regard, or self-esteem. Self-identity is fragile as a matter of self-understanding. We are not just what we are, as some sort of substance, but neither is identity a matter of constructing identity. To our identity as selves belongs that we change, and that we do so as selves. Something is at stake for us in time changing us. In understanding oneself, one relates to the life that one has to live, in ways in which others cannot and should not. This is part of one’s self-identity. In this sense, self-identity has to do with self-esteem and dignity. To respect the identity of the other self is to have a sense of dignity, not only the dignity of the other, but also one’s own. Conversely, one’s own dignity is not only a matter of how one conducts one’s life, but also concerns how one relates to the lives of others. This leads to the third point. I have touched upon the issue of self-identity and appropriation. One is to become oneself in the sense of appropriating oneself. This could be understood, in Locke’s terms, as appropriating past actions and thoughts as one’s own. In remembering them as my actions and thoughts, I am accountable. But self-accountability implies that I am both the one to account and the one to be accounted for. I should be one and the same: myself. This identity is a matter of concern or commitment. I do not observe myself to be accountable, I am to be accountable. And the past actions and thoughts I remember as mine are not isolated. They are part of a history that I have not just

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enacted or thought out, but have experienced or lived through. I am not only subject of past actions and thoughts, but subjected to my own history. I may identify this history as mine, and still be unable to appropriate it as my own. Furthermore, to take one’s past upon oneself is a double move, it is backwards (remembering), but also forwards in the sense that it is to live a life with this past and these possibilities. This indicates that the concern for oneself implies selfcommitment. Here the ethical significance of self-identification comes to the fore. We not only identify ourselves with, but commit ourselves to, so that the question will be whether we actually are, in the course of our life, committed by ourselves. To have a life to live as a self is a question of commitment. And to pose the identity question to oneself would here make sense, not as a matter of self-observation, but as a matter of self-obligation or self-commitment This third point accentuates the normative dimension of self and identity, and the relation of normativity and temporality. Self-identity in time is also a question of committing oneself. This can be brought out in the case of keeping a promise. To keep a promise is to remain the same, not in the sense of permanence in time, despite of time, but through relating to time. The normative dimension of identity is the double possibility of fulfilment and betrayal. Fourth, self-identification and identification between selves have, as already indicated, a profound, but also ambiguous, ethical significance. In order to bring this ambiguity out, we must discern a further layer of the issue of identification. In so far as self-identity takes place between selves, it is also a matter of how we see each other. This is the case in recognition. But recognition has negative counterparts. Thus, one can identify the other in the sense that one has decided who she is: she is what she has done. To judge or to condemn is in this sense to fix the identity of the other. The other is what one takes her to have shown herself as (e. g., she has shown herself to be a liar). This negative ethical significance of identifying, however, is to be set off against a positive one. To take an ethical stance implies seeing oneself as accountable for one’s acts. The link between a person and her acts is in this sense crucial in ethics: I am to identify myself as the one who has done these acts. If I loosen this identity between person and act myself, I am in a sense not the same (I do not appropriate my acts), but then I am still the one who seeks to evade myself and in this sense tries not to be the same. Thus, the identity between a person and her acts is itself of an ambiguous ethical importance. Fifth, the normative dimension is to be interpreted through negative phenomena. This is already implied in what has been said. The normative dimension concerns what it is to be what we already are: a self being oneself. It is a dimension for self-understanding, and not an ideal self set apart. It is a matter of identity in both directions: self-appropriation (I am to become myself) and recogni-

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tion (of the identity of the other self). In both directions, we understand the normative implications of being a self in seeing the negative possibilities that we have ourselves. First, it is possible in various ways not to appropriate oneself. It is possible not to realize that I am the one accountable. It is also possible to lose oneself, in the sense that one’s life falls apart and that one gives up oneself in despair.⁴⁷ Second, it is possible not to recognize the other in various ways. One can see the other in ways that deprive her of significance or dignity. But what self-appropriation and recognition mean should be a response to these negative possibilities. What is at stake in self-appropriation and recognition, we know from these possibilities that show the vulnerability of a self. The crucial point here is that there is still self-identity in the negative instances. If I do not appropriate myself, I am still myself not appropriating myself. If I lose myself in despair, I am still myself losing myself in despair. We can say: “I am not myself,” or “I am besides myself,”⁴⁸ but still I am the one that is not myself. It concerns me. Let us take once again the issue of remembering. What if I forget what I have done? According to Locke, it is not the person who forgets, for the person is accountable and is so only when she remembers. So the one forgetting is the man.⁴⁹ But to forget can be part of not acknowledging or not appropriating what one has done. Someone might say to me: “You should have remembered!” or “How could you forget?” In this, I am the one forgetting and might be accountable for forgetting. I am accountable as the one forgetting. If we should put it in Locke’s terms, it would then be the man who is the self. Or, to be more precise, self-accountability presupposes that we can fail as selves, not only in the sense that we should account for our failures, but also in the sense that we can fail, maybe resist, to account for ourselves. Thus, in the demand to account for ourselves, self-identity is at stake in a critical sense. We are ourselves questioned as the ones to account for who we are. This leads to the sixth point in the attempt to explicate the normative implications of self and identity. This last point can be put in terms of a brief summary. I have argued that the normative dimension is not separate, but concerns what we are as selves. The implication is double: the normative dimension is that the identity of a self is at stake, but this presupposes that it is already a self in the sense of self-relating. This can be seen in both directions (self-appropriation and recognition). What I should account for or appropriate is myself,  See Sickness unto Death (SKS 11 / SUD).  Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 342– 343 refers to both phrases, but in a third person perspective, in the case of madness.  Ibid., pp. 342– 345.

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which implies that I am already a self in the sense that I can fail. And what I should recognize is the other as an other self to be recognized. In recognizing, I relate to what I have already seen: that the other already is another self relating to herself. As mentioned, this can be seen negatively. To humiliate another person implies to have seen her as someone that can be humiliated, that is, as another person. Or, to use Sartre’s example, to treat a human being as a dog implies that one has seen him or her as something else: as a human being.

8 Hermeneutics of the Self Let us now return to the approach to the issue of personal identity. The approach should reflect the nature of the problem. I have argued that the problem of selfidentity is inherent to selfhood. The identity of a person is a matter of how she relates to herself: how she identifies herself, takes herself, understands herself. She can reverse the situation of identification or recognition, not only in identifying herself before us, but in relating to us as the others identifying her. She might question what we do in identifying her. Thus, what complicates the approach is the fact that the problem of identity is already part of being a person or a self. It is a problem for oneself, it is a problem between ourselves, and it is a problem about ourselves. The identity of a self is self-identity. This approach to the problem of personal identity could be called hermeneutical. It emphasizes that self-identity is a matter of self-understanding. Self-identity is a problem for a self seeking to understand itself. Furthermore, a hermeneutical approach focuses on the self being situated. It is embodied in being embedded in a social, cultural, and historical context, and it is situated as a self, in understanding and relating to the situation. If we are selves in relating to our world, what are the implications for the notion of identity? Personal identity is not simply to remain the same. To ask whether I am the same over time, according to Locke, can be taken as a matter of concern. The concern for my past identity harbours, so to speak, a concern for my future survival. My identity matters to me. But my identity is itself a matter of concern in the sense that it depends on what is valuable to me or what I am concerned about. We decide what matters to us, but we are also affected, or even defined, by what matters to us. Thus, there is a critical difference between saying that our identity is what matters to us and saying that our identity depends on what matters to us. In the latter case, identity is itself a matter of what matters to us. It might take some time, maybe most of a life time, to find out what matters to us. It is part of our life to ask what it is about. When we try to find out what matters to us, our past is also a future resource. We can reflect on experiences

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from which we have come to understand what matters to us. In remembering, we are already affected by what has happened to us in the past. We carry with us a history without which we would not be what we are. This does not mean, however, that we are our history. We relate to it, also when we try to forget or leave our past behind us. We can carry, on the other hand, our history with us, without appropriating it as our own. Thus, we would not be ourselves without our history, which we also can leave behind. Self-appropriation takes place in relation to a history, but it can do so in complex ways. We can seek to remember what was important to us; we can seek to appropriate our past in order to free future possibilities, and we can remember possibilities that were cut off in the past in order to change our future. Thus, the issue of self-identity and history should not be restricted to the identification of oneself in one’s past actions and thoughts. We tell (parts of) our history in order to tell who we are. We identify ourselves by our history: where we come from, what we have experienced and done in the course of our life, and where we plan to go. Self is a self on a journey. Identity is not something fixed, but to be developed. This is reflected in the stories we tell about ourselves. And if self-identity depends on what we identify ourselves as or identify ourselves with, one could argue that we not only tell, but also live, our lives as stories. This leads to the suggestion that in a hermeneutical approach, identity is narrative identity.⁵⁰ It could then be taken as the identity that is constructed through the narratives one can identify with. In Ricoeur, the notion of identity as ipseity is linked to the notion of narrative identity, but in distinguishing this from an ethical identity.⁵¹ As mentioned, the approach to the issue of self and identity that I have outlined can be considered to be hermeneutical, but I would hesitate to call it narrative. Let me indicate just two arguments. First, our identity is not simply what comes out of the narratives we tell about ourselves. Identity is also how we relate to our narratives or to ourselves in telling these narratives. Second, the key notion of self as self-relation can be developed in a hermeneutical approach in terms of self and self-understanding. This approach would focus on how we implicitly understand ourselves in relating to others and to a world in between. In this sense, the identity of the self depends on how one understands oneself: how one takes oneself in taking what happens to oneself. Thus, how one relates bodily – in movements, gestures, seeing – to others is also to place oneself in a po-

 Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenology of Self,” in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. by Tilo Kircher and Anthony David, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, p. 58.  Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 140 – 168.

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sition to others. But this is not an identity that is developed in a narrative, but rather what narratives would relate to. In trying to understand what I experience by “constructing” some sort of narrative, I relate to myself as the one having experienced what I try to understand. Self-relation is not first to be established in a reflection or in a narrative, but is implicit in relating to others and a shared world.

9 Self-Relation (2) What then is the relation between a normative and a minimal notion of self and identity? In a normative sense, identity as self-identity can be appropriated or lost, respected or violated, as self-understanding and as integrity. In a minimal sense, self-identity is given in an awareness of my experiences as mine. This is a rather intricate issue to end up with, so let me just give two brief suggestions concerning the two notions that lead back to my main argument. First, in what sense can we speak of a minimal self? If it is taken as a self not extended in time, in contrast to a narrative self,⁵² in what sense is this minimal self oneself? What is the link between this minimal self and the one identifying this as oneself? My suggestion is that we can only speak of a minimal self in a non-minimal context. It might be an open question to me, what it means that I am the one who has this experience or does this act. This would in particular be the case if the experience or the act in question is of a more complex nature, e. g., making this journey in order to visit someone. The non-minimal context has to do with the implications of the experience or the act in question. These implications are not outside my self-awareness. In being aware of my experiences as mine, I implicitly understand the context and myself in the context. When asked, I can tell what I have done or experienced, and I do so by trying to make explicit what was implied in my experience or act, and in the situation. In a sense, I would try to tell what it means that this experience and this act are mine. That is, I would try to explicate my implicit understanding and my awareness of my experiences as mine. And I might do so in some sort of narrative. This could already indicate the link between a minimal and a narrative self. Second, what would a non-minimal self look like? It could be taken as a narrative self, but, as I have argued, the core of the issue would be the problem of the normative dimension. I have further argued that a normative notion of self

 Shaun Gallagher, “Philosophical Conceptions of the Self: Implications for Cognitive Science,” Trends in Cognitive Science, vol. 4, 2000, pp. 14– 21.

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and identity implies a non-normative: to identify oneself as the one whose identity is in question or challenged. So, my second suggestion is that a non-minimal notion of self presupposes a minimal. The problem then is, once again, how to define this minimal self. The two suggestions can be rephrased as follows: A minimal notion of self is presupposed in a normative notion, which, on the other hand, offers a context for understanding the minimal self. The problem of self-identity thus involves both a normative and a non-normative dimension of self and identity. If we distinguish between two levels, a minimal and a normative, the problem lies in between. On the one hand, a normative notion presupposes a non-normative: I am the one whose identity is at stake. On the other hand, in order to make explicit what is implied in the awareness that a given experience or act is mine, we must ask what it is like to be the one whose experience or whose act it is. Let me explicate the double suggestion – that a normative notion concerns the conditions or the context of a minimal, and that a normative presupposes a non-normative – by considering how a person with schizophrenia, or a schizophrenic person, can describe her or his self-awareness. This is not meant just to be an illustration. One of my aims in delineating a strong notion of self-identity that focuses on the normative dimension is to capture philosophically some of the challenges presented by psychopathology. The second approach to the issue of personal identity, and the corresponding notion of self-identity outlined here, should prove itself relevant not least in cases where the very conception of self-identity is challenged. Following the double suggestion, I’ll move in both directions: from a minimal to a normative level, and from a normative to a presupposed self-relation. In order to see how the two parts of this argument is intertwined, let us take the argument about normativity and negativity, developed above, one step further. The point made there, namely that the significance of the normative dimension of self and identity is to be seen through negative phenomena, is accentuated when we are dealing not only with forms of self-relation that are misrelations (as described in Kierkegaard’s analyses of despair),⁵³ but with self-disturbances. The acute question now is: What is the self-relation in self-disturbances? If self-disturbances only can happen to a self, in what sense are they ways of

 Sickness unto Death (SKS 11 / SUD). See Michael Theunissen, “Kierkegaard’s Negativistic Method,” in Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, ed. by John H. Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press 1981, pp. 381– 423; Michael Theunissen, Der Begriff der Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993; Arne Grøn, “Der Begriff der Verzweiflung,” Chapter 19 in this volume; Arne Grøn, “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,” Chapter 20 in this volume.

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being a self, i. e., ways of relating to oneself? If we compare self-relation as misrelation (as in despair) and self-disturbances, the difference seems to be the following. In self-relation as mis-relation (despair), I am still able to recognize myself as the one not being myself (for example by saying “I am not myself,” “I am beside myself,” or even, “I cannot recognize myself”). In self-disturbances, this is precisely what is at stake. The question here is whether one can identify oneself as the one being disturbed. What is at issue here is what I have called radical self-identification: to see oneself as the one being in despair, or to identify oneself as the one suffering by or under self-disturbances, in distinguishing oneself from others. The structural disorders in schizophrenia seem to affect this minimal, but radical, self-identification Let us take two examples of how a person with schizophrenia can describe her or his self-awareness: (1) “My first-person perspective is replaced by a third-person perspective (further explained by the patient that he constantly witnesses his own experiencing).” (2) “I have a feeling as if it is not me who is experiencing the world; it feels as if another person was here instead of me.”⁵⁴ How is the question of identity to be understood in this context? The context or the situation itself is complicated. In the second example, the one speaking relates to himself in the mode of as if, but this is a very complex way of relating to oneself. What is implied is a radical self-identification, which is at the same time at stake in what is said. One can ask whether, in the first example, the subject does not also speak in an as-if mode. To say that my first person perspective is lost, requires this first person perspective. If the interlocutor then asks: “It is as if your first person perspective were lost?,” the situation might be changed in the sense that it would be a matter of recognizing oneself as the subject in assuming this as-if mode. On the other hand, if we take the second example, although it is not said that I am not the one who is looking at the world from here where I stand, yet the problem is to identify oneself as the one who is looking at the world from here. In both examples, the one speaking identifies herself (speaking of her perspective, or of herself as if not looking at the world from where she looks), but in a mode indicating that radical self-identification is a problem.

 Josef Parnas, Paul Møller, Tilo Kircher, Jørgen Thalbitzer, Lennart Jansson, Peter Handest, and Dan Zahavi, “EASE: Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience,” Psychopathology, vol. 38, 2005, pp. 236 – 258.

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Self-identification is being complicated. To identify oneself would be to recognize: I am the one who sees as if it was not me who was looking from here. The question then is: What is the subjectivity involved or presupposed in this situation where a subject can talk of her perspective being lost and replaced by a third person perspective? The givenness of one’s experiences as one’s own is problematized, but in such a way that one is relating to oneself in this problematizing or as-if mode. To appropriate oneself would then be to appropriate oneself as the one looking from here where one looks. This means that self-appropriation would relate to what I have called the radical self-identification. This might seem paradoxical, because self-appropriation, as I have argued, would presuppose this self-identification. Here the hermeneutical character of self-appropriation comes to the fore: what is appropriated is presupposed or pre-understood. What is disturbed is the minimal self-awareness, one could still say, but it is disturbed in a context that is not minimal and that is implicitly understood. It could be objected that this is due to the fact that the situation itself is reflective, talking about how one is.⁵⁵ However, it takes more than a minimal self-awareness for this self-awareness to be a problem. If one’s situation is in any way felt as a problem, the self-awareness is affected. In self-disturbances, the self being disturbed relates to itself in a complex, not minimal, sense. It encounters itself as being related to itself, as being burdened by itself. As the reflective situation (a form of speaker-hearer situation) indicates, when a minimal self-awareness is turned into a problem, it is drawn into a normative context. What is at issue is whether I myself can see that I am the one, or actually see myself as the one, who sees in this as-if mode. We have here moved primarily from a minimal to a complex level. When a minimal self-awareness is problematized, the issue is a complex one. Self-relation becomes a problem, which means that it is a problem to appropriate, acknowledge, or recognize oneself. The normative dimension of self-identity is then brought into focus, together with the context of the minimal self-awareness. But, so is the point made before: the normative dimension presupposes a nonnormative notion of self. What is to be appropriated is oneself, in the cases just mentioned: the fact that I am already the one who sees in this as-if mode. The normative dimension thus pertains to the self that one already is in relating to others, to a world in between, and to oneself.

 One should then look more carefully into the reflective situation, as a form of speaker-hearer situation. It is reflective in the sense that the context that was implicitly understood can come to the fore.

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The notion of self as self-relation should capture precisely this relation between a normative and a non-normative dimension of the self. Self is not same sort of substance, but the fact that we relate to ourselves in being already related to ourselves. Self as self-relation is in this sense presupposed. Let me briefly substantiate this point by considering the critical approach to the notion of self in Hume and Nietzsche. In the well-known section on personal identity in Treatise on Human Nature, Hume asked for “self or person” as “that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference,” and found: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”⁵⁶ Self or person is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions.”⁵⁷ What Hume is looking for is self as a substance. As he is not able to find a self as a substance unchanged in time or as a substance behind his perceptions, he reduces self to a bundle of different perceptions. But let us have a second look at the quote. Hume’s operation involves someone looking for “myself.” It thus presupposes a self that is not to be found where he is looking for it. If I take self to be nothing but a collection of different perceptions, I cannot account for the situation where I am looking for “myself.” What I am seeking to understand, “myself,” is neither a substance behind my perceptions, nor these perceptions, but the fact that I relate to myself, for example in looking for “myself.” The notion of self should account for this situation: that we are looking for a self, in order to understand what we are, as selves. That we are selves is the implication of the situation. It is pre-understood in understanding the situation. What it means to be a self is thus to be seen from the very situation where we are looking for ourselves. The self presupposed is not simply an I-pole, but a self relating to itself. Nietzsche not only criticizes the idea of self as a substance, he also holds the subject to be a fiction.⁵⁸ What is to be noted, however, is that we make this fiction.⁵⁹ Subjectivity then is to be looked for precisely in this self-relation: that we

 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1958, p. 252.  Ibid., p. 252.  See, for example, Nietzsche: “The ‘subject’ is just a fiction [Das ‘Subjekt’ ist ja nur eine Fiktion]” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885 – 1887, in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinary, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1988, vol. 12, p. 398, p. 162, p. 315, p. 383; translation by the editors).  See Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885 – 1887, p. 465.

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need the fiction of the subject in order to deal with ourselves.⁶⁰ This has to do with the problem of identity. A critical motive in Nietzsche is that we need the fiction of unity in order to cope with our own diversity. As Hume speaks of the self as a “commonwealth,” Nietzsche speaks of the subject as a “Vielheit” of subjects. The implication, however, is that we are already selves in having our own “Vielheit” or diversity as a problem. The subject is not simply a diversity of subjects. If we only consider a self to be diverse, we will have difficulties in accounting for the possibility that it can disintegrate. That one’s life is fragmented presupposes a minimal identity: that I am the one whose life is fragmented. If one cannot recognize oneself in this minimal sense, diversity will turn into disintegration. In these two classic examples of a critical approach to the notion of self, self is presupposed as self-relation, in our understanding the situation in question. A hermeneutical approach to the issue of self and identity should explicate what is implied in this presupposition: self as self-relation. It can do so in focusing on the self-understanding that is already implied in being a self. What I have called the second approach to the issue of self and identity is in this sense hermeneutical. Self-identity is a matter of self-relation. The problem of self-identity is part of what it is to be a self. What we are is a matter of what we take ourselves to be: how we understand ourselves in relating to others and to a world in between. In this sense, self-identity is a question to the self whose identity it is. It is a matter of self-understanding. Part of the solution to the quest for identity is that we are what we are in seeking to understand ourselves. If we could get some sort of definitive answer, this would change our situation as humans, our human condition. Thus, part of our human identity is the open question – about ourselves.

 We are always “putting the best ‘faces’” on ourselves, as Daniel Dennett says (Daniel C. Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. by Frank S. Kessel, Pamela M. Cole, and Dale L. Johnson, Hillsdale: Erlbaum 1992, pp. 103 – 116).

Chapter 5 Spirit and Temporality in The Concept of Anxiety 1 The Concept of Spirit? The Concept of Anxiety is a book, which itself anticipates and shapes the framework in which we discuss it. The concepts to be used in our interpretation are to a large extent concepts coined in the book itself. This is especially true of the concept, which gives the book its title, the concept of anxiety. In this sense, The Concept of Anxiety is a remarkably modern book; its author one of our contemporaries. One concept used in the book, however, reveals a historical distance, which seems insurmountable, namely the concept, of spirit. It is a concept, which is hard to repeat or to make use of ourselves – at the very least, we need some sort of translation. One might object that this distance is manifest to an even greater degree when we consider the problem of hereditary sin, which is put forward in the subtitle of the book. The Concept of Anxiety, however, offers a grandiose translation of the question of sin in terms of the consciousness of sin and the problem of freedom. So, the reader who is confronted with the difficulty of making sense of the concept of sin might find explicit clues for an answer in The Concept of Anxiety. But the concept of spirit is not recognized in the same manner as a problematic concept by the book itself. And what makes things worse, in The Concept of Anxiety the notion of spirit is a forceful one, explaining the most complex matters without itself being explained. So the book does not offer much help in answering the question, which it gives rise to: What does spirit mean? In order to arrive at a possible answer, let us first rephrase the question and ask: What is the role of the concept of spirit in the book? Kierkegaard did not write a book called The Concept of Spirit. However, references to the concept of spirit are abound in key passages of The Concept of Anxiety. Spirit is not itself a theme, but it is implicit in the primary themes of the book: themes such as anxiety, the human being as a synthesis, and (the consciousness of) sin. In fact, the concept of spirit unites these primary themes. As mentioned at the outset, the themes, which we can make our own, especially anxiety and freedom, are linked to and also presuppose the concept of spirit. In order to see this, we need only look at one passage, a passage, which contains a double reference to the concept of spirit.

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The passage is from Chapter I § 5, the heading of which repeats the name of the book: “The Concept of Anxiety.” When Vigilius Haufniensis here deals with the concept of anxiety, he uses the concept of spirit. Just one quotation: “What, then, is the human being’s relation to this ambiguous power? How does spirit relate to itself and to its conditionality? It relates as anxiety.”¹ These three sentences concern the question: Who is the subject of anxiety? Obviously (but also ambiguously) the subject is the human being, but tacitly the human being in the second sentence is replaced by spirit. This indicates that the human being is defined as spirit, anticipating the opening section of The Sickness unto Death. The point made by the movement represented in the three sentences is the following: It is a human being defined or determined as spirit who can be subject to anxiety. So, where we find the concept of anxiety, we find the concept of spirit: Spirit, or the human being defined as spirit, “relates as anxiety.” The passage from which I have quoted starts as follows: “That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns. The human being is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit.”² The human being is – as it is said later – “a synthesis of psyche and body that is constituted and sustained by spirit.”³ We will have to take a closer look later on at this famous definition of the human being as a synthesis. I give these quotations only as a reminder. In the short passage I have quoted from, we have two of the key concepts used in the book: anxiety and synthesis, both of which are explained by a direct reference to the concept of spirit. We might even anticipate that the two key concepts, anxiety and synthesis, are linked together by this double reference to the concept of spirit. References to the concept of spirit thus bear a heavy load. They occur in almost every key passage in the book, with one or two possible exceptions, namely Chapter IV and V. This, however, is due to the fact that in these chapters we are, so to speak, in the world of spirit, dealing with the problem of spirit, namely the problems of the human synthesis as the synthesis of spirit.⁴

 SKS 4, 349 / CA, 44; translation modified.  SKS 4, 349 / CA, 43.  SKS 4, 384 / CA, 81; translation modified.  This is indicated by the reference to “the standpoint of spirit [Aandens Standpunkt]” (SKS 4, 417 / CA, 115), anticipating The Sickness unto Death, and by the heading: “Freedom Lost Pneumatically” (SKS 4, 438 / CA, 137). We are dealing with “the qualifications of the spirit [Aandens Bestemmelser]” (SKS 4, 442 / CA, 141).

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So, if The Concept of Anxiety is not a book on the concept of spirit, it is a book showing the significance of the concept of spirit. The references to the concept of spirit, however, do not explain its significance. They often have an almost enigmatic character. After (re)reading the book, we might still ask: What is meant by spirit? As mentioned, this situation shows a historical distance separating us from The Concept of Anxiety. That Kierkegaard’s use of the concept of spirit appears strange to us might, however, be a challenge as well. It can remind us of the task, which confronts us in interpreting a text such as The Concept of Anxiety. An interpretation of the book must answer the following question: What is the problem, which The Concept of Anxiety will answer? In this, a second question is implied: How should we understand and answer the problem ourselves?

2 (In)Finitude The following presentation presupposes and develops some of the arguments put forward in my essay “Temporality in Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses.”⁵ It would be informative to compare The Concept of Anxiety and the edifying discourses of 1843 and 1844, especially in view of the problem of spirit and temporality, but space does not allow me to do so. Let me instead give a short outline of one main argument in my essay: In Kierkegaard, we can see a radical notion of temporality and finitude at work. A human being is finite in the sense that she can only relate to herself in time. Subjectivity is temporal in the sense that self-relation means relating to oneself in time by relating to time as a problem or a challenge. This is manifest in a phenomenon such as self-concern or self-torment. As a self, a human being is exposed to time. As humans, we cannot place ourselves in a world of eternity – or rather, we can only relate to the question of eternity in time. Here is short quotation from the crucial passage on time and eternity in The Concept of Anxiety: “If…time and eternity touch each other, then it must be in time.”⁶ My suggestion is that this phrase “in time” (i Tiden) goes to the root of human existence. This radical notion of temporality and finitude can be seen in the definition of a human being as “a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.”⁷ At first glance, the synthesis seems to consist of two parts or two dimensions of human exis-

 Chapter 7 in this volume.  SKS 4, 390 / CA, 87.  SKS 4, 388 / CA, 85.

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tence: the temporal and the eternal. But where does temporality occur in the definition? Obviously as the first component, the temporal. But if we look once again at the definition, we can see that temporality occurs in two places. First in the definition of the human being as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. And second in the definition as a whole. For what is the significance of the definition of a human being as a synthesis? Human existence as a synthesis is finite. Synthesis signifies human finitude. The synthesis itself – the very definition of the human being as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal – is a definition of human finitude or temporality. This is reflected in the passage in The Concept of Anxiety, which deals with time, eternity and temporality. The passage is crucial – and remarkable – for a reconstruction of the concept of timelighed (temporality). If we look at the way in which Vigilius Haufniensis coins the notion of timelighed, we again witness the double occurrence of temporality. The passage starts off by defining time as something, which passes by, and ends by defining timelighed (temporality) as something, which is of critical significance: “The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time.”⁸ In a footnote in Sein und Zeit, Martin Heidegger gives Kierkegaard the following ambiguous credit: “S. Kierkegaard is probably the one who have seen the existentiell phenomenon of the moment with the most penetration; but this does signify that he has been correspondingly successful in Interpreting it existentially.” Heidegger then claims: “He clings to the ordinary conception of time, and defines the ‘moment of vision’ with the help of ‘now’ and ‘eternity.’ When Kierkegaard speaks of ‘temporality,’ he means human being’s ‘being-in-time’ [‘Inder-Zeit-sein’].”⁹ My argument that Kierkegaard’s concept of human existence implies a radical notion of temporality and finitude is a rejoinder to this. In light of Heidegger’s philosophy of finitude, however, we can see that Kierkegaard’s notion of human finitude reopens the question of infinitude. I will put this question as follows: Is it possible to understand human finitude in a radical way – i. e., that to be a human being is to be finite – without the implication that this finitude has an infinite significance? In The Concept of Anxiety, we witness a complicated approach to the question of finitude and infinitude. If we compare the various definitions of human synthesis in The Concept of Anxiety to those in The Sickness unto  SKS 4, 392 / CA, 89.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, p. 323 / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1972, p. 338.

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Death, we observe that the synthesis of infinitude and finitude, which plays a prominent role in Anti-Climacus is lacking in Vigilius Haufniensis. The synthesis of finitude and infinitude, however, is what the whole book – The Concept of Anxiety – is about. It is the problem, which Vigilius Haufniensis is dealing with. The problem occurs within his second definition of human synthesis: If human existence as such is finite, if synthesis signifies human finitude, what does the eternal mean in the definition: “synthesis of the temporal and the eternal”?¹⁰ This is exactly the problem of spirit, which leads from the first definition to the second: “Man, then, is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.”¹¹ Synthesis is the synthesis of spirit as “the third”: There is no synthesis “if the two are not united in a third.”¹² This means that spirit has to do with finitude, the finitude of human synthesis, but spirit is eternal and infinite. So, the problem facing us is this: spirit and temporality.

3 Spirit and Temporality The problem of spirit and temporality appears in the movements and positions described by Vigilius Haufniensis. These are movements and positions affecting the human synthesis as a synthesis of finitude and infinitude. They are movements of spirit – or movements showing the problem of spirit. These movements are rather complicated. In order to make my point more transparent, I will therefore reconstruct the movements in a more systematic way. Basically we can discern two movements: The first is a movement of infinitude. The radical notion of human temporality has one presupposition: that a human being is not simply time and cannot be reduced to time. Human temporality is a relationship to time, it is a temporality of self-relation. That humans, in this sense, are something more than time is the condition for describing human finitude. Human temporality concerns “time as”: time as a burden, as a threat, or as a joy; it is time experienced and expected. Human finitude is not simply time, but consciousness of time. A human being is finite by relating to time: she asks what time will bring, thus relating to herself in time; she asks “what will become of me?” This means that there is a self at stake in time, a self to lose or to gain in time. This self-relation in

 SKS 4, 388 / CA, 85.  Ibid.  SKS 4, 349 / CA, 43.

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time is of infinite significance in the sense that it decides upon the meaning, or lack of meaning, of time. That self-relation is a relation to a self, which can be lost or won in time means that the self is exposed to time. The definition of a human being as spirit means this in-finitude in relation to time. The second movement is a movement of finitude. Both movements are movements of spirit. While the first movement explicates what is meant by saying that a human being is defined or determined as spirit (bestemt som Aand), the second movement concerns the process of determination or “being determined.” Spirit is not only the determination of a human being (Aandsbestemmelsen), but it is itself determined. It has a history. The entire issue behind the process described in The Concept of Anxiety is self-determination: to be determined as this individual (Enkelte).¹³ The self to be lost or to be won in time is not a self or the self in some general sense, but oneself as this definite individual. This point of being determined is reflected in the possibility of forgetting one’s own name: “Rebecca, is it I who is speaking?”¹⁴ To ask what sin means as if it did not concern oneself as this individual is to be thoughtless. Or to quote Vigilius Haufniensis: “So when the single individual is stupid enough to inquire about sin as if it were something foreign to him, he only asks as a fool.”¹⁵ The Concept of Anxiety thus describes a movement of determination, which singles out the individual as this individual. This movement of radical finitude is the movement of spirit. The claim made by Vigilius Haufniensis is that we only know what spirit means by following this movement. The issue of being determined is at the same time an issue of infinite significance. The two movements – of in-finitude – are in fact one: As spirit or self, a human being relates to time, but this implies that a human being as spirit is exposed to time: One can lose or gain oneself in time. And this loss or gain is infinite – it is a matter of deciding upon the meaning of time. If we take the two movements as one double movement, we can describe it as a transcendence of time (infinitude) that takes place in time by relating to time (finitude). One might object that I could have said this without referring to our text, The Concept of Anxiety. My approach is systematic or philosophical, and aims to find an answer to the question: What is the problem, which provokes Vigilius Haufniensis’ text? But as I have indicated, this question is a matter of reading the text. In the following, I will be a little more specific. First, let me substantiate

 To this concept of selv-bestemthed, see Arne Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet. Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1997.  SKS 4, 356 / CA, 51.  SKS 4, 355 / CA, 50.

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the claim made before that The Concept of Anxiety deals with the problem of the synthesis of finitude and infinitude. The movements described in the last chapter of the book, Chapter V, revolve around the notions of finitude and infinitude: “Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude.”¹⁶ The movement of education is measured by infinitude. But how is the individual educated by possibility? By anxiety consuming “all finite ends”: “Anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends [fortærer alle Endeligheder].”¹⁷ Faith is “the inner certainty that anticipates infinity [den indre Vished, der tager Uendeligheden forud].”¹⁸ But if the individual “defrauds possibility,” his faith will be “the sagacity of finitude [Endelighedens Klogskab].”¹⁹ The individual “who sank in possibility – his eye became dizzy,” he has “lost all,” he has nothing to hold on to. But when he “emerged from the depth of the abyss lighter than all the troublesome and terrible things in life,” he received “everything back.”²⁰ This dimension of “all,” “nothing” and “everything” is a question of in-finitude. The described movement is a loss of finitude and a loss of the shrewdness or cunning that adheres to finite ends. But experiencing this loss of finitude (in the sense of all finite ends) implies at the same time realizing what finitude means. When anxiety consumes all finite ends, it anticipates time or the possibilities of time. Everything will come to an end. What is lost is finitude (in the sense of all finite ends), and what is received back is finitude. The infinitude, which the individual learns to see concerns her own finitude; it is the infinite significance of guilt and atonement. This is the open end of The Concept of Anxiety. The concluding chapter deals with the possibility of making oneself finite.²¹ This very possibility shows that a human being is not simply finite. Making oneself finite means losing oneself in time, and this possibility is infinite. From the perspective of the concluding chapter, let us now look back at the movements and positions described in the book. The field of inquiry circumscribed by The Concept of Anxiety is the life of the finite spirit or the “existing spirit” as it is called in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. ²² In The Concept of Anxiety,

 SKS 4, 455 / CA, 156.  SKS 4, 454 / CA, 155.  SKS 4, 456 / CA, 157.  Ibid.  SKS 4, 457 / CA, 158.  “Whenever inwardness is lacking, the spirit is finitized [er Aanden endeliggjort]. Inwardness is therefore eternity or the constituent of the eternal in man” (SKS 4, 451 / CA, 151).  SKS 7, 114 / CUP1, 118.

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this field of inquiry is the human synthesis and the temporality of this synthesis. This means finitude as the human condition, the conditio humana. The question implied in the main themes of The Concept of Anxiety – themes such as anxiety, and the definitions of synthesis and sin – is: What is it to be a human being? The human condition is fragile and problematic. This comes from the contradiction “that the immortal spirit is determined as genus.”²³ Or to put it in other words, the problem is spirit and temporality. A human being determined as spirit is finite. This problem is reflected in the definition of synthesis.

4 The Synthesis of Temporality – the Temporality of Synthesis In The Concept of Anxiety, spirit is linked to the human synthesis in a distinct manner. I have already quoted the pivotal definition of the human being as a synthesis of psyche and body, which is constituted and sustained by spirit. There is no synthesis if the two – psyche and body – are not united in a third. “This third is spirit.”²⁴ The passage I quoted from in the beginning contains two references to the concept of spirit: A human being is determined as spirit, and spirit is what makes the human synthesis a synthesis. If we take these two references together, we can view the definition of synthesis as an explanation of the definition of the human being as spirit, namely the spirit as this third, which unites into one. Spirit as the third is not a definition or a translation of spirit, but rather indicates what the function or the role of spirit is: to make the human synthesis a synthesis. But what does it mean: spirit as the third? It is not a third component, which is being added as a supplement to the two, psyche and body. Spirit is the third in uniting the two. But how? Here we should bear in mind that it is the individual human being who is determined as spirit. We might then translate “spirit as the third” into the self as self-relation, following the opening section of The Sickness unto Death. This would give the following interpretation: Spirit, as this third, unites insofar as the human person relates to itself as body and relates to itself as psyche. This unity is the unity of the human self relating to itself. As we have already seen, the definition of the human being as the synthesis of psyche and body, constituted and sustained by spirit, appears to be only the first definition. It is followed by a second, which states that the human being is a

 SKS 4, 373 / CA, 69.  SKS 4, 349 / CA, 43.

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synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. While temporality seems to be lacking in the first definition, so is spirit in the second. Vigilius Haufniensis notes himself that “the third” seems to be missing in the definition of the human being as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. This gives him occasion to ask: “What, then, is the temporal?”²⁵ The key passage on time, eternity and the moment then follows, which results in the coining of the concept of temporality (timelighed). At the end of this passage, Vigilius Haufniensis remarks: “The synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is not another synthesis but is the expression for the first synthesis, according to which the human being is a synthesis of psyche and body that is sustained by spirit. As soon as the spirit is posited, the moment is present.”²⁶ But this also implies that spirit – and the first definition – deals with temporality. To cut a long story short: The second synthesis – the human being as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal – is what the first synthesis is all about. Let us now look at the long story.

5 The Secret of Spirit Temporality occurs not only in the second definition, which explicitly mentions the temporal. I have argued that synthesis signifies temporality. This is, upon closer consideration reflected in the first definition of the human being as a synthesis of psyche and body sustained by spirit. En passant, Vigilius Haufniensis gives the following clue – placed in parentheses – about the concept of spirit: “(and it is precisely the secret of spirit that it has a history).”²⁷ And in fact, the first definition, which focuses on spirit as the third, which makes the human synthesis a synthesis, opens a history of spirit: In the moment the spirit posits itself, it posits the synthesis, but in order to posit the synthesis it must first pervade it differentiatingly, and the ultimate point of the sensuous is precisely the sexual…without sexuality, no history. A perfect spirit has neither the one nor the other…First in sexuality is the synthesis posited as a contradiction, but like every contradiction it is also a task, the history of which begins at that same moment.²⁸

The “contradiction” pertains precisely to the problem of spirit and temporality. A human being spiritually determined is in-finite, but as spirit it is exposed to time.  SKS 4, 388 / CA, 85.  SKS 4, 392 / CA, 88.  SKS 4, 370 / CA, 66.  SKS 4, 354 / CA, 49; see also Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Kierkegaard, trans. by Jeannette B. Knox, Macon: Mercer University Press 2008, pp. 27– 36.

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It has a history. The problem in the history of spirit, which the first definition opens is the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. The reference to the history of spirit is thus repeated in the passage on the second definition of the human being as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. The implicit “third” here is the moment (Øieblikket) which, as we saw, is defined as “that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other.”²⁹ And “only with the moment does history begin…for at this point spirit begins.”³⁰ The history of spirit begins. This is what I have called the movement of finitude. But this movement of determination presupposes the moment where a distinction of infinite significance is posited in time. It is from this moment that history begins. The Concept of Anxiety not only points out that finite spirit has a history, but it also describes this history. It is a history of spirit coming to itself, but this phenomenology has two distinct features: It is a history of being determined as this single individual, and it is a history marked by the negative possibility of spirit not coming to itself. In Chapter IV, we are in the world of spirit, but the figures which Vigilius Haufniensis describes here are ways of losing oneself. And this means they are figures showing a human synthesis which is not a synthesis. This negative possibility of the history of spirit affects the status of spirit as the third. The notion of spirit as the third that unites the synthesis implies the question: Does spirit in fact unite? Not only the moment, but also this implicit question opens the history of spirit. The question points back to the possibility of losing oneself in time. So already in the notion of spirit as the third – the self-relation – lies the relation to time: the self being exposed to time.

6 Temporality of Spirit What, then, is the temporality of spirit? The passage which deals with time, eternity, and the moment seems to give a clue to this question. It shows that spirit and moment belong together. Spirit begins in the critical or decisive moment, but the moment is decisive because spirit begins. Consequently, temporality of spirit is to be understood as the temporality of the moment. It is the temporality of spirit coming to itself in the moment of decision or, in other words, the temporality of repetition. But this positive concept of temporality presupposes another temporality of spirit, namely the temporality implied in the notion of being exposed to time. While the first way of understanding the temporality of

 SKS 4, 392 / CA, 89.  Ibid.

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spirit concentrates on the moment of fulfilment, the second focuses on the history of spirit as a history in which spirit itself is at stake. To the history of spirit belongs the possibility of spiritlessness – as a possibility of spirit.

7 Spirit and the Temporality of Vision The question of spirit and temporality belongs in a wider framework: spirit, temporality, and (in)visibility. Let me sketch this as a concluding perspective. Temporality of spirit is also temporality of vision. The Concept of Anxiety takes place in a world of vision. The history of spirit is described through figures, movements, and positions. One of the dominant figures in the book – the figure which is, so to speak, the method – is the observer (Iagttageren). The one writing the book is the one observing. Vigilius Haufniensis carefully places his enterprise in the context of different sciences. What he is doing is psychology and psychology is a matter of seeing. But seeing demands attention and reflection. Spirit means interiority, but this manifests itself in seeing. What the observer should see is not something obvious, something to be seen without a second thought. On the contrary, what is to be seen demands time in order to be seen. This is what I have called “depth-phenomenology.”³¹ The objects for psychology are the attitudes or positions of freedom,³² i. e., ways of relating to the world and to oneself. These ways of relating are manifestations of spirit or interiority. To see these manifestations, however, is a matter of spirit: how the observer herself relates to what she sees. There is always a negative possibility: manifestations without spirit, seeing without understanding. “However, life is rich enough, if only one understands how to see. One need not travel to Paris and London; besides, this would be of no help if one is unable to see.”³³ Spirit is interiority, but also manifestation. It has its history. The manifestation of spirit is a matter of time, but to see the manifestations of spirit is also a matter of time – of giving oneself time to see and to understand what one is seeing, and of giving the other individual time to manifest herself. Vision has its own temporality. Because it is a matter of spirit.³⁴

 Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, p. 332.  “[F]reedom’s psychological attitudes [Frihedens psychologiske Stillinger]” (SKS 4, 420 / CA, 118).  SKS 4, 378 / CA, 74  This essay was translated by K. Brian Söderquist.

Chapter 6 The Embodied Self: Reformulating the Existential Difference in Kierkegaard 1 Introduction Embodiment has become an increasingly important issue in cognitive science during the last decade, in particular in the enactive approach that views cognition as embodied action.¹ The focus on embodiment (of mind) and enactment (of world), however, seems to question the status of the self or the cognizing subject. If cognition takes place in interactions between mind and environment, if mind is being embodied in being out there, embedded in its environment, and extended beyond what seems to be its own boundaries, if the brain as the controller of the body, or embodied action, is itself without a center and instead distributed in systems of networks, if biological aggregates are emergent, self-organizing processes without selves, where then should we look for the self? In this situation, however, we should also question the notion of self we bring along – self as a controlling center or as an ultimate ground. What is meant by the self when we take ourselves and other human beings to be selves? In particular, what is the relation between embodiment and self? In The Embodied Mind, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, following Merleau-Ponty, understand human embodiment in the double sense of being both observed and lived. But they also indicate that there is a critical difference in lived embodiment between being present and not being present. To be mindless is to be as if one was disembodied. When we ask what embodiment means we must therefore include ourselves, the asker of the question. Reflection can be theoretical, disembodied, but it can also be embodied, that is, it can take the embodiment of the one asking into account.² This argument is important in seeking to bridge the gap between science and experience – a problem, which most acutely concerns the notion of the self. Thus, cognitivism can be taken as implying that the notion of a self is not needed for cognition; cogni-

 See Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge: The MIT Press 1991; Andy Clark, Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, Cambridge: The MIT Press 1997.  Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, pp. 23 – 30. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-012

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tivist theories are, Daniel Dennett claims, theories of the sub-personal level.³ But still, we experience ourselves as selves. In order to bridge this gap, we must, Varela, Thompson, Rosch argue, enlarge our horizon and include non-Western traditions, in particular Buddhist pragmatic reflections and doctrines of no-self. The problem that seems to come out of, first, a cognitivist approach, and then the enactive approach to cognition, namely that we are ourselves not only disunified or fragmented, but also groundless, living in a world without ultimate grounds, finds an answer, they claim, in Buddhist transformative reflections on groundlessness as non-egocentric responsiveness. The existential concern is how we live in a world that science at the same time explains.⁴ In what follows, I am not going to discuss in detail the stimulating suggestions put forward by Varela. Thompson, and Rosch. Instead, I will argue that we should also enlarge our horizon in (re)discovering hidden resources in Western traditions in response to the problem of embodiment and self. Western traditions are often pictured in simplistic terms, especially as far as the issue of embodiment (e. g. dualism of mind and body) and self (e. g. the self as some substance or center, or as the hidden true or inner self) is concerned. To be more specific, what I will do is to argue for a notion of the embodied self in reformulating some insights in Søren Kierkegaard that point to the existential difference in being embodied. Let me briefly indicate the main arguments in the following: Kierkegaard uses a Hegelian model: the human mind exteriorizes itself, in history and language, in actions and speech. Human being is being (out) there. This does not make the notions of self and interiority obsolete. On the contrary, in order to understand human exteriority, we need to re-define what a human self is. Exteriority can also be a matter of inwardness, as inwardness in action and understanding. The crucial point in this re-definition is that self is to be understood as selfrelation. Self is to relate oneself to others and to a world in between, and, in these relations, to relate to oneself. The human self is embodied and embedded. It is a synthesis of body and consciousness, being corporeally and temporally determined. Human embodiment, with its intrinsic history, is also a matter of how humans take their embodiment. In this, there is a critical difference that could be called a difference between being present and not being present (actually,

 Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, pp. 279 – 280.  Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, pp. xvii, 127.

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Kierkegaard uses the term: to be simultaneous with oneself). Our embodied existence is to be taken over or to be appropriated by ourselves as embodied beings. This is the existential reformulated. Thus, my argument concerning embodiment and self will be twofold. First, in order to understand human embodiment we need a notion of the critical difference as to how humans take their embodiment. Second, in order to account for this character of human embodiment we need to re-define what it means to be a self. Self is not a center or a ground (this would already imply a self taking itself as center or ground), but self-relation.

2 Consciousness in Context In reconsidering the issue of embodiment, the link between being embodied and being embedded is of central importance. Human consciousness is embodied, but it is also embedded in a social, cultural, and historical context. These two conditions are not separate, but go together as aspects of the human condition. Humans are embodied in being embedded, socially, culturally and historically. If we only understand embodiment as the fact that human consciousness is always instantiated bodily, located in the brain, we do not understand consciousness as being embodied. It is embodied as consciousness. Thus, we relate bodily to the world, to others, and to ourselves, and we can be aware of ourselves as being embodied. Likewise, the fact that human consciousness is embedded socially, historically, and culturally affects how it functions as consciousness. Human consciousness is a matter of context. It situates itself. The question is what it means for human consciousness to be situated bodily in a historical, social and cultural context. We relate to others in social settings and participate in a history as embodied beings. Our embodiment is expressed and reflected culturally. We form images of the body. When we take something in a spiritual or metaphorical sense, we do so as embodied beings, drawing upon our bodily experiences. For example, when we seek to orient ourselves in terms of the course of our lives, we can ask where we are going, or talk about finding one’s way (in choosing education, job, etc.). These ways of speaking, including talking about the course of our lives, draw upon experiences of orienting ourselves in actually walking or travelling. Rich resources for understanding these two basic features of human consciousness (being embodied and being embedded) can be found in twentiethcentury existential philosophy, phenomenology and hermeneutics, in particular, but also in, for example, German Idealism and its critics in the first half of the

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nineteenth century. Thus, Kierkegaard has, primarily as the inaugurator of modern existential philosophy, profoundly influenced modern philosophy and, increasingly, also non-Western traditions. He is one of the most prominent figures in post-Hegelian philosophy, critically transforming motives in German Idealism in ways that have been not only formative for existential philosophy, but also have become, as a background, part of modern philosophy. Kierkegaard’s reputation as the father of existentialism, however, has caused some misunderstandings. His theory of subjectivity has been taken as subjectivism, or even as implying some sort of a-cosmism. But the resources to be found in Kierkegaard go in the opposite direction. His existential approach implies, I will argue, a strong notion of human being as being situated. Therefore, we should reformulate what the key notion of the existential means, and we should do so in view of the issue of self and embodiment. Arguing along this line, for a notion of the embodied self, might seem unorthodox, given traditional views on Kierkegaard’s thought. In a sense, then, the resources to be found in Kierkegaard are hidden behind pictures formed by Kierkegaard receptions in the twentieth century. In what follows, I will not go into a detailed interpretation of Kierkegaard’s texts, but will only take some key passages in order to give a more systematic presentation of what I consider to be some of the important potentials and resources in his approach.

3 History of Consciousness Let us follow the lead given above and focus on the historical context of consciousness. If we are to understand human embodiment we must take into account that humans are bodily embedded in histories. How is human consciousness as consciousness historically embedded? In what sense does it have a history? In Kierkegaard, we find a strong claim about the historicity of consciousness. The secret of spirit pertains to its history, he says in The Concept of Anxiety. ⁵ In making this claim, Kierkegaard transforms a key motive found in Hegel. Let us briefly see how the notion of the intrinsic history of consciousness is developed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

 Speaking about “the history of spirit” Kierkegaard notes: “and it is precisely the secret of spirit that it has history” (SKS 4, 370 / CA, 66).

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In his Phenomenology, Hegel elaborates in highly sophisticated ways the interplay between relating to an object, relating to oneself and relating to others. The relation to an object seems to be given with the object being given. Consciousness, however, only relates to an object in distinguishing the object from itself. It is itself not the object, but relates to the object, as something other than itself. The object is for consciousness.⁶ This implies that consciousness is part of its relation to the object. The implication will be clearer when we realize that we relate to an object in a context. Even when we think we can pick the particular object out by pointing at it (saying it is this object we mean), it only makes sense in a context in which we are able to distinguish this particular object (it is this and not that, or that kind of, object). We already understand the context in orienting ourselves towards the object in question. But we can also relate to the context itself; we can even question what the context is (what are we looking for?). Thus, implied in relating to an object is a context, which has various layers and thus is open for further moves taken by us (we can redirect our attention, we can move ourselves in other directions). What is ultimately implied in relating to the object is a notion of the world in which we relate to the object. But this is our notion. We come to understand ourselves in seeking to understand our world. The interplay between our notion of the object (context and world) and our notion of ourselves is at work in making an experience. ⁷ When we really experience something, in the sense that we come to think differently, our view of the world will be changed, and in this we are ourselves changed. I have here only sketched the initial step in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Crucial further steps in the book are, first, the theory of recognition where the interplay between relating to oneself and relating to the other self is brought into focus, and second, the notion of the world of spirit or mind (Geist), which both offers the context or framework for unfolding the interrelation between self-relation, relation to others, and relation to a shared world, and explicates that consciousness is embedded in a social, cultural and historical world.⁸ Thus, language is, according to Hegel, the embodiment of spirit or mind.⁹

 In German: “Dieses [consciousness] unterscheidet nämlich etwas von sich, worauf es sich zugleich bezieht; oder wie dies ausgedrückt wird: es ist etwas für dasselbe” (Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg: Meiner 1952, p. 70). Consciousness distinguishes from itself that to which it relates.  See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 73.  The connection between the two steps is indicated by Hegel when he calls the first a “turning point,” which in nuce gives the notion of spirit (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 140).

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Let this suffice as a background in order to give a preliminary answer to our question: in what sense is consciousness historical? First, we should note that the historical character of human consciousness has to do with the interplay between relating to an object, relating to oneself, and relating to others (the dimensions of subjectivity). This can be indicated by questions such as: what happens to us when we come to understand something, what happens between ourselves, and what happens to the way we see the world? In experiencing something, our notions of the world and ourselves are not only presupposed, but also at stake. Our consciousness, defined both by the notion of the object and by the notion of the self implied, can be changed. Second, that consciousness can be changed should be understood as something intrinsic to consciousness. Human consciousness takes place in a history. In a sense, consciousness happens to us. We are ourselves, as subjects, changed, or changing, in becoming conscious of something that matters to us. The importance of what we come to understand is measured by the fact that our views of the world and ourselves are changed. But this change of consciousness makes a difference in our history. Thus, consciousness is also intrinsically historical in the sense that if it is changed, our history is changed. Experiences can be epoch-making in the sense that time is not the same after the event as it was before; experiences make a cut in time in that our consciousness is changed. This is to be seen from the fact that we can only go backwards in time, trying to remember how things were before, with this changed consciousness, carrying it with us. The insight that embodiment involves history is also formulated in the enactive approach. Living beings are embedded in their environments. An organism is not parachuted into its environment, but has become what it is in interacting with it. In a sense, this helps also to understand that humans, as embodied beings, have history. But how far does it account for the way humans have history? Human cognition is enactive, but how are humans embodied in being embedded in a history they also enact? We will take these questions with us in the following. The moves to be taken can be seen as steps towards an answer, but they will, I think, only give an idea of what an answer could be. Before taking the next step, let me make just one point concerning the embedded nature of the human mind. A crucial insight

 Language is the being of spirit, “das Dasein des Geistes” (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 458). Charles Taylor takes the embodiment of spirit as a key point in his interpretation of Hegel (Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975). Embodiment here also implies being embedded. Hegel draws on and re-interprets a Christian understanding of spirit as incarnated.

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in Hegel’s model is that mind exteriorizes itself.¹⁰ Mind makes itself exterior to itself – in language, artefacts and institutions. Its activity is self-exteriorization and self-appropriation. Spirit or mind (Geist) takes place between a subject and its world, and between subjects in a more or less shared world. This model could be a fruitful resource for exploring the relation between mind and world in cognitive science. For example, when Andy Clark defines mind as being extended beyond itself (or beyond the brain) into external, physical and social, scaffolding structures (artefacts, institutions, etc.) that, on the one hand, inform and guide the daily actions of individuals and that, on the other hand, are themselves informed and structured by their communicative acts, it would be obvious to take the Hegelian model into account.¹¹ This goes in particular for the role of language as “the ultimate artefact.”¹² In Hegel, as noted and quoted, language is the embodiment of spirit or mind. Kierkegaard’s critical transformation of key motives in Hegel applies especially to the model of self-exteriorization and self-appropriation. Also in Kierkegaard, mind makes itself exterior to itself. What he calls interiority or inwardness is inwardness in relating to others and to the world, or inwardness in understanding and acting. But Kierkegaard transforms this relational model in that he defines self as relational in a strong sense, as self-relation. This will be the point we are heading for.

4 Existence The move from Hegel to Kierkegaard is often described as a move from a philosophy of the infinite to a philosophy of human finitude. In a sense, this is also what the following is about, but we need to see how radical this move is. Let us first have a look at the key notion of existence. While existence in philosophical traditions up to Kierkegaard meant the existence of something, irrespective of what it is, Kierkegaard coins the concept of existence anew in order to capture what human existence is. This step has been influential, not only giving rise to philosophies of existence, but also in becoming a manner of speaking in a broader cultural perspective. In Kierkegaard, existence means an intermediate being in a twofold sense.¹³ First, to exist is to be in a process of becoming. A human being exists between    

The German expression is: “sich entäussert.” Clark, Being There, pp. 180, 186 – 187, 215. Ibid., pp. 193 – 215. See, in particular, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (SKS 7 / CUP1).

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past and future. It is on life’s way, but this is ultimately a way between birth and death. We are situated between a beginning that is our own and yet out of reach of our consciousness and an end that is in an enigmatic sense our own, but also an ultimate limit to our consciousness. This double limit of consciousness forms what is in between: existence. The fact that our existence is an existence in-between means that it is in a radical sense finite. Second, human existence is an intermediate being in the sense that a human being relates to itself in past and future. Existence thus not only implies being in a process of becoming, but also relating to oneself in this process. To push the point even further, to exist is to relate to one’s existence. This means that humans are not simply finite; they are finite beings in that they also relate to their being finite (e. g. in being concerned about aging). Finitude is not only mortality (that we are all going to die), but to exist between an ultimate beginning and end. It is a reflected finitude in the sense that human consciousness itself is both finite (limited or conditioned) and consciousness of being finite. Human consciousness is embodied, as consciousness in time, but also as consciousness of time. Thus, what is implied in the notion of existence is, to put it briefly, that a human being is being situated and that it is so in relating to itself. It is a situated self. Existence thus understood implies an exteriority of the self. In existing, we “stand out”¹⁴ in the sense that we are living in time, in a world that demands us to respond in taking action. Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the temporality of human existence accentuates human embodiment, and it does so in a twofold direction. First, it implies that acting interferes with perception and thinking. We do not step outside ourselves in order to take action, but are ourselves involved in acting, under the pressure of time. Relating to time can already be a kind of action. Thus, Kierkegaard emphasizes that one can become guilty in letting time go and not acting. Second, as existing beings, something matters to us. We do not exist in a detached mode. Both points help understanding what human embodiment means. Being embodied implies that we cannot escape ourselves as existing beings. As embodied beings, we are situated, and this is, to use a Kierkegaardian key phrase, a serious matter. It matters to us. The further implication is that embodiment itself is a matter of how we take our embodied existence. Although the context is quite different, it might be fruitful to compare this notion of the exteriority of the existing self to the insistence of an enactive approach on embodiment as living in real time, as “being there,” and on the rela-

 Latin “existere”: to appear, to stand out.

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tion between cognition, perception and action.¹⁵ “Being there” is a translation of Heidegger’s “Dasein.”¹⁶ Actually, the notion of “Dasein” or “being-there” has Kierkegaardian roots. Human being as being-there relates to its existence, as the being it has to be, or to take as its own being.¹⁷ This means that it is a concerned being.¹⁸ Re-translated into the Kierkegaardian notion of the existential: to be embodied, being-there, is a matter of concern for the one existing.

5 Finitude of Perspective Kierkegaard’s existential approach thus transforms the motive of the historical character of consciousness that we found in Hegel. In this, Kierkegaard insists on the finitude of a human perspective. The insight into the perspective nature of human consciousness comes to the fore in Nietzsche’s perspectivism, but is already part of Kierkegaard’s transformation of the Hegelian motive. One of the main assets of an existential approach is to focus on the double character of the situated self: a human self is situated, but it is situated as a self. This is reflected in the notion of the finitude of human existence. To exist is to be situated between past and future, to be in a process of becoming, and in this sense to be on one’s way. The further implication is that a human being cannot escape its own perspective. As humans, we are not able to see from a point from nowhere. We exist in perspectives; we embody our own perspectives. To see from a point of nowhere would require a subject that could detach itself from its own perspective. The very act, however, of placing oneself in (what one takes to be) an absolute, detached perspective presupposes a subject, oneself, that is already situated in a perspective. The fact that a human being is embodied, in the sense of being in a process of becoming, affects its perspective. The notion of existence thus implies a notion of human embedded embodiment: to be embodied is to be part of a history that one has to take part in, also in seeking to come to terms with it. Understanding one’s existence becomes part of this existence.

 See the emphasis that Andy Clark puts on time, action and embodiment, “real-world, realtime action taking” in contrast to “timeless, disembodied reason” (Clark, Being There, pp. 7– 8, 67).  Ibid., p. 171.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, p. 10 – 13 / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1972, pp. 11– 15. Existence is the being to which we already relate, in the mode of concern.  Ibid., pp. 184– 193 / 191– 200.

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6 The Human Synthesis The double aspect of the human condition (to be embodied in being embedded) is implied in Kierkegaard’s basic definition of a human being as a synthesis. Let us first see how the definition of a human being as a synthesis is introduced in The Concept of Anxiety: “That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns. The human being [Mennesket] is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit.”¹⁹ In summary form it reads: “[T]he human being is a synthesis of psyche and body that is constituted and sustained by spirit.”²⁰ This suggestive definition is in need of interpretation, not only as to the content, but also as to the very form. So before focusing on the synthesis of psyche and body constituted by spirit we should ask what is implied in defining a human being as a synthesis. As a synthesis, a human being is heterogeneous with herself; she is “strangely put together” or “wondrously constituted.”²¹ The implication is that personal identity is not simply something given, but also something to be achieved; but it is to be achieved in the sense of becoming what one is, that is: acknowledging oneself to be “this individual human being.”²² The critical point is that it is possible to forget that one is a finite existing human being, but the very attempt to forget this is already a way of relating to oneself.²³ Let us then consider the content of the definition, that is, the bodily and temporal nature of the situated self. When the synthesis of psyche and body is described more fully, it turns out to be a process. The synthesis is posited as a task in the moment the individual is estranged to herself. This happens especially at the age of puberty. The critical point in the synthesis definition is that a human being relates to herself as body and as psyche or consciousness. This can be called an internal alterity. The individual relates to herself as an other, but not in the same way as she relates to another person, because she is herself the other in question. She relates to herself as an other. A human being is in a strange way determined by herself. She relates to her body and she is in that

    

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 349 / CA, 43; translation modified. 4, 384 / CA, 81; translation modified. 7, 163 / CUP1, 176. 7, 302 / CUP1, 329. 7, 116 / CUP1, 120.

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sense other than the body, but this other than the body is precisely bodily determined.²⁴ In this account of the human synthesis, Kierkegaard links body and history together from within. When the individual discovers herself as bodily determined, at that moment her history begins. She is, as a synthesis, given to herself, but given to herself as a task. The question is what she does to herself and what she makes out of herself. The further implication is that a human being’s identity with herself is fragile or vulnerable. She has a history in which her identity with herself is at stake. Consequently, the synthesis definition harbors a critical difference. A human being has identity, as this individual. She is given to herself, as a synthesis of body and consciousness. Yet, she also has to achieve identity with herself, in appropriating herself, her own acts and thoughts. This could be seen as a difference between being present to oneself and not being present to oneself. The synthesis definition is, also in this sense, a definition of human embodiment, as the embodiment of the self. We are ourselves embodied, which implies that we take our embodiment in various ways, but also that in our bodies we carry the history we take part in.

7 Embodiment and History In order to further unfold the implications of being embodied in being embedded in a history, let us take, as point of departure, the following quote from The Concept of Anxiety to which I have already alluded: “First in sexuality is the synthesis posited as a contradiction, but like every contradiction it is also a task, the history of which begins at that same moment.”²⁵ The link between being embodied and being embedded in a history is implied in formulations such as: “without sexuality, no history.”²⁶ At the moment one experiences oneself as “strangely put together,” as body and as consciousness, one’s individual history begins. One is situated in a process of becoming, but situated as a self, relating to oneself in this process: what do I make out of myself? We are subjects of our history in the double sense that we, as agents, should make something out of ourselves, but also are subjected to our own history. I live my history with a consciousness

 Spirit or mind, the third making the synthesis a synthesis, is – so The Concept of Anxiety states – “determined as genus” (SKS 4, 373 / CA, 69).  SKS 4, 354 / CA, 49.  Ibid.

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of it as mine, but this is also a consciousness of myself being subjected to my history. One can feel and fall victim of one’s own history. This complicated issue of history and identity pervades Kierkegaard’s authorship, both in form of philosophical reflections and as embedded in narratives. One of the most important passages is the following in Either/Or: [The individual that chooses himself] discovers that the self he chooses has a boundless multiplicity within itself inasmuch as it has a history, a history in which he acknowledges identity with himself. This history is of a different kind, for in this history he stands in relation to other individuals in the race and to the whole race, and this history contains painful things, and yet he is the person he is only through this history. That is why it takes courage to choose oneself, for at the same time as he seems to be isolating himself most radically he is most radically sinking himself into the root by which he is bound up with the whole.²⁷

Thus, a human self is, as embodied being-there, radically embedded in a history. To be an embodied self means to live a history through. History as the history of embodied selves is full of discontinuities, broken life stories, unfulfilled hopes, and new beginnings. Consequently, part of an existential approach to consciousness and history is the sense of the contingency of history. ²⁸ One only understands a history, be it one’s own or someone else’s, or history on a larger scale as a world history, if one understands that it could have been otherwise. Only then one realizes that it is a history of existences caught in processes of becoming and relating to themselves in these processes. We are also subjected to our history in the sense that we are still to live it.

8 Selfhood: Self in Relation, Self as Relation In seeking to account for the embodied and embedded nature of human consciousness, we have in various ways encountered a remarkable feature of the human being, a double character or a redoubling: to exist is to be in a process of becoming and to relate to oneself in this process; a human being is finite in relating to itself as finite; it is a synthesis in relating to itself as corporeal and temporal; a human being is subjected to its own history in relating to its own past and future possibilities. The famous opening of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death takes this redoubling as the definition of a human being as a self: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self?  SKS 3, 207 / EO2, 216.  SKS 7, 125 – 128 / CUP1, 134– 136.

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The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”²⁹ The passage first answers an implicit question: what is a human being? The answer reformulates the question: a human being is a self, but what is a self? The synthesis definition is then revised: a self is a relation that relates to itself. This definition is remarkable in at least two respects. First, a self is not a substance or some thing, it is a relation, or rather, a process – the relation’s relating to itself. It is the process of self-relating. Second, a self is a self before that to which it relates itself. “The criterion for the self is always: that directly before which it is a self.”³⁰ In short, self is self-relation (the first quote) and self is self in relation to (the second quote). The two points go together: self is to relate to oneself in relating to others and to a world in between. The definition of self as self-relation captures the double character of the human self. A human being is not simply what she is, but relates to what she is, and this relating becomes part of what she is. She is what she is in taking herself in certain ways, in particular in taking herself to be the person she is. The implication is that to be oneself is not simply to coincide with oneself, but to relate to oneself. To relate to myself implies to relate to what I have done and how I have taken what I have done and experienced. When I relate to my past, be it past experiences or acts, I not only relate to these experiences or acts, but to myself as the one who has experienced and has done this. I am the one to account for and live with what I have done and thought. If we tried to describe another person, we would also encounter the double character of the self. Imagine that we list all her traits as far as possible. This would include traits, which could, in principle, be shared with other persons as well, such as birth date, family relations, sex, nationality, education, job, social status, etc. Her identity can also be checked by various means (such as passport, photo, teeth prints, fingerprints, DNA profile). These ways of identifying a person concern the person as both embedded and embodied. Her history cannot be separated from her body. A person’s body can tell a story (for example a scar, the attitude of the body, the eyes or the voice). One’s history is unique only as the history of this person being born into a history and with its being, as embodied, subjected to this history. Kierkegaard’s synthesis definition implies that one only has history as embodied. An angel would have no history, he notes.³¹

 SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.  SKS 4, 354 / CA, 49.

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Consequently, if we have identified a particular person we would learn more about her if she tells something about herself. To tell who she is would include telling her history: the experiences, events, thoughts, and acts that have formed her. The critical point, however, is that we still would have to recognize that the other person is more than what we could describe her as. This is not something obscure, a further or hidden fact, but the core feature that a human being relates to what she is. But a person not only relates to what she is. What she is also becomes a matter of how she takes herself. We can, for example, be dissatisfied with what we are; we can wish to be something or even someone else, and this will affect what we are. Kierkegaard’s analyses of despair in The Sickness unto Death concern this point. To be in despair means not to be oneself, but this is also a way of being oneself: in despair. This double character of the self affects what it means to be embodied in being embedded in a history. The identity of a person is complicated by the fact that she relates to what she is, and that this also becomes part of her identity. We might, then, try to describe how she relates to herself. We can do this in at least two ways. First, we could, in the history we tell about her, include how she has taken experiences, events, and acts of her history. Second, we can seek to describe her character in the sense of more permanent features of how she takes herself, others, and the world shared with others. But not only is this difficult, whether we are right depends on a history that is also yet to come: how the person actually takes herself. She can also relate to her character. One can, for example, with regret describe oneself as impatient, and still be impatient. If the notion of identity is complicated by the fact that a self relates to itself, it might also appear to be questioned by the fact that a self only is self in relation to. If the human self is not an inner center, but self-in-relation, what are then the bounds of the self? If the human mind is intrinsically embodied and embedded, in what sense is it a self? If mind is leaky, distributed or rather extended into the environment, if it is out there, where are then the boundaries between self and world?³² What at first seems to cause our problem, the notion of self as self-relation, can on a closer look also provide an answer. Precisely in relating oneself and binding oneself to one’s world, there is a boundary between self and world. Describing the situation of a neurologically impaired person who relies heavily on a constantly carried notebook, Andy Clark observes: “Wanton destruction of the notebook, in such a case, has an especially worrying moral aspect: it is surely harm to the person, in about as literal a sense as can be imagined.”³³

 Clark, Being There, pp. 53, 213 – 215.  Ibid., p. 215.

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The notebook is personal because the impaired person relies on it. She has extended herself in drawing the notebook into the way she orients herself. In other words, it is because she is a person, relating herself to her world, that such a thing as the notebook can become personal in the sense that she can be harmed by its destruction. The boundary is to be seen exactly in the possibility that she can herself be harmed by what happens to the notebook she relies upon. Thus, the bounds of self are to be found in our ways of relating ourselves to the world. This leads back to the way a human being embodies her perspective. As embodied beings, our perspectives are finite, bound by ourselves, but they are also self-bound in a more intrinsic sense. We are related to ourselves also in the sense that we are to account for the way we, in what we think and do, relate to others, to the world, and to ourselves. My perspective is in this sense not to be taken over by someone, or anyone, else.

9 First-Person Perspective An existential approach is often viewed as a straightforward emphasis on the first-person perspective. Kierkegaard, however, emphasizes the problem of subjectivity inherent in the first-person perspective. This can be reconstructed in the following three steps: First, a human self is situated also in the sense that its perspective is finite, as we have seen. It is the perspective of an existing being that is caught in a process of becoming. Its consciousness is part of and takes part in its history. The finitude of a situated self, however, not only means that its perspective is limited, but that it is itself bound by its own perspective. It is an embodied self also in the sense that it is itself embodied in its way of seeing and understanding. Second, a human self is not bound by itself in a simple manner. The complex character of self-relation comes particularly to the fore in consciousness as conscience. A human being is a subject also in being subjected to itself, but it can nevertheless seek to escape itself. I can forget, and even seek to forget, that I am the one seeing and acting. I can pretend to see the world just as others do, or act just as others act. Such forms of anonymity are possibilities belonging to a self. Third, this means that the subjective perspective is a matter of self-appropriation: to realize what it means that I am the one seeing and acting. The implication is that I am the one to live with the consciousness of being the one seeing and acting as I have done. The existential emphasis put on first-person perspective has to do with the negative possibility inherent in being a self. To appropriate oneself as the person seeing and acting makes sense because it is possible to avoid seeing oneself in this way. If to be a self is to be self-accountable, it is also

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possible for a self not to account for itself. To be a self is a matter of self-appropriation.

10 Being Ourselves Embodied Let me conclude the discussion of self and embodiment by focusing on the existential difference. I have been arguing that human embodiment not only consists in the fact that human beings are embodied beings, but also involves the question: how humans take their own embodied beings. Of course, the two parts belong together. The fact that humans are embodied beings means that they are themselves caught in time and movement, and in action. That is, they are caught in taking themselves as embodied beings. But the issue of how humans take their being embodied opens up a critical difference in being embodied. Thus, it is possible to forget, or not to realize, that we are ourselves embodied. Therefore, human embodiment is also a matter of re-appropriation. As we have seen, first-person perspective is not only radical (in the sense that it cannot be embodied by someone else), but also problematic (in the sense that it is a matter of taking it upon oneself). It is a question whether we really ourselves embody our own thoughts and actions. Thus, a central issue in Kierkegaard is the question whether we, as selves, in action embody what we ourselves think and profess, or “reduplicate” what we say. This can be compared to the distinction, made in Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, whether we actually are present to ourselves or not.³⁴ As indicated, the parallels between the two approaches (the mindful and the existential) are challenging, but so might also their differences be. One point where they seem to part company is the notion of concerned existence and self-concern, and indeed the notion of self implied in self-concern. In Kierkegaard, the critical difference (between being present or not present, concerned or indifferent, concrete or abstract, etc.) is existential in the sense that it is a matter of our concern: it concerns our existence and concerns how we relate to it. The existential means that we are ourselves concerned in the sense that something matters to us, and that we are to respond to what happens to us. We should, however, be careful to distinguish between the different senses of self in self-concern. What one is concerned about need not be oneself in a narrow sense or in contrast to others. On the contrary, the critical question, in Kierkegaard, is  To be present (to oneself) is interpreted by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch as being “fully present in one’s action” and as being “fully present in the world” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, p. 122). This is the possibility for “total personal reembodiment” (ibid., p. 179; see also pp. 251– 252).

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whether self-concern is free or self-encircling. If one is self-concerned in the sense that one seeks one’s own, one becomes self-enclosed in relating to others and to the world in between. In contrast, one can be free in self-concern because something else (other) matters to oneself. That is, the self in self-concern is defined in terms of what matters to oneself. However, there is still an exclusive sense of self-concern at work, but this concerns oneself as the agent, as the one who is committed to respond. That is, the individual herself is concerned in a narrow, or rather singular, sense as the subject of concern. Whereas Varela, Thompson, and Rosch construe the embodied mind as selfless, I will argue for the notion of the embodied self. In their critique of the self, they take self as ground, unity or center,³⁵ or as a fixed and permanent self.³⁶ But as we have seen, the embodied self is not some sort of substance, which first is in itself and then related to a world. On the contrary, it is relational in the strong sense of relating itself, as self-relation. If we would understand the self as a ground or a center, we would have to presuppose a self that could take this self (e. g. the cogito in Descartes) as ground or center for itself, that is, we would presuppose a self as self-relation. The further argument is that in order to understand human embodiment and the critical difference in being embodied, we need a notion of the self. We are ourselves being embodied. We are placed in a situation in which something matters to us. We are situated as being concerned. If the situation is that we try to understand, in a more theoretical approach, what human embodiment means, we are still engaged in the project of self-understanding. In that case also, we cannot account for our situation without presupposing a notion of self. This also applies if we would take a more critical stance towards our own attitudes³⁷ and in particular towards our tendency to grasp ourselves.³⁸ We would still be the ones grasping and the ones to let go of our own grasping.

 Ibid., pp. 59, 64, 123.  Ibid., pp. 80, 110.  The critique of the self proposed by Varela, Thopson, and Rosch seems to involve a critique of “the everyday conditioned mind,” which is “full of grasping” (ibid, p. 125), and a critique of “everyday, unreflective life,” or experience, with its sense of self (ibid., p. 116). However, referring to Nagarjuna, it is also said that there is no distinction between the everyday world (samsara) and freedom (nirvana) (ibid., p. 234). The everyday world is to be released from “the clutches of the grasping mind and its desire for an absolute ground” (ibid., p. 254). Thereby we might learn, in a scientific culture, to “embody groundlessness as compassion” for the world (ibid.; see also, ibid., p. 252).  See Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, p. 61: “the origin of human suffering is just this tendency to grasp onto and build a sense of self, an ego, where there is none” (see also the conclusion of Chapter 4, p. 80). They then ask: “What is it in experience that we take for

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What we need is a notion of self as it is implied in self-understanding. Selfunderstanding does not simply amount to understanding oneself in isolation. It can, on the contrary, consist in taking oneself into account in understanding others and the world that one is part of. This also means to take into account that we are ourselves part of the world we seek to understand and to explain. Furthermore, the possibility of being mindless is a possibility belonging to a self. What it is to be a self we also see in the negative modes. What I have called the critical difference in being embodied pertains to, or rather demands, a self. If being embodied in some sense implies being (the one) concerned, in beingthere, the critical difference implies that it is also possible to be indifferent. If we use the terminology of Heidegger, we could see indifference as a negative mode of concern. This is also what human history is about: how humans take their being embodied, what matters to humans being embedded and subjected to a history, what are their concerns and indifference, sufferings and relief. Being embedded in a history affects humans being embodied. An alternative way, much in vogue, of reformulating what a self is that also seeks to avoid a substantial definition of the self, is a narrative theory. In conclusion, it might be helpful to consider this alternative, as it emphasizes that a human self is embedded in a history, or histories, but also turns out to presuppose a notion of self as self-relation.

11 Situated Self: Narrative Self? Kierkegaard’s authorship seems to lend itself to a narrative theory of self and identity. His works abound with narratives, combined with philosophical reflections. These narratives are often the narratives of figures, which could be called figures of consciousness, to use the terminology of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As such, they embody ways of viewing self, others, and the world. Is a human self narrative? Is self-identity narrative? In order to discuss this we need to differentiate in both directions: what it is to narrate a history and what it is to narrate oneself. First, we have to distinguish between living a history and telling a story. An existential approach can focus precisely on the problem of narrating existence or telling a lived history. This has to do with the character of human existence. It is in-between and in-becoming. It is existence between a beginning and an end that cannot be told by the one existing, and it is existence in

a self?” (ibid., p. 63). However, self is to take ourselves as (e. g. as a self or as no-self). Being a self is already implied in taking the self as one’s ground, or in taking ourselves as groundless.

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becoming with the implication that the individual concerned cannot reach a final perspective on her own existence. One could argue that the history that begins in the moment one comes to consciousness is a history that one can tell. If one lives a history with this consciousness, one has the point from where to tell one’s history. But this leads to the second issue that also concerns the character of human existence: the one existing relates to herself in existing. In this sense, one has a history in relating to it. If one relates it in the form of narrative, then the question is how one does so. One can tell one’s history with a sense of fulfilment or failure, joy or sorrow, relief or repentance, etc. This means that a human self is not simply a narrative self. Self is not just what comes out of narratives about the self. On the contrary, these narratives, as self-narratives, are only to be accounted for when we take into account that they are already ways of self-relating. The question then is: how does a human being, as a self, relate to what she tells about herself? Let me take the issue in three steps: First, the existential approach can, as noted, focus on the very problem of narrating oneself, or putting oneself into a narrative. It is a problem of perspective. In the attempt to narrate myself, I am already situated and related to myself. I look upon the history to be narrated from a perspective, which is part of or takes part in this history as a history yet to be lived, a perspective, which I nevertheless cannot just make part of the narrative. The redoubling of the self both makes possible and complicates self-description. As already noted, if we could list the features and tell the story of a person, she would still be more than the listed features and the told story in that she also relates to her own features and her history. If not, they would not be her own. But this double character also gives the possibilities of self-disguise and self-deceit. To describe oneself in such a way that one disguises oneself, or even deceives oneself, is a radical possibility of selfhood. This indicates the complex nature of first person perspective. I can ascribe various facts or even traits to myself, I can tell parts of my history, but I am not simply what I tell. In describing or narrating myself, I relate to what I am. This means that I am also the one relating to what I am. That is not just an additional reflective option I have. The way I understand myself is part of what I am. I do not simply live my life, but live it in certain ways that are also ways of selfunderstanding. How I describe or narrate myself could be taken as ways of making this self-understanding explicit. But here again the double character of self is crucial. I relate to myself in describing and narrating myself. This can, for example, imply that I need to describe myself in a certain way to others in order to see myself in the way I want. If I persist in doing this, my way of describing and narrating myself becomes part of my history. Second, the implication is that there is no simple identity in self-narratives, between self and narrative. When we seek to narrate ourselves in the form of our

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histories, we do not just tell who we are. The problem of narrating oneself comes to the fore in questions to be asked such as: why do we tell the narratives about ourselves that we do? What are we doing in telling our narratives? We do not simply inform about who we are, but seek, for example, to be confirmed or even to assert ourselves. The picture that comes out of the narrative matters to us. If we would hold that the identity of a self is a narrative identity, the critical point will be that this identity is at stake for us in the narratives we tell about ourselves. Self-narratives might be a matter of self-understanding or self-appropriation. It could be argued, then, that the self actually is what comes out of selfnarratives, but a self relating to itself is already implied in the narrative situation. It relates to itself in narrating and through the narratives it tells about itself. Thus, in order to account for the complexity involved in narrating oneself we need a notion of self as self-relating. The critical question is: do we actually understand ourselves through our narratives? Third, that narratives are important to us in order to understand ourselves reflects that we are, as selves, situated; but a situated self is not simply a narrative self. The question is how we relate to ourselves in seeking to tell who we are. We are not just what we tell ourselves to be. That we relate to ourselves through our narratives can be seen in our ways of telling them. As Kierkegaard’s synthesis definition indicates, human subjectivity is bodily and historically determined, but it is so in relating to itself as corporeal and as temporal. This self-relating in being embodied and embedded is reflected in our narratives. As we carry our history with us in our bodies, so we tell our stories as embodied beings. We tell our stories in expressing ourselves bodily and metaphorically (e. g. using the metaphor of being on life’s way); and telling our narratives are ways of dealing with our temporality: oneself as another in time, changing and being oneself in the course of one’s history. In sum, narrativity presupposes self-relation. We are already related to ourselves in being temporally and bodily determined, and we are relating to ourselves in telling our narratives. How we tell our stories tells something about us.

12 Self Situated Let me add a short note on self as narrative, in order to further set off the notion of self as self-relation. There are various ways of construing human self as a narrative self. One is put forward by Daniel Dennett who holds that the self is a

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“center of narrative gravity.”³⁹ It is “a theorist’s fiction.”⁴⁰ The theorist sees some complicated things moving about in the world, human beings and animals, and “it turns out to be theoretically perspicuous to organize the interpretation around a central abstraction: each person has a self.”⁴¹ This self then turns out to be not only the theorist’s fiction, but a narrative construction on the part of the self. We treat each other in the same way as we would get a novelist to write more novels on demand to answer our question to his fictional characters: “that is the way we are,” Dennett says.⁴² He continues: “That is, it does seem that we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified, but sometimes disunified, and we always put the best ‘faces’ on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography.”⁴³ Such a theory of the narrative self, or the self as narrative, cannot account for the self involved: we find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, we try to make all our material cohere into a single good story, we put the best “faces” on it. That is, the theory of the narrative self cannot account for the narrative situation (in much the same way as Hume overlooks the self involved in the situation where he is looking for a self and cannot find it).⁴⁴ We are already engaged, we find ourselves more or less disunified, we try to make ourselves cohere into a single good story. Thus, a self is not just what comes out of our narratives, we are already selves in putting the best “faces” on ourselves.⁴⁵ We are already the ones that need to tell stories in order to cohere.⁴⁶ That is, we use fic-

 Daniel C. Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. by Frank S. Kesse, Pamela M. Cole, and Dale L. Johnson, Hillsdale: Erlbaum, pp. 103 – 115.  Ibid., p. 103.  Ibid., p. 105.  Ibid., p. 110.  Ibid., p. 114; see also Dennett, Consciousness Explained, pp. 412– 430.  “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception” (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by J. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978, p. 252).  What Dennett calls “our material” in writing ourselves must in some sense be ourselves – otherwise we would not find ourselves disunified, and not have to make ourselves cohere into a single good story.  In a remarkable passage on Multiple Personality Disorder, Dennett writes about children who have been kept in extraordinarily terrifying and confusing circumstances and preserve themselves by a desperate redrawing of their boundaries: “What they do, when confronted with overwhelming conflict and pain, is this: They ‘leave’. They create a boundary so that the horror

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tions in order to come to terms with ourselves. That we are not “the captains of our ships,” but “somewhat disunified,” is a problem for us,⁴⁷ or, if we find the requirement of being unified intolerable, we can find the experience of being disunified relieving, that is, we try to solve the problem by accepting ourselves as more selves. Dennett’s theory of the self as narrative presupposes a subject that has itself as material in order to write the good story that it can identify with. In contradistinction to this, the notion of self as self-relation implies that we do not have ourselves at our disposal as material for our narratives (so that we were captains of our narratives). Whether we are how we tell us to be is an open question: it might turn out, in the history we are yet to live, that our narrative was not only a fiction, but an illusion. Also in this sense are we, as selves, embedded in our history.⁴⁸

doesn’t happen to them” (Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 420). What this shows is, I think, that they are already selves, relating to themselves in what happens to them.  Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” p. 113. This is implied in the notion of a human being as a synthesis: we are heterogeneous to ourselves, and our identity as unity is a problem to ourselves.  My thanks to Anthony Freeman for constructive suggestions to a previous version of this essay.

Chapter 7 Temporality in Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses 1 The Problem of Time Even a reading of Kierkegaard, which has no philosophical ambitions sooner or later runs into philosophical questions. One might for example ask, “What does inwardness mean?” A question of this sort is not merely about terminological explanations, but rather about the philosophical potential, which lies in Kierkegaard’s texts. And with inwardness, we are provided with a good example of how a question often does not manage to get raised before an answer is given. We read Kierkegaard with an assumed or presupposed understanding of what inwardness means. This implies that some questions are never raised. One such question is the relationship of inwardness to time. The question disappears since it is assumed that inwardness stands in opposition to temporality. Perhaps this is due to the perception that for Kierkegaard inwardness is nonworldly. And if inwardness is devoid of an external world, it is likewise devoid of temporality. In support of such a conception, one might refer to the edifying discourses, which state that temporality belongs to the world or the external sphere.¹ If this is the case, one need not ask about the relationship of inwardness to time. But what if inwardness is a relationship to time? It is this question, which will guide my reading of the edifying discourses. In the edifying works, inwardness is continually present. The edifying discourses speak to inwardness. But what, then, about temporality? Initially, time and temporality do not seem to play a prominent role in the edifying discourses of 1843 – 44. Time does not stand out as an independent theme. But though the discourses are not reflections on time, they nonetheless speak about time. The question then is about the way the edifying discourses speak about time. This can lead us to inquire about the relationship between discourse and theme in the edifying discourses. Do the edifying discourses have themes at all? The discourse should move the reader; it has a purpose. In the final analysis, the aim of the discourse is this: edification. The discourse brings the things it speaks about into view. It makes visible, speaks to the reader’s power of sight and imagination. When a discourse has a particular theme – patience in anticipation, for ex-

 See for example: “If it [something possessed that is at the same time acquired] is not to be found in the external as such, then it is not to be found in the temporal as such either” (SKS 5, 163 / EUD, 163). It is in fact found only in “the outer.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-013

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ample – it is in order to show what edification means. But in the edifying discourses, time and temporality are not, in this sense, themes; they are not discourses about time. They are not themes since, in and of itself, time does not reveal what edification is about. But even if the discourses do not speak directly about time, they speak nonetheless more powerfully in an indirect way. This can only be the case if the edifying discourses have something to do with time after all. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the themes of the discourses – patience and anticipation, for instance – are defined in relation to time. Time is therefore an indirect or accompanying theme throughout the edifying discourses. They speak with the help of time. That which the discourses speak about turn out to be modes of relating to time. The discourses show that, in the end, there is a crucial connection between edification and the problem of time: edification can only be understood in light of the problem, which time presents for human beings. That the discourses speak of time and temporality only indirectly is grounded in the fact that edification is their purpose. But an indirect method can be a strength both philosophically and theologically. In the discourses, the aim is not to construct a theory about time, but rather to illuminate the experience of time or the experiences in which time presents itself as a problem in the first place. The indirect method is phenomenological; the edifying discourses describe our experiences of time by articulating the ways we relate to time.

2 Temporality – and Temporality Kierkegaard’s writings offer examples of another method of treating the question of time, which we can provisionally call “theoretical.” The definition of time shows up in key sections in the Kierkegaardian corpus, first and foremost in the definition of the human being as a synthesis, and in the doctrine of the absolute paradox. In both cases, time appears as the definitional counterpart of eternity. If we take note that the synthesis and the paradox are compositions of time and eternity, it seems that time is one domain, eternity another. We stand between two worlds, the temporal and eternal. But a crucial difference appears within the composite. Let us take a look at the definition of the human being as “a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal” as it appears in the Concept of Anxiety. ² If we ask where time shows up in this definition, the question ap-

 SKS 4, 388 / CA, 85.

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pears to answer itself: it is one of the elements in the composite. The definition states, after all, that the human being is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. But let us examine the issue more closely. If we look once again – not so much at what the definition says, but rather at the very definition itself – it becomes apparent that time appears in two places. First, it appears as one of the elements in the composition of the temporal and the eternal. The second place, however, is not within the synthesis, but rather in the fact that the human being is defined as a synthesis. The definition of synthesis, considered as a whole, is a definition of the finitude or temporality of the human being. That the human being is defined as a synthesis implies that he or she is drawn out or distended in time. The self is not only a synthesis of time, but also a synthesis in time. A duplication of temporality occurs with the definition of the human being as a synthesis. In the central passage on time and eternity in the Concept of Anxiety, the dual presence of time becomes evident. Just prior to this passage – as a sort of prelude – we find the previously quoted definition of the human being as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. Vigilius Haufniensis asks there: “what, then, is the temporal?” He begins by defining time as an infinite succession. But the structure of time is that it passes. The distinction between time as the present, the past, and the future is not inherent in time itself, but rather occurs only through the relationship of time to eternity. Vigilius Haufniensis writes: “The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time. As a result, the above mentioned division acquires its significance: the present time, the past time, the future time.”³ Once again, it is striking that time and temporality appear in two places: in part as an element in the relationship between time and eternity, in part as something, which can be conceptualized only as time and eternity touch each other in a relationship. This confirms the idea that the conceptualization of synthesis implies dual conceptualizations of temporality. In the quoted passage, the second conception is emphasized in italics. Temporality appears not only as one of the elements in the composite of the temporal and the eternal, but also as temporality, the concept of which is first posited with the composite itself. The synthesis – as the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal – is a designation for the finitude of the human being. To be composed or distended in such a manner

 SKS 4, 392 / CA, 89.

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is identical with being finite. It is first at this juncture that we understand temporality in its nuanced form. We discover something similar in the doctrine of the paradox. Time appears as one element in the composite consisting of time and eternity, but this composite is indeed a paradox. The paradox – the paradoxical composite of time and eternity – redefines time again. This redefinition of time lies in the duplication of time, or more correctly stated, the decisive transformation of time by which time itself is renewed. I have used the definition of synthesis and the doctrine of the paradox as examples of another approach to the understanding of time. This approach is concerned with a direct definition of what time and temporality mean. But upon closer inspection, we discover that in both cases we are directed back to the first approach, which is concerned with the experience of time. Synthesis and paradox are both concerned with time, but they define time as the time in which human beings themselves are defined or characterized. With that said, we must at the same time differentiate between a structural level – the definition of synthesis as a description of human finitude – and a concrete level – a closer inspection of the ways in which the synthesis, which ought to be a synthesis in time, fails to come about in time. The transformation of time, which the paradox speaks of, is a transformation of time, which has already been altered in guilt. With this extremely short sketch, we are again approaching the edifying discourses. In the final discourse of 1843, “To Gain One’s Soul in Patience,” a human soul is described as a “self-contradiction between the outer and the inner, the temporal and the eternal.”⁴ As was the case earlier, there is no talk of two worlds here, the temporal and the eternal. The human being is indeed temporal, even when he or she relates to the eternal. The eternal should be a measure in time. Again this means that inwardness is not a world for itself, but a relation to time. I will attempt to demonstrate this below.

3 Time as Burden As mentioned, the indirect method in the edifying discourses consists in the fact that they speak about time by speaking about experiences of time, and by extension, the experiences of time as a problem. But how does time present itself as a problem?

 SKS 5, 165 / EUD, 166.

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We experience time as it happens to us. Time does something to us. It changes us. We become something other than what we were, simply by aging. Time penetrates us, or penetrates the way we understand ourselves. When the edifying discourses say that a person should resist or evade time, it shows that time already affects inwardness. As mentioned, the edifying discourses are not discourses about time; by contrast, they speak from, or in light of the problem, which time presents to the human being as a self. They pay special attention to the fact that time does something: it breaks down, destroys. As a self, the human being must put up resistance against the destructive power of time. When the edifying discourses make eternity the measure in time, they seek to give an answer to the problem of the destructive power of time. But upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the problem of time belongs even more intimately to with the project of becoming a self. In Works of Love, it is said that the heaviest burden placed upon human beings is time.⁵ In an explanatory parenthetical statement, one reads that human beings have placed the burden of sin upon themselves. That is, there is a difference between the burden of time and the burden of sin. The burden of time consists of the notion that it changes us, or more correctly, gives us a chance to change ourselves. Furthermore, it gives us the chance to do so in the most crucial emotion, love. That time is experienced as a burden shows that the human being as a self is exposed to time. A person is changed in time, but can also be changed in such a way that she cannot recognize herself again, or refuses to recognize herself. This means that time is a burden for the human being as a self. The question, then, is what we do with ourselves in time. Time drags on not only when we are bored, but also when we are feeling lonely. The question, which appears at that moment is, “how do I get the time to pass,” but the question is really about what one is to do with oneself. Phenomena such as busyness and distraction are interpreted in the edifying discourses as ways to use time to avoid the problem, which time presents: to preserve oneself within the changes of time, to “be true to oneself”:⁶ “distraction can help the light-minded forget and a kind of busy activity can help the more thoughtless blot out the past,” but “time as such will not help a person forget the past.”⁷

 SKS 9, 136 / WL, 133.  SKS 5, 193 / EUD, 190.  SKS 5, 327 / EUD, 338 – 339.

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4 Concern and Time I have suggested here that to be a self is to relate to oneself in time. When I emphasize that the problem of time is experienced, it is because a human being experiences the problem of time with himself. As is shown in the edifying discourses, this does not mean that the problem of time can be reduced to the problem of the self-relationship. But it does mean that the self-relationship is a relationship to oneself in time. In support of this thesis, I will refer to the discourse on the concern of selftorment in Christian Discourses. “All earthly and worldly worry is basically for the next day. The earthly and worldly care was made possible precisely by this, that the human being was compounded of the temporal and the eternal, became a self, but in his becoming a self, the next day came into existence for him. And basically this is where the battle is fought.”⁸ In a famous footnote in Being and Time, Martin Heidegger writes, that “more is to be learned philosophically from his ‘edyfing’ writings than from his theoretical work – with the exception of his treatise on the concept of anxiety.”⁹ The discourse on the concern of self-torment shows that there is possibly more to be learned philosophically than Heidegger wants to admit.¹⁰ For in this discourse, Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the self’s temporality emerges from the phenomenon of concern. To be a self means that the next day exists for that individual. “This is where the battle is fought.” What this means is explained later in the discourse with help from the concept anxiety. Short and sweet, one reads: “What is anxiety? It is the next day.” And a bit later again: “but with whom, then, does the pagan contend in anxiety? With himself, with a delusion, because the next day is a powerless nothing if you yourself do not give it your strength.”¹¹ This is a theme, which made its appearance as early as the first edifying dis-

 SKS 10, 80 / CD, 71; translation modified.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, p. 225 / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1972, p. 235.  As already suggested, this concerns the understanding of finitude. The role, which Being and Time has played in twentieth century philosophy, is due not least to Heidegger’s radical thinking about finitude. But Kierkegaard also thinks radically about human finitude. That a human being exists means that she is distended in time; she cannot work herself out of her existence. A human being is so decidedly in time that she cannot save herself in a kind of eternity. On the contrary, she can only relate to the eternal in time. Kierkegaard’s example leads to a question about whether finitude can only be understood radically if thought about eternity is eliminated, or whether finitude can be radically thought with a starting point in thought about eternity.  SKS 10, 87 / CD, 78.

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course of 1843, “The Expectancy of Faith”: “He who battles with the future has a more dangerous enemy [than he who battles the present]; he cannot remain ignorant of himself since he is battling with himself. The future is not; it borrows its power from himself.”¹² The concern in self-torment is, as the word says, the concern with which a person torments herself. It is a torment, a burden, but also a burden, which an individual places upon herself. We trap ourselves in concern for the coming day. Concern is a crucial theme in the edifying discourses. And concern must be evaluated in two radically different ways. A person must be concerned with himself, but must not be full of concerns or worried. The prerequisite, which the edifying discourses demand, is that one is concerned with oneself. As far as that goes, it is a demand for inwardness. As we will see, concern for oneself in this positive sense is a mode of relating to time. There is a critical connection between, one the one hand, self and concern (cura), and on the other, time. Heidegger claims that the “existential” problem is foreign to Kierkegaard. But what we find in Kierkegaard are “existentielle” descriptions of ways to relate to time and at the same time, an “existential” determination of the subject’s condition, subjectivity, as time or temporality. The existential determination is given with the description of the modes of relationship. This indirect method need not be an expression of an absence of theory, but, on the contrary, can be a decisive point which can be used against Heidegger. The description of the experience of time shows, in fact, that the problem of time is fundamentally ethically defined. This is what the edifying works display. But let us first look at the modes of relationship.

5 Phenomena: Patience and Anticipation “The burden of time” indicates that we suffer the effects of time as a burden. This is related to the idea that time is something that happens to us. But time is a burden for the human being as a self. We do not simply suffer from time; the question is what we do with ourselves in relation to time. This shows up as phenomena such as worry, but also as anxiety and despair. These phenomena are defined by time inasmuch as they are ways in which we relate to time. Worry, anxiety, and despair are temporal in their very structure. They cannot be conceived outside a relationship to time.

 SKS 5, 27 / EUD, 18.

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The edifying discourses build upon phenomena – ways of relating – which create a positive counterpart to other ways of relating such as feeling worried, anxious, and in despair. As mentioned, to be concerned about oneself is one of those counterparts, as are faith and hope. In the edifying discourses of 1843 and 1844, patience and anticipation are also emphasized. All these are ways of relating to time – time which happens to us. They are what they are only insofar as they are relationships to time. The fact that the first edifying discourses revolve around patience and anticipation might be because they clearly display the relationship to time, which characterizes the project of the edifying. If one is patient, one endures. And it is time, which one endures. When the first edifying discourse of 1844 speaks of “preserving one’s soul in patience,” both the danger and the enemy are named. Patience is the remedy human beings must use when they “must begin the long battle with an indefatigable enemy, time, and with a multifarious enemy, the world.”¹³ The danger is the loss of one’s soul. That patience is named as the remedy follows from the idea that we suffer time as a burden. We experience time, not as we experience an event, but as something, which happens to us, and which happens in and with an event. At every moment, one is subject to being changed such that one loses oneself. In patience, on the other hand, one endures the burden of time. But to do so in patience means to endure in such a way that one preserves courage. Just like other forms of courage – open confidence (frimodighed), for example – patience is a way of relating to time. Patience and anticipation correspond to each other, we read in the discourse “Patience in Anticipation [Forventning].” Anticipation has the future as object. But anticipation is not just about time; it is also a way to deal with time. We can speak of the time of anticipation. This is the time one lives with anticipation. “The true anticipating person keeps company with his anticipation every day,” the discourse says.¹⁴ The question, “how should I deal with anticipation?” becomes crucial because another radical possibility lurks in the background, namely, the possibility of abandoning all anticipation. This is despair understood as giving up the self.

 SKS 5,195 / EUD, 192.  SKS 5, 221 / EUD, 221; translation modified.

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6 Characters and the Course of Time Anticipation is a fundamental openness or confidence towards the future, but at the same time an anticipation of something specific. True anticipation is anticipation of something, which in truth concerns a human being. But the discourse does something more than merely describe anticipation as a way of relating to the future; it sketches a figure of anticipation: Anna, who “concealed the expectancy of all time in her devout figure,” as it says.¹⁵ The description is qualified by a paradoxical “nevertheless.” Anna’s mind is “among the graves;”¹⁶ she remains, nevertheless, the image of anticipation: This tranquility in her eyes that nevertheless is expectant, this gentleness that is reconciled to life and nevertheless is expectant, this quiet integrity that is femininely occupied with recollection and nevertheless is expectant, this humble self-denial that nevertheless is expectant, this devout heart that covets nothing more and nevertheless is waiting in suspense; beyond flowering nevertheless still vigorous, forsaken nevertheless not withered, childless nevertheless not barren, bent with years and stooped nevertheless not broken – a widow, nevertheless betrothed, “she is in silence” with her expectancy.¹⁷

True anticipation is present where one could have given up. This anticipation “sees heaven open.”¹⁸ It is a notable way to speak of the ability to see. It does not say: anticipation sees that heaven is open. Anticipation does something, it sees heaven open.¹⁹ Anna’s anticipation is an anticipation “of something that was to occur in time.”²⁰ It is the anticipation of the fullness of times. But it is simultaneously an endurance against time, it is a patience, which, in an odd way, makes the time of anticipation a time of joy. The edifying discourses do not just describe phenomena or ways of relating such as patience and anticipation. They depict characters, and what is more, characters who find themselves in the midst of the course of time or a process.

 SKS 5, 224 / EUD, 225; translation modified.  SKS 5, 212 / EUD, 211.  SKS 5, 212 / EUD, 211– 212.  SKS 5, 214 / EUD, 214.  The expression “to see heaven open” appears in key passages in Johannes V. Jensen’s novel The Fall of the King (Kongens Fald). The passage is carried by an eschatological tone: “Mikkel sees all the troubled souls receive justice; they stand up, they receive a share of the order of the Kingdom of Heaven. Music streams down upon them. Mikkel sees all those he has known throughout his life, whom the years have scattered, gathered together again. Wretched faces… he sees again in their exaltation. He sees heaven open “ (Johannes V. Jensen, Kongens Fald, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968, p. 109; translation by the translator).  SKS 5, 222 / EUD, 223.

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This process has the nature of a test. The characters are characters in time. They are exposed to the loss of themselves or to the loss of courage in the course of this process. Here we find displayed the notion that time is a burden or test. As mentioned, the edifying discourses make visible what they speak of. They speak to the power of sight. The characters therefore end up playing a methodological role. But a condition for seeing the characters is that the one seeing, the reader, must be concerned about himself. Thus, the character can remain nameless. An example of such a character in process is given at the beginning of the speech “To need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection.” The example aims at disrobing the human person in order to see how little he or she needs. Again it happens that the course of time inverts the meaning. The person who is unclothed in such a manner is in the process of being re-clothed in ceremonial costume. Later in the discourse, another example is given in a passage that begins with the question, “what is a human being?” The course of time is here a movement that takes hold of the eye: “To external observation, man may well be the most glorious creation, but all his glory is still only in the external and for the external: does not the eye aim its arrow outward every time passion and desire tighten the bowstring.” But if a person does not simply wish to act as a mirror in which the world is reflected, “if he himself, even before the eye aims at something to make a conquest, wants to capture the eye so that it may belong to him and not he to the eye,” then everything is transformed. He is then no longer in conflict with the world, but with himself. The discourse continues: “Observe him now; his powerful figure is held embraced by another figure, and they hold each other so firmly interlocked and are so equally matched in suppleness and strength that the wrestling cannot even begin, because in the same moment the other figure would overwhelm him – but that other figure is he himself.”²¹ The character and the process of time, which are put in front of the reader’s eye, lead back to the reader himself. Like an arrow, the reader’s eye can also look forward, but in the instant the reader wants to see himself in the mirror, there is another character with him, namely, his own. This is the character with which we see.

7 No Time to Waste – the Time of the Discourse The discourses describe then a course of time in which a character is exposed to time, but also in which a change in meaning occurs. But the use of time in the

 SKS 5, 301 / EUD, 308 – 309.

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discourses is not hereby exhausted. The discourses themselves require time; they require time of the reader, who is asked to read slowly. The discourses are speeches for deliberation, but deliberation takes its time. The reader then must give herself time. Just as the character can become the character with which the reader sees, so also is time the reader’s own time. Since the problem of time is fundamentally an ethical problem, the reading does not fall outside ethics. That we must give ourselves time to read reveals that time is not something we simply experience. Time does not simply happen to us. Time is something we use. As we read in the discourse “The Thorn in the Flesh,” for example, we use time to forget the past. We can give ourselves time to forget time. As mentioned, this means that the relationship to time is also ethically defined. To give ourselves time can mean that we postpone something we ought to do. This point is made repeatedly in the edifying discourses. When we read that it does not help a person to ride away from sorrow because it is sitting on the back of the horse, this glance backwards requires time. A person rides his horse through life with sorrow sitting right behind him. But, as we read in the discourse, this is not the case with love: “Where would the eye that loves find time for a backward look since the moment it did so it would have to let its object go.”²² Here, the discourse describes a time period full of tension. There is no time to waste; an individual should not give herself time to postpone what she ought to do. But at the same time, the discourse requires that one give oneself time for reflection.

8 Time for the Edifying I started by saying that edification can only be understood from the problem, which time poses for a person. Time is a burden, which can change a person at the very core, can change its love; time can break down courage. Edification is about courage. Both patience and anticipation are edifying inasmuch as they are ways to preserve courage throughout time. Courage is courage for life, but understood as courage to be true to oneself, to acknowledge oneself, to be confident (af frit mod). Above, I described the edifying phenomena as positive counterparts to negative ones. When a person frets about time or when he despairs he is trapped

 SKS 5, 83 / EUD, 74.

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within himself and thus trapped within time. In anxiety and despair, he uses time to trap himself. He allows time to be used up with worry. The forms of non-freedom, which Kierkegaard describes deal with time. What about the freedom, which the edifying discourses offer as a counterpart? They likewise deal with time. It is a freedom in relation to time: it is a freedom from time as a burden, but it is at the same time a freedom in time. As we have seen, anticipation, faith, hope, and love all do something with time. The project of edification relates to time. It is about building courage, a courage to handle time as a burden, but also a courage to accept time, the future, as a possibility. Anticipation is not only about enduring time, but also about accepting the future. But to edify is also to grant time. And one does not grant time to oneself, but to another. When a person judges another, she fixes her gaze: the other is just as she has seen him or her. But this means that she severs time. Time becomes a past, it is not longer something to come. She fixes the other person in his or her past, in that which he or she has disclosed and done. In opposition to this, love grants time. Love works by believing in and hoping for the other person, as we read in Works of Love. To believe in and hope for the other person is to grant time to the other, time to show himself as another. In the edifying discourses, hope and faith continually play a role. Faith and hope are ways of relating to time, but they are at the same time expressions of human temporality. Precisely in faith, the radical meaning of temporality as finitude is made visible. The discourses emphasize that within time there is no assurance or certainty. Tomorrow everything can change. The discourses speak from within this uncertainty and contingency. That we can never get beyond this fundamental uncertainty shows the significance of time. But faith is mentioned only where we find this kind of uncertainty, which we cannot annul ourselves. If we were not finite, there would not be talk of anticipation, faith, and hope. They witness to time. The edifying discourses confirm the point we found in the concept of synthesis. Temporality is not simply an element in the composite, but rather time defines human existence. The existing person is extended in time. Human existence depends upon finitude. Time defines us according to the things, which make us human: passion, love, hope, and faith. And it is precisely these universally human characteristics, which the edifying project is about. The problem, which time presents, is experienced at the most elementary level from a first-person perspective. It is a question about being true to oneself and not losing oneself. Time and first-person perspective belong together. It is an ethical perspective, which cannot be transferred to the other. But edification discloses itself in the ways in which a person preserves himself in relation to time. Edification does not simply hope for oneself, or have faith in oneself. On the con-

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trary, faith and hope bind us to the other. The universal element in edification is about what human beings have in common. And this means the universal we share as human beings: to be able to feel courage and dejection, happiness and sorrow, hope and despair. These “primitive” or elementary relationships involve time. The fundamental experience of time is something we all have in common, even if the particular experiences we have as individuals are only possible to experience alone. Here we discover the connection between the universal and the individual in edification, and not in the particular projects we undertake individually. What is the significance of all this? The indirect method in the edifying discourses can provide a key for a better understanding of two crucial relationships, both about inwardness: first, the relationship between subjectivity and time which I have already argued for – subjectivity is subjectivity in time – second, the relationship between faith and experience. Even though faith is not the natural result of experience – but conversely is dependent upon uncertainty and can even be held in opposition to experience – faith is nonetheless related to experience. The edifying discourses can illustrate this with the help of the indirect theme, temporality and time.²³

 This essay was translated by K. Brian Söderquist.

Chapter 8 Mediated Immediacy? 1 The Problem of a Second Immediacy Immediacy and reflection are problematic notions. On the one hand, immediacy is a concept of reflection, and on the other hand, reflection is what it is by virtue of its relation to an immediacy, which seems to be dissolved by reflection itself. In addition to this problem, inherent in the two concepts we might also note the problem of their multi-contextuality: with Kierkegaard, the relation between immediacy and reflection is not only a conceptual problem, it is also a problem within the philosophy of subjectivity (the concept of self-reflection), within the philosophy of religion (faith as a second or new immediacy) and within social philosophy (reflection as a diagnosis of the present age). The context, however, is not simply an additional problem; it also seems to offer a solution to the problem of immediacy and reflection. Immediacy and reflection can only be understood as interrelated – but their interrelation is exactly what makes them problematic. By contrast, the notion of a second immediacy offered by the aforementioned context implies that the relation can be positive. A second immediacy is an immediacy, which is not dissolved by reflection, but an immediacy after reflection and maybe an immediacy through reflection. The theme of immediacy and reflection is a rich one for Kierkegaard, but also a theme, which is difficult to deal with. I think we need to reflect upon the problem of immediacy and reflection in order to understand the idea of a second immediacy. Just as immediacy and reflection are problematic notions due to their negative interrelation, so a second immediacy is problematic as a positive counterpart. In the following essay, I will focus on the problematic nature of the two concepts immediacy and reflection in order to discuss the problem of a second immediacy. My question is a simple one: what can a second or new immediacy mean? An answer to this question, however, is not simple. At least I am not able to give a simple answer. This simple question begets further questions, which once again turn on the problematic notions of immediacy and reflection. In what sense is a second immediacy immediacy? If a second immediacy is a later immediacy, an immediacy after reflection, what then is the role played by reflection in this second immediacy? What kind of reflection?

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2 Dialectics of Immediacy First, let me briefly sketch what I would call the dialectics of immediacy. If we describe something as immediacy, it is reflected. In this sense immediacy is immediately lost. The description turns it into something else. This goes especially for immediacy as self-description. What we describe as immediacy would no longer be immediacy. In short, immediacy is not a position in which one can place oneself. This negative dialectics of immediacy can be illustrated by two passages in The Concept of Anxiety. The first is about faith, the second about innocence. The first passage states that faith is not to be qualified as “the immediate.” For the immediate “is annulled at the very moment it is mentioned, just as a somnambulist wakes up at the very moment his name is mentioned.”¹ In the second passage, innocence is distinguished from immediacy. At first glance, innocence would seem to be the most obvious candidate when we are looking for something to be described as immediacy, but innocence is precisely not immediacy. Immediacy is to be “annulled” (ophæves), but innocence is not to be understood as something preliminary, which is to be “annulled.” Innocence is something “sufficient unto itself” or complete in itself, which is only to be annulled by guilt. The dialectics of immediacy appears in the contrasting qualification of immediacy: “Innocence, unlike immediacy, is not something that must be annulled, something whose quality is to be annulled, something that properly does not exist [er til], but rather, when it is annulled, and as a result of being annulled, it for the first time comes into existence [bliver til] as that which it was before being annulled.”² Consequently, the annulment of immediacy is “an immanent movement within immediacy,” or it is a movement “by which mediacy presupposes immediacy.”³ In that sense, immediacy is not something to be annulled, because it is not something (as innocence is).⁴ The dialectics of immediacy, however, must be qualified. In what sense does immediacy annul itself? We do in fact describe some phenomena as immediate, e. g. love. When Kierkegaard in the second discourse of Works of Love speaks of

 SKS 4, 318 / CA, 10.  SKS 4, 343 / CA, 36 – 37.  SKS 4, 343 / CA, 37.  See, for example: “[F]or the immediate is not to be annulled, because it at no time exists” (SKS 4, 341 / CA, 35) and “Innocence is something that is cancelled by a transcendence, precisely because innocence is something (whereas the most correct expression for immediacy is that which Hegel uses about pure being: it is nothing)” (SKS 4, 343 / CA, 37).

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immediate or spontaneous love,⁵ immediacy turns out to be a problematic notion in a more qualified sense. Immediacy is viewed through the problem of immediacy: “However joyous, however happy, however indescribably confident instinctive and inclinational love, spontaneous love, can be itself, precisely in its most beautiful moment it still feels a need to bind itself, if possible, even more securely.”⁶ The question is: Why? Because spontaneous or immediate love is confronted with the problem of time. Immediate love is reflected as it relates to time, which makes change possible – the change of love itself. As the discourse observes, “spontaneous love can be changed within itself”⁷ (when it turns into hate or jealousy) and it “can be changed from itself”⁸ (when it becomes habit). This is not just something that happens to spontaneous or immediate love. It is a possibility inherent in love as immediate love, which reflects itself in anxiety: “[H]owever confident it [spontaneous love] is, there is still an anxiety, an anxiety about the possibility of change. Such love does not understand that this is anxiety…, because the anxiety is hidden.”⁹ In this anxiety there is reflection without selfunderstanding. Thus Kierkegaard reads immediacy – spontaneous love – in a mode of suspicion. What is professed as immediate love is reflected in the sense that one identifies oneself with it, which means that the possibility of change of love, given by time, affects oneself. Consequently, Kierkegaardʼs method of suspicion also uncovers a suspicion inherent in spontaneous love itself: “In this misgiving [Mistanke], therefore, lies hidden the anxiety that makes erotic love and friendship dependent upon their objects, the anxiety that can kindle jealousy, the anxiety that can bring one to despair.”¹⁰ The anxiety is hidden, we were told, but where is it hidden? It is hidden in spontaneous love itself, in its misgivings about the relationship of love in which it takes part. Thus spontaneous or immediate love is related to itself, namely in an anxiety about its own possibility of change, and is related to the other human being, in its misgivings about the relationship of love itself. Spontaneous love, however, does not itself understand this; but its lack of self-understanding does not amount to immediacy. The anxiety hidden in immediacy indicates that what seems to be immediacy (spontaneous love) stands in a problematic relation to itself, which is intensified precisely

 What is translated as “spontaneous love” is “den umiddelbare Kjerlighed,” which is literary “immediate love.”  SKS 9, 37 / WL, 29.  SKS 9, 41 / WL, 34.  SKS 9, 43 / WL, 36.  SKS 9, 40 / WL, 32– 33.  SKS 9, 73 / WL, 66.

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by its lack of reflective understanding. Thus, reflection itself needs to be qualified when talking about immediacy. As already noted, spontaneous or immediate love is reflected in that it identifies or mirrors itself in relating to the other, but this it does not understand. It is even possible in a reflective position to entertain or cultivate the ideal of immediacy, e. g. as spontaneous love. But if we profess that we are spontaneous, the question of suspicion is: What do we use this spontaneity or immediacy for? What are we hiding? Kierkegaardʼs suspicion towards a position of immediacy points to the selfrelation hidden in immediacy. The dialectics of immediacy here changes. We are not only dealing with a negative dialectics (immediacy dissolving itself), but also with a dialectics of self-relation, which, for Kierkegaard, is a fundamental insight. This comes to the fore, e. g., in two connected footnotes in the Postscript, the first stating that “the dialectical still cannot be excluded. It may be that one generation, or perhaps two, can pass its years in the presumption of having found a stockade that is the end of the world and of dialectics. It is of no use.”¹¹ The second footnote continues: “On the whole, the infinite reflection in which the subjective individual is first able to become concerned about his eternal happiness is immediately recognizable by one thing, that it is everywhere accompanied by the dialectical.”¹² Dialectics destroys the position of immediacy in which we would like to place ourselves and hide, but it thereby displays our own subjectivity. It accompanies the infinite reflection, which has to do with self-appropriation. Now, if dialectics is fundamental and not to be avoided, what is left for immediacy? Is there any immediacy left? Should we at all be looking for immediacy as some sort of remainder or remnant left over by reflection? I would suggest that if we are to find an immediacy after reflection in Kierkegaard, it must be on the condition of dialectics – namely on the condition of a dialectics of self-relation. It would be an immediacy in reflection itself, making reflection infinite. Maybe immediacy and infinity are connected after all. But does this make sense: immediacy on the condition of dialectics? What would it be? As mentioned, immediacy appears to be something, which is lost, or something to be lost. In what sense is immediacy also to be regained or won? Is a second immediacy an immediacy repeated? What is the relation of repetition and immediacy? In order to see what kind of immediacy a second immediacy could be, let us take a move from the other side: reflection.

 SKS 7, 31 / CUP1, 24.  SKS 7, 41 / CUP1, 34.

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3 Dialectics of Reflection If reflection seems to dissolve each and every position of immediacy, it does so by being self-reflection. When we reflect upon ourselves, we are no longer what we are in an immediate manner. In reflecting upon ourselves we are changed. This is a point to be made both within the context of a philosophy of subjectivity and within the context of social philosophy. Thus, in A Literary Review, reflection is a condition, which must not be avoided – times have changed. In the dialectics of immediacy, we ended with the question of whether any immediacy was left as a remainder. Conversely, in the dialectics of reflection we encounter an unexpected immediacy: if reflection seems to dissolve all positions of immediacy, it cannot dissolve itself. Reflection changes our life. Furthermore, what we reflect upon is something given. Self-reflection presupposes a self to be reflected. But even more striking: in self-reflection we encounter an immediacy of the self. Let me explain. When The Sickness unto Death opens by stating that a human being is a self, it immediately defines the self as a relation relating to itself. To be a self, it is not only necessary to relate to oneself, but to relate to oneself as a self. A human being is self-relation. This can be seen from the experiences we can have of ourselves. We can seek to hide ourselves, also in the sense of being ignorant about ourselves, but this confirms that we are related to ourselves. This self-relation is not established for the first time in self-reflection, but is already reflected in anxiety (as we saw with the self-relation hidden in spontaneous or immediate love). Self-reflection presupposes that we are being reflected upon ourselves. In self-reflection there is a crucial passivity. As subjects we are also subjected to ourselves. We are subjects in the sense that when we act we do something to ourselves. Envy, suspicion and mistrust, for example, affect the one having envy, suspicion and mistrust. The very idea of a subjected subject is built into Kierkegaardʼs concept of the self. This is caught by the definition that a human being is a self in the sense of self-relation. The immediacy of the self (that a human being is self-relation) reflects itself in conscience. In conscience I am related to myself. What is reflected in conscience is the radical character of the first-person perspective: I am the one to act and to account for my actions, which also implies that I am the one to be accounted for. Kierkegaardʼs thought is dialectical in that he cannot take immediacy as a point of departure or as a position in which we can place ourselves. This goes also for conscience. Conscience is not immediate in the sense that it is given as a basis. Instead, we face immediacy as a problem before us. The first-person

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perspective is not only radical, it is also a problem and a task: it is to be assumed. The dialectics of reflection implies that immediacy appears within reflection itself. Immediacy does not mean a position, nor a starting point, but the limit of reflection. Dialectics is not just an act of reflection, it is also a dialectics of reflection in the sense that the dialectics of immediacy is reversed: reflection implies an encounter with its own limits. The limit of reflection is not immediacy as some sort of remnant outside reflection, but the immediacy of the first-person perspective, which is assumed in an ethical self-reflection. Also in this sense is Kierkegaardʼs dialectics a dialectics of the limit. What, then, would immediacy mean as “second” immediacy? Is it immediacy repeated? Or rather immediacy transformed?

4 Immediacy Transformed? Immediacy “after” reflection is – according to my argument – not some sort of remnant left over by reflection, but the limit of reflection itself. It is the immediacy or the primitive character of the first-person perspective. To paraphrase the point made in the epilogue of Fear and Trembling: passion is the essentially human, and faith and love are the highest passion, but in faith and love everyone has to begin with him- or herself. The immediacy of self-relation – that we are related to ourselves and that I am the one seeing, thinking, reflecting etc. – is converted into normativity: an immediacy or a primitivity to be regained. This seems to be paradoxical: immediacy as a task. However, it reflects the character of the first-person perspective: it is immediate in a radical sense. I cannot annul it myself, and yet I can forget or hide that I am the one seeing and acting, but this is a possibility belonging to the first-person perspective itself (I am also the one forgetting or hiding). Immediacy or primitivity is transformed into something normative due to this negative possibility, which comes in between. The first-person perspective is to be assumed. However, there is more to be said about a “second” immediacy as a normative qualification. It is – as a normative qualification – dialectical, and not to be realized in any direct manner. In order to see this, let us have a brief look at faith as a second immediacy. As mentioned, faith is not “the immediate.” This is the starting point for talking about faith as a second immediacy: “Faith is not the first immediacy but a later immediacy,”¹³ as it is stated in Fear and Trembling.

 SKS 4, 172 / FT, 82.

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It is “a new interiority,” which is “preceded by a movement of infinity.”¹⁴ This means that “faith itself is a dialectical qualification,”¹⁵ as we read in Practice in Christianity. Faith is not immediacy since it is “a choice.” We are not simply in some sort of immediate position of faith (feeling), because faith questions who we are. At the same time, however, faith is reception, though “a very specific kind of reception.”¹⁶ It is “certainly not direct reception,” which means that we only receive it by being ourselves disclosed: “Faith is a choice, certainly not direct reception – and the recipient is the one who is disclosed, whether he will believe or be offended.”¹⁷ “Second” immediacy has to do with this specific kind of reception, which implies a choice – in which we are ourselves disclosed. I will return to this relation of passivity (reception) and activity (choice) shortly. But in order to reformulate the problem of a second immediacy, let us consider simplicity (Enfoldighed) as normative immediacy. Simplicity is an immediacy to be won. It is not simple immediacy, but contrasted to the immediacy of spontaneous love.¹⁸ Purity of heart or simplicity means to be “of one mind” (een-foldig). It is a self-relation in which we are undivided and contemporaneous with ourselves. But how is this possible? To be a self seems to imply that we do not simply coincide with ourselves. We are displaced in relating to ourselves. This aporetic situation is reinforced by the demand of self-denial. How is it possible for a self to fulfill a demand of self-denial, which implies forgetting oneself? Not in any direct manner. If we decide to forget ourselves, the very decision implies the opposite. What then would an indirect way mean? My suggestion is that it has to do with vision. Let us proceed in two steps, first considering the vision implied in reflection, and second, vision harboring or mediating a second immediacy.

5 The Mirror of Reflection Especially in Works of Love, Kierkegaard places – or rather re-places – his reader in a world of vision where we see and are seen. Subjectivity is a reflected subjectivity. We look at ourselves in and through the eyes of others. The world of vision thus becomes a world of mirroring.

 SKS 4, 161 / FT, 69.  SKS 12, 144 / PC, 141.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Thus, the second discourse on the change of spontaneous love states that “true love…is never changed; it is simple [eenfoldig]” (SKS 9, 42 / WL, 34).

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There is, however, a loose end here. In what sense is reflected subjectivity subjectivity? Where is the radical first-person perspective in the world of vision? It is located precisely in the fact that I am the one seeing others seeing me. Consequently, if we are reflected in the eyes of others, then one should see oneself as the one seeing others. But this is exactly what is at stake in the world of vision. Reflexivity is ambiguous. When we mirror ourselves in the eyes of others, it is possible to overlook what we ourselves are doing, namely seeing others. When this happens, reflexivity turns out to be the opposite of primitivity. Passion is lost. The first-person perspective then becomes an immediacy to be rediscovered. This rediscovery is a reflection, which takes place in the world of vision, and which struggles with images and conceptions (Forestillinger). It seeks to reflect the primitive self-relation: that each of us is the one seeing and reflecting. Self-reflection in this emphatic sense is about the relation between passivity and activity indicated above. It implies the passivity of being disclosed, but we are only disclosed in what we are doing. That faith as a second immediacy turns on this connection between passivity and activity appears in the following passage on the sign of contradiction in Practice in Christianity: And only the sign of contradiction can do this: it draws attention to itself and then it presents a contradiction. There is something that makes it impossible not to look – and look, as one is looking one sees as in a mirror, one comes to see oneself, or he who is the sign of contradiction looks straight into oneʼs heart while one is staring into the contradiction. A contradiction placed squarely in front of a person – if one can get him to look at it – is a mirror; as he is forming a judgment, what dwells within him must be disclosed. It is a riddle, but as he is guessing the riddle, what dwells within him is disclosed by the way he guesses. The contradiction confronts him with a choice, and as he is choosing, together with what he chooses, he himself is disclosed.¹⁹

The passage draws upon the difficulty of seeing oneself as seeing. When we see something, especially when we see others, we tend to overlook that we are the ones seeing. The immediacy that must be discovered, the primitive character of the first-person perspective, is therefore disclosed through a contradiction. What is contradicted is our own way of seeing. The passivity concerns our own subjectivity: It is the passivity of being disclosed, but what is disclosed is our subjectivity understood as activity. We come to see ourselves seeing and choosing. We are disclosed in what we are doing. Thus, the first step concerns the relation of passivity and activity, but it also focuses on the role played by reflection in a second immediacy. If second immediacy is an immediacy after reflection, what then does reflection do? It is a reflec SKS 12, 131 / PC, 126 – 127.

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tion broken in the sense that we are being reflected upon ourselves. This is the passivity of being disclosed in what we are doing. Reflection, however, thereby also offers an understanding of our own brokenness. This self-understanding is part of a second immediacy. The question then is: In what sense is second immediacy immediacy? As mentioned, it is not to be achieved in a direct manner. How is an indirect way to be conceived? I will argue that a second immediacy pertains to the indirection of vision, which implies that our vision is being redirected. This will be the second step.

6 Vision and Second Immediacy The problem of a second immediacy is the problem of the self. It is a normative immediacy in the sense that the immediacy of self-relation must be assumed. Simplicity or purity of heart is something to be gained. Thus, second immediacy implies a transformation of the self-relation. But how is this possible? Not in a direct manner in the sense that we choose and then as a result of the choice are transformed. The one choosing is also the one that will be transformed. The transformation is a matter of will (activity), but our will itself must be transformed (passivity). The paradoxical character of a second immediacy comes to the fore when, in Christian Discourses, it is said that the rich Christian has an abundance, but is ignorant of it, “and therefore he must have become ignorant. To be ignorant is no art, but to become ignorant and to be ignorant by having become ignorant – that is the art.”²⁰ How is it possible to become ignorant in this sense? Once more, we face the above-mentioned aporetic situation: second immediacy means to be undivided, but as a self one does not coincide with oneself. How is it possible for a self to become ignorant of itself without self-deceit? As a self, a human being relates to the future, which implies that we should be concerned about ourselves in time, and yet we should not worry. The paradoxical character of second immediacy thus corresponds to the aporetic qualification of the self: to become oneself is a matter of how one relates to oneself, but one is not undivided by deciding to be so. To become oneself affects oneself. It is only possible to become oneself by also forgetting oneself, but this implies self-understanding. Correspondingly, to become ignorant without self-deceit presupposes self-reflection.

 SKS 10, 37 / CD, 25.

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In order to substantiate this interpretation, let us briefly consider the description of forgiveness in Works of Love. The one doing the forgiving is not ignorant, but sees what is to be forgiven. Otherwise it would not be forgiveness. The point, however, is that the one who is forgiving sees what is to be forgiven in such a way that it is as if it did not exist. He or she sees it away. “The unseen is that forgiveness takes away that which does indeed exist…Just as one by faith believes the unseen into what is seen, so the one who loves by forgiveness believes away what is seen.”²¹ This might offer a clue to understanding what second immediacy is. Second immediacy is possible inasmuch as our vision is broken and redirected. Immediacy can be achieved as we see in a different way. We look in another direction. Just as one can trick oneself convening the way one sees the other, e. g. in envy or mistrust, so conversely, one can be free by seeing the other in this mode of notseeing. Works of Love describes this as the possibility that the loving one cannot see “with his eyes open [med aabne Øine ikke kan see].”²² She does not see what she sees in that she “sees it away.” Kierkegaard compares this to childrenʼs game: “The childlikeness, then, is that, as in a game, the one who loves with his eyes open cannot see what is taking place right in front of him.”²³ This seeing ignorance is not simply ignorance. The one who loves, if he sees the multitude of sins, “he still is as one who does not see them.”²⁴ To become ignorant means that it really is as if one were ignorant. What kind of self-understanding is implied in this? It is only possible to forgive and, in this sense, not to see what one does see if one sees oneʼs own fallibility and brokenness. Conversely, it is possible to forget oneself through the relation to the other as the neighbor, i. e., through the redirection of vision. In what sense then is second immediacy immediacy? Not as a position without reflection. First, immediacy means the limit of reflection: the primitive character of the first-person perspective. Second, it is converted into a normative qualification in that the first-person perspective must be assumed. Third, it is an immediacy transformed because self-appropriation has an indirect and receptive character. Second immediacy implies self-understanding, but this implies a reflection that is broken in the sense that our vision is redirected. Second immediacy has to do with this indirect and receptive character of becoming oneself.

   

SKS 9, 292 / WL, 294– 295. SKS 9, 285 / WL, 287. Ibid. SKS 12, 295 / WA, 181.

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“But a second time – the second time is what is decisive. To become a child again, to become nothing, without any selfishness … yes, that is the task.”²⁵ The second time is the time of spirit. It is the time of repetition. “There is no immediate health of the spirit,”²⁶ The Sickness unto Death declares. The notion of second immediacy is not a marginal one in Kierkegaard, but pertains to the qualification of spirit.

 SKS 10, 191 / PC, 192.  SKS 11, 141 / SUD, 25.

Chapter 9 Ein Leben zu führen: Kierkegaard und der Begriff des Lebens 1 Der Begriff Leben Leben geschieht mit uns, und wir leben es. Unser Leben zu verstehen stellt uns vor die Aufgabe, diese Spannung zu begreifen. Das Leben kann uns überwältigen; und wir haben ein Leben zu führen. Ein Leben zu führen erfordert, dass wir versuchen, das Leben zu verstehen. Wir haben also ein Leben zu leben, das wir zu verstehen versuchen. Wir haben aber ein Leben zu verstehen, das mit uns geschieht und das sich uns entzieht, indem wir es leben. Wenn ein Begriff des Lebens in den Blick bringen soll, wie wir das Leben, das wir leben, verstehen können, müssen wir Subjektivität als Passivität und als Aktivität verstehen. Indem das Leben uns überwältigt, ist es, als gingen wir im Leben unter. Wir werden aber überwältigt als diejenigen, die ein Leben zu führen haben. Das Leben überwältigt uns, indem wir es leben. Mit dieser kleinen Problemskizze war hier anzufangen, weil bei Kierkegaard der Begriff der Existenz, nicht der des Lebens im Vordergrund steht. Woran liegt das? Ist Existenz ein anderes Wort für Leben? Man kann dafür argumentieren, dass Kierkegaard in einer dänischen, lebensphilosophischen Tradition steht,¹ die sich gegen die „Abstraktion“ wendet und auf die konkrete Reflexion des Lebens zielt. Er scheint aber auch das Problem zu reflektieren, dass Leben keine Gegeninstanz sein kann, die uns vor der Abstraktion rettet, denn Abstraktion ist eine Möglichkeit menschlichen Lebens. „Leben“ wird bei Kierkegaard allein schon deshalb nicht einfach durch „Existenz“ ersetzt, weil sein Existenzdenken nicht ohne einen Begriff des Lebens auskommt. Der Begriff des Lebens steht bei ihm aus dem Grund nicht im Vordergrund, weil er auf komplizierte Weise darin hineinspielt, wie Existenz verstanden werden kann. Wie sollen wir diese hermeneutische Situation fassen, dass das Leben eher eine indirekte oder fast mediale Rolle spielt? Wäre es nicht möglich, das Leben direkt aus dem Leben selbst zu verstehen? Diese Fragen werde ich in zwei Richtungen aufgreifen: Wie ist erstens das Verhältnis zwischen dem Leben und dem

 Zu dieser Tradition, vgl. Mogens Pahuus, Livsfilosofi: lykke og eksistens i eksistens og litteratur, Aarhus: Philosophia 1986. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-015

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„Anderen“ des Lebens verfasst, das wir brauchen, um das Leben zu verstehen; und wie verhalten sich zweitens Leben und Subjektivität zueinander? Die beiden Richtungen laufen im Begriff des Geistes zusammen. Den Begriff des Lebens bei Kierkegaard auszulegen stellt vor eine nicht nur exegetische, sondern auch systematische Aufgabe. Das Anliegen seines Existenzund Subjektivitätsdenkens ist zu reformulieren, um den Begriff des Lebens, der darin hineinspielt, in den Vordergrund zu rücken. Dabei muss das eingangs skizzierte Problem im Blick bleiben: Leben und Subjektivität, oder Leben und das Verhältnis zum Leben. Wir können einen Begriff des Lebens bei Kierkegaard nicht einfach auslegen und rekonstruieren – ohne die Frage nach dem Verhältnis zum Leben zu stellen. Die systematische Frage ist: Woran liegt das? Die Frage ist aber auch schon: Welchen Charakter haben die Begriffe, mit denen wir versuchen, das Leben, das wir leben „zu verstehen“? Wird Existenz nicht deshalb in den Vordergrund gerückt, weil die Begriffe, mit denen wir menschliches Leben verstehen, existentiell sind? Existentielle Begrifflichkeit wird aber leicht und oft missverstanden. „Existentiell“ schließt nicht aus, dass es um strukturelle Bestimmungen geht. Existentielle Begrifflichkeit ist eher auf der Linie von Heideggers „formaler Anzeige“ zu lesen.² Was z. B. mit „Sorge“ gemeint ist, wissen wir je für uns, indem wir unser Leben zu leben haben. Wie wir es wissen, ist aber fragwürdig. Das kann auch erklären, wie die Texte Kierkegaards Hinweise auf das Leben durchziehen. Der Begriff Leben wird kontextbestimmt und fast pointiert unsystematisch verwendet, indem er in Beschreibungen menschlichen Lebens eingebettet ist. Kierkegaard verfährt in dem Sinne phänomenologisch, dass es darum geht, das Leben, von dem geredet wird, vor Augen zu führen. Wir müssen an das Leben erinnert werden, das wir schon leben und zu verstehen versuchen. Menschliche Existenz auf den Begriff zu bringen, ist bei Kierkegaard eine Gegenbewegung zur Tendenz, zu vergessen, was es heißt, zu existieren. Deshalb muss er auf das Leben hinweisen, welches wir schon leben und oft so leben, dass es uns nicht auffällt. Dass er einen Begriff des Lebens nötig hat, obwohl Leben nicht wie Existenz als Begriff geprägt wird, liegt auch in dem Versuch zu bestimmen, was Existieren heißt. Vorausgreifend lässt sich das so formulieren: Leben ist, was wir zu bestimmen versuchen, indem wir existierend ein Leben führen. Indem wir es leben, sind wir aber selbst darin verwickelt. Bestimmt das Leben uns dazu, uns zu bestimmen? Damit ist man wieder beim Kernproblem Leben und  Zu „formaler Anzeige“ und „faktischem Leben“ siehe z. B. Martin Heidegger, ,,Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion,“ in Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 60, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1995. Vgl. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Berkeley: Los Angeles 1993.

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Subjektivität, das bei der Auslegung im Blick sein muss. Der Auslegung seien kurze Überlegungen vorausgeschickt, wie das Problem des Zuganges (Reflexion) mit der Sache (Leben) zusammenhängt.

2 Leben und Reflexion Wenn eine philosophische Reflexion sich gegen die Abstraktion wendet und konkret werden will, kann sie versuchen, im Begriff des Lebens das Andere der Reflexion geltend zu machen. Eine philosophische Reflexion kann aber nicht bei dem Hinweis auf das Leben stehen bleiben, sondern muss versuchen, die Schwierigkeiten in den Blick zu nehmen, die wir mit dem Leben haben. Das Leben gibt in diesem Sinne selbst zu denken. Dass das Leben sich entäußert, sich in Formen des Lebens verlieren, sich entzweien kann (Hegel), oder eine Tendenz in sich trägt, zu verfallen (Heidegger), fordert eine philosophische Reflexion heraus. Wenn die Bewegtheit des Lebens verstanden werden soll, muss reflektiert mit begrifflichen Unterscheidungen verfahren werden. Wie schon angedeutet, kann Kierkegaard so interpretiert werden, dass sich eine Reflexion des Lebens auf einen entscheidenden Punkt konzentrieren muss: das Leben und das Verhältnis zum Leben. Das wird im Begriff des Existentiellen angezeigt. Dass wir versuchen müssen, das Leben zu verstehen, liegt darin, dass wir es leben. Das Leben geht uns so tief an, dass es auch davon abhängt, wie wir es verstehen. Wir leben verstehend, tun es aber so, dass wir auch mit unserem Verstehen zu früh oder zu spät kommen. Die Temporalität der Reflexion liegt im Nachdenken. Die Aufgabe kann aber auch umgekehrt bestimmt werden: uns in der Existenz – im Augenblick – zu verstehen. Das Grundproblem – Leben und das Verhältnis zum Leben – kann durch den Begriff des Geistes naher bestimmt werden. Wie bei Hegel geht es auch bei Kierkegaard um die Figur, das Leben zu verlieren, um das Leben zu gewinnen – bei Kierkegaard jedoch wird diese Figur als die Schwierigkeit menschlicher Freiheit thematisiert, nämlich ein Leben zu führen, indem das Leben sich uns entzieht.

3 Phänomene des Lebens Im Begriff Angst (1844), wo es eben darum geht, wie menschliche Freiheit zu sich kommt, spielen Hinweise auf das Leben entscheidend hinein. Der pseudonyme Verfasser Vigilius Haufniensis hat sein Metier oder seine Praxis darin, das Leben in Kopenhagen zu beobachten. Er betreibt Psychologie, und das heißt: ,,Beob-

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achtung des Menschenlebens.“³ Um Menschen zu beobachten, muss man sehen, wie sie leben. Das ist aber nicht einfach. Denn was wir beobachten sollen, ist, wie sie denken und sich zu ihrem Leben stellen. Menschen leben aber nicht einfach, wie sie denken. Dass unser Leben sich anders formt, als wir denken, gibt uns aber auch anders zu denken. Das Innere äußert sich nicht einfach im Leben, das wir leben. Damit ändert es sich als das Innere. Deshalb schreibt Vigilius Haufniensis ein Buch über „Stellungen der Freiheit“: Wie ein Mensch sich zu sich stellt, indem er sich zu anderen und zu einer gemeinsamen Welt verhalt.⁴ Wie sein Leben sein Leben ist, das ist aber nicht einfach zu sehen. Wie er sein Leben versteht, lässt sich auch da hinein verstecken, wie er es lebt. Deshalb muss man Beobachter sein, um es zu sehen. Der Begriff Angst ist insofern ein Buch über das Sehen und das Sehenlernen. Hier erhalten Hinweise auf das Leben eine methodische Bedeutung. Der Kopenhagener Beobachter schreibt fast programmatisch: „Das Leben ist mittlerweile reich genug, wenn man sich nur auf das Sehen versteht; man braucht nicht nach Paris oder London zu reisen, – und dies hilft nichts, wenn man nicht zu sehen vermag.“⁵ Als Eingang zu einer auch phänomenologisch eindrucksvollen Passage über das Schweigen und die Macht des Auges (Inquisitor, Verbrechen und Strafe) heißt es: „Beispiele hierfür auf allen möglichen Gebieten und in allen möglichen Graden bietet das Leben reichlich.“⁶ In dieser Passage wird das, was zu sehen ist, den Lesern vor Augen geführt.Vigilius Haufniensis kann aber nicht alles ausführen. Er muss andeuten, weist jedoch auch darauf hin, dass er andeutet: „Was hier angedeutet ist, gibt das Leben wohl Gelegenheit zu beobachten.“⁷ Wenn Vigilius Haufniensis darauf hinweist, dass das Leben etwas zeigt, fordert er seine Leser dazu auf, für sich selbst zu sehen. Er deutet an, und die Leser können dann versuchen mitzumachen und die angezeigten Einsichten zu erfüllen. Beobachten ist aber gefährlich. Indem man beobachtet, tut man selbst etwas, was aber leicht aus dem Blick fällt. Denn was beobachtet wird, ist ja das Leben der Anderen. Vigilius Haufniensis ist aber auch in dem Sinne wachsam, dass er versucht, uns die Gefahr des Beobachtens vor Augen zu führen. Als Beobachter soll man sich selbst in Acht nehmen. Im Sehen können wir uns leicht entgehen. Wir können übersehen, dass unser Beobachten auch von uns berichtet. Dies tut es aber nicht nur in dem Sinne, dass wir selbst etwas tun, indem wir das Leben der Anderen beobachten. Das Leben, das wir beobachten, geht auch uns an, weil es     

SKS 4, 351 / BA, 43. SKS 4, 420 / BA 121. SKS 4, 378 / BA, 75. SKS 4, 426 / BA, 129. SKS 4, 418 / BA, 119.

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um menschliches Leben geht. Die Entscheidung, die im Beobachten des Lebens der Anderen liegt, tritt nicht zuletzt im Phänomen des Mitleides hervor. So kann man das Leiden eines Anderen mit einer „feigen Sympathie“ betrachten, „die Gott dafür dankt, nicht so einer wie dieser geworden zu sein, ohne dass man begreift, ein solcher Dank sei ein Verrat an Gott und an sich selbst, und ohne dass man bedenkt, wie das Leben allezeit analoge Erscheinungen [Phænomener] in sich trage, denen man vielleicht nicht entgehen werde.“⁸ Das menschliche Leben ist sowohl je meines als auch gemeinsam. Dass ein Mensch sowohl Individuum als auch Geschlecht ist, wie es formelhaft heißt, „das verkündet das Leben wahrlich mit lauter Stimme.“⁹ Dass es um ein gemeinsames Menschenleben geht, bedeutet aber auch, dass bei der Beobachtung menschlichen Lebens ein de te fabula narratur mitspielt.¹⁰ Die Psychologie, die Vigilius Haufniensis betreibt, handelt von Möglichkeiten, die uns als Menschen verbinden. Dass wir jeder unser Leben zu leben haben, ist in dieser Möglichkeitsdimension zu verstehen. Diese Spannung (menschliches Leben als je meines und gemeinsames) weist schon auf den Begriff des Geistes hin. Es sei hier aber schrittweise vorgegangen. Was zunächst gebraucht wird, ist die schon existentiell und ethisch pointierte Frage nach dem Zugang in der Beobachtung des Menschenlebens. Begonnen wurde mit dem Pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, weil er methodisch auf „Phänomene des Lebens“ hinweist. Was das Leben zeigt, sind Phänomene des Lebens: wie sich das Leben zeigt, indem es gelebt wird. Phänomene des Lebens sind aber auch, wie sich das Menschenleben in der Welt und in der Geschichte zeigt. Wie können wir uns als Menschen darin verstehen? Die Frage, was es heißt, ein Mensch zu sein, schwingt in der Beobachtung des Menschenlebens in der Welt und in der Geschichte mit. Genau dann, wenn wir versuchen, Menschenleben so zu verstehen, kann die Beobachtung auch verwirren und überwältigen. „Die ungeheure Rechnung des Lebens“ ist aber kein Buch, das wir führen.¹¹ Jedoch können wir sie „verwirren.“ Deshalb sollen wir für das Leben, das wir führen, Rechenschaft ablegen. Hier wird aus den Phänomenen des Lebens die Aufgabe des Lebens.Was sich im Leben zeigt, das wir leben, ist das Leben als Aufgabe. Das wird besonders von dem pseudonymen Verfasser Johannes Climacus in der Abschließenden unwissenschaftlichen Nachschrift (1846) hervorgehoben.

 SKS 4, 358 – 359 / BA, 53.  SKS 4, 376 / BA, 73.  SKS 4, 377 / BA, 74.  SKS 4, 379 / BA, 76.

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4 Aufgabe des Lebens So saß ich also da und rauchte meine Zigarre, bis ich in Gedanken versank. Unter anderem erinnere ich mich an folgendes: Du wirst nun, sagte ich zu mir selbst, allmählich alt, ohne etwas zu sein und ohne dir eigentlich etwas vorzunehmen. Dagegen siehst du überall, wo du dich in der Literatur oder im Leben umsiehst, die Namen und Gestalten der Gefeierten; siehst die teuren und mit Akklamation begrüßten Leute auftreten oder hörst von ihnen reden, von den vielen Wohltäter der Zeit, die der Menschheit dadurch zu nützen verstehen, dass sie das Leben immer leichter machen, die einen durch Eisenbahnen, andere durch Omnibusse und Dampfschiffe, wieder andere durch das Telegraphieren, noch wieder andere durch leichtfassliche Übersichten und kurze Mitteilungen von allem Wissenswerten.¹²

So schreibt Johannes Climacus. Er entschließt sich dann zu der Aufgabe, Schwierigkeiten zu machen, und zwar dadurch, dass er auf die Aufgabe aufmerksam macht, das zu werden, was man so – ohne weiteres – ist: subjektiv. Man könnte einwenden, dass die Aufgabe, subjektiv zu werden, resignativ anmutet. Climacus antwortet auf diesen Einwand, indem er schlicht und ergreifend auf einen anderen Einwand hinweist: Verhielte es sich nicht so mit dem Subjektivwerden, dass eben das die Aufgabe wäre, die höchste Aufgabe, die jedem Menschen gestellt ist, eine Aufgabe, die auch für das längste Leben ausreichen kann, da sie die merkwürdige Eigenschaft hat, erst dann vorbei zu sein, wenn das Leben vorbei ist – verhielte es sich nicht so mit dem Subjektivwerden: dann bleibt eine Schwierigkeit, die, wie mir scheint, mit Zentnergewicht auf jedes Menschen beschwertem Gewissen lasten müsste, so dass er sich eher heute als morgen den Tod wünschte:¹³

nämlich, wie man die göttliche Verschwendung erklärt, die „die unendliche Schar von Individuen gebraucht, um die welthistorische Entwicklung in Gang zu bekommen.“¹⁴ Wäre die Aufgabe nicht, subjektiv zu werden, dann bliebe eine Schwierigkeit, die es unmöglich macht, das Leben zu tragen: sich in der ungeheuren Rechnung des Lebens zu orientieren. Was bedeutet es, dass die Aufgabe erst dann vorbei ist, wenn das Leben vorbei ist? Die Aufgabe, subjektiv zu werden, ist quantum satis für ein Menschenleben.¹⁵ Es ist aber möglich, das Leben so wie „der Zu-Geschäftige [den Stundesløse]“ zu leben, der „mit dem Leben fertig würde, ehe das Leben mit ihm fertig würde.“¹⁶ Ob

    

SKS 7, 171 / AUN1, 177. SKS 7, 147 / AUN1, 148. Ibid. SKS 7, 151 / AUN1, 153. SKS 7, 152 / AUN1, 154.

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wir die Aufgabe des Lebens richtig erfasst haben, ist daran zu messen, wie wir uns in rechter Weise Zeit nehmen. Das zeigt sich daran, ob uns die Aufgabe des Lebens unser ganzes Leben ausfüllen wird.Wo „die Zeit selbst die Aufgabe ist,“ wird es zu einem Fehler, „vor der Zeit fertig zu werden.“¹⁷ Die Aufgabe, subjektiv zu werden, reicht für das ganze Leben aus, indem es die Aufgabe des Lebens ist: zu leben. Erklärungsbedürftig ist aber dann wieder die Bestimmung der Lebensaufgabe: subjektiv zu werden. Stillschweigend ist der Ausgangspunkt derjenige, dass das Leben Schwierigkeiten damit macht, es zu leben. Deshalb kann man die Aufgabe des Lebens darin sehen, sich das Leben immer leichter zu machen. Wenn man aber das Leben mit dieser Einstellung lebt, entzieht man sich der Aufgabe des Lebens. Selbstredend handelt es sich für Climacus nicht um irgendwelche Schwierigkeiten. Vielmehr identifiziert er die Aufgabe des Lebens damit, subjektiv zu werden, und sieht darin die Schwierigkeit. Wir können diese Identifikation so nachvollziehen: subjektiv wird man dadurch, dass man das je eigene Leben als das eigene Leben lebt. Warum ist es eine Aufgabe, das Leben, das das je eigene Leben ist, als das eigene zu leben? Erstens scheint es unmöglich, nicht durch „die ungeheure Rechnung des Lebens“ verwirrt zu werden. Wie sollen wir uns angesichts des Schreckens der menschlichen Geschichte durch die Möglichkeit des Menschenlebens verstehen? In dieser Verwirrung ist es leicht, die Orientierung des eigenen Lebens zu verlieren. Diese Orientierung können wir nur gewinnen, indem wir uns darauf besinnen, dass wir schon das je eigene Leben zu leben haben. Zweitens lebt sich unser Leben nicht von selbst, sondern wir leben es. Wir haben also die Aufgabe des Lebens, unser Leben zu führen. Das heißt aber: Wir sollen uns durch das Leben, das wir leben, verstehen. Es kann aber unmöglich erscheinen, sich mit dem Leben, das man lebt, zu identifizieren, obwohl man weiß, dass es das eigene Leben ist. Es kann sogar schwierig sein, an der Aufgabe festzuhalten, sich durch das eigene Leben zu verstehen. Die fast paradoxe Aufgabe, subjektiv zu werden, ist vor diesem negativen Hintergrund zu verstehen. Wenn man sich das Leben immer leichter zu machen versucht, entzieht man sich der Schwierigkeit, sich durch das Leben, das man lebt, zu verstehen. Obwohl wir nicht einfach leben, wie wir verstehen, geht unser Verstehen darin ein, wie wir leben. Wir können uns nicht soweit entziehen, dass wir unser Leben leben, ohne ein Verständnis davon zu haben, dass es unser Leben ist. Dies Verständnis kann aber undeutlich gemacht oder verdunkelt werden. Die Schwierigkeit besteht darin, das Leben als das eigene Leben zu übernehmen. Wenn wir das nicht tun, leben wir anders. Wir leben das eigene Leben, aber nicht

 SKS 7, 152 / AUN1, 155.

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als das eigene. Anders gesagt ist die Einstellung entscheidend, in der man lebt. Das wird bei Kierkegaard durch den Schlüsselbegriff des Mutes hervorgehoben. Im Leben geht es um Mut zum Leben und Mut, man selbst zu sein. Es ist aber möglich, den Mut zu verlieren.Was uns im Leben zustoßt, kann uns dazu bringen, zu resignieren. Wenn das geschieht, dann leben wir resigniert. Richtet sich die Denkbewegung Kierkegaards auf das Leben des Einzelnen, so geht sie darin auf das Allgemeinmenschliche zurück. In der Beobachtung des Menschenlebens gilt es, die Möglichkeiten zu sehen, die uns als Menschen miteinander verbinden. Die Aufgabe des Lebens ist durch Möglichkeiten zu bestimmen, die für ein ganzes Leben ausreichen, indem sie ein Leben offen halten. Dies wird im Epilog zu Furcht und Zittern durch die Leidenschaft als das eigentlich Humane bestimmt. Liebe und Glaube sind zwar Möglichkeiten, die wir mit jedem anderen Menschen teilen. Dennoch fängt hier jeder mit sich an. Sollte jemand fragen, warum man nicht über die Möglichkeiten von Liebe und Glaube hinausgehe, so lautet die Antwort: „ich habe mein Leben darin.“¹⁸ Im Mut, in der Liebe und im Glauben wird das Leben als Aufgabe gesehen. Es wird bestimmt und doch als Möglichkeit offen gehalten.

5 Leben als Weg Die Abschließende unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift ist Kierkegaards Versuch, Existenz auf den Begriff zu bringen. Ein Mensch ist als Mensch in der Weise, dass er existiert. Wie kommt hier der Begriff des Lebens ins Spiel? Existenz wird durch zwei Bestimmungen definiert: im Werden sein und sich zu sich verhalten. Ein Mensch existiert, indem er im Werden ist, und zwar so, dass er mit sich zu sich unterwegs ist. Unterwegs sein heißt: sich im Leben, zwischen Anfang (Geburt) und Ende (Tod) zu befinden. Wie sind wir aber unterwegs? Ein Mensch ist geboren, um selbst – mit sich – anzufangen (könnten wir sowohl mit Kierkegaard als auch mit Hannah Arendt sagen). Er ist nicht nur unterwegs zwischen Geburt und Tod – er ist auch selbst ein Zwischenwesen. Der Mensch ist nicht nur zwischen den Extremen, durch die er sich in seiner Welt orientiert: Nichts und Gott, Endlichkeit und Unendlichkeit. Die Zwischenbestimmung ist vielmehr komplexer, insofern der Mensch selbst (als Selbst) eine Synthese ist. Das heißt: Er existiert, steht als Zwischenwesen so aus, dass er sich zu sich als Seele

 SKS 4, 210 / FZ, 141.

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und zu sich als Leib verhält. Der Mensch ist mit sich, als Synthese, unterwegs. Damit steht seine Identität aus.¹⁹ Was Existenz heißt, kann dabei nur entfaltet werden, indem auf das faktische Leben zurückgegriffen wird. Existenz ist im Leben – zwischen Geburt und Tod – eingeschrieben. Ein Mensch existiert „embodied and embedded.“²⁰ Er kommt als eine Synthese von Seele und Leib in einer Geschichte zu sich, in der er schon angefangen hat. In der Sprache von Kierkegaards Begriff Angst ist das die Geschichte des Geschlechts. In dieser großen Geschichte, in der ein Mensch geboren ist, soll er aber mit sich anfangen (und sich nicht verwirren lassen). Er soll seine eigene Geschichte haben, indem er sein eigenes Leben zu führen hat. In diesem Sinne kann Vigilius Haufniensis von der „Geschichte des individuellen Lebens“ sprechen.²¹ Menschliches Leben ist ein geschichtliches Leben. Nun wird die Rolle, die das Leben in der Artikulation der Existenz spielt, bei Kierkegaard nicht direkt thematisiert. Aufschlussreich ist aber vor allem die fast methodische Verbindung von Leben und Weg, die im Hintergrund jener Bestimmung liegt, dass ein Existierender unterwegs mit sich sei. Im betonten Sinne ist der Lebensweg der Weg, den wir existierend zu gehen haben. Dies hat Kierkegaard insbesondere in seinen Erbaulichen Reden in verschiedenem Geist (1847) heraus gestellt: „Es ist ein übliches, von allen gebrauchtes, in die Sprache übernommenes Bild, das Leben mit einem Weg zu vergleichen.“²² Mit dieser Mitteilung fängt Kierkegaard an, um mit diesem Bild sofort etwas zu wollen. Er will die Fragestellung ändern. Wenn wir das Leben lediglich in dem ganz allgemeinen Sinne, dass man lebt, mit einem Weg vergleichen, sagen wir bloß, dass alle Lebenden auf dem Lebensweg sind.Wenn es aber mit dem Leben Ernst ist, ändert sich die Frage. Sie lautet nicht: Wo ist der Weg? sondern: Wie wird der Weg gegangen? In einem geistigen Sinne entsteht der Weg erst mit dem Einzelnen, der ihn geht: „Der Weg ist: auf welche Weise er gegangen wird.“²³ Das Geistige – auf welche Weise man den Weg des Lebens geht – macht den Unterschied des Weges. Dass es Ernst wird, heißt, dass es den Einzelnen angeht, der den Weg zu gehen hat. Er ist nicht, was er ist, um dann seinen Weg zu gehen. Leben ist also nicht einfach als Weg zu verstehen. Dass das Leben zu leben ist, provoziert zwangsläufig die Frage, wie wir den Lebensweg gehen. Diese Einsicht

 Vgl. Arne Grøn, Angst bei Søren Kierkegaard. Eine Einführung in sein Denken, übers. von Ulrich Lincoln, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1999.  Vgl. Arne Grøn, „The Embodied Self: Reformulating the Existential Difference in Kierkegaard,“ Kapitel 6 in diesem Buch.  SKS 4, 415 / BA, 116.  SKS 8, 384 / ERG, 303.  Ibid.

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muss durch zwei weitere Bestimmungen entfaltet werden. Erstens sind wir mit uns unterwegs. Ich habe einen Weg zu gehen, ein Leben zu leben, und dieser Weg ist meiner. Kein anderer kann diesen Weg gehen. Die Betonung ist doppelt: Der Weg ist, wie wir ihn gehen (unser Leben ist, wie wir es leben), und wir haben schon einen Weg zu gehen (ein Leben zu leben). Wir können den Weg nicht beliebig wählen, indem wir ihn mit uns zu gehen haben. Wir können den Weg auch verfehlen. Zweitens ist die Frage der Zeit hervor zu heben, die in der Rede vom Lebensweg liegt. Indem wir den Weg gehen, geht die Zeit mit uns. Ohne dass wir es planen, ändern wir uns. Lebensweg ist Lebenszeit. Bei Kierkegaard wird die Bedeutung des Lebensalters oft hervorgehoben. Unterwegs im Leben ist es bedeutungsvoll, wo wir uns im Leben befinden. Vigilius Haufniensis z. B. bemerkt, dass – wenn wir uns auf die Erfahrung berufen – zu fragen ist, „in welchem Abschnitt des Lebens es so erfahren wird.“²⁴ Warum ist dies von Bedeutung? Weil wir das Leben anders verstehen, wenn wir selbst anders situiert sind. Die Lebenszeit ist aber auch durch die Aufgabe des Lebens bestimmt worden, die für das ganze Leben reicht. Durch diese Spannung – zwischen den verschiedenen Lebensaltem und dem Leben als der Aufgabe, die das ganze Leben bestimmen soll – kann Kierkegaard die Einsicht in die Zeitlichkeit eines Menschenlebens verschärfen. Zugespitzt heißt es in den Erbaulichen Reden in verschiedenem Geist: „in der elften Stunde versteht man das Leben ganz anders als in den Tagen der Jugend oder in der geschäftigen Zeit des Mannesalters oder im letzten Augenblick des Greises.“²⁵ Das klingt unmittelbar paradox. Das Greisenalter ist ja in einem direkten Sinne „die elfte Stunde, und der Augenblick des Todes das letzte in der elften Stunde.“²⁶ Die Frage ist aber wieder, wie wir die Stunde nehmen. Ob wir jung oder alt sind, viel oder wenig verbrochen haben – der Ruf, den Weg wieder zu finden, „ergeht immer zur elften Stunde.“²⁷ Der Ruf zur elften Stunde kann uns jederzeit unterwegs im Leben treffen, indem das, was wir tun, uns angeht. Die Frage ist, ob wir es uns angehen lassen. Was in diesen Gedankengängen allmählich in den Blick kommt, ist die Entscheidung des Lebens. Was unterwegs im Leben entschieden wird, ist das Leben, das wir zu leben haben.

   

SKS 4, 346 – 347 / BA, 39. SKS 8, 130 / ERG, 19. Ibid. SKS 8, 129 / ERG, 18.

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6 Faktisches Leben In den Texten Kierkegaards kommt der Ausdruck „im Leben“ oft vor. Man kann leicht über solche Ausdrücke hinweg lesen, die unauffällig vorkommen.Was heißt aber: „im Leben“? Es bedeutet nicht, dass wir uns im Leben vorfinden. Es ist nicht etwas Vorhandenes, sondern soll verbal verstanden werden: darin oder dadurch, dass wir leben. Der Ausdruck weist nicht nur darauf hin, dass wir natürlich „im“ Leben sind, sondern zieht die Frage nach sich: wie wir es sind. Der Lebensweg ist so, wie er gegangen wird. „Im“ Leben sind wir selbst unterwegs. Wenn z . B. eine Rede in Der Liebe Tun (1847) mit der Erinnerung an die Möglichkeit anfängt, „was dir auch im Leben widerfahren mag,“²⁸ wird die Situation der Rede angegeben, in der die Rede sagen will: „Liebe bleibt“ desto trotz. Wenn wir nicht mit Ernst verstehen, was uns im Leben (das heißt: indem wir leben) widerfahren mag, verliert die Rede „Liebe bleibt“ ihre Bedeutung. „Im Leben“ weist darauf hin, dass wir situiert sind.Wir sind selbst situiert, und zwar als diejenigen, die unser Leben zu leben haben. Deshalb können wir uns im Leben auf das Leben besinnen. Unterwegs im Leben widerfährt uns etwas, mit dem wir zu leben haben. Was uns widerfährt, erfahren wir mit dem Leben, das wir zu leben haben. Es geht hier – so das hier vorgetragene Argument – um einen Begriff des faktischen Lebens. „Im Leben“ heißt: wie wir das Leben faktisch leben. Auf die fast unauffälligen Hinweise auf das Leben zu fokussieren mag einem als Umweg vorkommen – wir sind aber auf dem Wege zum Begriff der Existenz. Denn Existenz kann nur durch Hinweise auf das Leben artikuliert werden, welches wir je schon – faktisch – leben. Existenz bedeutet: wir stehen heraus, indem wir selbst unser Leben zu leben haben. Wir leben es schon, und wir haben es zu leben. Die doppelte Betonung liegt in der Frage: wie wir das Leben – das schon je meines ist – leben. Leben wir es als ein Leben, in dem wir uns selbst verstehen können? Es scheint aber möglich, ein Leben zu leben, in dem wir uns diese Frage eben nicht stellen. Dieser negativen Möglichkeit sei sich hier schrittweise angenähert. Wenn unser Leben ist, wie wir es leben, können wir es in Frage stellen: Wie leben wir das Leben? Wir brauchen diese Frage nicht ausdrücklich zu stellen, um von ihr bewegt zu werden. Denn wir leben unser je eigenes Leben so, dass es uns angeht. Wir leben es mit einem Verständnis davon, dass es unser Leben ist. Dass wir es so leben, dass es uns angeht, ist aber, was hier in Frage kommt. Wie ist das zu verstehen?

 SKS 9, 298 / LT, 331.

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Dazu muss die Struktur der Sorge genauer bestimmt werden. Sorge (Bekymring) ist auch bei Kierkegaard ein Kernbegriff. Sie ist eine Frage dessen, wie wir leben, im Sinne der Einstellung, in der wir unser Leben leben. Wir sollen uns darum kümmern, wie wir leben. Wir sollen etwas damit meinen und wollen. Wir sollen ein Leben führen.Wir können uns aber auch derartige Sorgen machen, dass wir das Leben aus unserem Leben heraus treiben. Der Unterschied zwischen Kierkegaards und Heideggers Begriff der Sorge liegt insbesondere darin, dass Kierkegaards Begriff direkter die Frage des Selbstverfehlens eröffnet. Wir können diese Frage zugespitzt als eine doppelte Frage der Sorge formulieren: Wie bewahren wir uns in der Sorge um uns selbst? Die negative Möglichkeit, die immer mitspielt, besteht darin, dass wir uns selbst eben dadurch nicht bewahren, dass wir uns bekümmern. „Die Besorgnis [Bekymringen]“ ist die Beziehung zum Leben, zur Wirklichkeit des Persönlichen und somit, christlich: der Ernst, heißt es im Vorwort zur Krankheit zum Tode (1849).²⁹ Diese Bestimmung eröffnet eine intensive Untersuchung darüber, wie Menschen sich dadurch verfangen können, dass sie sich dazu verhalten, was sie berührt und angeht. Bevor diese negative Möglichkeit weiter verfolgt wird, ist noch einmal zu erörtern, wie hier vom faktischen Leben die Rede ist. Was es heißt, ein Mensch zu sein, kann über die Frage verstanden werden, was es heißt, als Mensch ein Leben zu führen. Kierkegaards Antwort darauf muss durch eine spannungsvolle Bestimmung eingekreist werden. Ob wir es wollen oder nicht, wir bestimmen uns dadurch, wie wir leben. Wir verfügen nicht so über unser Leben, dass wir uns dem Leben, wie wir es faktisch leben, entziehen können und frei dazu sind, uns anders zu bestimmen. Ein Leben zu führen heißt eben nicht, über das Leben zu verfügen, und zwar deshalb, weil wir selbst schon „im Leben“ sind. Das faktische Leben – das Leben, wie wir es faktisch leben – ist in diesem Sinne geschichtlich. Leben geschieht mit uns. Es geschieht aber mit uns, indem wir es leben. Subjektivität als Passivität (das Leben geschieht mit uns) weist schon auf Subjektivität als Aktivität hin (indem wir es sind, die dies Leben zu leben haben). Wir bestimmen uns aber nicht einfach durch das Leben, das wir leben. Wir können uns zu unserem Leben so verhalten, dass es anderswo ist, als wir es leben. Ist dies der Fall, werden wir aber unser Leben durch die Vorstellung leben, dass es anderswo ist. Das faktische Leben gibt nicht nur die Möglichkeit, ein Leben zu führen. Es ist auch das Leben, woraufhin Möglichkeiten bestimmt werden. So kann sich – angesichts der Möglichkeit des Todes – die Zeitperspektive eines Menschen so än-

 SKS 11, 117 / KT, 4.

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dern, dass Möglichkeiten in ein anderes Licht treten. Wir haben dann anders mit Möglichkeiten zu leben. Das heißt, dass wir uns nicht nur zwischen schon gelebtem und möglichem Leben befinden. Faktisches Leben ist schon so, wie wir jetzt Möglichkeiten leben. Wie verhält sich dann faktisches Leben dazu, ein Leben zu führen? Ein Leben zu führen heißt, dass wir versuchen, unser Leben zu gestalten. Als solches ist es schon ein bestimmtes Leben. Das zeigt sich darin, dass wir zu ihm zu stehen haben, obwohl es nicht das Leben ist, welches wir führen wollen. Das faktische Leben ist je meines, indem ich es schon lebe. Nur so kann ich versuchen, mein Leben zu führen. Dieser Gedanke des faktischen Lebens liegt – so die hier vertretene These – in den beiden weiteren Schritten, die sich bei Kierkegaard verfolgen lassen: erstens, das Leben durch den Gedanken des Todes in den Blick zu bekommen, und zweitens, die Analyse der Verzweiflung (verzweifelt nicht zu dem Leben zu stehen, das man schon lebt). Die Aufgabe des Lebens löst sich nicht in der Frage auf, wie wir es leben wollen. Sie besteht bereits darin, zu dem Leben zu stehen, das wir schon leben. Wenn wir uns das Leben anders vorstellen, oder anderswo sehen, ist die Frage schon: Welche Bedeutung hat es für das Leben, dass das Leben diese Bedeutung für uns hat? Diese Frage nimmt das faktische Leben in den Blick. Um Existenz auf den Begriff bringen zu können, braucht Kierkegaard Hinweise auf das Leben, das wir faktisch leben und das mit uns geschieht, indem wir es leben. Existierend treten wir als diejenigen heraus, die unser Leben zu leben haben. Mit dem Begriff der Existenz wird das Wie des Lebens hervorgehoben. Wie wir es leben, ist auch die Frage, wie wir das Leben haben: Was treiben wir, während die Zeit mit uns verstreicht? Für Kierkegaard liegt hier eine ethische Fragestellung: Wozu verwenden wir die Zeit? Das kann auch so formuliert werden: Worin haben wir unser Leben? Wir können unser Leben „in der Eitelkeit, im Augenblick, in der Einbildung“³⁰ haben oder an die Verschiedenheit von Anderen verloren haben,³¹ können es aber auch in der Liebe oder im Glauben haben. Dann mag sich die Frage stellen: Kann das, womit wir die Zeit gehen lassen, unser Leben erfüllen? Wir haben unser Leben in etwas, indem wir uns darum kümmern. Wie bedeutungsvoll etwas für uns ist, zeigt sich darin, wie wir damit leben. Wenn wir etwas erfahren, das unser Leben ändert, tritt unser Leben als das auf, wodurch etwas für uns Bedeutung hat. Letzten Endes kann etwas im Leben so bedeutungsvoll sein, dass es die Bedeutung des Lebens entscheidet.

 SKS 5, 448 / DRG, 180.  SKS 5, 457 / DRG, 190.

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Das Leben ist aber nicht so einfach, wie es hier erscheint. Wir sollen nämlich etwas mit dem Leben wollen, können aber auch unser Leben durch unser Wollen vergeuden oder verspielen. Wir können etwas Bedeutung beimessen und damit unser Leben füllen, ohne dass es im Ernst diese Bedeutung haben kann – wie Eitelkeit oder die Verschiedenheit von Anderen. Die Sorge um sich selbst kann sich in einer negativen Dialektik der Selbstliebe verfangen. Das kommt in einer Passage in Der Liebe Tun zum Ausdruck, in der es darum geht, dass wir lernen sollen, uns selbst zu lieben.³² Damit sind wir zu der verdoppelten Frage nach der Sorge zurückgekommen: Wie bewahren wir uns in der Sorge um uns? Besonders in Der Liebe Tun ist es ein Grundthema, dass wir an unserer Seele Schaden nehmen können durch das, was wir selbst tun. Was wir gegen einen Anderen tun, bestimmt uns selbst. Um das Leben so führen zu können, dass wir uns selbst bewahren, müssen wir die Gefahr im Blick haben, die wir selbst ausmachen. Wir sollen lernen, uns vor uns selbst zu fürchten.³³ Ins Blickfeld rückt damit die Frage nach der Entscheidung des Lebens. Ein Leben zu führen schließt ein, dass wir versuchen zu entscheiden, was unser Leben entscheiden soll. Wenn unser Leben aber ist, wie wir es leben, scheint alles davon abzuhängen, was wir bedeutungsvoll finden. Wenn es so einfach wäre, würde die Aufgabe, ein Leben zu führen, bloß darin bestehen, unsere Entscheidungen im Leben auszuführen. Da es die Aufgabe des Lebens ist, subjektiv zu werden, eröffnet sich aber die Frage, wie wir uns darin bestimmen, ein Leben zu führen.

7 Einübung im Leben – in das Leben Wenn bei Kierkegaard – in zwei Reden über den Tod – das Leben als Thema in den Vordergrund rückt, ist sein Verfahren negativ und bleibt noch indirekt. Die Thematisierung findet vor einem negativen Hintergrund (der Gedankenlosigkeit im Leben im Umgang mit dem Leben) und durch den Umweg über „die Entscheidung des Todes“ statt.³⁴ Zuerst ist zum negativen Hintergrund zu sagen: Zeitkritisch bemerkt Vigilius Haufniensis im Begriff Angst, dass die Menschen sich heutzutage darin vervollkommnet haben, „in Gedankenlosigkeit das so schon angelegte Leben zu vergeuden.“³⁵ Die Gedankenlosigkeit kann so weit gehen, dass die Aufgabe des Lebens dadurch, sich das Leben immer leichter zu machen, völlig vergessen wird.    

SKS 9, 30 – 31 / LT, 27– 28. SKS 5, 448 / DRG, 180. SKS 5, 447 / DRG, 179. SKS 4, 371– 372 / BA, 68.

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Wenn Johannes Climacus in der Nachschrift die Aufgabe, subjektiv zu werden, in den Vordergrund rückt, ist dies ein Gegenzug gegen das Vergessen. Die Aufgabe besteht schon darin, den Sinn der Aufgabe des Lebens wider zu gewinnen. In einer Passage in der Nachschrift über das Sterben will Climacus zeigen, dass die Aufgabe des Lebens darin besteht, subjektiv zu werden, und zwar dadurch, dass er die Schwierigkeiten herausstellt, die in dem im elementaren Sinne Menschlichen liegt.³⁶ Die Schwierigkeit ist „z. B. das Sterben“³⁷ zu verstehen und damit zu leben.Wir können so oder so über die Ungewissheit des Todes reden und doch vergessen, diese Ungewissheit in das hinein zu denken, was wir über die Ungewissheit sagen. Die Ungewissheit des Todes bedeutet die Ungewissheit des Lebens, das wir schon leben. Genau da, wo es um das Allgemeinmenschliche geht, können wir vergessen zu verstehen. Wir können im Allgemeinen reden. Wenn Kierkegaard mit Johannes Climacus darauf insistiert, dass wir das, was uns als Menschen verbindet, mit uns, je für uns, verstehen sollen, geht es darum, denn Sinn für das Allgemeinmenschliche wieder zu gewinnen. Die traditionelle Kritik, dass es bei Kierkegaard um Subjektivismus und Individualismus geht, verfehlt genau diese Pointe. Nun liegt die Schwierigkeit, die Ungewissheit des Todes zu verstehen, in der Aufgabe, „ihn in jeden Augenblick meines Lebens hineinzudenken; denn da dessen Ungewissheit in jedem Augenblick da ist, ist diese Ungewissheit nur dadurch zu überwinden, dass ich sie jeden Augenblick überwinde. Ist dagegen die Ungewissheit des Todes so etwas im allgemeinen, so ist das, dass ich sterbe, auch so etwas in allgemeinen.“³⁸ Was Climacus hier zugespitzt hervorhebt, ist, dass die Aufgabe des Lebens für das ganze Leben reicht, indem es in jedem Augenblick um die Entscheidung des Leben geht: wir ich es lebe. Kierkegaard verfährt negativ, um das Positive hervorzutreten zu lassen: die Affirmation des Lebens.³⁹ Dass tritt vor allem in einer meist übersehenen Rede über die Freude hervor, die das Leben grundlos affirmiert.⁴⁰ Das Leben affirmieren wir aber, indem wir es als Aufgabe nehmen, und zwar als die Aufgabe, die für das  SKS 7, 153 – 158 / AUN1, 156 – 161.  SKS 7, 153 / AUN1, 156.  SKS 9, 154– 155 / AUN1, 157.  Obwohl Paul Ricoeur Kierkegaard differenziert auslegt (vgl. Paul Ricoeur, „Philosophieren nach Kierkegaard,“ in Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, hg. von Michael Theunissen und Wilfried Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, S. 579 – 596), tendiert er dazu, Kierkegaard in der Linie der Negationsphilosophie Sartres zu lesen (vgl. Paul Ricoeur, „Vraie et fausse Angoisse“ und „Négativité et affirmation originaire,“ in Paul Ricoeur, Histoire et verité, Paris: Seuil 1955, S. 317– 360).  Die Lilie auf dem Felde und der Vogel unter dem Himmel. Drei Fromme Reden (SKS 11, 40 – 48 / LF, 64– 74).

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ganze Leben reicht.Wir können aber so leben, dass wir vergessen, was es heißt, zu leben. Eine solche Kurzformel kann jedoch leicht irreführen. Denn es geht nicht darum, eine bestimmte, vorgeschriebene Antwort zu finden, sondern darum, die Aufgabe des Lebens zu verstehen, die darin liegt, es zu leben. Um die Aufgabe zu verstehen, müssen wir eben negativ anfangen, indem wir versuchen nachzuvollziehen, wie es überhaupt möglich ist, sie zu vergessen. Wie ist es möglich, das Leben so zu leben, dass es nicht zu einer Entscheidung des eigenen Lebens kommt? Man lebt durch das Leben hindurch, man schleicht sich davon, oder man versucht, sich nicht durch das Leben bestimmen zu lassen. Eine Entscheidung des Lebens trifft man mit sich – mit dem Leben, das man lebt. Ein Leben zu führen geht auf die Entscheidung des Lebens, das man lebt. Was das heißt, lässt Kierkegaard in der Krankheit zum Tode Anti Climacus negativ erklären: „Die meisten Menschen leben sicherlich mit allzu geringem Bewusstsein ihrer selbst, als dass sie eine Vorstellung davon haben könnten, was Folgerichtigkeit ist: das will heißen, sie existieren nicht in Eigenschaft (qua) Geist…Sie spielen sozusagen mit im Leben, aber nie erleben sie es, alles an Eines zu setzen.“⁴¹ Mindestens zwei bemerkenswerte Punkte sind an dieser kurzen Passage hervorzuheben. Es sieht so aus, als ob es die Natur der meisten Menschen wäre, ein so geringes Bewusstsein ihrer selbst zu haben, dass sie nie erleben, alles an Eines zu setzen. Erstens ist zu fragen, was es bedeutet, dass sie so sind? Sie leben so, mit diesem Bewusstsein ihrer selbst. Das heißt: Sie verhalten sich so. Zweitens ist festzuhalten, dass alles an Eines zu setzen nicht etwas ist, das man erlebt, sondern etwas, das man selbst tut. Wenn wir nie dazu kommen, alles an Eines zu setzen, verspielen wir eine Möglichkeit, die wir als Menschen haben. Wir können es nicht mit Hinweisen darauf erklären, dass unsere Natur so ist. Es handelt sich um Vergessen und Gedankenlosigkeit. Vielleicht können wir in der Vorstellung leben, dass wir eigentlich nicht selbst davon bestimmt werden, was wir selbst tun. Wir leben aber nur so, indem wir uns in dieser Vorstellung halten, können uns jedoch darin halten, ohne es uns klarzumachen. Es ist möglich, sich das Leben leicht zu machen und „sich durchs Leben zu stehlen.“⁴² Die Frage des Lebens lässt sich aber nicht darin auflösen, wie wir es leben wollen. Dass sie radikaler ist, kommt in folgender Passage in Entweder-Oder zu Ausdruck: „[W]eißt Du es denn nicht, es kommt eine Mitternachtsstunde, da jedermann sich demaskieren muss, glaubst Du etwa, dass das Leben immerfort mit sich scherzen lasse, glaubst Du, dass man sich kurz vor

 SKS 11, 219 / KT, 107.  SKS 9, 89 / LT, 95.

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Mitternacht wegschleichen könne, um dem Fallen der Maske zu entgehen?“⁴³ Was das Leben zeigt und was es zu denken gibt, stellt auch in Frage, wie wir mit Erfahrungen des Lebens leben. Das Leben gibt uns Möglichkeiten, zu der Vorstellung einer Entscheidung des Lebens zu gelangen. Nicht zuletzt kann sich das Leben für uns „an Eines“ anheften und auf dieses eine konzentrieren, wenn wir den Tod eines anderen Menschen erfahren, ohne den wir uns das eigene Leben nicht vorstellen können. Die Frage ist dann eher, wie wir mit Erfahrungen vom Verlust des Lebens leben. Es ist schwierig zu vermeiden, dass sich „im Leben“ die Frage meldet, wie wir leben und leben können. Auch die negativen Möglichkeiten, die hier im Anschluss an Kierkegaard berührt wurden, fordern alle folgendes: so zu leben, dass wir uns davon schleichen; uns das Leben leicht zu machen; oder die Frage zu vermeiden, warum wir leben, wie wir es tun. Wie Heidegger rückt Kierkegaard das Vergessen in den Vordergrund, kann es aber nicht so eindeutig wie Heidegger als eine Tendenz des faktischen Lebens verstehen. Indem das Leben uns die Frage stellt, wie wir es leben, kommen wir nicht um die ethische Dimension herum, die sich in der Frage meldet, was wir mit der Zeit tun. Auch vor diesem negativen Hintergrund ist der Umweg – in den beiden Reden über den Tod – eindrucksvoll. Die Rede „An einem Grabe“ (die letzte der Drei Reden bei gedachten Gelegenheiten aus dem Jahre 1845) sagt, worum es geht.⁴⁴ Es geht darum, „den ernsten Gedanken des Todes in seinem Leben einzuüben.“⁴⁵ Es stellt sich hier die Frage, warum es nicht nur sinnvoll, sondern auch nötig ist, den Gedanken des Todes in unserem Leben einzuüben. Dabei wendet sich die Rede an den Lebenden.⁴⁶ So „hat der ernste Gedanke des Todes den Lebenden gelehrt, die härteste Verschiedenheit zu durchdringen mit der Gleichheit vor Gott.“⁴⁷ Der Gedanke des Todes richtet sich gegen die Gedankenlosigkeit im Umgang mit dem Leben, die sich auch darin zeigen kann, dass wir unser Leben in der betonten Verschiedenheit von den Anderen verloren haben. Die „Verwirrung der Gedankenlosigkeit“ meldet sich auch, wenn wir den Tod im Allgemeinen betrachten.⁴⁸ Im Gedanken des Todes geht es darum, dass es mit dem Leben ernst ist. „Denn der Tod in dem Ernst gibt Lebenskraft wie nichts andres, macht wach wie nichts

 SKS 3, 157 / EO2, 170.  Vgl. Michael Theunissen, „Der Erbauliche im Gedanken an den Tod: Traditionale Elemente, innovative Ideen und unausgeschöpfte Potentiale in Kierkegaards Rede An einem Grabe,“ Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2000, S. 40 – 73.  SKS 5, 447– 448 / DRG, 179.  Ibid.  SKS 5, 458 / DRG, 192.  SKS 5, 461 / DRG, 196.

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andres.“⁴⁹ Dem Ernsten gibt der Gedanke des Todes „die rechte Fahrt ins Leben und das rechte Ziel, die Fahrt dahin zu richten.“⁵⁰ Er hat eine „spornende Macht“⁵¹ – auch dazu, anders zu leben. Die Rede handelt von der „Entscheidung des Todes.“⁵² Was heißt das? Ebenso, wie die Rede sich an den Lebenden wendet, hat die Entscheidung des Todes mit unserer Entscheidung des Lebens zu tun. Sie stellt unsere Entscheidung in Frage: Was entscheidet für uns das Leben? Wie tun wir das: den Gedanken des Todes in unser Leben einzuüben? Wieder ist die Antwort: Wir tun es „im Leben“ – darin, wie wir es leben. Die Rede wendet sich an uns, indem wir zu fragen sind, wie wir uns zu unserem Leben verhalten, indem wir es leben. Die Denkbewegung, welche die Rede „An einem Grabe“ anzeigt und hervorbringt, tritt noch deutlicher in der zweiten Rede „Der Liebe Tun, eines Verstorbenen zu gedenken“ (in Der Liebe Tun) zu Tage: „Ja, gehe einmal wieder hinaus zu den Toten, um dort das Leben aufs Ziel zu nehmen.“⁵³ Denn der Tod ist „der kürzeste Inbegriff des Lebens.“⁵⁴ Im Leben – indem wir leben – können wir das Leben aus dem Blick verlieren, vor allem indem wir uns an unsere Verschiedenheiten von den Anderen verlieren. Wir vergessen dabei, dass wir das Leben zu leben haben, und dass uns hinter den Verschiedenheiten, in denen wir unser Leben je haben, menschliches Leben gemeinsam ist. Dass „alle Menschen Blutsverwandte“ sind, „diese Verwandtschaft des Lebens...wird im Leben so oft geleugnet.“⁵⁵ Die Bewegung „über das Leben hinaus, um das Leben zu sehen,“ mag paradox erscheinen. Wir haben jedoch diese Bewegung nötig, weil wir uns dadurch, wie wir es leben, im Leben verfangen können. Sie kann als eine Transzendenzbewegung in der Form einer Doppelbewegung bestimmt werden:⁵⁶ über das Leben hinaus, um zum Leben zu kommen. Indem wir in dieser Bewegung zum Leben zurückkommen, ist dasselbe Leben anders. Wir verstehen es anders und können es vielleicht anders leben. Es ist aber keine Transzendenzbewegung, die wir einfach inszenieren.Wir sind schon durch das Leben bewegt und können deshalb durch den Gedanken des Todes zum Leben geführt werden.

       

SKS 5, 453 / DRG, 185. SKS 5, 453 / DRG, 186. SKS 5, 458 / DRG, 192. SKS 5, 447 / DRG, 179. SKS 9, 339 / LT, 378. Ibid. Ibid. Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Zeit und Transzendenz,“ Kapitel 22 in diesem Buch.

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8 Entscheidung des Lebens In der Entscheidung des Todes tritt das Leben als dieses bestimmte Leben so hervor, dass wir mit der Frage konfrontiert werden, wie wir das Leben entscheiden, indem wir es leben. Ob wir es wollen oder nicht, findet eine Entscheidung des Lebens dadurch statt, wie wir es leben. Unsere Entscheidung des Lebens besteht aber nicht darin, dass das Leben wird, wie wir es entscheiden.Vielmehr haben wir mit unseren Entscheidungen zu leben. Bei Kierkegaard wird diese Figur zwar nicht als Entscheidung des Lebens thematisiert. Entscheidung ist jedoch ein Schlüsselbegriff seines Existenzdenkens. Was in Subjektivität und Leidenschaft entschieden wird, ist – so kann argumentiert werden – das Leben, das wir zu leben haben. Das ist hier nicht auszuführen. Vielmehr ist direkt zu den Begriffen Verzweiflung und Glaube über zu gehen, die auf entgegensetzte Weise die Entscheidung des Lebens tragen. Auch hier wird eine systematische Rekonstruktion vorgelegt. Sie will zunächst zeigen, wie der Begriff des Lebens in die Analyse der Verzweiflung hineinspielen kann. Die Verzweiflungsanalyse in der Krankheit zum Tode will vertieft den Blick für die negative Möglichkeit scharfen. Es geht darum, das „noch Entsetzlicher“ fürchten zu lernen.⁵⁷ In der Verzweiflung als Krankheit zum Tode wird unsere Einstellung zum Leben selbst betroffen. Wir können einen Verlust erleiden, der uns zum Verzweifeln bringt. Wir werden dann in unserem Verhältnis zu dem Leben getroffen, das wir zu leben haben. Wenn wir verzweifeln, verzweifeln wir aber selbst. Wir tun etwas mit uns selbst: Wir geben uns auf. Das mag nicht ganz einleuchten.⁵⁸ Denn wenn wir von einem Verlust getroffen werden, der uns im Verhältnis zum eigenen Leben trifft, kommt die Verzweiflung ja zu uns und trifft uns. Dass wir aber selbst etwas tun, wird deutlicher, wenn wir Verzweiflung und Trauer miteinander vergleichen. In einer Passage in Der Liebe Tun heißt es, dass wir – wenn wir den Verlust eines anderen Menschen erleiden, ohne den wir uns das Leben nicht vorstellen können – trauern sollen, aber nicht verzweifeln dürfen.⁵⁹ Nur so können wir die Liebe – und uns selbst in der Liebe – bewahren. Kierkegaards Analyse der Verzweiflung skizziert ein Register von Möglichkeiten, sich selbst aufzugeben. Verzweiflung kann unauffällig sein und sich verbergen. Die Kernbedeutung ist jedoch, dass wir uns selbst aufgeben, indem wir

 SKS 11, 125 / KT, 7.  Vgl. Michael Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993, und die Diskussion zwischen Michael Theunissen, Alastair Hannay und Arne Grøn in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 15 – 116.  SKS 11, 50 / LT, 50.

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den Mut zum eigenen Leben verlieren. Das ist nicht nur „entsetzlich,“ sondern das „noch Entsetzlichere,“ indem wir uns selbst verraten. Es geht um die Einstellung, in der wir das Leben empfangen. Durch die Art, wie wir es leben, kann das Leben für uns verloren werden. Das bedeutet nicht, dass wir nicht weiter leben können – wir können es sogar erfolgreich tun und die Welt gewinnen.Wir leben aber verzweifelt, indem wir nicht zu uns stehen können. Die Zuspitzung der negativen Möglichkeit zielt wieder auf die Affirmation: das eigene Leben zu leben und zu sich zu stehen. Lässt sich diese Affirmation als ein Großes Ja zum Leben interpretieren? Ein Großes Ja tendiert dazu, uns von uns selbst zu lösen. Was bejaht werden soll, ist aber das Leben, das je meines ist, indem wir es schon leben, und es soll dadurch affirmiert werden, dass wir zu uns stehen. Wir können nur im Ernst zu uns stehen, indem wir die Furcht vor uns selbst lernen. Dadurch gewinnen wir einen anderen Mut, den Mut des Glaubens, in dem wir das Leben neu empfangen. Findet auch hier eine Entscheidung des Lebens statt? Es ist jedenfalls keine Entscheidung, die wir treffen, sondern eine Entscheidung des Lebens, die wir empfangen. Wir empfangen sie aber „im Leben.“ Das Leben, das wir schon leben, geht nicht darin auf, wie wir es gelebt haben, sondern wird von uns neu entschieden: als dasselbe Leben, das noch und neu zu leben ist. Was bedeutet dann Entscheidung des Lebens? Die Rede über die „Entscheidung des Todes“ enthält eine Verschiebung. Sie rückt ins Blickfeld, wie wir uns zum Leben stellen, indem wir es leben. Sie stellt damit in Frage, wie wir unser Leben bestimmen lassen, und weist darauf hin, dass wir ein Leben zu führen haben. „Im Leben“ steht eine Entscheidung des Lebens auf dem Spiel.Wie wir uns zu unserem Leben (ein)stellen, entscheidet, was für uns bedeutungsvoll ist. Wie wir uns zum Leben einstellen, ist aber eine Frage dessen, was es für uns bedeutet. Obwohl wir uns zum Leben stellen, kommt die Bedeutung des Lebens auf uns zu. Das zeigt sich darin, dass wir eine Entscheidung des Lebens nur mit unserem Leben „im Leben,“ treffen können. Ob sie ernst gemeint ist, hängt davon ab, wie wir mit ihr leben. Eine existentielle Entscheidung, die darauf ausgeht, wie wir im Blick auf Leben und Tod leben, fordert ihren Augenblick, in dem das Leben für uns sich wie in einem Blick sammelt. Sie wird aber selbst darin entschieden, wie wir mit der Entscheidung leben. Beides – im Augenblick und jeden Augenblick – wird bei Kierkegaard betont. Die doppelte Pointe, dass unser Leben eine Frage dessen ist, wie wir uns zum Leben einstellen, und dass die Bedeutung des Lebens auf uns zukommt, weist auf die Verwicklung von Subjektivität als Aktivität und als Passivität hin. Sie wird durch den Begriff des Geistes auf folgendes zugespitzt: das Leben zu verlieren, um das Leben zu gewinnen.

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9 Leben und Geist Es sei hier wieder mit der grundlegenden Frage des Wie begonnen: „Also das Geistige, dies: auf welche Weise man den Weg des Lebens geht, macht den Unterschied und die Verschiedenheit des Weges.“⁶⁰ Geist ist, wie wir den Weg des Lebens gehen. Das Wie macht aber den Unterschied des Weges. In Der Liebe Tun wird es formelhaft beschrieben als: das Gehen mit Gott, „um das Leben und sich selbst kennen zu lernen.“⁶¹ Wir können den Weg des Lebens so gehen, dass wir das Leben in einem metaphorischen oder geistigen Sinne verlieren. Erstens wird hier die negative Möglichkeit intensiviert. Wir können das Leben durch die Weise, wie wir es leben, verlieren. Das wird in Formen der Verzweiflung deutlich, in denen wir den Mut und die Hoffnung aufgeben. Es ist aber wichtig zu sehen, dass es sich um ein Register von Möglichkeiten handelt, die uns als Menschen auf dem Lebensweg begleiten, indem wir den Weg mit uns gehen. Die radikale Möglichkeit, die mitspielt, besteht darin, dass wir uns selbst verraten und Schaden an der Seele nehmen. Wir können die Welt gewinnen und uns selbst verlieren. Zweitens wird damit auch die Frage der Normativität zugespitzt. Sie liegt schon darin, dass wir uns selbst fragen müssen, wie wir leben.Wozu „verwenden“ wir die Zeit des Lebens? Was erfüllt für uns das Leben? „Leben“ kann metaphorisch oder geistig das bezeichnen, was unser Leben erfüllt. Merkwürdig ist, dass das Leben für uns nicht nur seinen Sinn durch das verlieren kann, was uns geschieht, sondern auch durch das, was wir selbst tun und wollen. Wir können selbst das Leben verspielen. Diese Verwicklung hat Kierkegaard mit dem Begriff Geist im Blick. Es geht um die Tiefendimension des Lebens, in der das Leben in Frage kommt: Was ist „das Leben“ im Leben? Geist hat mit der Einstellung zu tun, mit der wir das Leben empfangen und leben. Einstellung und Leben verteilen sich jedoch nicht einfach auf zwei Seiten. Denn mit dem Begriff des Geistes kommt die Verwicklung ins Blickfeld – die Verwicklung der Einstellung zum Leben und der Bedeutung des Lebens, die auf uns zukommt. Die Einstellung zum Leben liegt darin, wie wir es leben. Sie wird selbst durch das Leben eröffnet und ermöglicht. Unser Leben hängt so von der Einstellung zum Leben ab, dass es nur lebendig für uns ist, wenn wir es als ein Leben leben, das zu uns kommt. Der Geist, der lebendig macht, kommt zu uns als Geist.⁶²

 SKS 8, 385 / ERG, 304.  SKS 9, 83 / LT, 88.  Vgl. besonders, Zur Selbstprüfung der Gegenwart anbefohlen III (1851): „Der Geist ist’s, der da lebendig macht“ (SKS 13, 95 – 108 / ZS, 105 – 120).

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So merkwürdig die Möglichkeit ist, dass wir selbst unser Leben verspielen und verlieren, so paradox ist die umgekehrte Möglichkeit, dass e s i n der Lebensgefahr, in der wir uns dann befinden, gilt, „das Leben zu verlieren, um es zu gewinnen.“⁶³ Wir müssen uns jedoch verschieden zu den beiden Möglichkeiten verhalten. Während wir die erste Möglichkeit haben, wird uns die zweite die Möglichkeit als Möglichkeit des Glaubens geschenkt. Wenn wir bei der ersten Möglichkeit metaphorisch oder geistig vom Tod im Leben reden können, geht die zweite Möglichkeit durch den Tod zum Leben. Der Tod schafft alle Verschiedenheiten ab, zu denen wir in der Vorliebe hatten, um uns Identität zu geben. In dem Versuch, uns selbst Identität zu verschaffen, bleiben wir selbst zurück als diejenigen, um deren Identität es geht. Wenn die Liebe dazu dient, uns selbst Identität zu geben, wird die Identität des Anderen festgelegt. Er ist der Geliebte, der uns ermöglicht, wir selbst zu werden. Wir können uns so wechselseitig in Identitäten verfangen. Im Kontrast dazu heißt es in Der Liebe Tun: „doch geht der Weg zum Leben und zum Ewigen durch den Tod und durch die Abschaffung der Verschiedenheiten: deshalb fuhrt allein die Liebe zum Nächsten in Wahrheit zum Leben.“⁶⁴ Nicht nur ist das Leben – metaphorisch oder geistig – ein Weg. Die Frage ist auch, wie wir auf dem Lebensweg zum Leben kommen. Wegweisung wird genug angeboten, aber nur eine fuhrt „in Wahrheit einen Menschen durchs Leben zum Leben,“ heißt es in den Erbaulichen Reden in verschiedenem Geist mit Hinweis auf Joh 14,6.⁶⁵ Wir kommen zum Leben und führen uns nicht selbst dazu. Jedoch kommen wir nur zum Leben „im Leben.“ Wir haben selbst den Weg zu gehen, wenn wir versuchen, ein Leben zu führen. Dass die Forderung, den Nächsten zu lieben, uns selbst einschließt („als dich selbst“), rückt die Aufgabe uns „so nahe auf den Leib wie möglich“.⁶⁶ Die Aufgabe wird uns so nahe wie möglich an das Leben gebracht, das wir schon leben. Nur so verstehen wir, dass sie uns angeht. Mit dem Begriff Geist wird das Leben im folgenden Sinne doppelt betont. Menschliches Leben ist je meines, indem jeder sein eigenes Leben zu leben hat, und es ist ein gemeinsames Leben, indem das Leben, das wir je für uns zu leben haben, mit anderem verwickelt ist, ehe wir uns verbunden wissen. Dass wir je für uns ein Leben zu leben haben, bedeutet nicht, dass jeder ein Leben für sich hat, das dann – vielleicht – mit dem Leben der Anderen verbunden werden kann. Im Gegenteil geht die Beziehung zu den Anderen in die Selbstbeziehung ein: „Ei-

   

SKS 9, 356 / LT, 396; im Anschluss an Mk 8,35. SKS 9, 69 / LT, 71– 72. SKS 8, 319 / ERG, 229. SKS 9, 28 / LT, 25; vgl. SKS 8, 100 – 101 / LT, 107.

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gentümlichkeit haben, heißt an die Eigentümlichkeit jedes anderen glauben.“⁶⁷ Wir haben uns selbst in Beziehung zu den Anderen. Wie man das eigene Leben lebt, kann in die Möglichkeiten Anderer, ihr Leben zu leben, eingreifen. Wenn die Rede „An einem Grabe“ den Lebenden dazu auffordert, sich selbst zu betrachten, geht es nicht um Selbstbespiegelung, sondern im Gegenteil darum, sich selbst in Acht zu nehmen.

10 Leben und Selbstverhalten Obwohl der Begriff des Lebens durchgehend in Kierkegaards Existenzdenken hinein- und mitspielt, betreibt er keine direkte Lebensphilosophie. Er braucht jedoch einen Begriff des Lebens. Existieren heißt, als derjenige herauszustehen, der ein Leben zu führen hat. Existenz auf den Begriff zu bringen fordert, dass wir uns an das Leben erinnern, das wir schon leben. In der Entfaltung des Existenzdenkens geht es auch um das Leben. Durch den Begriff des Geistes wird die existentielle Entscheidung des Lebens zugespitzt: das Leben verlieren und das Leben gewinnen. Warum dann nicht Lebensphilosophie? Es ist möglich, dafür zu argumentieren, dass Leben aus dem Leben selbst zu verstehen ist. Wenn wir uns zum Leben verhalten, leben wir. Selbst wenn wir das Leben betrachten, sind wir im Leben situiert. Konnten wir dann nicht sagen, dass das Leben sich in uns ausdrückt? Oder dass Leben sich zu Leben verhalt? Wenn wir artikulieren wollen, dass Leben alles ist, brauchen wir ein anderes. Die Frage ist schon, wie wir überhaupt das Leben in den Blick bekommen, das alles ist. Die Denkbewegung, die Kierkegaard sowohl vorführt als anzeigt, besteht darin, dass wir durch den Gedanken des Todes das Leben in Sicht bekommen. Das zeigt aber, dass menschliches Leben das „Andere“ des Lebens schon bei sich hat. Wir leben als Menschen ein Leben, in das der Tod schon eingebrochen ist. Die Frage ist nur, ob wir es sehen, und wie wir damit leben. „Im Leben“ – indem wir leben – sind wir schon mit dem Problem konfrontiert, wie wir es leben. Wir sollen uns nicht erst in Beziehung zum Leben setzen, sondern sind schon selbst darauf bezogen. Das „Andere“ des Lebens wird damit eine Frage des Lebens. Die Entscheidung des Todes betrifft das Leben „selbst.“ Wir können mit der Vorstellung eines anderen Lebens so leben, dass wir denken, das Leben sei anderswo. Das weist darauf zurück, dass das Leben sich für uns ändern kann. Es kann sich so ändern, dass die Frage dann die ist, wie wir es leben.

 SKS 8, 270 / LT, 300.

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Das Leben kann für uns verloren gehen, und es kann für uns erneuert werden. Ware dies nicht ein Argument dafür, das Leben als Kategorie für das Verstehen des Lebens zu nehmen? Leben hat das Andere des Lebens bei sich und kann selbst anders werden. Wenn wir sagen wollen, dass Leben alles ist, stellt sich aber das Problem, wie wir dann verstehen, dass es im Leben für uns auf etwas ankommt. Wenn wir antworten, dass es im Leben auf „das Leben“ ankommt, ist dies Leben, worauf es ankommt, eben nicht alles Leben. Der Grund, warum Kierkegaard nicht ohne weiteres Lebensphilosophie betreibt, ist darin zu suchen, dass wir etwas mit dem Leben tun, indem wir es selbst leben. Dass wir ein Leben zu führen haben, geht nicht im Leben „selbst“ auf. Es geht nicht im Leben auf, das mit uns geschieht, und es geht nicht in einem übergreifenden Leben auf, das in unserem Leben zum Ausdruck kommt. Wir treten als diejenigen heraus, die sich zum Leben verhalten, indem wir es schon leben. Systematisch kann deshalb der entscheidende Punkt so zusammengefasst werden: Einerseits ist das Selbstverhältnis darin eingeschrieben, dass wir ein Leben zu führen haben, das wir schon leben. Es geht uns an, indem wir davon betroffen sind. Was es heißt, ein Selbst zu sein, ist in diesem Kontext des Lebens auszulegen. Sich zu dem Leben zu verhalten, kommt nicht zu dem Leben hinzu, das wir leben. Wir leben selbstverhaltend. Andererseits können wir unser Selbstverhalten nicht in das Leben zurücklegen. Wenn wir uns selbst durch das Leben erklären wollen, das wir leben, kommen wir selbst dazwischen. Wir verhalten uns dazu. Das bedeutet, dass wir auch mit unseren Selbsterklärungen zu leben haben. Wir ek-sistieren, d. h. wir stehen heraus, indem das Leben mit uns geschieht als diejenigen, die es zu leben haben. Wenn wir versuchen, einen anderen Menschen dadurch tiefer zu verstehen, dass wir fragen, wie sich das Leben für ihn gestaltet, bedeutet das auch, dass wir fragen, wie er sich zu dem Leben stellt, das er lebt. Wenn wir im Leben des Anderen nur ein Leben sehen, das sich ausdrückt, ist es nicht sein Leben. Das Leben geschieht mit ihm. Die Subjektivität, die darin liegt, können wir nicht auf das Leben zurückführen, das mit ihm geschieht. Subjektivität heißt hier: sich darin zum Leben zu verhalten, indem man es lebt. Die Frage ist schon, wie man das Leben nimmt, und ob und wie man sich mit dem Leben identifizieren kann, das man lebt. Zu sich im Leben zu stehen, fordert vielleicht eben, dass man sich nicht in dem Leben aufgehen lässt, welches man lebt. Deshalb vermag die Würde eines Menschen auch darin liegen, dass er sein Leben aufs Spiel setzen kann. Entscheidend ist schließlich auch, was nicht gesagt wird. Kierkegaard spricht eben nicht vom Leben als einem Quasi-Subjekt. Stattdessen geht es um das Leben, wie wir es faktisch leben. Wir leben es so, dass wir uns dazu verhalten. Dies ist keine zusätzliche Reflexion, sondern wie wir selbst (als Selbst) leben. Was durch

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den Begriff Existenz hervorgehoben wird, ist die Verbindung von Leben und Subjektivität. Indem Existenz in den Vordergrund tritt, bleibt etwas im Hintergrund, das die Artikulation der Existenz ermöglicht: das Leben, das wir zu leben haben. Die Bewegung läuft aber auch umgekehrt. Im Versuch, Existenz auf den Begriff zu bringen, geht es darum, menschliches Leben zu verstehen, das eben nicht in einem direkten Griff – aus dem Leben selbst – zu haben ist. Insofern ist Existenzdenken eine indirekte Lebensphilosophie. Nun könnte uns die Erfahrung, dass das Leben uns übersteigt, indem es uns überwältigt, zu der Vorstellung veranlassen, das Leben als absolutes zu verstehen. Wie kommen wir aber dann vom Leben zu dem Verhältnis zum Leben, das sich schon darin zeigt, dass wir uns Leben als absolutes vorstellen, und dass wir uns dem Leben hingeben können? Wir stehen nicht vor der Alternative, dass entweder unser Leben dadurch bestimmt ist, dass wir überwältigt werden und mit dem, was wir selber denken und tun, zu kurz kommen, oder dass unser Leben dadurch bestimmt ist, dass wir es leben. Die erste Option wurde Subjektivität auf Leben zurückführen, weist aber auf Subjektivität hin (wir kommen zu kurz). Die zweite bestimmt Leben auf Subjektivität hin, legt aber Subjektivität so aus, dass wir uns dadurch bestimmen, dass wir ein Leben zu führen haben. Wir werden als diejenigen überwältigt, die schon ein Leben zu leben haben. Was zu uns kommt, ist aber auch, was wir selbst tun, um das Leben zu führen. So lässt sich damit das Kierkegaard‘sche Motiv reformulieren: Es geht darum, zu sich zu stehen, indem man sich sein Leben aneignet. Ein Leben zu führen lauft auch auf die Frage hinaus, wie wir mit dem leben, was wir tun, um das Leben zu gestalten. Ein Leben zu führen heißt also auch: das Leben zu leben, das wir zu führen versuchen.⁶⁸

 Für die sprachliche Revision meines Textes möchte ich Claudia Welz herzlich danken.

Chapter 10 Zweideutigkeiten der Angst 1 Eingang Warum schreibt Kierkegaard ein Buch über Angst – und zwar über den Begriff „Angst“? Wie verhält sich hier das Phänomen zum Begriff, und wie wird Angst hier – in der Angstanalyse – auf den Begriff gebracht? Um die letzte Frage zuerst zu beantworten: Zweideutigkeit ist ein (vielleicht der) Schlüsselbegriff in Kierkegaards Angstanalyse. Was liegt in diesem Begriff? Was ich im Folgenden zeigen möchte, ist, dass dieser Begriff an eine Theorie der Subjektivität gekoppelt ist, welche die Frage nach dem Subjekt wieder neu eröffnet. Dabei geht es mir darum, das philosophische Potential der Angstanalyse ans Licht zu bringen.

2 Zweideutigkeit Dass die Angst durch Zweideutigkeit definiert ist, geht aus dem Paragraphen über den Begriff der Angst im ersten Kapitel des Buches Der Begriff Angst (1844) direkt hervor: „Wenn wir die dialektischen Bestimmungen von Angst betrachten wollen, so zeigt es sich, dass diese eben die dialektische Zweideutigkeit haben. Angst ist eine sympathetische Antipathie und eine antipathetische Sympathie.“¹ Was heißt das? Es klingt wie eine Antwort auf die Frage: Was ist Angst? Doch es ist nur eine Eingangsbestimmung, die das ins Blickfeld bringt, was genauer bestimmt werden muss: die Angst als das auf den Begriff zu Bringende. Schon hier spielt das Verhältnis von Phänomen und Begriff eine Rolle. Wo liegt der Kern in dieser Eingangsbestimmung der Angst als sympathetische Antipathie und antipathetische Sympathie? Darin, dass ein Subjekt hier mitbestimmt wird: Wenn man sympathetisch antipathetisch bestimmt – oder gestimmt – ist, befindet man sich „zwischen“ Sympathie und Antipathie. Man wird dann zugleich angezogen und abgestoßen. In der Angst stößt man auf sich selbst – als gestimmt. Was aus der Eingangsbestimmung der Angst implizit hervorgeht, ist damit ein Subjekt, das sich nicht so hat, dass es sich einfach bestimmt, sondern je schon auf die eine oder andere Weise gestimmt ist, wenn es sich bestimmen soll. Es hat sich zu bestimmen, indem es bereits ge- und bestimmt

 SKS 4, 348 / BA, 40. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-016

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ist. Kurz gesagt geht es in der Zweideutigkeit der Angst um die Zweideutigkeit der Subjektivität.² Die Schlüsselstelle zur Bestimmung der Angst als Zweideutigkeit ist dem Anfang des IV. Kapitels des Buches über den Begriff Angst zu entnehmen. Zunächst müssen wir darüber im Klaren sein, dass die Angstanalyse auf zwei verschiedenen Ebenen stattfindet (dies wird leicht übersehen). Auf der ersten Ebene – Kapitel I bis III des Buches – wird Angst durch die Möglichkeit der Freiheit bestimmt (Angst vor dem Fall). Auf der zweiten Ebene – Kapitel IV – verhält sich ein Mensch in Angst zu der von ihm selbst verspielten Möglichkeit der Freiheit – oder genauer: zu sich als demjenigen, der selbst die Möglichkeit der Freiheit verspielt hat (Angst nach dem Fall). Die Möglichkeit der Freiheit ist hier anders bestimmt, und zwar durch die Erfahrung, dass wir uns (in Freiheit) unfrei machen können. Am Anfang des vierten Kapitels heißt es dann: Sobald „der qualitative Sprung gesetzt ist, sollte man glauben, die Angst wäre behoben.“³ Warum dies? Weil jetzt der Gegenstand der Angst ein Bestimmtes ist, „da der Unterschied zwischen Gut und Böse im Konkreten gesetzt ist und die Angst daher ihre dialektische Zweideutigkeit verloren hat.“⁴ Angst ist also durch dialektische Zweideutigkeit definiert. Dass diese nicht behoben wird, dass die Angstanalyse also auf einer zweiten Ebene weitergeht, liegt daran, dass die Zweideutigkeit wiederkehrt – und zwar in Bezug auf eine Wirklichkeit, die von dem bestimmt wird, was man selbst getan hat. Die beiden Hauptformen der Angst im Kapitel IV – Angst vor dem Bösen und Angst vor dem Guten – stellen gesteigerte Formen der Zweideutigkeit dar. Die Angstanalyse geht also nicht nur von der Bestimmung der Angst als Zweideutigkeit aus, sondern ist eine immer intensiv werdende Analyse von Zweideutigkeiten der Angst (im Plural) – und zwar auf die Zuspitzung hin, dass das Subjekt zwei Willen hat: „einen untergeordneten, ohnmächtigen, der das Offenbarwerden will, und einen stärkeren, der die Verschlossenheit will.“⁵ Die Zweideutigkeit der Angst wird insofern plastisch begriffen, als mit diesem Begriff eine Reihe von immer intensiveren Möglichkeiten auf eine bestimmte

 Arne Grøn, „Homo subiectus. Zur zweideutigen Subjektivität des Menschen,“ in Seinkönnen: Der Mensch zwischen Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, hg. von Ingolf. U. Dalferth und Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, S. 19 – 33.  SKS 4, 413 / BA, 114.  Ibid.  SKS 4, 430 / BA, 133.

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Pointe hin gedeutet wird, und zwar auf die Freiheit als Selbstbestimmung.⁶ Es geht um die Komplikation dieser Freiheit. Was entdeckt wird, ist die Möglichkeit, sich selbst unfrei machen zu können. Wie ist das möglich? Die Angst vor dem Guten erscheint als ein Paradox: Sie ist Angst vor dem, was uns vor der Angst (vor dem Bösen) befreien würde. Sie – die Angst vor dem Guten – wird als „das Dämonische“ bestimmt: Das Dämonische verschließt sich nicht in sich mit Etwas, sondern schließt sich selber ein, und darin liegt das Tiefsinnige am Dasein, dass die Unfreiheit eben sich selber zu einem Gefangenen macht. Die Freiheit ist immerfort „kommunizierend“ (sogar wenn man auf die religiöse Bedeutung des Worts Rücksicht nehmen will, schadet es nichts), die Unfreiheit wird immer mehr verschlossen und will keine Kommunikation. Dies kann man auf allen Gebieten beobachten.⁷

Entscheidend ist, wie ein Subjekt zu sich selber steht: Wie sieht sein Selbstverhältnis aus, wenn ein Subjekt, das sich selbst bestimmen soll, sich selbst verschließt und zu einem Gefangenen seiner selbst macht? In jener Unfreiheit, die nicht einfach von außen kommt, steckt Freiheit. Kierkegaard spricht explizit von der „der Unfreiheit zugrunde liegende[n] Freiheit.“⁸ Eine solche selbstverschuldete Unfreiheit ist nichtsdestotrotz rätselhaft. Man kann sich zwar vornehmen, sich frei zu machen, aber man kann sich nicht vornehmen, sich unfrei zu machen. Dass man sich selbst unfrei macht, ist eher etwas, was mit einem geschieht. Man kann sich nicht auf dieselbe Weise unfrei machen wie man einen anderen Menschen unfrei machen kann oder von einem anderen unfrei gemacht werden kann. Wie ist dies überhaupt möglich: sich selbst unfrei zu machen? An dieser Stelle wird der Begriff Angst zentral. Worauf zielt die Angstanalyse Kierkegaards? Wie gesagt geht es mir hier um das philosophische Potential der Angstanalyse. Was in Frage steht, ist, was es heißt, ein Subjekt zu sein: ein Subjekt der Angst. Sowohl die Eingangs- wie auch Schlussbestimmung werde ich auf genau diesen Punkt hin lesen. Wird die Angst als sympathetische Antipathie und als antipathetische Sympathie (so die Eingangsbestimmung) bestimmt, stellt sich die Frage, wie ein Subjekt – so gestimmt – mit sich selbst gestellt ist (zwischen Antipathie und Sympathie, oder genauer: als sowohl angezogen als auch abgestoßen). Dass die Angst vor dem Guten auf

 Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Frihed i religionsfilosofisk perspektiv,“ in Frihed – idé og virkelighed, hg. von Arne Grøn und H. C.Wind, Frederiksberg: Anis 1989, S. 9 – 30.Vgl. auch Arne Grøn, Angst bei Søren Kierkegaard. Eine Einführung in sein Denken, übers. von Ulrich Lincoln, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1999, S. 80 – 104.  SKS 4, 425 / BA, 128.  SKS 4, 425 / BA, 127.

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diese Zweideutigkeit hin bestimmt wird und dass der in sich Verschlossene zwei Willen hat (so die Schlussbestimmung), erlaubt uns, die Frage folgendermaßen weiterzuführen: Was heißt es, ein Subjekt zu sein, das sich „zwischen“ zwei Willen stellen kann? Das Selbstverhältnis wird in diesem Fall nicht vom Subjekt etabliert, sondern lediglich erfahren. Kierkegaards Angstanalysen provozieren die Frage, was es bedeutet, dass die Unfreiheit – also dass man sich selbst unfrei macht – als etwas erfahren wird, das mit einem geschieht. Anders gesagt: Die Angstanalysen handeln von der Verwicklung von Subjektivität als Aktivität und Subjektivität als Passivität.

3 Was ein Mensch ist Wenn wir Kierkegaards Buch über den Begriff der Angst als eine Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit lesen, wirkt es schon merkwürdig, dass Kierkegaards Anthropologie in einem Buch über Angst (Der Begriff Angst) und in einem Buch über Verzweiflung (Die Krankheit zum Tode) zu finden ist. Was am Phänomen der Angst verleiht ihm diese Bedeutung? Kehren wir zur Eingangspassage über die Angst als sympathetische Antipathie und antipathetische Sympathie zurück. Der nächstfolgende Abschnitt beginnt mit den folgenden beiden Sätzen: „Dass die Angst sichtbar werde, das ist der Angelpunkt des Ganzen. Der Mensch ist eine Synthesis.“⁹ Was verbindet diese beiden Sätze? Wie kommen wir vom ersten zum zweiten und wieder zurück? Die Frage ist auch, was Angst über das Menschsein offenbart. Genauer: Was ist ein Mensch, dass er sich ängstigen kann? Die Antwort, die zwischen den beiden Sätzen steckt, lautet: Dass ein Mensch sich ängstigen kann, zeigt, dass er eine Synthese ist. Wichtig ist wie Kierkegaard die Synthesebestimmung umformt. Als Synthese ist ein Mensch nicht nur „zwischen“ den heterogenen Momenten, aus denen er zusammengesetzt ist. Er ist darin zwischen sich als Seele und als Leib, zwischen sich als endlich und als unendlich bestimmt. Er verhält sich zu sich als endlich und unendlich. Das bedeutet, dass er sich selbst aufgegeben ist. Seine Identität ist nicht vorgegeben, sondern eine Frage dessen, wie er sich verhält. Das heißt gerade nicht, dass der Mensch seine Identität selbst konstruieren kann. Wenn wir das tun könnten, stünde unsere Identität nicht auf dem Spiel (Wir könnten uns nicht ängstigen).

 SKS 4, 349 / BA, 41.

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Wir sind uns selbst gegeben, indem wir uns verhalten. Dass wir eine Synthese sind, bedeutet, dass wir mit uns selbst gesetzt sind. Wir sind ein „Selbstverhältnis“: ein Verhältnis, das sich zu sich verhält – wie es später im Buch Die Krankheit zum Tode (1849) heißt. Dass es in diesem Selbstverhältnis nicht (oder jedenfalls nicht nur) um Reflexion geht, zeigt die Angstanalyse. Wenn wir die Angst ins Blickfeld bekommen, haben wir einen Blick dafür, dass uns unsere Identität sowohl gegeben als auch aufgegeben ist. Sie ist sowohl uneinholbar (d. h. nicht konstruierbar) als auch fragil. Dennoch sind Kierkegaards Bestimmungen schwer nachvollziehbar: Angst als Zweideutigkeit, Angst als der Angelpunkt des Ganzen, der Mensch als Synthese. Zwischen den beiden Passagen – d. h. der Eingangsbestimmung (Angst als sympathetische Antipathie und antipathetische Sympathie) und der Synthesebestimmung – kommt ein Abschnitt über den qualitativen Sprung. Der zentrale Passus lautet wie folgt: Der qualitative Sprung steht außerhalb aller Zweideutigkeit, aber der, welcher durch Angst hindurch schuldig wird, er wird ja unschuldig; denn er ist es nicht selbst gewesen, sondern die Angst, eine fremde Macht, welche ihn packt, eine Macht, nein, vor der er sich ängstigte; – und doch ist er ja schuldig, denn er versank in der Angst, welche er dennoch liebte, indem er sie fürchtete. Es gibt in der Welt nichts Zweideutigeres als dies.¹⁰

Zunächst: Auf welche Art und Weise steht der qualitative Sprung „außerhalb aller Zweideutigkeit“? Dass ein Mensch schuldig wird, ist nicht zweideutig. Wie er es wird, nämlich durch die Angst, ist es. Kierkegaard unterscheidet zwischen Sünde und Sündigkeit. In der Sünde tun wir selbst etwas, wodurch wir Böses in die Welt hineinbringen. „Sünde“ können wir auch so übersetzen, dass das, was wir tun, an uns haftet – als unser Tun. Wir werden von unserem eigenen Tun gezeichnet und können es nur so hinter uns lassen, dass wir noch etwas anderes, Weiteres tun. „Sündigkeit“ dagegen ist, dass sich Böses in der Welt anhäuft. Ein Mensch handelt in einer Umgebung, in einer Geschichte, die schon durch Böses geprägt ist. Er kann unter dem Druck – oder Eindruck – davon stehen und dazu geführt oder verführt werden, das Böse zu wiederholen. Was wir aber in die Welt einführen, ist vorher noch nicht dagewesen. Wir sind es, die es tun. In diesem Tun geht es auch um unser Selbstsein: Wir tun etwas, obwohl wir zugleich unter dem Einfluss und Eindruck von etwas anderem stehen, das wir nicht selbst herbeigeführt haben. Warum spricht Kierkegaard hier vom „Sprung“? Wir können versuchen, das, was wir selbst tun, dadurch zu erklären, dass wir unter dem Einfluss oder Eindruck von etwas stehen, das uns bewegt oder in Bewegung setzt. Das erklärt aber

 Ibid.

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nur, wie wir dazu kommen, das zu tun, was wir tun. Es erklärt nicht, dass wir es tun – oder dass wir es tun. „Der Sprung“ ist meines Erachtens nichts Irrationales oder Mysteriöses, sondern hat mit den Grenzen der (Selbst)Erklärung zu tun: Indem wir uns selbst zu erklären versuchen, tun wir selbst etwas.Wir treten selbst hervor – als diejenigen, die sich selbst zu erklären versuchen. Außerhalb aller Zweideutigkeit steht aber, dass wir tun, was wir tun, und dass wir dadurch schuldig werden – als diejenigen, die dies tun. Es geht darin um unsere Selbstbeziehung. Warum steht dies „außerhalb aller Zweideutigkeit,“ und warum ist Zweideutigkeit dennoch der Schlüsselbegriff der Angstanalyse?

4 Möglichkeit der Freiheit Wie gesagt ist die Angst auf der ersten Ebene der Analyse die Möglichkeit der Freiheit, oder genauer: Angst ist, dass diese Möglichkeit sich zeigt (sie zeigt sich in der Angst). Fragen wir zunächst, welchen Charakter die Möglichkeit der Freiheit hat. Dies ist keine Möglichkeit, die wir vor uns haben – dies würde bereits ein Selbst voraussetzen, das für sich aber erst durch die Möglichkeit der Freiheit erscheinen soll –, sondern eine Möglichkeit, durch die wir, indem sie uns selbst hervorruft, allererst selbst bestimmt werden. Sie ist unsere eigene Möglichkeit in dem Sinne, dass wir selbst hervortreten können. Inwiefern ist diese Möglichkeit nun zweideutig? Eine Möglichkeit scheint etwas Leichtes an sich zu haben. Wir können sie aufnehmen oder liegen lassen. Die Möglichkeit der Freiheit jedoch hat ihre Schwere und Schwierigkeit. Sie kann schwindelerregend sein, sofern sie die Möglichkeit ist, sich selbst zu bestimmen und dadurch gleichzeitig auch selbst bestimmt zu werden. Darin liegt: dass man sich selbst zu tragen hat. So hat man auch die eigenen verspielten Möglichkeiten zu tragen. Ich zitiere nun die zentrale Passage zur Zweideutigkeit der Angst. Die Passage ist berühmt, nicht zuletzt aufgrund des in ihr auftretenden Bild des Schwindels: Vertigo. In diesem Bild steckt die Schwere der Möglichkeit: Angst kann man vergleichen mit Schwindel. Der, dessen Auge es widerfährt in eine gähnende Tiefe niederzuschauen, er wird schwindlig. Aber was ist der Grund? Es ist ebensosehr sein Auge wie der Abgrund; denn falls er nicht herniedergestarrt hätte. Solchermaßen ist die Angst der Schwindel der Freiheit, der aufsteigt, wenn der Geist die Synthesis setzen will, und die Freiheit nun niederschaut in ihre eigne Möglichkeit, und sodann die Endlichkeit packt sich daran zu halten. In diesem Schwindel sinkt die Freiheit zusammen. Weiter vermag die Psychologie nicht zu kommen, und will es auch nicht. Den gleichen Augenblick ist alles verändert, und indem die Freiheit sich wieder aufrichtet, sieht sie, dass sie schuldig ist. Zwischen diesen beiden Augenblicken liegt der Sprung, den keine Wissenschaft erklärt hat

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oder erklären kann. Wer in Angst schuldig wird, er wird so zweideutig schuldig wie nur möglich.¹¹

Lesen wir diese Passage im Blick auf die Frage nach der Subjektivität als Verwicklung von Aktivität und Passivität: Es „widerfährt“ uns (unserem Auge), in den Abgrund niederzuschauen, dadurch „wird“ unserem Auge schwindlig. Es geschieht – passiert – mit uns, dass wir sowohl in den Abgrund niederschauen als auch dass uns dabei schwindelig wird. „Aber was ist der Grund?“ Ist der Grund der Abgrund oder das Auge (d. h. wir selbst)? Der Abgrund macht uns schwindlig. Hätten wir jedoch nicht niedergestarrt, wäre uns auch nicht schwindelig geworden…Das heißt: Wir hätten in eine andere Richtung sehen können. Wir können erklären, warum wir dies und nicht das getan haben: Wir waren unter dem Eindruck dessen, was wir gesehen haben. Dennoch haben wir selbst, beeindruckt, niedergestarrt. Ist das Starren etwas, was wir selbst tun? Dies ist schwer zu entscheiden, es liegt aber eine Entscheidung darin. Wie kommen wir dazu, dass wir selbst etwas getan haben? Diese Frage hat damit zu tun, dass das Bild vom Abgrund und dem Auge ein Bild der Angsterfahrung ist. Greifen wir auf die bereits zitierte Passage zurück: Der qualitative Sprung steht außerhalb aller Zweideutigkeit, aber der, welcher durch Angst hindurch schuldig wird, er wird ja unschuldig; denn er ist es nicht selbst gewesen, sondern die Angst, eine fremde Macht, welche ihn packt, eine Macht, nein, vor der er sich ängstigte; – und doch ist er ja schuldig, denn er versank in der Angst, welche er dennoch liebte, indem er sie fürchtete.¹²

Angst ist eine fremde Macht, die uns packt. Wir können uns zudem vor der Angst ängstigen. Darin tun wir etwas: Wir versinken in Angst – indem wir uns ängstigen. Was begegnet uns beim Blick in den Abgrund? In den Abgrund niederzuschauen ist ein Bild. Es ist ein Bild für die Zeit, die sich uns eröffnet und die zu uns kommt. Wenn wir in die Zukunft „hineinschauen,“ können wir uns in der Angst der Sorge oder Besorgnis verlieren. Wir haben in ihr mit unseren eigenen Vorstellungen zu tun, in die wir uns verstricken können. Die Möglichkeiten, die zu uns kommen, sind unsere eigenen in dem Sinne, dass wir uns selbst durch sie bestimmen sollen. Worin besteht dann der Sprung? Der Sprung ist mit einer Entscheidung verbunden – sogar mit dem Augenblick der Entscheidung. Man beachte aber erstens, dass es in der zitierten Passage um zwei Augenblicke geht. Der Sprung kommt

 SKS 4, 365 – 266 / BA, 60 – 61.  SKS 4, 349 / BA, 41.

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dazwischen. Die Entscheidung geschieht mit einem selbst. Man geht unter, verliert sich im Abgrund. Man steht nicht vor dem Abgrund, um hinunterzuspringen. Eher gleitet man in den Abgrund. Der Sprung passiert mit einem. Man wird schuldig. Man beachte zweitens, welche Rolle das Sehen in diesem Prozess spielt: Man sieht, dass man schuldig ist. Schuldigwerden ist keine Entscheidung. Man entscheidet sich nicht dafür, schuldig zu werden, sondern lediglich, sich selbst als schuldig zu übernehmen. Diese Entscheidung setzt voraus, dass man schuldig geworden ist. Schuldigwerden hat jedoch mit einer anderen, früheren Entscheidung zu tun: Man hat etwas getan, das an einem haftet. Man wird als derjenige identifiziert, der sich dafür zu verantworten hat. Man entdeckt sich selbst im Akkusativ. Dann geht es darum, was es heißt, sich dafür entscheiden, die Konsequenzen jener früheren Entscheidung zu tragen. Was außerhalb aller Zweideutigkeit steht, ist der Sprung: dass man schuldig ist. Mit Zweideutigkeit verbunden ist dagegen, wie man schuldig wird. Das hängt damit zusammen, dass ein Mensch nicht etwa ein Subjekt für sich allein ist, sondern relational bestimmt wird durch die Art seines Verhaltens zu sich und zu anderen. Wir sind Menschen, die „unter Einfluss stehen.“ Wir sind es aber auch, die tun, was wir – unter Einfluss stehend – tun. Angst als Phänomen der Zweideutigkeit par excellence kommt als eine Erklärung ins Spiel, die nur bis zu einem gewissen Punkt (er)klärend wirkt: dem Punkt, wo die Grenze der (Selbst)Erklärung liegt. Wenn wir versagen und Böses tun, können wir versuchen zu verstehen, warum wir es getan haben. Was hat uns dazu geführt? Vielleicht wollen wir auch versuchen, uns selbst zu verstehen, indem wir uns das, was wir getan haben, durch das erklären, was uns bei unserer Tat beeinflusst hat. Zurück bleibt in jedem Fall die Tatsache, dass wir es getan haben und schuldig geworden sind.Wenn wir versuchen wollen, dies zu erklären, wechseln wir die Perspektive. Dass hier von einem Sprung die Rede ist, bedeutet nur, dass es dabei um eine Grenze der (Selbst)Erklärung geht. Dass „keine Wissenschaft“ den Sprung erklärt hat oder erklären kann, liegt wie schon gesagt nicht daran, dass es sich um etwas Mysteriöses handelt. Ich habe dafür argumentiert, dass wir – wenn wir versuchen, uns (und unser Schuldigwerden) wissenschaftlich zu erklären – selbst etwas tun: In diesem Fall nehmen wir die falsche Haltung zu uns selbst ein. Obwohl wir versuchen, uns dadurch zu verstehen, dass wir uns selbst erklären (Wie sind wir dazu gekommen, dies zu tun?), setzt dieser Erklärungs- und Verstehensversuch voraus, dass wir selbst diejenigen sind, die getan haben, was wir zu erklären versuchen. Indem wir dies getan haben, haben wir etwas in die Welt hineingebracht, das die Welt ethisch verändert hat. Das heißt: Wir sind dadurch schuldig geworden. Wie wir schuldig wurden, darin liegt die Zweideutig-

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keit. Die Ambiguität von „schuldig – unschuldig“ betrifft dieses „Wie,“ nicht das „Dass.“ Man hatte nicht vor, schuldig zu werden – man wird schuldig. Das Buch über den Begriff der Angst kann man als Kierkegaards Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit lesen. Frei zu sein bedeutet auch, dass wir uns selbst verfehlen können. Wenn Kierkegaard ethische Selbstverfehlungen auf den Begriff der Sünde bringt, folgt daraus die Einsicht, dass wir nicht nur fehlbar, sondern auch davon gezeichnet sind, dass wir uns selbst verfehlen. Es geht in Kierkegaards radikaler Reformulierung des Sündenbegriffs weder um Freiheit (im Sinne von Wahlfreiheit, liberum arbitrium) noch um Natur (wir können uns selbst nicht mithilfe unserer Natur erklären). Wir können uns unsere Sünde nur dadurch erklären, dass es Grenzen der Selbsterklärung gibt. Sonst würden wir nicht im Ernst uns selbst zu erklären versuchen.¹³

5 Angst als Selbsterschließung Die Kategorie der Entscheidung kann leicht missverstanden werden. „Der entscheidende Punkt“ ist, dass es in der Entscheidung um eine Verwicklung von Aktivität und Passivität geht. Indem man sich entscheidet, wird man selbst „entschieden“ oder bestimmt. Zugespitzt habe ich das so formuliert, dass die Entscheidung auch mit einem geschieht. Was liegt in dieser Passivität der Entscheidung? Sie besteht nicht darin, dass man passiv zusehen kann, wie die Entscheidung mit einem geschieht, sondern dass man selbst unter der Entscheidung und ihren Konsequenzen zu leiden hat: dass man sie ertragen muss, weil man selbst das Subjekt der Entscheidung ist. Man wird selbst durch die Entscheidung gezeichnet oder geprägt. Im Blick auf eine Theorie der Subjektivität sollten wir weiterfragen: Warum diese Verschiebung, dass die Entscheidung mit einem geschieht? Das hängt mit der Frage zusammen: Warum eine Theorie der Subjektivität in der Form einer Angstanalyse? Die Antwort liegt meines Erachtens darin, dass es in der Angst um eine grundlegende Selbsterschließung geht. Uns selbst als Selbst zu entdecken ist etwas, das wir tun, und doch können wir uns das nicht vornehmen oder es inszenieren. Wir kommen uns selbst zuvor. Sich selbst als Selbst zu entdecken, erfordert, ein Selbst zu sein. Was es heißt, ein Selbst zu sein, steht schon in der  Dies kann ich hier leider nicht weiterentwickeln.Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Krop og selv – om inkarneret fejlbarlighed,“ in Kroppens teologi – teologiens krop, hg. von Kirsten B. Nielsen und Johanne S. Teglbjærg, Kopenhagen: Anis 2011, S. 63 – 93, sowie Arne Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet. Kierkegaard, Kopenhagen: Gyldendal 1997, S. 97– 169, 320 – 342.

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Selbstentdeckung auf dem Spiel. Darin, dass wir uns selbst entdecken, jeder sich selbst als ein Selbst, treten wir selbst erst hervor. Wir selbst sind darin impliziert. Wie und weshalb ist Selbsterschließung grundlegend? Auf der einen Seite ist das Selbst nicht da, um entdeckt zu werden. Auf der anderen Seite sind wir in der Selbsterschließung schon da als das Selbst, als das wir uns entdecken. Anders gesagt: Selbsterschließung gehört zur Selbstwerdung. Aber gilt das nicht nur auf der ersten Ebene der Angstanalyse? Durch die Möglichkeit der Freiheit entdecken wir uns – jede(r) für sich – als ein Selbst. Ist das nicht die grundlegende Selbsterfahrung? Dass die Analyse der Zweideutigkeit der Angst aber auf einer zweiten Ebene weitergeführt wird, bedeutet, dass Selbsterfahrung mit Selbstsein einhergeht. Was es heißt, ein Subjekt – als Subjekt der Angst – zu sein, können wir erst auf der zweiten Ebene sehen. Auf der ersten Ebene heißt es, dass Angst eine fremde Macht ist, die einen packt, und doch ist man der- oder diejenige, welche(r) sich ängstigt. Der Selbstbezug in der Angst wird erst auf der zweiten Ebene deutlich. Man ist Opfer der Angst, die man selbst hegt. In der Angst ist man sich selbst unterworfen (als „subjected subject“). Man ist sich selbst derart unterworfen, dass man sich in der Angst gefangen nehmen kann. Anders gesagt: Man entdeckt sich nicht nur in der und durch die Angst, sondern hat sich auch darin zu verstehen. Was in der Angstanalyse in Frage steht, ist Subjektivität: was es heißt, ein Subjekt zu sein, und zwar als Subjekt der Angst. Dies bedeutet umgekehrt, dass eine Theorie der Subjektivität genau die Verwicklung von Aktivität und Passivität im Blick haben muss, die wir in der Angst erfahren können. Warum wird jedoch die grundlegende Selbstentdeckung an die Erfahrung von Gut und Böse gebunden? Es geht in dieser Erfahrung um Selbstbestimmtheit: Wir werden selbst in Bezug auf Gut und Böse bestimmt – sowohl als diejenigen, die selbst etwas tun, wofür wir uns verantworten müssen, wie auch als diejenigen, die unter dem Bösen leiden. Hier treten wir als Einzelne hervor.

6 Zweideutigkeit der Angst: Aktivität und Passivität Wie genau stellt sich Angst als Selbsterfahrung auf der zweiten Ebene der Angstanalyse dar (also in Kapitel IV des Buches über den Begriff Angst)? Die Zweideutigkeit der Angst wird hier soweit intensiviert, dass auch fragwürdig wird, in welchem Sinne die Selbsterfahrung zur Erfahrung der Angst dazugehört. Die Angst nähert sich hier der Verzweiflung, wie sie in Der Krankheit zum Tode thematisiert wird: als ein Versuch, sich selbst zu entweichen. Darin steckt aber auch ein Selbstbezug. Erst hier wird nämlich deutlich, dass es in der Angstanalyse um

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Geschichte geht. Das Buch über den Begriff Angst verstehe ich als eine Untersuchung über unsere schwierige Freiheit, und zwar mit Blick auf die Frage nach der Geschichte der Freiheit. Ich habe von der Eingangs- und Schlussbestimmung der Angst gesprochen. Greifen wir nun zurück auf Letztere, d. h. auf die Bestimmung, dass das Subjekt in der dämonischen Angst vor dem Guten zwei Willen hat: „einen untergeordneten, ohnmächtigen, der das Offenbarwerden will, und einen stärkeren, der die Verschlossenheit will.“¹⁴ Was heißt hier „Wille“? Wenn wir etwas wollen, das für uns Bedeutung hat, bestimmen wir uns durch dieses Wollen. Das bedeutet nicht, dass wir über unseren Willen bestimmen könnten, sondern eher, dass wir darin selbst bestimmt werden. Haben wir den Willen dazu, dasjenige wollen zu können, was wir wollen? Können wir unsere Entscheidungen tragen? Die Angst zeigt, dass wir mit uns so gestellt sind, dass wir uns selbst (und das Gewicht unserer Entscheidungen) zu tragen haben. Das gilt schon für die Möglichkeit der Freiheit – als Möglichkeit, uns selbst zu bestimmen. In der Angst vor dem Guten wird dies noch deutlicher. Die Angst vor dem Guten wird von Kierkegaard als dämonische Verschlossenheit bestimmt. Der Selbstbezug ist wiederum entscheidend. Dämonische Verschlossenheit bedeutet, in sich verschlossen zu sein. Das ist nicht nur in sich gekehrte, sondern verdrehte Innerlichkeit, d. h. Selbstverschlossenheit. Recht verstandene Innerlichkeit wendet sich nach außen. Sie ist die Innerlichkeit, womit man versteht und handelt, d. h. eine bestimmte Modalität des Verstehens und Handelns. Die dämonische Verschlossenheit dagegen wendet sich derart nach innen, dass sie von der Außenwelt abgeschlossen ist. Dass das Selbst relational bestimmt ist, zeigt sich gerade an der dämonischen Verschlossenheit: In sich gekehrt zu sein, ist nur möglich, wenn man unter dem Eindruck eines Anderen steht und dieses Andere bei sich hat, wogegen man sich verschließt. Dies ist das Gute, das (mit Heidegger gesprochen) „formal angezeigt“ bzw. gekennzeichnet wird: als Kommunikation, Wiederherstellung von Freiheit. Ich zitiere eine Passage aus dem vierten Kapitel (eine Dostojewski-Passage): Beispiele hierfür [d. h. dafür, dass das Dämonische sich selbst einschließt] auf allen möglichen Gebieten und in allen möglichen Graden bietet das Leben reichlich. Ein verstockter Verbrecher sträubt sich wider das Geständnis (hierin liegt eben das Dämonische, dass er mit dem Guten nicht in Gemeinschaft treten [kommunizieren] will durch Erleiden der Strafe). Es gibt gegen so einen ein Verfahren, das vielleicht recht selten angewandt wird. Es ist Schweigen und des Auges Macht. Wofern ein Inquisitor leibliche Kraft und geistige Spannkraft hat, um auszuhalten, ohne dass sein Muskelspiel erschlafft, Kraft, um auszuhalten, und

 SKS 4, 430 / BA, 133.

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seien es sechzehn Stunden, es wird ihm zuletzt gelingen, dass das Geständnis unwillkürlich herausbricht. Kein Mensch, der ein böses Gewissen hat, vermag Schweigen auszuhalten. Setzt man ihn in einsame Haft, so stumpft er sich ab.¹⁵

Zwei Willen zu haben, bedeutet nicht, dass man sich zwischen zwei Willen bewegt – dem Willen zur Kommunikation und dem Willen zur Verschlossenheit. In der Verschlossenheit hat man die Möglichkeit bei sich, gegen die man sich verschließt: die Möglichkeit der Kommunikation. Die Möglichkeit der Freiheit kehrt wieder – als Angst. Der Unterschied jedoch ist absolut: „denn die Möglichkeit der Freiheit zeigt sich hier im Verhältnis zur Unfreiheit.“¹⁶ Dass der in sich Verschlossene das bei sich hat, wogegen er sich verschließt, die Möglichkeit der Kommunikation, setzt voraus, dass er berührt werden kann. Dieses Beispiel situiert uns in einer Welt des Sehens und Gesehenwerdens. Ohne es zu wollen, werden wir berührt von dem, was wir tun: sehen. In der Analyse der Angst vor dem Guten wird mehrmals auf die Bedeutung von Kommunikation und Berührung hingewiesen, jedoch ohne dass deren Verbindung thematisiert wird. Ich habe dies im Blick auf Subjektivität als Verwicklung von Passivität und Aktivität ausgelegt.¹⁷ Daher stammt auch meine These, dass die Angstanalyse, mit der Zweideutigkeit als Schlüsselbegriff, eine Theorie der Subjektivität ist.¹⁸

 SKS 4, 426 / BA, 129.  SKS 4, 424 / BA, 127.  Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Subjectivity, Passion and Passivity,“ in Passion and Passivity: Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2009, hg. von Ingolf U. Dalferth und Michael Rodgers, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, S. 143 – 155.  Die Druckfassung wurde von Claudia Welz erstellt, die auch für sprachliche Korrekturen und die Fußnoten die Verantwortung übernimmt.

Chapter 11 Subjektivität und Un-Wahrheit 1 Eingang Der Titel „Subjektivität und Wahrheit“ mutet Kierkegaard-Leser vertraut an. Subjektivität und Wahrheit sind bei Kierkegaard formelhaft miteinander verbunden. Sie sind so zusammengestellt, dass sie miteinander bestimmt sind. „Die Subjektivität ist die Wahrheit,“ wie der Satz von Johannes Climacus in der Unwissenschaftlichen Nachschrift sentenzartig lautet.¹ Auf welche Frage antwortet dieser Satz? Wenn wir der unmittelbaren Richtung im Satz folgen, scheint er die Frage zu beantworten: „Was heißt Subjektivität?“ Als Antwort darauf ist aber der Satz: „Die Subjektivität ist die Wahrheit“ selber fragwürdig. Denn was heißt Wahrheit, wenn Subjektivität die Wahrheit sein soll? Wenn wir den Satz dann umgekehrt lesen,² als Antwort auf die Frage: „Was heißt Wahrheit?“ ist er ebenso fragwürdig. Nicht nur ist zu fragen, was Subjektivität heißt, wenn sie die Wahrheit sein soll. Es ist auch die Frage, was Wahrheit heißt. Die Frage wiederholt sich durch die Antwort. Und im Rückblick gilt das auch für die erste Lesart. Was heißt Subjektivität, wenn sie die Wahrheit sein soll? Oder was heißt Subjektivität, um die Wahrheit zu sein? Dass die Frage in beide Richtungen gehen kann, spiegelt sich in der Antwort wider. Wenn die Antwort hervorhebt, dass die Subjektivität die Wahrheit ist, ist zu fragen: „Was heißt dann Subjektivität?“ Wenn die Antwort umgekehrt betont, dass die Subjektivität die Wahrheit ist, ist die Frage: „Was heißt dann Wahrheit?“ Die Antwort wird selber zur Frage. So emphatisch der Satz von Climacus lautet, so offen kommt er vor. Der Satz scheint die Fragen wieder oder weiter zu geben, auf die er antwortet. Vielleicht verschärft er sie noch. Denn was soll Subjektivität als Wahrheit heißen? In der Anmutung von Vertrautheit schwingt so etwas Rätselhaftes oder Befremdendes mit. Eine solche rhetorische Wirkung ist vielleicht sachgemäß. Diese Vermutung möchte ich kurz vorausgreifend begründen: Der Satz: „Die Subjektivität ist die Wahrheit“ scheint ein Grundsatz zu sein. Er legt den Grund, indem er ihn in die Subjektivität hineinlegt. Es ist aber ein Grundsatz, der in einem zweiten Schritt so beginnt: „Die Subjektivität ist die Unwahrheit.“ Diese Rückbewegung in

 SKS 7, 191 / AUN1, 200.  In der Überschrift zu dem Kapitel, dem fast alle Zitate im Folgenden entnommen sind, lautet der Satz umgekehrt: „die Wahrheit ist die Subjektivität“ (SKS 7, 173 / AUN1, 179).Wenn wir den Satz in diesem Kontext lesen, scheint es um eine Bestimmung von Wahrheit zu gehen. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-017

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den Grund, die sich im zweiten Satz: „Die Subjektivität ist die Unwahrheit“ vollzieht, stellt die Subjektivität selber in Frage. Die Subjektivität mutet rätselhaft an. Die beiden Sätze sind Sätze offener Fragen: Was heißt Wahrheit, wenn Subjektivität die Wahrheit ist? Was heißt Subjektivität, wenn sie im zweiten Schritt als Unwahrheit bestimmt wird? Was heißt die Wahrheit, die hier ermöglicht, von Subjektivität als Unwahrheit zu sprechen? Dies greift voraus, gibt aber auch einen methodischen Schlüssel. Um die beiden Sätze zu verstehen, müssen wir die Bewegungen in den Blick fassen, die sich im ersten und im zweiten Satz, und zwischen den beiden Sätzen, vollziehen. Es geht um ein Spiel von Bewegungen, das nicht nur rhetorisch wirkungsvoll, sondern auch dialektisch trächtig ist. Im Titel ist dies durch den Binde- und Gedankenstrich: „Un-Wahrheit“ angegeben. Im Folgenden sollen erstens die Bewegungen, die in den beiden Sätzen zum Ausdruck kommen, nachvollzogen werden. In einem zweiten Schritt soll dann die Bestimmung von Subjektivität, die durch das Spiel zwischen den beiden Sätzen stattfindet, erörtert werden, und zwar im Blick darauf, dass Subjektivität sich selbst entzieht (wie es Die Krankheit zum Tode ins Blickfeld bringt). Drittens soll die Frage diskutiert werden, in welchem Sinne es hier um eine Bestimmung oder eine Theorie von Wahrheit geht. Welchen Sinn hat es, die Wahrheitsfrage durch das Problem der Subjektivität zu stellen?

2 Subjektivität als Wahrheit? Versuchen wir zunächst die Bewegung, die im ersten Satz stattfindet, „Die Subjektivität ist die Wahrheit,“ nachzuvollziehen. Wenn wir den Kontext des Satzes betrachten, fällt auf, dass es eben um einen Weg geht. Johannes Climacus unterscheidet zwischen zwei Wegen: dem Weg der objektiven Reflexion und dem Weg der subjektiven Reflexion. Wenn er „die Verschiedenheit des Weges zwischen der objektiven und der subjektiven Reflexion“ verdeutlichen will, zeigt er „das Suchen der subjektiven Reflexion zurück (und) nach innen in die Innerlichkeit hinein.“³ Der Kontext ist von Anfang an durch die Frage nach dem Weg bestimmt. Es scheint um Alternativen zu gehen: Wir können den objektiven Weg oder den subjektiven Weg wählen. Wir müssen schon hier fragen, was Subjektivität heißt, wenn von dem subjektiven Weg die Rede ist. Entscheidend ist, dass der Weg

 SKS 7, 182/ AUN1, 189; auf Dänisch: „Jeg skal nu, for at tydeliggjøre Vei-Forskjellen mellem den objektive og den subjektive Reflexion, vise den subjektive Reflexions Søgen tilbage ind efter i Inderlighed.“

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der subjektiven Reflexion sich zu der menschlichen Bedingung verhält: Wer nach der Wahrheit fragt, ist ein Existierender. Das scheint trivial, ist aber von der Möglichkeit her zu verstehen, dass man selber diese Bedingung vergisst. Die Frage ist dann, was es heißt, ein Existierender zu sein. Climacus antwortet, dass ein Existierender „selbst durch sein Existieren im Werden ist.“⁴ Der subjektive Weg reflektiert also, dass das Subjekt selbst auf dem Wege – mit sich – ist.Was hat dies aber mit der Wahrheitsfrage zu tun? Ich interpretiere den Ansatz von Climacus so, dass die Forderung, die in der Frage der Wahrheit enthalten ist, umgekehrt bedeutet, dass die ewige Wahrheit „innerhalb der Bestimmung der Zeit zu verstehen ist,“ und zwar „von dem, der, weil er existiert, selbst in der Zeit ist.“⁵ Die Fragestellung, die im Satz über Subjektivität und Wahrheit enthalten ist, ist somit das Problem von Wahrheit und Zeit, aber als ein Problem, welches das fragende Subjekt selber betrifft. Der Weg der objektiven Reflexion ist, nach Climacus, eben dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass er „das Subjekt zu dem Zufälligen und damit die Existenz zu etwas Gleichgültigem, Verschwindendem“ macht.⁶ Man könnte dagegen einwenden: Wenn wir die Frage nach der Wahrheit stellen, bewegen wir uns über uns selbst hinaus. Wir suchen eben eine Wahrheit, die nicht von uns abhängt. Wahrheit muss Unabhängigkeit von Subjektivität bedeuten. So gesehen leuchtet es nicht ein, dass der objektive Weg ein Abweg ist. Stellen wir uns aber vor, dass der objektive Weg sich durchführen lässt. Wenn wir den objektiven Weg zu Ende gehen könnten, dann würden wir „alles erklären,“ eines ausgenommen: wie sich die Wahrheit zu dem Subjekt verhält, das sich seinerseits zu der Wahrheit verhält, indem es die Frage nach der Wahrheit stellt.⁷ Dies gibt eine erste Andeutung davon, dass es hier um den Begriff der Wahrheit geht. Was als Wahrheit gelten soll, muss auch erklären können, dass wir die Frage nach der Wahrheit stellen können. Dies tritt bei Climacus allerdings nicht deutlich hervor. Statt dessen sagt er, dass „alles wesentliche Erkennen“ die Existenz „betrifft“ oder angeht.⁸ Ein Erkennen ist wesentlich, wenn es die Frage betrifft, was die Wahrheit für denjenigen bedeutet, der die Frage nach der Wahrheit stellt. Es verhält sich also dazu, dass das erkennende Subjekt selbst in der Existenz, unterwegs mit sich, begriffen ist. Ein wesentliches Erkennen nimmt das Verhältnis wahr, dass derjenige, der die

 SKS 7, 176/ AUN1, 183.  Ibid., auf Dänisch: „hvorledes den evige Sandhed er at forstaae i Tidens Bestemmelse af Den, der, ved at existere, selv er i Tiden.“  SKS 7, 177 / AUN1, 184.  SKS 7, 177 / AUN1, 183.  SKS 7, 181 / AUN1, 188.

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Frage nach der Wahrheit stellt, selbst ein Existierender ist. Was bedeutet dies? Zunächst dass die Bedingung der Wahrheitsfrage und des Wahrheitssuchens Ungewissheit ist. Im Existieren begriffen ist der Fragende so situiert, dass die Wahrheit durch Ungewissheit bestimmt ist. Dies reflektiert die menschliche Bedingung, womit der Fragende die Wahrheit sucht. Die Implikation davon ist zweifältig: Erstens bedeutet Ungewissheit, dass die Wahrheit sich entzieht. Zweitens ist die Ungewissheit die Wahrheit der Subjektivität. Wenn wir die Wahrheit suchen, dann ist die Wahrheit bereits, dass wir in Ungewissheit begriffen sind. Wenn Climacus einen Schritt weiter geht und von der „ewigen wesentlichen Wahrheit“⁹ spricht, werde ich dies im doppelten Sinne interpretieren: Erstens, die Wahrheit entzieht sich, wir werden den objektiven Weg nie zu Ende gehen können, in dem Sinne ist die Wahrheit ewig. Die ewige Wahrheit (die eigentlich die Wahrheit am Ende des objektiven Weges wäre) bedeutet Ungewissheit für uns. Zweitens zeigt sich aber die ewige Wahrheit durch die Ungewissheit, weil sie die menschliche Bedingung erklärt. Ungewissheit ist die Wahrheit der menschlichen Existenz – und zwar in bezug auf die ewige Wahrheit. Wie bekannt gibt Climacus die folgende (wie er es nennt) „Definition der Wahrheit“: „Die objektive Ungewissheit, in der Aneignung der leidenschaftlichsten Innerlichkeit festgehalten, ist die Wahrheit.“¹⁰ Die Ungewissheit ist objektiv, indem die Wahrheit sich letzten Endes entzieht. Dies ist aber die Wahrheit der Existenz, die es anzueignen gilt. Hiermit stellt sich die Frage, wie das Subjekt sich zur Frage der Wahrheit verhält.Wie stellt es sich zur Wahrheit? Wie geht es mit dieser Frage um? Wozu verwendet es die Wahrheit oder die Vorstellung von der Wahrheit? Wie lebt es mit dieser Frage? Der objektive Weg gibt die Möglichkeit an, dass wir in der Weise nach der Wahrheit suchen, dass wir uns selbst los werden. Es kann glückhaft sein, von sich loszukommen oder sich zu verlieren. Hier aber geht es darum, dass man den objektiven Weg zur Wahrheit so geht, dass man davon absieht, dass man ihn mit sich – als Existierenden – geht. Damit ändert sich aber der Weg. Im Gegensatz dazu bedeutet der subjektive Weg, dass man den Weg mit sich so geht, dass man sich selbst als denjenigen einbezieht, der den Weg geht. Dies heißt aber: den Weg so zu gehen, dass man ihn sich aneignet, was nur in Leidenschaft möglich ist. Leidenschaft heißt, dass man über sich hinaus bestimmt, aber eben als sich selbst bestimmt ist. Die Frage der Wahrheit fordert Leidenschaft, indem sie denjenigen betrifft, der die Frage stellt. Wir sind so am ersten Satz angelangt: „Aber die Leidenschaft der Unendlichkeit ist gerade die Subjek-

 SKS 7, 188 / AUN1, 196; vgl. SKS 7, 191 / AUN1, 200.  SKS 7, 186 / AUN1, 194.

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tivität, und somit ist die Subjektivität die Wahrheit.“¹¹ Die Bewegung endet aber nicht hier. Ich habe den Kontext des Satzes relativ ausführlich interpretiert. Es geht ja um die Bewegung, die im Satz zum Ausdruck kommt. Der Satz steht ziseliert für sich, wie eine Sentenz. Man könnte versuchen, oder versucht sein, den Satz so zu verstehen, dass er Wahrheit in Subjektivität übersetzt. Die Bewegung geht dann von Wahrheit (als Frage) in die Subjektivität (als Grund) zurück, so dass es darum geht, die Wahrheit zu bestimmen, obwohl der Satz unmittelbar Subjektivität bestimmt. Die Frage, welchen Sinn es hat, Subjektivität und Wahrheit zu identifizieren, könnte dann die direkte Antwort erhalten: Wahrheit ist subjektiv in dem Sinne, dass Wahrheit durch Subjektivität bestimmt ist. Dies kann subjektivistisch so interpretiert werden, dass die Wahrheit durch die Entscheidung des Subjektes festgelegt wird. Die Wahrheit ist die Wahrheit, die wir als Wahrheit gelten lassen in dem Sinne, dass wir uns dazu entschließen. Wir wählen die Wahrheit, die für uns gelten soll. Man könnte versuchen, eine solche Interpretation dadurch zu untermauern, dass man auf das Wie der Subjektivität verweist. „Objektiv wird akzentuiert: was gesagt wird; subjektiv: wie es gesagt wird.“¹² Das Wie ist die Subjektivität als Leidenschaft, und „die Leidenschaft der Unendlichkeit ist die Wahrheit selber.“¹³ „Somit ist das subjektive Wie und die Subjektivität die Wahrheit.“¹⁴ Die Wahrheit wird durch Subjektivität als das Wie bestimmt. Eine direkte Identifikation von Subjektivität und Wahrheit (die nur in eine Richtung gehen kann: nämlich Wahrheit durch Subjektivität zu bestimmen) nimmt nicht den Gedankengang wahr, der zum ersten Satz führt. Ich will hier nur zwei Argumente anführen, die das ergänzen, was ich schon gesagt habe. Zum ersten: Im Satz: „Die Subjektivität ist die Wahrheit“ geht es um eine Bewegung in die Subjektivität zurück. Das wurde schon anfangs von Climacus selbst angegeben, wie wir gesehen haben. Dies bedeutet, dass die Subjektivität, die die Wahrheit ist, nicht Subjektivität schlechthin ist, sondern die Subjektivität, die durch die Wahrheitsfrage selbst bestimmt ist. Der subjektive Weg ist, uns in die Subjektivität zurück zu bewegen, indem wir nach der Wahrheit fragen, die die Wahrheit der Subjektivität ist – die Wahrheit, die auch die Subjektivität erklärt. Dies fordert aber, dass Subjektivität – das Verhältnis, dass wir selber den Weg gehen und nach der Wahrheit fragen – angeeignet wird. Dies bedeutet, kurz gesagt, dass Subjektivität durch die Frage der Wahrheit gegen sich selbst bestimmt wird. Denn Subjektivität gibt ja auch die Möglichkeit, sich selbst zu vergessen, von    

SKS 7, 186 / AUN1, 194. SKS 7, 185 / AUN1, 193. SKS 7, 186 / AUN1, 194. Ibid.

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sich loszukommen, und den objektiven Weg zu gehen. Der objektive Weg wird von existierenden Subjekten gegangen. Was Subjektivität heißt, muss durch diese Komplikation bestimmt werden: dass Subjektivität die Möglichkeit des objektiven Weges gibt. Subjektivität ist auch die Möglichkeit der Willkür. Im Gegensatz dazu bedeutet Subjektivität als Leidenschaft und Aneignung Selbst-Bestimmtheit. Subjektivität ist aber nur als Leidenschaft und Aneignung zu bestimmen, wenn wir die Wahrheitsfrage stellen. Die Subjektivität, die die Wahrheit ist, ist wahrhafte Subjektivität, Innerlichkeit, Aneignung.¹⁵ Wenn man Wahrheit durch Subjektivität bestimmen will, wird Subjektivität selber durch die Wahrheitsfrage bestimmt. Wie schon bemerkt, wenn Subjektivität die Wahrheit ist, dann bleibt zu fragen, was Subjektivität heißt, um die Wahrheit sein zu können. Die Antwort lautet, dass Subjektivität Aneignung der Wahrheit ist, die die Subjektivität bestimmt. Dies ist die angemessenere Interpretation der betreffenden Textpassagen. Dazu kommt aber zweitens noch ein inhaltliches Argument. Welchen Sinn hat es, von Aneignung zu reden, wenn Wahrheit subjektiv ist? Wenn Wahrheit ist, was wir als Wahrheit gelten lassen oder wählen, leuchtet es nicht ein, dass wir die Wahrheit, und dadurch uns selbst, aneignen sollen. Eine subjektivistische Interpretation des ersten Satzes geht von einem vorgegebenen Begriff von Subjektivität aus. Die Pointe der Textpassagen ist aber im Gegenteil, Subjektivität neu oder noch einmal zu bestimmen. In der Bewegung in die Subjektivität zurück ist eben die Frage, wie Subjektivität zu bestimmen ist. Was heißt dann Wahrheit als das Wie der Subjektivität? In diesem Wie wird Subjektivität selber bestimmt, indem die Wahrheit die Wahrheit für mich sein soll. Sie ist nur Wahrheit, indem ich sie als Wahrheit aneigne. So die Wahrheit, dass Ungewissheit die menschliche Bedingung ist. Dies bedeutet eben nicht, dass ich die Wahrheit wähle. Ich kann mir die Wahrheit nur aneignen, indem ich mich anders verstehe. In dem Sinne eigne ich mir die Wahrheit an, die sich mir entzieht. Wenn das Wie akzentuiert wird, stellt sich die Rückfrage: Was wird angeeignet? Wenn ich mir nur das aneigne, was ich als die Wahrheit wähle, kann die Wahrheit nicht selbst als Aneignung definiert werden. Gegenstand der Leidenschaft ist nicht die Leidenschaft selber. Die Entscheidung richtet sich nicht gegen die Entscheidung selbst.¹⁶

 Deshalb lautet der erste Satz auch: „die Subjektivität, die Innerlichkeit, ist die Wahrheit“ (z. B. SKS 7, 187 / AUN1, 195).  Die exegetische Lage ist hier allerdings keineswegs eindeutig. So behauptet Climacus nicht nur: „die Leidenschaft der Unendlichkeit ist die Wahrheit selber,“ sondern auch: „Die Leidenschaft der Unendlichkeit ist das Entscheidende, nicht ihr Inhalt; denn ihr Inhalt ist sie eben selbst“ (SKS 7, 186 / AUN1, 194).

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Aneignung kann aber auch als Aneignung von Subjektivität bestimmt werden, nämlich im folgenden Sinne: Wenn der subjektive Weg Aneignung ist, dann ist das, was angeeignet wird, auch die Wahrheit der menschlichen Bedingung, die Ungewissheit, die damit zusammenhängt, dass ich selbst unterwegs bin, indem ich die Frage nach der Wahrheit stelle. Die Wahrheit, die ich mir aneigne, muss das Verhältnis einbeziehen, dass ich mich zur Wahrheit verhalte.

3 Subjektivität als Unwahrheit? Gehen wir jetzt einen Schritt weiter, indem wir zum Kontext des Satzes zurückkehren. Der Satz in der Nachschrift: „Die Subjektivität ist die Wahrheit“ scheint ein Grundsatz zu sein, der aber dann in einem zweiten Schritt so beginnt: „Die Subjektivität ist die Unwahrheit.“ Diese Rückbewegung in den Grund, die im zweiten Satz vollzogen wird, stellt die Subjektivität in Frage. Die zweite, zusätzliche Bewegung ist radikal, indem der Grundsatz anders, und zwar umgekehrt, beginnt. Wie wir gesehen haben, findet schon im ersten Satz eine Bewegung in die Subjektivität zurück statt. Ist er – in Wahrheit – ein Grundsatz? Der Satz hat den Schein, dass wir in die Subjektivität als den Grund – für Subjektivität¹⁷ – zurückgehen. Die Bewegung in die Subjektivität zurück ist aber schon im ersten Satz eine Bewegung, in der Subjektivität selbst bestimmt wird – und zwar durch die Wahrheitsfrage. Insofern könnte man sagen, dass der Rückgang im zweiten Satz die Bewegung im ersten verlängert. Er tut es aber so, dass er sie verlagert. Unmittelbar scheint der zweite Satz die Bewegung des ersten Satzes abzubrechen. Wie ist dann der zweite Satz zu verstehen? Fragen wir zunächst, wie wir zu ihm kommen.Wie wird er eingeführt? „Also, die Subjektivität, die Innerlichkeit ist die Wahrheit; gibt es nun dafür einen innerlicheren Ausdruck? Ja, wenn die Rede: Die Subjektivität, die Innerlichkeit ist die Wahrheit, so beginnt: Die Subjektivität ist die Unwahrheit.“¹⁸ Die Bewegung zurück in die Subjektivität, die im ersten Satz zum Ausdruck kommt, wird wiederholt. Wir gehen jetzt noch weiter zurück in die Subjektivität als Innerlichkeit. Warum diese zweite Bewegung zurück? Warum können wir nicht beim ersten Satz haltmachen: Die Subjektivität, die Innerlichkeit

 Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Subjektivität: Begriff und Problem,“ in Krisen der Subjektivität. Problemfelder eines strittigen Paradigmas, hg. von Ingolf U. Dalferth und Philipp Stoellger, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2006, S. 317– 332.  SKS 7, 189 / AUN1, 198; auf Dänisch: „Altsaa Subjektiviteten, Inderligheden er Sandheden; gives der nu et inderligere Udtryk derfor? Ja, hvis den Tale: Subjektiviteten, Inderligheden er Sandheden, begynder saaledes: Subjektiviteten er Usandheden.“

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ist die Wahrheit? Warum müssen wir einen innerlicheren Ausdruck dafür finden? Das Problem muss in der Subjektivität selber liegen. Es betrifft den Anfang, und zwar den Anfang, den das Subjekt mit sich selbst macht. Wir müssen die Passage langsam lesen: „Hier dagegen ist die Subjektivität in dem Augenblick, wo sie beginnen will, dadurch die Wahrheit zu werden, dass sie subjektiv wird, in der Schwierigkeit, dass sie die Unwahrheit ist. So wendet sich die Arbeit zurück [so geht die Arbeit zurück], zurück nämlich in Innerlichkeit. Und der Weg führt somit auf nichts weniger als auf das Objektive hin, vielmehr liegt der Beginn nur noch tiefer in der Subjektivität.“¹⁹ Sehen wir die Bewegung näher an. Die Interpretation des ersten Satzes, dass die Subjektivität selbst bestimmt wird, wird durch die Beschreibung der Ausgangslage bestätigt: Die Subjektivität will beginnen, die Wahrheit zu werden, und zwar dadurch, dass sie subjektiv wird. Es geht also um den Anfang, den das Subjekt mit sich selbst macht. Es soll mit sich anfangen, indem Subjektivität nicht ohne weiteres die Wahrheit ist, sondern das Subjekt soll subjektiv werden, indem es die Wahrheit aneignet. Wenn die Subjektivität so beginnen will, die Wahrheit zu werden, ist sie in der Schwierigkeit, dass sie die Unwahrheit ist. Wie ist dies zu verstehen? Dass die Subjektivität die Unwahrheit ist, hat eben mit dem Anfang zu tun. Das Subjekt soll mit sich selbst anfangen, fängt aber falsch oder verkehrt an, indem es schon mit sich angefangen hat. Der Beginn, der noch tiefer in der Subjektivität liegt, ist der Anfang, den das Subjekt bereits mit sich gemacht hat, wenn es beginnen will. Es ist schon in eine Geschichte mit sich verstrickt. Damit wird, wie oben bemerkt wurde, das Problem von Wahrheit und Zeit akzentuiert. Dass die Wahrheitsfrage innerhalb der Bestimmung der Zeit zu verstehen ist, wie Climacus sagt, hat mit der Unwahrheit von Subjektivität zu tun. Das Subjekt ist im Verhältnis zur Zeit bestimmt, indem es sich selbst verfehlt hat. Es kann sich nicht einholen. Die Bewegung, die sich im zweiten Satz vollzieht, ist auch eine Bewegung zurück in die Subjektivität. Sie ist aber kompliziert, und zwar in bezug auf die erste Rückbewegung. Der zweite Satz scheint dem ersten zu widersprechen. Im zweiten Satz geht es aber um den Anfang des ersten: Wir gehen noch tiefer in die Innerlichkeit zurück, wenn die Rede: Die Subjektivität ist die Wahrheit, so beginnt: Die Subjektivität ist die Unwahrheit. Der erste Satz wird somit nicht im zweiten aufgehoben, sondern vertieft. Er wird vertieft, indem er versetzt wird. Der Anfang liegt noch tiefer in der Subjektivität, indem sie als Unwahrheit, und somit

 SKS 7, 190 / AUN1, 198 – 199; auf Dänisch: „Her derimod er Subjektiviteten, idet den vil begynde paa at blive Sandheden, ved at blive subjektiv, i den Vanskelighed, at den er Usandheden. Saa gaaer Arbeidet tilbage, tilbage nemlig i Inderlighed. Det er saa langtfra, at Veien saaledes skulde være hen til det Objektive, at Begyndelsen blot ligger endnu dybere i Subjektiviteten.“

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nicht nur gegen sich, sondern außer sich, bestimmt wird. Eben in der Bewegung zurück in Subjektivität wird das Subjekt de-zentriert. Wenn der erste Satz den Anschein erweckt, ein Grundsatz zu sein, scheint die zweite Bewegung einen noch tieferen Grund zu finden. Die Rückbewegung ist aber paradox. Wenn wir den Grund in der Subjektivität suchen, stoßen wir auf Subjektivität als Unwahrheit. Die nächste Frage ist: Was ist dann die Wahrheit der Subjektivität als Unwahrheit? Diese Frage mutet merkwürdig an, gibt aber das Spiel zwischen den beiden Sätzen wieder. Wenn eben der erste Satz oder die erste Rede so beginnt: „Die Subjektivität ist die Unwahrheit,“ dann müssen wir fragen: Wie ist im zweiten Satz die Rede davon, dass die Subjektivität die Wahrheit ist? Der zweite Satz muss die Wahrheit der Subjektivität erzählen. Paradox gesagt: Es ist die Wahrheit der Subjektivität, dass sie in Unwahrheit ist. Wenn die Subjektivität, die die Wahrheit ist, wahrhafte Subjektivität, Innerlichkeit, Aneignung ist, dann sagt der zweite Satz, dass das, was angeeignet werden soll, die Unwahrheit der Subjektivität ist. Wir sollen uns so erkennen, dass wir uns nicht kennen. Wir kennen uns nur, wenn wir sehen, dass wir die Wahrheit über uns nicht besitzen. Sonst ist es nicht die Wahrheit über uns. Sie soll aber angeeignet werden.

4 Bestimmung der Subjektivität Im Spiel der beiden Sätze wird Subjektivität bestimmt. Was es bedeutet, nach der Wahrheit zu fragen, zeigt sich darin, dass das Subjekt selbst durch diese Frage bestimmt ist.Versuchen wir, diese Bestimmung der Subjektivität kurz auszulegen. Wenn wir die Wahrheitsfrage stellen, wird schon Subjektivität in dem Sinne unterstellt, dass wir uns zu der Frage stellen können. Es ist Subjektivität als: Stellung nehmen, sich bestimmen, sich entscheiden. In dieser Bestimmung von Subjektivität als Aktivität spielt eine Passivität mit: sich bestimmen, sich entscheiden, indem man etwas für wahr hält. Man wird selbst dadurch bestimmt, dass man sich für etwas bestimmt. Diese Selbst-Bestimmtheit ist aber auch der kritische Punkt. Die Frage ist, ob man sich davon bestimmen lässt, wenn man etwas für wahr hält. Dass man selbst bestimmt wird, wenn man sich für etwas bestimmt, geht eben nicht problemlos vor sich. Wenn wir verstehen möchten, was Subjektivität bedeutet, sollen wir vor allem diesen kritischen Punkt von SelbstBestimmtheit im Blick haben. Die Bewegung zurück in Subjektivität, die sich im ersten Satz vollzieht, habe ich so interpretiert, dass die Subjektivität bestimmt wird: als wahrhafte Subjektivität, Innerlichkeit, Aneignung. Diese Bestimmung impliziert, dass das Subjekt sich bestimmen lässt. Es bestimmt sich, indem es sich bestimmen lässt. Sonst gibt es keine Aneignung. Nach Climacus besteht das sokratische Geheimnis darin,

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„dass die Bewegung nach innen geschieht, dass die Wahrheit in der Verwandlung des Subjekts in sich selbst besteht.“²⁰ Dies Geheimnis kann im Christentum „nur durch eine tiefere Innerlichkeit unendlich gemacht sein.“²¹ Hier – am Anfang der Nachschrift – ist das Spiel der beiden Sätze vorgezeichnet. Wenn man sich zu der Wahrheitsfrage stellt, hängt die Stellung also davon ab, ob man sich bestimmen lässt. Wenn man Stellung nimmt, verpflichtet man sich. Die Wahrheit verpflichtet. Diese komplexe Bestimmung von Aktivität und Passivität schöpft aber die Bestimmung von Subjektivität nicht aus. Subjektivität ist auch die Möglichkeit, sich selbst zu verfehlen. Dies bringt uns zu der Frage zurück: Was ist die Wahrheit der Subjektivität als Unwahrheit? Wie wird die Rede von Subjektivität als Wahrheit dadurch vertieft, dass sie so beginnt: Die Subjektivität ist die Unwahrheit? Erstens ist die Unwahrheit, die die Subjektivität ist, die Wahrheit über Subjektivität. Dies bedeutet zweitens, dass die Unwahrheit angeeignet werden soll. Die normative Bestimmung von Subjektivität als Aneignung wird dadurch festgehalten. Drittens ist zu fragen, was durch die zweite Rede über Subjektivität entdeckt wird. Dass die Subjektivität die Unwahrheit ist, hat mit Subjektivität zu tun: Sie hat schon mit sich begonnen, wenn sie mit sich anfangen will. Dass sie den Anfang mit sich verfehlt, weist auf die Subjektivität zurück. Der Beginn liegt noch tiefer in der Subjektivität. Dies bedeutet paradox, dass Subjektivität sich selbst entzieht. Sie ist in sich versetzt.²² Ich möchte hier nur kurz eine zweifache Weiterführung angeben. Dass Subjektivität sich selbst entzieht, wird in Die Krankheit zum Tode ein Hauptpunkt: Das Selbst kann sich nicht setzen, indem es schon ein Verhältnis ist, das sich zu sich verhält. Es entzieht sich als Selbst-Verhältnis. Zweitens geht es in der Frage nach dem Anfang der Subjektivität, der noch tiefer in die Subjektivität selbst verlegt wird, um die Zeitlichkeit der Subjektivität. Im Verhältnis zur Zeit verhält sich das Subjekt zu sich. Es hat schon mit sich angefangen, entzieht sich aber, was bedeutet, dass es sich nicht einholen kann.Wenn es sich setzen will, wird es versetzt. Dass es sich in der Zeit entzieht, bedeutet auch, dass es an sich zurückgegeben werden kann. Indem Subjektivität sich entzieht, stellt sich die Frage nach der Wahrheit der Subjektivität. Wenn wir uns in der Geschichte mit uns verstrickt haben, meldet sich die eigene Identität als Problem. Wir versuchen, uns eine Identität in der Zeit zu geben, haben aber schon Identität. An sich selbst zurückgegeben zu werden, oder vergeben zu werden, heißt dann, die eigene Identität zu erhalten.  SKS 7, 44 / AUN1, 34; auf Dänisch: „at Bevægelsen er ind efter, at Sandheden er Subjektets Forvandling i sig selv.“  Ibid.  Dies zeigt, dass das Subjekt nicht „integer“ ist (vgl. SKS 7, 188 / AUN1, 197).

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5 Bestimmung der Wahrheit Wenn Subjektivität als Un-Wahrheit bestimmt wird, wird das Subjekt gegen sich, außer sich, bestimmt. Was als Identifikation erscheint, ist eine differenzierte Bestimmung von Subjektivität durch die Wahrheitsfrage. In der Rede von Subjektivität als Wahrheit geht es nicht um die Subjektivität der Wahrheit, sondern um die Bestimmung der Subjektivität. Geht es auch um die Definition von Wahrheit? Welchen Sinn hat es, die Wahrheitsfrage durch das Problem der Subjektivität zu stellen? Gibt Climacus in der Nachschrift einen neuen Begriff von Wahrheit? Das Kapitel über Subjektivität und Wahrheit in der Nachschrift fängt mit der Diskussion an, wie Wahrheit zu bestimmen ist, führt aber dadurch den Blick zurück auf das Subjekt, für welches sich die Wahrheitsfrage stellt.Wenn Climacus dann die Subjektivität als die Wahrheit bestimmt, kommt die Frage jedoch wieder: Was heißt Wahrheit, damit die Subjektivität als die Wahrheit bestimmt werden kann? Wie bestimmt Climacus also Wahrheit? So viel er von Subjektivität redet, auch von Subjektivität als Wahrheit, so sparsam geht er mit der Definition von Wahrheit um. Diese Sparsamkeit deutet an, dass der Begriff von Wahrheit durch die Frage der Wahrheit bestimmt ist. Insofern hat er einen formellen Charakter. Was heißt Wahrheit? müssen wir so verstehen: Was kann als Wahrheit gelten? Welche Forderungen müssen erfüllt werden, um von Wahrheit zu sprechen? Wenn Climacus von der Wahrheit spricht, geht es um die Wahrheit, in der ich – derjenige, der von der Frage nach der Wahrheit bewegt ist – „ruhen“ kann, wie es in den Philosophischen Brocken heißt.²³ In der Nachschrift ist das Stichwort, wie wir gesehen haben, „die wesentliche Wahrheit.“ Die ewige, wesentliche Wahrheit ist „die, die sich wesentlich zu einem Existierenden verhält, indem sie wesentlich das Existieren betrifft.“²⁴ Es scheint, dass wir mit einem neuen, und zwar existentiellen, Begriff von Wahrheit zu tun haben, der nicht Wahrheit im allgemeinen, sondern eine besondere Art von Wahrheit, eben die existentielle, definiert. Climacus spricht in der Überschrift zum Kapitel über Subjektivität und Wahrheit von der „subjektiven Wahrheit.“ Wie Subjektivität hat das Existentielle aber den Schein von Selbstverständlichkeit gewonnen.Wir meinen zu wissen, was es heißt. Welche Forderung liegt aber darin, hier von Wahrheit zu sprechen? Die Forderung hat eben damit zu tun, dass der Begriff der Wahrheit durch die Frage der Wahrheit bestimmt ist. Die Wahrheit – das, was als Wahrheit gelten kann – muss letzten Endes erklären können, dass ich mich zu der Frage der Wahrheit verhalte. Hegel spricht davon, dass das Selbstbewusstsein wesentliches

 SKS 4, 221 / PB, 10.  SKS 7, 187 / AUN1, 196.

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Moment des Wahren ist.²⁵ Dies können wir so interpretieren, dass das, was als Wahrheit von der Wirklichkeit gelten kann, auch darüber Rechenschaft ablegen muss, dass ich mich zu der Wirklichkeit so verhalten kann, dass ich nach der Wahrheit frage. Die menschliche Wirklichkeit ist dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass wir uns zu ihr verhalten können, indem wir die Wahrheitsfrage stellen. Die Rede von dem subjektiven Weg habe ich deshalb so ausgelegt, dass wir in der Weise nach der Wahrheit fragen, dass wir die menschliche Bedingung mit einbeziehen: Wir sind selbst unterwegs. Dass wir uns zu der Wahrheit unter der Bedingung der Ungewissheit verhalten, ist nicht unwesentlich, sondern gehört schon zu der Wahrheit, nach der wir fragen, mit hinzu. Das heißt, dass wenn wir die Wahrheitsfrage stellen, wir diese Bedingung mit einbeziehen müssen. Wie wir nach der Wahrheit fragen, ist auch eine Frage von Wahrheit. Damit wird die Forderung existentiell verschärft. Die Forderung, die in der Rede von Wahrheit liegt, besteht nicht nur darin, dass das, was als die Wahrheit gelten soll, auch die Subjektivität einbeziehen muss, die nach der Wahrheit fragt. Die Wahrheit soll auch diese Subjektivität bestimmen, indem sie sich zur Wahrheit verhält. Wenn ich etwas für wahr halte, bin ich selbst verpflichtet. Ich muss selbst dafür einstehen. Durch die Wahrheitsfrage werde ich aber auch selbst in Frage gestellt. Ich kann mich der Wahrheit nicht dadurch vergewissern, dass ich selbst dafür einstehe. Die Wahrheitsfrage stellt somit die Subjektivität in Frage, die sich bestimmen soll, indem sie sich bestimmen lässt. Was Climacus über Subjektivität und Wahrheit sagt, scheint einen Sonderdiskurs über Wahrheit zu implizieren: die Wahrheit, welche die Subjektivität als einen Sonderbereich betrifft. Dieser Eindruck scheint sogar von der Rede über die wesentliche Wahrheit bestätigt zu werden. Die wesentliche Wahrheit ist die ethische und ethisch-religiöse Wahrheit, wie aus den Entwürfen zur Dialektik der ethisch und ethisch-religiösen Mitteilung hervorgeht.²⁶ Die Rede über Subjektivität und Wahrheit betrifft ethisch aufgeladene Wahrheiten. Wir werden aber den existentiellen Begriff von Wahrheit missverstehen, wenn wir ihn als einen Sonderbegriff auffassen. Erstens betreffen ethisch-religiöse Wahrheiten unsere Existenz in der Welt. Subjektivität ist Subjektivität in Weltbezug. Zweitens geht die subjektive Wahrheit die Situation an, in der wir nach Wahrheit fragen. Wir fragen zwar nach einer Wahrheit über uns selber hinaus, sind aber als Fragende selber  Vgl. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III,Werke Bd. 20, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971, S. 120.  Es gehört zum Erkennen von besonders ethisch und ethisch-religiöser Wahrheit eine Situation (SKS 27, 422). Die ethisch und ethisch-religiöse Wahrheit betrifft aber die Situation, in der wir nach der Wahrheit fragen.

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situiert. Wir fragen mit uns. Die subjektive Wahrheit hat damit zu tun, dass wir fragend selber existierend, unterwegs, sind. Sie betrifft die menschliche Bedingung, mit der wir nach Wahrheit fragen. Dies bedeutet drittens, dass der existentielle Begriff von Wahrheit die radikale Bedeutung der Wahrheitsfrage reflektiert. Die Wahrheitsfrage ist radikal, indem sie das fragende Subjekt einbezieht und in Frage stellt. Dazu kommt, dass Diskussionen über Wahrheitstheorien immerhin mit Subjektivität zu tun haben. In der Bestimmung von Wahrheit steckt das Problem von Subjektivität als Zugang zur Wirklichkeit. Was Climacus über Subjektivität und Wahrheit sagt, scheint neben die traditionellen Diskussionen zu fallen. Er rückt aber das Problem von Subjektivität und Wahrheit in den Vordergrund, das in der Tradition der philosophischen Wahrheitstheorien liegt. Und, um noch einen Schritt weiter zu gehen, die Fragestellung von Wahrheit und Zeit, die auch in Wahrheitstheorien enthalten ist, wird durch den existentiellen Begriff von Wahrheit verschärft. Das Verhältnis von Wahrheit und Zeit ist ein Problem, das schon das fragende Subjekt selber betrifft. Wir sind selber unterwegs. Im Ansatz von Climacus steckt die radikale Einsicht, dass die Wahrheit, nach der wir fragen, eben mit dieser Bedingung zu tun hat. Sie hat mit der eingangs angesprochenen Beziehung von Wahrheit und Weg zu tun, die im Verfahren von Climacus impliziert ist. Wir müssen diese Beziehung genau verstehen. Es ist ja keineswegs etwas Neues,Wahrheit und Weg miteinander zu verbinden.Wenn wir nach der Wahrheit fragen, meldet sich die Frage, ob wir uns selber auf dem Wege zur Wahrheit befinden. In dem Sinne ist der Weg schon von der Frage nach der Wahrheit umfasst. Die Frage ist schon: Was ist die Wahrheit des Weges, den wir gehen? Die Frage von Wahrheit und Weg ist aber radikaler zu verstehen, als es in den traditionellen Diskussionen geschieht. Denn wir fragen mit uns nach der Wahrheit, indem wir selber auf dem Wege – mit uns – sind. Die Frage ist also: Was ist die menschliche Bedingung, mit der wir nach der Wahrheit fragen? Diese Frage zeigt auch, was es heißt, nach der Wahrheit zu fragen.

6 Nach der Wahrheit fragen In der Nachschrift verbinden sich Rhetorik und Dialektik. Die Verbindung wirkt sich besonders in den Passagen über Subjektivität und Wahrheit aus. Ich werde dieses Thema von Rhetorik und Dialektik nur kurz berühren, um die Bedeutung der Wahrheitsfrage zu beleuchten. Nähern wir uns der Verbindung von außen durch zwei Beobachtungen. Erstens, der Leitsatz: „Die Subjektivität ist die Wahrheit“ ist auch dadurch rhetorisch wirkungsvoll, dass er übertreibt. Wenn die Subjektivität die Wahrheit sein soll, ist sie ja nicht bloß die Wahrheit, sie ist nicht

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bloß Subjektivität, sondern Subjektivität, die durch die Wahrheitsfrage bestimmt ist. Sie ist Innerlichkeit als Aneignung von Wahrheit. Zweitens, es ist schwierig, Subjektivität und Wahrheit zu bestimmen, weil sie je auf ihre Weise unhintergehbar vorkommen: Subjektivität als Zugang zur Wirklichkeit, Wahrheit als die Frage nach dem Verhältnis zur Wirklichkeit. Das Verfahren von Climacus kann so interpretiert werden, dass er versucht, diese Schwierigkeit dadurch in den Griff zu bekommen, dass er die beiden Begriffe gegeneinander „reibt,“ wie es in der Dialektik im Spätwerk Platons geschieht. Die Rhetorik versetzt uns ins Spiel zwischen den beiden Sätzen, in dem Subjektivität und Wahrheit sich dialektisch bestimmen. Wie zeigt dies die Bedeutung der Wahrheitsfrage? Die Wahrheitsfrage ist auch eine Frage danach, was wir tun und tun können: Wir können uns irren, wir können uns auch täuschen, und zwar dadurch, dass wir meinen, uns zu der Wahrheit zu verhalten. Die Wahrheitsfrage ist also auch die Frage, wie wir mit der Wahrheit umgehen. Wir gehen mit der Wahrheit so um, dass wir auch davon reden. Was tun wir, wenn wir von Wahrheit reden? Hier verbinden sich Rhetorik und Dialektik in einer Dialektik der existentiellen Bewegungen. Der entscheidende Punkt ist, dass wir uns zu der Wahrheitsfrage stellen oder stellen können, dass wir aber durch die Wahrheitsfrage auch selber bestimmt werden – indem wir uns als bereits von uns selbst bestimmt entdecken. Die Frage ist dann auch, was mit uns durch unser Tun geschieht. Verpflichten wir uns? Werden wir selber durch die vermeinte Wahrheit frei? Entscheidend ist, dass die Wahrheit sich meiner Behauptung von der Wahrheit entzieht, indem sie auch die Wahrheit über meine Behauptung ist. Die Wahrheitsfrage hat einen formellen Charakter, wie oben bemerkt wurde, der besser als übergreifend zu beschreiben ist. Wir haben nicht nur die Frage vor uns, wie die Wahrheit zu bestimmen ist, sondern die Frage greift darauf über, was wir tun, wenn wir mit der Wahrheitsfrage umgehen. In der Bestimmung von Subjektivität als Un-Wahrheit geht es also nicht um die Subjektivität der Wahrheit, sondern um die Bestimmung der Subjektivität. Durch die Wahrheitsfrage ist die Wirklichkeit der Subjektivität selber in Frage gestellt. Dies zeigt die Bedeutung der Wahrheitsfrage.²⁷

 Für die sprachliche Revision meines Textes möchte ich Dorothea Glöckner herzlich danken.

Chapter 12 Religion und Subjektivität – in existenzieller und pragmatischer Perspektive 1 Natur und Geist Wenn die Aufteilung der Wirklichkeit in Natur und Geist nicht länger überzeugt, stellt sich die Frage, wie „das Ineinander von Geist und Natur“ zu verstehen ist.¹ Retrospektiv scheint die Aufteilung die westliche Philosophie seit Descartes zu beherrschen, was jedoch nicht ausschließt, dass sie – die Philosophie – mit dem Problem zu kämpfen hat, wie Geist und Natur zusammen verstanden werden können. Wenn Geist gegen Natur bestimmt wird, wie wird er dann als Geist verstanden? Was an dieser Entgegensetzung von Geist und Natur problematisch ist, tritt schon am Kernbegriff von Subjektivität hervor. Die Entgegensetzung scheint darauf abzuzielen, die Eigenart von Subjektivität herauszustellen, aber Subjektivität wird dadurch gerade nicht als Subjektivität ausgelegt. Die Entgegensetzung von Natur und Geist hat Subjektivität schon im Voraus bestimmt: als Subjektivität, die einerseits nur gegen die Welt der Dinge bestimmt werden kann, andererseits nur als Subjektivität durch diese Welt der Dinge hervortritt, indem ein Subjekt sich auf sich selbst als Objekt bezieht. Dennoch brauchen wir Menschen einen begrifflichen Unterschied wie den zwischen Natur und Geist, um uns selbst in der Welt zu beschreiben. Dass Geist nicht einfach Natur ist, zeigt sich auch darin, dass die Aufteilung in Natur und Geist sich heute wieder auftut.² Wir leben in einem Zeitalter, in dem Sichtweisen, die durch Naturwissenschaften und Technologien geformt sind, das Leben, das wir je für uns und gemeinsam leben, immer tiefer prägen, und zwar indem sie unsere Sichtweisen formen. Wenn wir uns aber als „Natur“ zu verstehen bekommen, ändert sich etwas für uns. Wir werden anders leben. Dies zeigt schon, dass die Weise, auf die wir Natur sind, menschlich ist. Die Art und Weise, wie wir uns verstehen, ändert die Welt für uns, was gerade nicht bedeutet, dass wir unsere Welt „konstruieren.“

 Vgl. Hermann Deuser, „Gottesinstinkt, Glaubensgewissheit und die Universalität religiöser Erfahrung,“ in Instinkt Redlichkeit Glaube: Zum Verhältnis von Subjektivität und Religion, hg. von Heiko Schulz, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck 2011, S. 21– 44.  Zu fragen ist schon, was hier „Natur“ bedeutet. Natur ist insofern auch nicht einfach Natur, sondern was wir als Natur verstehen oder vor uns haben. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-018

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Wir leben aber auch in einem Zeitalter, das von Subjektivität fasziniert ist: Um „dabei“ zu sein, müssen wir uns selbst erzählen und inszenieren können; wir sollen unsere Identität vorführen, wenn nicht gar erfinden. In der Kultur der Visualisierung verstehen wir uns immer mehr dadurch, dass wir uns in den Augen der anderen spiegeln. Dadurch ändert sich aber auch unsere Einstellung. Um die beiden Tendenzen zusammenzuhalten: Wir befinden uns zwischen Naturalisierung und Subjektivierung. Vielleicht werden durch beide – Naturalisierung und Subjektivierung – sowohl Natur als auch Subjektivität übersehen und missverstanden. Hier möchte ich letztere aufgreifen, und nur indirekt auf erstere anspielen. Das Argument, das ich hier vorgeführt habe, will ich pragmatisch nennen: Wenn wir uns als Natur verstehen, und wenn wir uns in den Augen der anderen spiegeln, ändert sich für uns das Leben. Dass das Leben sich so ändert, ist nur indirekt unsere Entscheidung. „Pragmatisch“ ist hier mit „existenziell“ zu verbinden: Was tun wir, wenn wir uns entweder gegen oder durch die Natur, wie wir sie verstehen, zu verstehen versuchen? Was tun wir mit uns selbst? Indem wir etwas zu verstehen meinen, tun wir selbst etwas. Wir verhalten uns, obwohl wir nicht direkt Stellung nehmen. Mit unserem Verstehen nehmen wir an der Welt teil.³ Deshalb stellt sich auch für uns die Aufgabe zu verstehen, was es heißt, dass wir verstehen. Damit zeigt sich Subjektivität als komplex, wenn nicht kompliziert. Wenn wir versuchen wollen, die Komplexität der Subjektivität in den Blick zu bekommen, kommen wir nicht umhin, philosophisch über Religion zu reflektieren. Religion ist ein zutiefst menschliches Anliegen, das nicht nur von Menschen zeugt, sondern auch davon handelt, was es heißt, Menschen zu sein, und zwar die Menschen, die wir je schon sind. Dass Religion subjektiv ist, scheint selbstverständlich zu sein. Wenn wir aber versuchen, ihren subjektiven Charakter zu bestimmen, verschwindet die Selbstverständlichkeit. Nicht zuletzt wenn wir über Subjektivität in der Optik der Religion reflektieren, gilt es, mit der Frage der Subjektivität anzufangen. Was zeigt der subjektive Charakter der Religion von menschlicher Subjektivität?

2 Nur subjektiv? In einer wissenschaftlichen Einstellung kann Subjektivität als etwas Störendes, wenn nicht als etwas zu Eliminierendes erscheinen. Subjektivität haftet aber

 Vgl. Deuser, „Gottesinstinkt, Glaubensgewissheit und die Universalität religiöser Erfahrung,“ S. 29: „wie die Welt wirklich ist – indem wir daran teilnehmen.“

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menschlicher Wirklichkeit an. Dies tritt nicht zuletzt durch Religion hervor. Denn Religion scheint unauflöslich subjektiv zu sein. Die Meinung liegt dann auf der Hand, ihr subjektiver Charakter sei gerade, was sie problematisch macht. In dieser Perspektive scheint Religion eine enigmatische Subjektivität zu verkörpern, eine letzte, aber auch willkürliche Weise, die Welt anzusehen, eine Sichtweise, die sich der Rationalität entzieht. Subjektivität kommt hier als ein Rest- oder Abfallsprodukt vor. Auch der Einwand liegt nahe, dass diese Weise, Religion und Subjektivität zu verbinden, eine moderne, westliche Erfindung sei, die Religion zu einer individuellen, privaten Angelegenheit macht. Religion sei, so der Einwand, nicht nur subjektiv. Sie sei auch Tradition, Gemeinschaft, Institutionen etc. Dieser Einwand bestätigt aber die Auffassung von Subjektivität, die in der Rede von „nur subjektiv“ impliziert ist.Was in beiden Fällen – sowohl in der Reduktion von Religion auf eine Subjektivität, die nur subjektiv ist, als auch in der Entgegensetzung von Religion als privater, bloß subjektiver Angelegenheit und Religion als Sache einer Gemeinschaft – übersehen wird, ist, dass die Subjektivität der Religion in den Begriff der Öffentlichkeit eingeschrieben ist. Religion steht hier für den Umgang mit grundlegenden Überzeugungen. Wir können miteinander trotz verschiedener Grundüberzeugungen zusammenleben, indem wir die Möglichkeit haben, einen Schritt zurückzutreten, indem wir zueinander sagen: „So sehe ich die Welt.“ Öffentlichkeit hängt vom Sinn für die Grenzen der Öffentlichkeit ab. Deshalb ist Religionsfreiheit (einschließlich der Freiheit von Religion) von basaler Bedeutung. Um dies Argument noch einen Schritt weiterzuführen: Die Subjektivität der Religion ist ein modernes Problem auch darin, dass sie zeigt, was die Subjektivität der Perspektiven genannt werden kann, die zentral für Modernität ist. Wenn der subjektive Charakter das Problem der Religion ist, hat dies mit dem Problem der Modernität selbst zu tun.Wenn wir uns auf den Verlust einer Universalperspektive – Nietzsches „Tod Gottes“ – fokussieren, übersehen wir leicht, dass Religion gerade mit der Subjektivität der Perspektiven zu tun hat, die hiermit in den Vordergrund kommt. Diese – nur skizzenhaften – Überlegungen erschöpfen in keiner Wese die Fragestellungen, die in der Subjektivität der Religion impliziert sind. Wir müssen radikaler verfahren, und zwar dadurch, dass wir die Blickrichtung wechseln. Anstatt Religion auf Subjektivität zurückzuführen, müssen wir versuchen, Subjektivität auszulegen. Zu fragen ist dann nicht nur, ob Religion nur subjektiv ist, sondern auch, wie sie subjektiv ist. Religion ist vielleicht eben nicht subjektiv in dem Sinne, dass sie „nur subjektiv“ ist. Wenn es selbstverständlich wirkt, dass Religion subjektiv ist, übersehen wir, dass es nicht so selbstverständlich ist, in welchem Sinne sie subjektiv ist.

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Entscheidend ist, dass Religion nicht nur subjektiv ist, sondern auch menschliche Subjektivität artikuliert und auslegt.Wenn sie Subjektivität nicht von Vornherein direkt thematisiert, kann sie ein Nachdenken über Subjektivität ermöglichen. Sie kann dies, indem sie Fragen eröffnet, durch die wir über unsere eigene Subjektivität reflektieren können. In diesem Sinne ist Religion nicht nur subjektiv, sondern hat Subjektivität im Blick: Sie handelt von Subjektivität, und zwar auf einer Komplexitätsebene, die philosophisch herausfordernd ist. Im Folgenden möchte ich diese These entfalten und beginne mit der Frage, wie Philosophie und Religion sich zu einander verhalten, wenn wir von Religionsphilosophie sprechen. Indirekt werde ich für das Potential argumentieren, das eine Religionsphilosophie für eine Theorie der Subjektivität besitzt.

3 Religionsphilosophie: Religion und Philosophie Religionsphilosophie kann erstens das Diskussionsfeld zwischen Philosophie und Theologie bezeichnen. In diesem Sinne hat sie Philosophie und Theologie von Anfang an begleitet. Zweitens wird die Bezeichnung „Religionsphilosophie“ erst zu einer Zeit etabliert, in der Religion an Selbstverständlichkeit verloren hat. Religionsphilosophie in diesem zweiten, modernen Sinn hat mit denselben Themen zu tun wie Religionsphilosophie im ersten, klassischen Sinn, wird aber durch die Frage bestimmt, die für Modernität zentral ist: die Frage nach Perspektiven und Subjektivität. Religionsphilosophie verstehe ich durch zwei verbundene Leitmotive: a. Sie ist durch eine Perspektivenverdoppelung gekennzeichnet. Ihr Gegenstand, Religion, gehört nicht nur der menschlichen Wirklichkeit an, sondern interpretiert selbst diese Wirklichkeit. Nicht nur Philosophie, sondern auch Religion versucht die Wirklichkeit zu bestimmen. Religion tut es unter der Frage dessen, was uns unbedingt angeht, und in dieser Frage steht menschliche Wirklichkeit selbst in Frage. Dies bedeutet, dass Religionsphilosophie keine regionale Philosophie ist, sondern Philosophie, die durch Religion herausgefordert ist. Philosophie wäre nicht, was sie ist, ohne Religion als ihr „anderes,“ das es ermöglicht, dass Philosophie auf die Rationalität reflektiert, die sie selbst wahrnehmen soll. Die Perspektivenverdoppelung besteht darin, dass die Frage nach der menschlichen Wirklichkeit durch die Optik der Religion reflektiert wird. Religion spricht von der Welt, indem sie über etwas anderes als die Welt spricht. Was bedeutet diese Verschiebung für die Weisen, auf die wir die Welt sehen, in der wir leben? Was können wir durch die Optik der Religion zu sehen bekommen? b. Das zweite Motiv antwortet darauf. Durch die Optik der Religion ist die Welt von der Grenze her gesehen. Die Grenze bedeutet hier sowohl die Grenze der

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menschlichen Existenz, Anfang und Ende, Geburt und Tod, als auch Grenzsituationen und Grenzen menschlichen Verstehens und Handelns. Im Folgenden werde ich diese zwei Motive durch vier verbundene Schritte entfalten, die mit den Stichworten Un-Endlichkeit, conditio humana und Kontingenz, „Embodiment“ des Geistes, und Subjektivität als Aktivität und Passivität angegeben werden können. Dabei habe ich die doppelte Frage im Blick: Worin besteht die Subjektivität der Religion, und was zeigt Religion über menschliche Subjektivität?

4 Un-Endlichkeit: Existenz Religion ist keine Theorie der Welt. Sie betrifft die Welt als die Welt, in der wir leben und die uns angeht. Religion hat mit der Welt zu tun, indem sie menschliche Stellungen zur Welt einbezieht. Damit kann die Religion auch auf eine Umkehrung abzielen, indem sie den Blick der Adressaten transformieren will und dadurch Menschen in jener Welt reorientiert, in der sie sich schon befinden. Wenn Religion hier als eine Art Subjekt auftritt, hat dies mit dem Charakter der menschlichen Reorientierungsversuche zu tun. Die werden nicht einfach von Menschen selbst inszeniert, sondern geschehen auch mit ihnen. Wir können uns dazu entschließen, die Welt anders zu sehen, aber damit ist eben noch nicht entschieden, ob wir es auch tun. Religion erzählt auch vom menschlichen, oft allzu menschlichen Versuch, die eigenen Sichtweisen – und die von anderen – zu transformieren.⁴ Wenn zum Beispiel gesagt wird, dass ein Mensch nackt geboren wird und nackt dahinfährt (vgl. Job 1,21), werden die Augen der Zuhörer vom Leben, in dem wir⁵ aufgehen, zum Anfang und Ende des Lebens hinbewegt. Der Anfang und das Ende des Lebens, die wir schon kennen, werden durch Nacktheit neu beschrieben, und diese wiederholte Beschreibung hebt die radikale Bedeutung von Anfang und Ende hervor. Dies kommt in einer Rückwärtsbewegung zum Vorschein: Unsere Augen werden auch vom Anfang und vom Ende her wieder zu dem Leben gerückt, von dem wir zuerst eingenommen waren. Dann stellt sich die Frage: Was ist zwischen Anfang und Ende? Wie ist die Existenz zu verstehen, die ein Sein

 Im Folgenden werde ich über das Potential sprechen, das Religion für ein philosophisches Nachdenken darbietet. Dazu gehören auch – und nicht zuletzt – Erfahrungen menschlicher Zweideutigkeit. Als ein zutiefst menschliches Anliegen ist Religion zweideutig, kann aber auch Zweideutigkeit in den Blick bringen.  Ich verwende hier „Wir“ als einen operativen Begriff, um die Möglichkeit menschlichen Selbstverständnisses zu untersuchen.

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zwischen einem Anfang und einem Ende ist, die unhintergehbar sind? Die Existenz kann – so scheint es – in Versuchen aufgehen, nicht nackt, sondern „bekleidet“ zu sein oder Status zu haben. Wenn dies Leben, das in all unserem Tun aufzugehen scheint, durch die Optik der Religion in eine ultimative Perspektive gerückt wird, werden unser Tun und unser Verstehen von der Grenze her gesehen, von einer grundlegenden und gemeinsamen Nacktheit her, die allen Unterschieden in der „Bekleidung“ unterliegt. Diese Doppelbewegung, in der wir erstens vom „Mitten-im-Leben“ an den nackten Anfang und an das nackte Ende gerückt werden, um dann wieder zurückgebracht zu werden, lässt uns die Existenz als ein Zwischen-Sein sehen. Dies ist der Begriff der Existenz, den Kierkegaards Climacus in der Abschließenden unwissenschaftlichen Nachschrift prägt, und der zu einem Schlüsselbegriff in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts wurde. Ein Mensch ist so, dass er unterwegs ist. Er ist situiert, mitten im Leben, in einer Geschichte, die noch nicht abgeschlossen ist. Merkwürdig aber ist, dass das Leben als ganzes mitten im Leben, unterwegs, auf dem Spiele stehen kann. Dies kommt im Begriff des Augenblicks zum Ausdruck. Wenn es in Verzweiflung unmöglich scheint, fortzufahren, und wenn es in Hoffnung möglich wird, neu anzufangen, kehrt die Frage nach dem Anfang und dem Ende wieder zurück. Existierend sind wir auf uns selbst bezogen, indem wir es sind, die unser Leben zu leben haben. Ehe wir uns auf uns selbst beziehen, sind wir mit uns situiert. Damit ist Leben auch auf Leben bezogen. Die Übertragung, die zum Ausdruck kommt, wenn wir z. B. von einem Tod im Leben sprechen, hat damit zu tun, wie wir mit uns situiert sind, indem wir unser Leben zu leben haben. Die Möglichkeit, dass das Leben, von dem wir schon eingenommen sind, in einem entscheidenden Augenblick gesammelt wird, hängt damit zusammen, dass es ein Leben ist, in das etwas anderes einbricht, am Anfang der Geburt und am Ende des Todes. In der Religion suchen Menschen das Leben als ganzes zu sehen, obwohl sie sich mitten im Leben befinden. Die Imagination, die hier gefordert ist, nimmt ihren Ausgangspunkt in der Erfahrung, dass das Leben selbst von anderswoher bestimmt ist. Was ich hier herausstellen möchte, ist die Einsicht, dass die Endlichkeit selbst durch die Transzendenzbewegung der Religion ins Blickfeld gebracht werden kann. In einer traditionellen, modernen Perspektive wird Religion nach einem Schema verstanden, demzufolge die Transzendenzbewegung der Religion einfach auf eine andere Welt abzielt. Damit wird die Möglichkeit übersehen, dass Religion durch eine doppelte Betonung gekennzeichnet werden kann. Durch die Bewegung über das Sichtbare hinaus wird das, was wir sehen, in eine andere Perspektive

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gerückt.⁶ Durch die Bewegung zum Unendlichen hin wird die Endlichkeit selbst betont. Das liegt daran, dass menschliche Existenz ein Zwischen-Sein ist.Wir sind in einer Geschichte situiert, die mit uns geschieht, und deren Ende wir selbst nicht erzählen können. Wir sind so mitten drin, dass wir Geschichte nur so vor uns haben, indem sie noch, und zwar mit uns, aussteht. Diese Zwischen-Existenz wird durch die Optik der Religion von der Grenze – vom Anfang und vom Ende – her gesehen. In dieser Perspektive kann auch die radikale Bedeutung der Endlichkeit zum Vorschein kommen.

5 Kontingenz und conditio humana Diese doppelte Betonung – die mit dem Doppelbegriff von „Un-Endlichkeit“ eingekreist werden kann – stellt nur einen ersten Schritt dar, um zu zeigen, was mit den beiden Leitmotiven gemeint ist: die Optik der Religion und die Dialektik der Grenze. Religion spricht von menschlicher Existenz, indem sie sich über diese Existenz hinausbewegt. Durch diese Transzendenzbewegung wird die menschliche Existenz von ihrer eigenen Grenze her gesehen. In einem zweiten Schritt werde ich versuchen, kurz die Implikationen dieser doppelten Bewegung im Blick auf eine Reformulierung des Begriffes der conditio humana herauszustellen. Religion scheint vom Ewigen als dem Unveränderlichen zu handeln, im Gegensatz zur Welt der Veränderung, die wir auch verändern können, und in der wir selbst verändert werden. Die Betonung der menschlichen Endlichkeit in unserem ersten Schritt gibt uns die Möglichkeit, dass wir die conditio humana als die Bedingung verstehen, unter der wir als Menschen Veränderung durchleben. Die Erfahrung von Veränderung, die auch uns verändert und uns – wie es scheint – auch gegen uns selbst verändern kann, ist eine Erfahrung von Verletzbarkeit. Menschliche Existenz als Unterwegs-Sein bedeutet, dass wir ausgesetzt sind. Dies ist eine menschliche Bedingung, die Bedingung, unter der wir Menschen sind. Die Erfahrung der Veränderlichkeit ernst zu nehmen schließt ein, dass wir einsehen, dass in dieser Erfahrung unsere Beziehungen zur Welt, zu den anderen und zu uns auf dem Spiel stehen. Wenn wir überhaupt in Erfahrungen von Veränderung und Veränderlichkeit auf Grund stoßen und Schiffbruch erleiden können, ist es, weil wir selbst darin ausgesetzt sind.

 Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Beyond? Horizon, Immanence, Transcendence,“ in Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers, hg. von Jonna Bornemark und Hans Ruin, Södertörn: Södertörn University 2010, S. 223 – 241.

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Wie im ersten Schritt Endlichkeit durch die Bewegung zum Unendlichen hin betont wurde, hebt dieser zweite Schritt Kontingenz hervor. Religion legt Erfahrungen aus, die auch über unsere Vorstellungen hinausgehen können und durch die wir selbst überwältigt werden.Was sich so ereignet, dass es unsere Vorstellung übersteigt, bricht auch in unsere Welt hinein. Kontingenz bedeutet nicht nur, die Welt hätte anders sein können. Kontingenz ist auch Erfahrung davon, dass die Welt sich anders zeigt, indem etwas Unerwartetes und Unvorstellbares in sie hineinbricht. Religion ist Umgang mit Erfahrungen von Kontingenz in diesem Sinne. Die Erfahrung von Kontingenz kann radikal sein, indem sich die Welt für uns ändert. Wenn Religion unsere Aufmerksamkeit auf die conditio humana hinleitet, besonders auf eine grundlegende Nacktheit, die wir sonst übersehen, werden wir in derselben Bewegung auch die Endlichkeit und die Kontingenz zu sehen bekommen, die unsere Existenz kennzeichnen. In der Optik der Religion – durch die Verschiebung, in der die menschliche Existenz, in der wir begriffen sind, von der Grenze her gesehen wird – werden Endlichkeit und Kontingenz ins Zentrum gerückt. Durch die Optik der Religion können wir nachdenkend auf die radikale Bedeutung von Kontingenzerfahrungen hingeleitet werden. Die Zweideutigkeit der Religion als menschliches, allzu menschliches Unternehmen zeigt sich besonders darin, dass sie auch diese Erfahrungen weginterpretieren kann.

6 „Embodiment“ des Geistes – die Sprache der Religion Der dritte Schritt versucht mit dem Stichwort „Embodiment“ des Geistes, die Implikationen der doppelten Betonung im ersten Schritt weiter zu entfalten. Als conditio humana ist dieses „Embodiment“ – die verkörperte Existenz – die Nacktheit, die unseren Versuchen unterliegt, uns selbst zu „bekleiden“ und Identität zu geben. „Embodiment“ als Nacktheit bedeutet, dass wir selbst ausgesetzt sind. Wir haben schon eine Identität, die wir uns nicht gegeben haben, eine Identität, die fragil ist. Die Identität, die wir uns zu geben versuchen, ist ein Umgang mit der eigenen Fragilität und kann ein Versuch sein, uns selbst zu schützen. Dieser dritte Schritt antwortet auch auf ein traditionelles, schematisches Verständnis von Religion, und zwar als eine Bewegung über die verleiblichte Existenz hinaus zu einer Welt des Geistes. Geist ist aber selbst Bewegung, und zwar nicht nur eine Bewegung über die Endlichkeit hinaus, sondern auch eine Rückwendung, eine Wiederholung. In der Transzendenzbewegung bringen wir unsere verleiblichte Existenz mit uns. Dies zeigt sich wiederum darin, dass die Sprache der Religion metaphorisch ist. Wenn Religion vom Unsichtbaren spricht,

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tut sie es durch das schon Gesehene.Was geschieht mit dem Sichtbaren, indem es das ausdrücken soll, was noch nicht gesehen ist oder nicht gesehen werden kann? Die verleiblichte Existenz wird selbst übertragen oder transfiguriert, indem sie die Frage mit sich bringt, was sie selbst bedeutet. Nur als „embodied“ verstehen wir, was es heißt, dass wir selbst ausgesetzt und verletzbar sind. Umgekehrt verleihen Erfahrungen von Verletzbarkeit der verleiblichten Existenz Bedeutung. Die Sprache der Religion greift in diesem Sinne auf leibliche Erfahrungen zurück, indem nach der Bedeutung der menschlichen Existenz gefragt wird. Bedenken wir zwei Beispiele der metaphorischen Sprache der Religion, die den beiden ersten Schritten (Existenz als Unterwegs-Sein und Existenz als Ausgesetztsein) entsprechen: a. Als existierend ist ein Mensch unterwegs. Wie ist es möglich, das Leben als ganzes zu fassen? Wie können wir es in den Griff bekommen? Wenn wir versuchen, das Leben, in dem wir selbst begriffen sind, vor uns hin zu stellen, können wir uns das Leben als einen Weg vorstellen und auslegen. Das Bild des Weges greift auf die leibliche Erfahrung zurück, einen Weg zu gehen. Auf dem Wege sind wir Gefahren ausgesetzt. Wie der Anfang des Gleichnisses vom barmherzigen Samariter lautet: „Es war ein Mensch, der ging von Jerusalem hinab nach Jericho und fiel unter die Räuber“ (Luk 10,30). Wenn wir auf dem Wege sind, sind wir selbst dem ausgesetzt, was uns zustoßen kann und was mit uns geschieht. Aber nicht nur das. Wir sind auch uns selbst ausgesetzt. Wir gehen den Weg auch mit unserem Blick. Was ist es, was unseren Blick anzieht, wenn wir unterwegs sind? Unser Weg hängt davon ab, in welche Richtung wir sehen. Ein Mensch ist auch in dem Sinne ausgesetzt, dass er sich selbst auf dem Wege verlieren kann. Sein Verhältnis zu sich steht auf dem Wege auf dem Spiel. In der Optik des Gleichnisses wird ein Mensch in einer ultimativen Perspektive gesehen. Es geht um eine Entscheidung, die unterwegs geschieht, indem er den Weg mit sich geht. In dieser Entscheidung wird er selbst entschieden. Das liegt nicht nur in der Erzählung, sondern auch in deren Kontext. Das Gleichnis antwortet auf die Frage des Schriftgelehrten, der sich selbst rechtfertigen wollte, indem er Jesus fragte: „Wer ist denn mein Nächster?“ Durch das Gleichnis wird der Zuhörer auf sich zurückverwiesen: Wie gehst du selbst den Weg? Was siehst du selbst? b. Als zweites Beispiel nehmen wir die Metapher, eine Last zu tragen. Wenn wir auf dem Wege sind, haben wir oft etwas zu tragen. In der Optik der Religion können wir von der Last sprechen, die wir mit uns tragen oder tragen sollen. Metaphorisch kann es die Zeit sein, die wir zu tragen haben, während wir den Weg gehen. Es kann auch die Aufgabe sein, den Weg zu gehen. Aber es kann auch der vergangene Weg sein, den wir mit uns zu tragen haben. Indem wir den Weg mit uns gehen, haben wir auch uns selbst zu tragen oder ertragen.Was wir zu ertragen haben, ist nicht nur, was uns zustößt, sondern auch, was wir selbst getan haben.

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Damit wird wieder auf das Selbstverhältnis zurückverwiesen: Wir kommen nicht umhin, den Weg mit uns zu gehen. Obwohl wir es vielleicht nicht wollen, tragen wir uns selbst mit. Denn das Selbstverhältnis kommt nicht erst dadurch zustande, dass wir es etablieren. Es ist eher mit dem Wege verbunden, den wir selbst gehen. Subjektivität besteht nicht erst darin, dass wir das Leben selbstbewusst leben. Vielmehr steckt schon Subjektivität darin, dass wir auf dem Wege sind, „zu uns“ zu kommen. Subjektivität ist damit tief in beiden Bildern verwurzelt: einen Weg zu gehen und eine Last zu tragen. Damit sind wir beim vierten Schritt angelangt.

7 Subjektivität: Aktivität und Passivität Wenn Religion und Subjektivität so verbunden werden, dass wir sagen, Religion sei nur subjektiv, übersehen wir, dass Religion menschliche Subjektivität zum Vorschein kommen lässt, und zwar so, dass ein Nachdenken über Subjektivität ermöglicht und herausfordert wird. Die Frage ist also, wie wir durch die Optik der Religion menschliche Subjektivität zu sehen bekommen. Religion als ein zutiefst menschliches Anliegen lässt Subjektivität in ihrer Kompliziertheit sehen. Religion ist nicht nur ein zweideutiges Phänomen, sondern gibt uns auch die Möglichkeit, menschliche Zweideutigkeit ins Auge zu fassen. Nehmen wir zunächst das Problem des Willens. Wenn wir etwas tun, wofür wir uns entschieden haben, tun wir das selbst. Wir sind in einem emphatischen Sinne das Subjekt unseres Tuns. In welchem Sinne sind wir aber Subjekte unseres Willens? Wir sind es, die etwas wollen. Wir bringen nicht selbst den Willen hervor, sondern sind selbst dadurch bestimmt, dass wir etwas wollen. Wir können auch von unserem Willen gefangen werden.Wenn wir z. B. Ambitionen haben, ist die Frage nicht nur, wie wir sie verwirklichen, sondern auch, wie wir mit ihnen umgehen. Unser Willen kann ein Problem für uns selbst werden. Wir können selbst darunter leiden, wenn wir das tun, was wir wollen. Das Verhältnis von Aktivität (Tun) und Passivität (Leiden) ist somit kompliziert. Wir sind Subjekte, nicht nur als Subjekte unseres Tuns, sondern auch als diejenigen, die damit zu leben und zu ertragen haben, was sie tun.⁷ Wie kann in der Optik der Religion diese Verwicklung von Aktivität und Passivität artikuliert werden? Was wir tun und wie wir leiden, wird in einer Di Auf Englisch kann diese Ambiguität von Subjektivität so ausgedrückt werden: „We are subjects, not only as subjects of what we do, but also as subjected to what we do.“ Vielleicht leuchtet es nicht unmittelbar ein, wie wir auch im zweiten Fall (as subjected to what we do) Subjekte sind.Wir sind aber Subjekte in dem Sinne, dass wir auch unser eigenes Tun zu tragen haben, indem wir damit leben müssen.

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mension der Unendlichkeit reflektiert, in der wieder die endliche Existenz betont werden kann.Wenn wir darüber nachdenken, können wir z. B. fragen: In welchem Sinne sind wir Subjekte unseres Gewissens? Wir sind es, die davon getroffen werden, und dass wir es sind, können wir nicht mit anderen teilen, obwohl wir miteinander über Fragen des Gewissens kommunizieren können. Obwohl es um das je eigene Gewissen geht, bringen wir es nicht selbst hervor. Vielmehr werden wir selbst dadurch als Subjekte ausgezeichnet oder hervorgerufen. Ist aber unsere Schuld nicht etwas, das wir selbst hervorbringen? Richtig ist, dass unsere Schuld auf das zurückgeht, was wir getan haben. Die Erfahrung von Schuld zeigt aber auch an, dass wir die Bedeutung dessen, was wir tun, nicht selbst beherrschen. Unser Tun geht vielmehr so auf uns selbst zurück, dass wir dadurch selbst bestimmt werden, und zwar anders als wir uns bestimmen wollen. Nicht nur unser Tun, auch unsere Erfahrungen können in einer Unendlichkeit reflektiert werden, die das Leben als ganzes angeht. Wenn wir einen Verlust erfahren, der unwiderruflich und unersetzbar ist, kann unser Leben sich von Grund auf verändern. Wenn wir dies als Frage einer subjektiven Wahl oder Interpretation verstehen, können wir von dieser Erfahrung nicht Rechenschaft ablegen. Was im Gefühl der Trauer auf dem Spiel steht, kann gerade die Frage sein, wie wir mit der unendlichen Bedeutung des Verlustes umgehen. Trauer kann sich in Verzweiflung verwandeln.⁸ Wenn wir Freude am Leben erfahren, hat sie zwar mit dem Leben zu tun, das wir leben, indem wir etwas tun. Die Freude geht aber nicht darin auf. Obwohl sie Freude an dem ist, was wir erfahren, findet ein Überstieg statt. Wenn sie eine Freude am Leben ist, geht sie ein Leben an, das nicht einfach auf das zurückgeführt werden kann, was wir tun und erfahren.⁹ Diesen unterschiedlichen Beispielen ist gemeinsam, dass wir als Subjekte angesprochen sind, indem wir auch über uns selbst hinausgeführt werden. Wenn die Frage ist, was unser Tun, unsere Erfahrung, unser Leben für uns bedeuten, wird sie nicht so entschieden, dass wir darüber entscheiden. Vielmehr werden wir selbst darin entschieden. Die Entscheidung liegt darin, wie wir unser Leben leben können. Ich nenne dies eine existenziell-pragmatische Perspektive: Wir entscheiden uns schon in und mit dem, was wir tun. Die Frage, was wir in und mit dem tun, was wir tun, weist auf die Entscheidung hin, die mit uns geschieht. Die Entscheidung braucht nicht eine bewusste Entscheidung zu sein, die wir selbst

 SKS 9, 50 / LT, 50.  Vgl. die Rede „Glæde,“ in Søren Kierkegaard, Die Lilie auf dem Felde und der Vogel unter dem Himmel. Drei Fromme Reden (SKS 11, 40 – 48 / LF, 64– 74).

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formulieren, sondern die Entscheidung, die mit uns geschieht in und mit dem, was wir tun. Entscheidung als ein existenzphilosophischer Schlüsselbegriff muss in dieser existentiell-pragmatischen Perspektive, und zwar gerade im Blick auf ihren subjektiven Charakter, reformuliert werden. Die Subjektivität der Entscheidung besteht nicht einfach darin, dass wir uns so entscheiden, dass wir über unsere Entscheidung verfügen. Vielmehr liegt sie darin, dass wir selbst die Entscheidung zu tragen haben, die wir treffen. Es ist nur unsere Entscheidung, wenn wir dafür einstehen können, und dies ist nur möglich, wenn die Entscheidung nicht willkürlich, sondern in dem Sinne bestimmt ist, dass wir uns selbst dadurch bestimmen, dass wir selbst bestimmt werden. Entscheidungen, die für uns bedeutungsvoll sein sollen, treffen wir mit uns, und zwar so, dass wir selbst entschieden werden. Wenn Religion mit Grundüberzeugungen und Grundentscheidungen zu tun hat, die wir vielleicht nicht miteinander teilen oder teilen können, ist die Frage, wie Öffentlichkeit und Religion sich zueinander verhalten. Die Subjektivität der Religion kann hier leicht missverstanden werden. Wenn wir glauben, dass wir über unsere Grundüberzeugungen verfügen, haben wir wahrscheinlich nicht Grundüberzeugungen im Blick. Grundentscheidungen sind Entscheidungen, von denen unser Leben selbst abhängt und die wir nicht einfach vor uns haben. Vielmehr sind es Entscheidungen, die „mit uns“ geschehen, und zwar durch unser Tun und unser Leiden hindurch.

8 Dimensionen der Subjektivität Wie bekommen wir menschliche Subjektivität durch die Optik der Religion zu sehen? In der Religion geht es um menschliches Selbstverständnis, aber auf Umwegen, auf denen nicht nur Trägheit, sondern auch Blindheit ins Spiel kommt. Durch die Religion kann Subjektivität in einer Doppelperspektive gesehen werden: Subjektivität wird hervorgehoben, indem es in der Religion um eine Hinwendung geht; ein Mensch wird als Adressat angesprochen. Dadurch wird die Perspektive der ersten Person reflektiert, die in Erfahrungen z. B. von Gewissen, Schuld, Trauer hervortritt. Gleichzeitig aber wird Subjektivität im Kontext situiert. Es geht in der Religion um De-zentrierungen, in denen ein Subjekt dadurch angesprochen wird, dass es über sich hinaus geführt wird. Gerade dort, wo es um uns selbst geht, in Erfahrungen und Selbstbestimmung, werden wir über uns selbst hinaus bestimmt. Was uns unbedingt angeht ist keine Frage von letzter Setzung von Prioritäten. Die Perspektive der ersten Person wird radikal betont, indem die Selbstbeziehung in eine ultimative Perspektive gerückt wird: in die Perspektive

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einer Nacktheit jenseits menschlicher Konstruktionen, mit denen wir uns „bekleiden.“ Wir sind selbst unseren Konstruktionen der Wirklichkeit unterworfen, indem wir dem Leben ausgesetzt sind, das wir leben. In dieser ultimativen Perspektive ist es möglich, uns selbst durch uns selbst zu verlieren. In der skizzierten Doppelperspektive kann die Verwicklung der verschiedenen Dimensionen der Subjektivität deutlicher werden. Religion geht alle drei Dimensionen an: Selbstbeziehung, Verhältnis zur Welt, Verhältnis zu anderen Menschen. Entscheidend ist, dass die Selbstbeziehung in den beiden anderen Verhältnissen auf dem Spiele steht. Die De-zentrierung ist damit keine Hinzufügung, sondern liegt schon darin, dass wir mit uns selbst situiert sind. Man kann sich in Relationen zu anderen nicht nur so verlieren, dass man sich darin aufgehen lässt und nicht dazu kommt, das eigene Leben in den Blick zu fassen. Man kann sich auch dadurch verlieren, wie man sich zu den anderen unterwegs verhält (wie der Auslegung des Gleichnisses vom barmherzigen Samariter zu entnehmen ist). Die Selbstbeziehung ist nur radikal zu betonen, indem sie als in den Relationen zu anderen und zur Welt verwickelt ausgelegt wird. Dass die Perspektive der ersten Person sowohl radikal betont als auch dezentriert wird, tritt besonders an einem Punkt hervor, in dem die Hinwendung der Religion an die Einzelnen gipfelt. Die Perspektive der ersten Person kann genau so umgekehrt werden, dass aus dem „Ich“ ein „Du“ wird: Fabula de te narratur geht den an, der die Erzählung hört. Die Perspektive der ersten Person wird hier nur derart umgekehrt und verwandelt, dass sie als Perspektive der ersten Person vertieft wird. Religion ist keine Theorie der Welt, sondern beinhaltet die Frage, wie wir mit uns in der Welt situiert sind. Wenn nicht anders, sind wir schon durch diese Frage miteinander verbunden. Auch in diesem Sinne ist die Religion keine „nur subjektive“ Frage.¹⁰

 Für die sprachliche Revision danke ich Claudia Welz herzlich.

Chapter 13 Paradox des Denkens – paradoxes Denken 1 Das Absolute denken? Was heißt es, das Absolute zu denken? Wenn wir darüber nachdenken, kann es uns auffallen, dass ein solches Unternehmen denjenigen in Frage stellt, der es vorzunehmen versucht. Wenn ein Mensch sich in dieses Projekt hineinbegibt, vergisst er dann nicht, wie er – als Mensch – situiert ist? Und macht er sich nicht blind dafür, wie er sich selbst mit seinem Unternehmen situiert? Wie ist er selbst – als Subjekt – in seinem Denken da? Was heißt es, Gott zu denken? Hier kommt ein absolutes Gegenüber ins Spiel, so dass wir uns selbst als Menschen dem Anderen gegenüber zu denken haben. Genau dies können wir aber vermeiden, wenn wir meinen, Gott zu denken. Stellen wir uns vor, dass ich zum letzten Satz hinzufüge: „ohne dass uns dies jedoch gelingt“ (also Gott zu denken). Ich würde dann voraussetzen, dass wir in der Lage wären, die Gottesfrage so zu beantworten, dass wir sagen könnten: „Jetzt gelingt es uns, Gott zu denken.“ Würden wir damit nicht den Charakter der Gottesfrage verkennen? Wie entscheiden wir, ob es uns gelingt, Gott zu denken? Einerseits muss es sinnvoll sein zu fragen, ob wir wirklich tun, was wir zu tun meinen. Andererseits müssen wir uns selbst fragen, in welche Lage wir uns bringen, wenn wir meinen, dass es uns gelingen kann, Gott zu denken. Dass wir uns als Menschen auf diese Weise in Frage stellen müssen, gehört dazu, die Gottesfrage überhaupt als solche zu verstehen. Diese Einsicht werde ich im Folgenden zu entfalten versuchen, und zwar durch eine Re-Interpretation des Begriffs des Paradoxes. Was ich damit im Blick habe, ist kurz gesagt Folgendes. Der Begriff vom Paradox des Denkens rückt die menschliche Möglichkeit und Tendenz in den Vordergrund, dass wir uns als Menschen vergessen. Das Paradox ist ein Gegenzug: Es erinnert uns daran, dass wir vergessen können und vielleicht auch wollen, was wir selbst tun – auch wenn wir meinen, das Absolute oder Gott zu denken. Das Paradox als Gegenentwurf bedeutet, dass das Absolute nur indirekt gedacht werden kann, und zwar dadurch, dass es uns in Frage stellt – als diejenigen, die versuchen, es zu denken. Kapitel III von Søren Kierkegaards Philosophischen Brocken verknüpft menschliches Selbstverstehen und das absolute Paradox. Die Verbindung leuchtet zunächst nicht ein. Im Versuch, das Absolute zu verstehen, sollen wir uns über uns hinaus bewegen. Es geht um Transzendenz. Diese Bewegung über uns https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-019

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hinaus können wir aber nur mit uns machen. Das ist der Grund, warum wir das Absolute paradox verstehen müssen. Der Widerspruch im Paradox weist auf uns selbst zurück, die versuchen, das Absolute zu verstehen. Wir werden an die Unmöglichkeit erinnert, uns jenseits unserer selbst zu versetzen. Existierend befinden wir uns in der Zeit, können nur in der Zeit – mit uns – über die Zeit hinausgehen. Wenn wir versuchen, uns existierend zu verstehen, fällt uns die Lage auf, in der wir uns schon befinden – auch wenn wir versuchen, das Absolute zu denken. Das Paradox ist also als eine Erinnerung an uns selbst zu verstehen. Was sind wir, dass wir meinen, wir könnten das Jenseits denken? Wie sollen wir uns in diesem Denkversuch verstehen? In dem Versuch liegt jedoch nicht nur die Versuchung zu vergessen, dass wir uns selbst mitbringen. Es steckt auch Leidenschaft darin. Wir sind über uns hinaus im Versuch, das Andere zu verstehen, in Bezug worauf wir uns selbst haben. In dieser Bewegung über uns hinaus können wir uns selbst suchen. Finden wir damit nur uns selbst im Anderen? So wie wir vergessen können, dass wir in der Transzendenzbewegung über uns hinaus uns selbst mitbringen, können wir das Andere auf uns zurückführen. Diese merkwürdige Verwicklung von Selbstvergessen und Selbstbehauptung macht die paradoxe Erinnerung an uns notwendig. Zweierlei ist hier bedenkenswert. Erstens, wir brauchen uns nicht erst über uns selbst hinaus zu bewegen. Wir sind schon da – über uns hinaus, in Bezug auf das Andere. Zweitens, wenn wir versuchen, denkend über uns hinaus zu gehen, bringen wir uns selbst mit. Diese doppelte Bestimmung – über uns hinaus mit uns – liegt darin, dass unser Denken leidenschaftlich bestimmt ist. Im Kapitel III der Brocken lässt Kierkegaard Johannes Climacus hervorheben, dass das Paradox zum menschlichen Denken gehört. Es ist „die Leidenschaft des Denkens“: „Das ist denn des Denkens höchstes Paradox: etwas entdecken wollen, das es selbst nicht denken kann.“¹ Kapitel III der Brocken trägt die Überschrift: „Das absolute Paradox.“ Wie ist das Paradox des Denkens zu verstehen, wenn es darum geht, das absolute Paradox zu denken? Diese Frage werde ich im Folgenden mit zwei anderen Fragen verknüpfen: Erstens, wie zeigt sich die conditio humana im metaphysischen Denken als dem Versuch, Transzendenz zu denken? Zweitens, was heißt es, dass wir verstehen sollen, dass wir das absolute Paradox nicht verstehen können? Meine These ist, dass die Forderung des Verstehens des Nicht-Verstehens Verstehen als eine Frage der conditio humana hervortreten lässt. Die Forderung des Verstehens hat genau damit zu tun, dass wir versuchen können, uns als

 SKS 4, 243 / PB, 35.

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Menschen zu vergessen. Gott zu denken birgt in sich sowohl die Versuchung, uns als Menschen zu vergessen, als auch die Erinnerung an uns selbst, die wir uns derart vergessen können. Conditio humana bedeutet zunächst, dass wir als Menschen in der Zeit sind und zwar so, dass wir mit der Zeit als Problem leben. Metaphysik als Versuch, denkend über die Zeit hinaus zu gehen, setzt ihrerseits die Zeit als Problem voraus. Bewegt sich Metaphysik aber nicht so über die Zeit hinaus, dass sie sich auf das Ewige als das Zeitlose hin bewegt? Ist dies nicht die Vorstellung, die wir in einem nachmetaphysischen Zeitalter verloren haben?

2 Nachmetaphysik? Moderne westliche Philosophie ist von der Rede von Kehren geprägt, wie z. B. „the linguistic turn“ oder „the iconic turn.“ Nicht zuletzt in dieser Hinsicht leben wir philosophisch noch im 20. Jahrhundert. In den letzten Jahrzehnten ist die Rede von Kehre oder turn sogar inflationär geworden. Dabei wird die Frage nicht gestellt, was geschieht, wenn man dergestalt „in turns“ denkt. Besonders selbstverständlich erscheint die Rede von einem nachmetaphysischen Zeitalter. Dieser Zustand ist jedoch zweideutig: Obwohl wir uns darin schon befinden, sollen wir sie erst verstehen und dadurch eine Kehre vollziehen. Diese Kehre – die Einsicht, dass wir uns in einem nachmetaphysischen Zeitalter befinden – ist derart selbstverständlich geworden, dass sie ohne weiteres in andere Vorstellungen von Kehren hineinspielt. Zu fragen ist aber, was wir nicht sehen, wenn wir uns unsere Welt nachmetaphysisch vorstellen. Die Gewissheit, dass wir in einem nachmetaphysischen Zeitalter leben, spiegelt ironischerweise die Metaphysik wider. Die Tradition der Metaphysik wird als Kontrasthintergrund fast gewaltsam stilisiert oder schematisiert. Darin liegt nicht nur, dass ein modernes Selbstbewusstsein sich von etwas abhebt, das es für sich konstruiert. Im „Konstruieren“ stecken auch Fragen, die auf das zurückgreifen, was wir konstruieren, die wir aber auch durch unsere „Konstruktionen“ vergessen können. Dies gilt nicht zuletzt für „die“ metaphysische Tradition. Ob die Metaphysikkritik der metaphysischen Tradition gerecht wird, diese Frage kann vielleicht den Blick dafür eröffnen, was wir in einem nachmetaphysischen Selbstverständnis übersehen. Was Heidegger Destruktion nennt, ist nicht nur Kritik, sondern auch Versuch, die Tradition wiederzuentdecken. In einem nachmetaphysischen Zeitalter können wir die Erfahrung machen, dass wir von der Metaphysik nicht loskommen. Wenn wir den – wie es scheint – entgegengesetzten Versuch machen, die Metaphysik zu restaurieren, tun wir, als ob die Zeit sich nicht geändert habe. In beiden Fällen

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wird übersehen, dass Metaphysik als metaphysisches Denken mit der Zeit als Problem der Veränderung zu tun hat. Wie aber hängt metaphysisches Denken mit der Zeit und Geschichte zusammen? Eingangs möchte ich ein Motiv und eine Frage unterscheiden und zusammenhalten. Das Motiv ist, dass das Denken seine geschichtlichen Bedingungen mitreflektieren muss. Diese Forderung kommt nicht nur von außen, von der Geschichte her, sondern auch von innen her – vom Denken selbst. Wenn es sich selbst denken will, muss es dazu kommen, sich selbst als geschichtlich zu verstehen. Die Frage lautet: Ist Metaphysik auch ein Versuch, die Bedingungen des Denkens mitzudenken? In dieser Frage liegt die Vermutung, dass Metaphysik selbst – die metaphysische Tradition – durch das Problem bestimmt ist, wie Metaphysik zu verstehen ist, was seinerseits zu der weiteren Frage führen kann, wie sie, die Metaphysik, möglich ist. Anders gesagt, entsprechend dazu, dass wir von der Metaphysik nicht loskommen, bricht in der Metaphysik von innen her die Frage auf, was es heißt, metaphysisch zu denken. Zunächst sieht es so aus, dass das moderne Motiv, dass Denken daran zu messen sei, ob es seine geschichtlichen Bedingungen mitreflektiert, gegen die Metaphysik zu wenden ist, weil diese auf das Zeitlose aus ist. Aber vielleicht greift dieses Motiv auf das Problem zurück, das die Metaphysik mit sich selbst hat.

3 Metaphysisches Denken Wenn die Metaphysik der Versuch ist, das Absolute zu denken, bringt sie die Frage mit sich: Wie ist das möglich – wie können wir Menschen den letzten Grund des Denkens denken? Dies ist die im ausgezeichneten Sinn metaphysische Frage, mit der die Metaphysik selbst in Frage steht. Dass innerhalb der Metaphysik die Frage aufkommen kann, was es heißt, metaphysisch zu denken, liegt sowohl daran, dass sich in der Tradition die Metaphysik mit Metaphysik auseinandersetzt, als auch daran, dass metaphysisches Denken auf die Grenze des Denkens stößt, indem es versucht, jenen Grund zu denken, der unhintergehbar ist. Im ersten Punkt – metaphysischem Denken als Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition – liegt die Möglichkeit, dass die Geschichte der Metaphysik Thema der Metaphysik selbst wird, und im zweiten Punkt die Möglichkeit, dass Metaphysik zu einer kritischen Besinnung auf die Grenzen des Denkens wird. Wie aber kann das kritische Fragen innerhalb des metaphysischen Denkens aufbrechen? Metaphysik als der Versuch, das Absolute zu denken, stößt auf das Problem, dass wir das Absolute nur durch das andere denken können, für welches es das Absolute ist.Wenn das Absolute als Prinzip zu verstehen ist, wie können wir es dann als das Absolute denken? Wie kann es sowohl Prinzip für…als auch ab-solut sein? Diese

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Frage können wir der Auseinandersetzung entnehmen, die Aristoteles mit Platon führt. Wenn die Ideen absolut sind, so dass sie eine Welt für sich jenseits der Welt der Veränderung bilden, wie können sie dann als Prinzipien für diese Welt verstanden werden, in der wir leben? Die Metaphysik Hegels, die Metaphysikkritik in sich birgt, können wir als groß angelegten Versuch verstehen, diese Frage zu beantworten. Metaphysisches Denken kommt aber über die Schwierigkeit nicht hinaus, die Grenze des Denkens zu denken. Aus der kritischen Selbstbesinnung wird damit ein Paradox des Denkens im Sinne Kierkegaards. Das Paradox ist die Leidenschaft des Denkens: das zu denken, das es nicht denken kann. Das Paradox des Denkens ist eine kritische Figur, in der es darum geht, die Grenzen des Denkens zu denken, jedoch nicht nur (wie bei Kant) als Selbstbegrenzung des Denkens, sondern als Erfahrung des Denkens, die es uns ermöglicht, anders zu denken.² Was eingangs als Motiv und als Frage formuliert wurde, kann damit erneut bestimmt werden. Wenn wir versuchen, die Metaphysik „metaphysisch“ auf jenen Grund hin zu bestimmen, der unhintergehbar ist, stoßen wir auf uns selbst. Die Frage ist, wie wir uns im Denken erfahren. Wie sind wir selbst dabei im Denken? Denken wird durch Fragen bewegt. Metaphysisches Denken betrifft letzten Endes Fragen, die wir als Menschen nicht beantworten können – Fragen über dies „letzten Endes.“ Insofern ist metaphysisches Denken ein Fragen, in dem es sich offen hält. Jedoch kann es auch die Frage nach dem Absoluten so beantworten, dass wir den Eindruck bekommen, dass wir selbst absolut denken: Wir begreifen das Absolute, haben es im Griff, und haben Antworten, die selbst absolut sind. Damit wird das Fragen im Antworten vergessen. Deshalb kann es in der metaphysischen Tradition auch darum gehen, wider das eigene Vergessen nach dem Anfang zu fragen. Wenn Metaphysik durch die Vorstellung eines nachmetaphysischen Zeitalters stilisiert wird, werden gerade die Fragen vergessen, die metaphysisches Denken in sich birgt. Hinter Metaphysik als Antwort steht metaphysisches Denken, das durch Fragen bewegt wird. In dieser Bewegtheit kann Metaphysik auf die menschliche Bedingtheit stoßen – und zwar als die Bedingung metaphysischen Denkens. Fragend sind wir im Denken selbst bewegt.Wenn wir über Metaphysik als Denken nachdenken, stoßen wir auf die Bedingung, die wir selbst mitbringen. Deshalb trägt Metaphysik die Frage nach der Metaphysik mit sich, die zur kritischen Frage werden kann, wie Metaphysik selbst überhaupt möglich ist. Das Problem der

 Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Transcendence of Thought: The Project of Philosophical Fragments,“ Kapitel 18 in diesem Buch.

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Metaphysik führt uns zum Paradox des Denkens: Wie können wir die Grenzen des Denkens denken? Die menschliche Bedingtheit liegt schon darin, dass wir in der Zeit situiert sind. Metaphysik als ein Denken, das über die Zeit hinaus auf das Ewige als das Zeitlose hinzielt, ist durch das Problem der Zeit in Bewegung gebracht: Wie können wir eine Welt in Veränderung verstehen? Wo ist für das Verstehen Halt? Wie können wir den Grund des Verstehens verstehen? Metaphysisches Denken ist eine bewegte Transzendenzbewegung, die aber versuchen kann, sich selbst – als bewegt – in dieser Bewegung aufzuheben. Damit kann metaphysisches Denken aber auch gegen sich selbst gekehrt und als ein menschliches Denken bloßgelegt werden. Diese Bloßlegung setzt wiederum die metaphysische Bewegung voraus. Wir können die conditio humana als Frage in den Blick bekommen durch die Metaphysik, die – selbst bewegt – über diese menschliche Bedingtheit hinauszugehen versucht. Das heißt aber, dass Metaphysik als die Bewegung, in der Menschen versuchen, über sich hinaus Transzendenz zu denken, selbst von der conditio humana zeugt. Das liegt darin, dass wir nur mit uns, bewegt, über uns hinaus fragen können. Die bewegte Transzendenzbewegung metaphysischen Denkens zeigt die menschliche Natur als meta-physisch an. Als Menschen kommen wir nicht umhin, Fragen zu stellen, die wir nicht beantworten können. Wir bewegen uns über die Zeit hinaus, um nach der Bedeutung der Zeit zu fragen – und diese Bewegung zeugt von unserer zeitlichen Existenz. Auch wenn eine Metaphysik in der Bewegung über die Zeit hinaus der Zeit Wirklichkeit abspricht, zeigt diese Bewegung selbst die Wirklichkeit der Zeit an.

4 Kritische Dimensionen des Paradoxes Bis jetzt habe ich in die Richtung argumentiert, im metaphysischen Denken liege der paradoxe Versuch, das Absolute zu denken, das jenseits des Denkens ist. Wenn wir dann umgekehrt von dem Begriff des absoluten Paradoxes ausgehen, ist der Blick zunächst metaphysikkritisch. Er setzt metaphysische Bestimmungen von Zeit und Ewigkeit (als Zeitlosigkeit) voraus, um das Paradox absolut zu bestimmen: Die ewige Wahrheit jenseits der Zeit verhält sich nicht nur paradox zu dem Existierenden in der Zeit (so dass der Existierende sich zu der ewigen Wahrheit verhalten kann), sondern ist selbst paradox, indem sie in die Geschichte des Existierenden hineintritt. Ohne Metaphysik wäre es unmöglich, das absolute Paradox zu bestimmen. Die kritische Dimension des Paradoxes liegt aber nicht nur darin, dass metaphysisches Denken als der Versuch, Transzendenz zu denken, gegen die Me-

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taphysik selbst gekehrt wird. Auch nicht nur darin, dass es um die kritische Bestimmung von der Grenze menschlichen Denkens geht. Das Paradox ist überdies kritisch in einem existenziellen Sinne. Kierkegaards Text über das absolute Paradox im Kapitel III der Philosophischen Brocken ist besonders in zwei Hinsichten bemerkenswert. Erstens ist er nicht nur ein Text über das Paradox als die Leidenschaft des Denkens, sondern auch über das Problem des Selbstbewusstseins. Zweitens geht es um das Selbst und das Andere: Die Leidenschaft des Denkens ist der Versuch, das Andere zu denken, das sich dem Denken entzieht. In der Erfahrung, dass das Andere sich dem Denken entzieht, stößt das Denken auf Grund. Es wird mit sich selbst konfrontiert: Denken wir nicht nur uns selbst im Anderen – wenn wir versuchen, das Andere zu denken, in Bezug worauf wir uns selbst haben? Die Erfahrung, auf Grund zu stoßen, indem das Andere sich entzieht, wird in Kierkegaards Text mit der Liebe verglichen. In der Liebe zum Anderen geht das Selbst zu Grunde. Zu fragen ist, ob es in dieser Erfahrung zu sich kommt. Im Folgenden werde ich zu zeigen versuchen, wie wir die verschiedenen kritischen Fragen, die ihre Spuren im Kierkegaardschen Text hinterlassen – Fragen nach dem Denken, Menschsein, dem Verhältnis von Selbst und Anderem – verbinden können. Es geht hier vor allem darum, die Subjektivität des Denkens näher zu bestimmen.

5 Leidenschaft des Denkens Was bedeutet es, dass das Paradox die Leidenschaft des Denkens ist – wie es im Kapitel III der Brocken heißt? In der Leidenschaft ist ein Mensch über sich hinaus, indem er auf etwas aus ist. Er ist es aber selbst. Er ist selbst in Bewegung: bewegt, indem er sich selbst bewegt. Auf welche Weise ist die Leidenschaft eine Leidenschaft des Denkens? Wenn wir denken, machen wir mit uns Denkbewegungen: Wir denken. Ob wir über uns selbst hinauskommen, hängt auch davon ab, wie wir darin selbst bewegt werden. Wir werden von dem bewegt, was wir zu denken versuchen.Wenn es sich als etwas anderes zeigt, als wir dachten, können wir dazu kommen, anders zu denken. Die Frage ist aber auch, ob wir das verstehen, was wir erfahren. Kommen wir wirklich dazu, anders zu denken? Ob wir das tun, hängt auch davon ab, wie wir darüber nachdenken. Denken handelt nicht nur davon, dass wir denken, wie wir nun einmal denken; es handelt auch davon, wie wir das denken, was wir denken. Denken ist auch Nachdenken in diesem Sinn: das zu denken, was wir denken. Wenn wir das Andere als das Andere bestimmen, sieht es so aus, als ob wir es schon gedacht hätten. Es ist als „das Andere“ in das Denken einbezogen.Wie ist es

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möglich, das Andere des Denkens „innerhalb“ des Denkens zu bestimmen? Gibt es die Möglichkeit, es als das zu bestimmen, das wir nicht denken können? Verstehen wir, dass es das Andere ist, indem wir verstehen, dass wir es nicht verstehen? Das ist die offene Frage, die die Möglichkeit eines paradoxen Denkens anzeigt und die im Titel meines Beitrages anvisiert ist. Zunächst müssen wir die Frage nach der Subjektivität des Denkens festhalten, die sich in der Bestimmung der Leidenschaft meldet. Dass es ein Anderer ist, den wir zu verstehen versuchen, zeigt sich auch darin, dass etwas mit uns geschieht. Wir sind nicht Subjekte des Denkens so, dass wir unser Denken einfach führen und inszenieren könnten. Wir sind selbst im Denken begriffen, in es einbegriffen, so dass wir uns denkend erfahren können. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes ist Wissenschaft von der Erfahrung des Bewusstseins in dem Sinne, dass wir Erfahrungen mit Erfahrung machen.Wir machen Erfahrungen mit uns, indem etwas uns zu denken gibt.Wie wir denken, bekommen wir aber auch zu erfahren. Indem wir etwas anders verstehen als früher, setzen wir uns auch davon ab, wie wir selbst gedacht haben. Wir kommen nur so dazu, anders zu verstehen, dass wir einmal anders verstanden haben. Auch verstehend sind wir in der Zeit „ausgespannt.“ Warum müssen wir daran erinnert werden, dass Denken Leidenschaft ist? Wenn wir denken, können wir uns in den Schein hineindenken, dass wir aus uns selbst heraus denken. Ist es nicht so, dass unsere Leidenschaft aus uns selbst kommt? Wir sind ja selbst in der Leidenschaft da.Wie aber? Wir treten selbst in der Leidenschaft hervor, „tun“ es aber, indem wir selbst in Leidenschaft bewegt werden. Deshalb bringen wir nicht selbst unsere Leidenschaft hervor. Das gilt auch für die Leidenschaft des Denkens. Wir versuchen zu denken, was uns bewegt. „Letzten Endes“ werden wir von etwas bewegt, das uns zu denken gibt, indem es sich unserem Denken entzieht. In der Verwicklung von Sichbewegen und Bewegtwerden ist das Selbst mit dem Anderen verwickelt. Das Andere kommt so ins Spiel, dass es das Selbst bewegen kann. Es kann uns über uns selbst hinaus bewegen, so dass wir verändert werden. Wir werden aber nur selbst verändert, indem wir anders denken. Wie sollen wir verstehen, dass es das höchste Paradox des Denkens ist, etwas zu entdecken, das man nicht denken kann (wie es im Kapitel III der Brocken heißt)? Was Denken letzten Endes bedeutet, zeigt sich, wenn wir versuchen, dies „letzten Endes“ zu verstehen. Was letzten Endes zu denken ist, darüber hinaus kann das Denken nicht gehen. Das Denken muss aber versuchen, über das hinauszugehen, was es schon gedacht hat. Als ein Versuch im Transzendieren gelingt das Denken nur dadurch, dass es sich selbst transzendiert. Der Versuch, das letzte Ende zu denken, weist damit das Denken auf es selbst als Leidenschaft zurück.

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Als leidenschaftlich bestimmt versucht es, über sich selbst hinauszugehen, muss damit aber versuchen, die Grenzen des Denkens zu denken. Es lohnt sich, die beiden Hinweise in Kierkegaards Text genauer zu überlegen. Der erste weist uns auf die Liebe, der zweite auf das Menschsein hin. Erstens, die paradoxe Leidenschaft des Denkens, etwas zu entdecken, das es selbst nicht denken kann, wird mit dem Paradox der Liebe verglichen. „Der Mensch lebt ungestört in sich selber, da wacht das Paradox der Selbstliebe auf als Liebe zu einem andern, zu einem, den man entbehrt.“³ In der Leidenschaft sind wir selbst über uns hinaus; wir haben uns in Beziehung zu einem Anderen. Wenn wir aber uns selbst im Anderen wiederfinden, wie sehen wir dann den Anderen als den Anderen? Wie ist es möglich, sich selbst über sich hinaus zu finden? Wenn wir den Hinweis in Kierkegaards Text folgen, lautet die Antwort auf diese doppelte Frage: Nur indem die Selbstliebe in der Liebe zu Grunde geht – im doppelten Sinne des Wortes. Wir können dies folgendermaßen auslegen: Das Selbstverhältnis wird in der Liebe zum Anderen gebrochen, indem wir uns vor dem Anderen sehen, das uns selbst so hervorruft, dass wir für uns selbst antworten sollen. Dem Anderen gegenüber können wir uns selbst anders entdecken, nicht als ein Anderer wie der Andere, sondern uns selbst als ein Anderer. Wir kommen dazu zu verstehen, dass wir uns nicht verstehen. Das Paradox der Liebe besteht darin, dass wir uns so über uns hinaus wiederfinden, dass wir durch die Liebe verändert werden. Wir erkennen uns nicht einfach wieder. Der zweite Hinweis – aufs Menschsein – hängt mit dem ersten zusammen. Kierkegaard lässt Johannes Climacus vorschlagen: Machen wir eine kühne Proposition: Nehmen wir an, dass wir wissen, was ein Mensch ist! Der Vorschlag ist überraschend. Wir wissen ja, was ein Mensch ist, denn wir sind es selbst. Die Proposition beinhaltet, dass wir nicht wissen, was wir als Menschen sind. Dies ist aber kein einfaches Nichtwissen. Wir wissen, was es heißt, ein Mensch zu sein, sofern wir es selbst sind. Wir wissen es mit uns.Was wir mit uns wissen, verstehen wir aber nicht, und das liegt an uns: Wir können es für uns selbst zudecken. So lautet das Motiv in der Abschließenden unwissenschaftlichen Nachschrift zu den Philosophischen Brocken: Wir können vergessen, was es heißt, ein Existierender zu sein – und zwar dadurch, wie wir es sind. Selbstverstehen ist schwierig nicht nur in dem Sinne, dass wir noch mehr von uns zu verstehen haben, sondern auch dadurch, dass wir in der Weise, wie wir uns zu verstehen meinen, uns nicht verstehen können. Selbstbewusstsein kann auch Selbstentfremdung sein. Sünde

 SKS 4, 244 / PB, 36.

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als Selbstentfremdung bedeutet, dass wir uns selbst in Frage stellen müssen – und zwar in der Weise, wie wir uns verstehen.

6 Subjektivität des Denkens Kierkegaards Text über das absolute Paradox gibt Anlass zu Fragen, die er nicht selbst beantwortet. Denken und Existenz werden so miteinander verbunden, dass sich die Frage von der Leidenschaft des Denkens (das Dialektische) zu einer Frage nach dem Menschsein (das Existenzielle) verwandelt. Wie aber ist Denken eine Frage dessen, was wir sind? In der Leidenschaft des Denkens sind wir selbst da. Dass im Denken ein Subjekt im Spiel ist, bedeutet nicht, dass es sein Denken inszeniert. Wir können einen Gedankengang ausführen, tun es aber, indem wir denken. Wir führen nicht unser Denken aus.Wir sind selbst im Denken da als diejenigen, die dieses denken. Wir verkörpern unser Denken, so dass wir davon Rechenschaft ablegen können. Was wir denken, zeugt von uns, ohne dass wir uns selbst hineinzulesen bräuchten. Wir sind schon in das Denken einbezogen – als diejenigen, die es denken. Entscheidend ist, dass wir im Denken da sind, so dass wir auch darunter leiden können. Leidenschaft des Denkens impliziert Leiden. Wären wir nicht, leidend, im Denken da, könnten wir uns selbst nicht dadurch bestimmen. Das Leiden tritt zum Beispiel in dem Ausdruck hervor: Wir können unter „schweren Gedanken“ leiden, oder in Nietzsches „Das grösste Schwergewicht“: „Wenn jener Gedanke über dich Gewalt bekäme, er würde dich, wie du bist, verwandeln und vielleicht zermalmen.“⁴ Wie kommt die Subjektivität des Denkens ins Spiel im Paradox des Denkens? Indem wir selbst im Denken da sind, kann uns durch das Paradox widersprochen werden. Das Paradox ist kein logischer Selbstwiderspruch. Wenn es dies wäre, würde es nichts bedeuten. Es bedeutet aber etwas für das Subjekt, das versucht, es zu verstehen. Wir sollen uns darin verstehen, dass wir das Paradox nicht verstehen. Nur so verstehen wir es als Paradox. Die Bestimmung des Paradoxes setzt ein Subjekt voraus, das in seinem Verstehen adressiert werden kann, indem es sich selbst darin hat, wie es andere Menschen und die Welt versteht. Dass das Denken subjektiv ist, scheint zu bedeuten, dass wir es auf ein Subjekt des Denkens zurückführen können. Es zeugt von dem Denkenden. Entscheidend ist aber, wie wir es auf das Subjekt zurückführen. Im Denken ist der

 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in Kritische Studienausgabe, hg. von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter 1988, Bd. 3, § 341.

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Denkende nicht einfach in sich eingeschlossen, sondern in Leidenschaft schon über sich hinaus. Nur sofern wir versuchen können, andere Menschen zu verstehen und damit über uns hinauszugehen, auch auf das hin, was uns mit anderen Menschen verbindet, ist es sinnvoll zu sagen, dass wir – trotzdem – nicht über uns hinauskommen. Dass wir die Bewegung über uns hinaus nur mit uns tun können, bedeutet nicht schon, dass wir nur uns selbst im Anderen wiederfinden. Es bedeutet umgekehrt, dass wir in unserem Verstehen selbst betroffen werden können. In dem, was wir denken, können wir selbst umgewendet werden. Der metaphysische Versuch, Transzendenz zu denken, wird dadurch unterminiert, dass wir uns selbst mitbringen. Was ein direktes Transzendenzdenken unterminiert, macht aber auch die Transzendenz möglich, die darin besteht, dass uns in unseren Transzendenzvorstellungen widersprochen wird. In den kritischen Dimensionen des Paradoxes geht die Frage nach den Grenzen des Denkens mit der Frage nach der conditio humana zusammen. Während die erste Frage metaphysisches Denken gegen die Metaphysik kehrt, kann die conditio humana meta-physisch bestimmt werden. Menschen sind Natur, die über die Natur hinaus ist.⁵ In unserem Kontext ist der entscheidende Punkt, dass Verstehen zur conditio humana gehört. Verstehen ist menschliche Natur im Sinne einer Eigenart, die uns meta-physisch situiert. Wir haben uns selbst zu verstehen. Auch das Sich-Nicht-Verstehen ist eine Weise des Sich-Verstehens. Das kommt in der Diskussion über das Paradox zum Vorschein. Es sieht so aus, als ob wir mit dem Paradox über das Verstehen hinaus seien: Das Paradox ist nicht zu verstehen. Dies aber – dass das Paradox nicht verstanden werden kann – sollen wir verstehen.

7 Verstehen des Nicht-verstehens – paradoxes Verstehen? Dass wir das absolute Paradox nicht verstehen, ist also nicht etwas Beiläufiges. Es ist vielmehr die Weise, auf die wir es als Paradox verstehen sollen. In dem Sinne geht das Paradox darum, dass wir nicht verstehen. Es ist ein Paradox des (Nicht‐) Verstehens. Denn Nicht-Verstehen ist kein einfaches Tun. Ist es überhaupt ein Tun? Was tun wir, wenn wir nicht verstehen? Wir können die Erfahrung machen, dass wir nicht verstehen, aber was tun wir mit dieser Erfahrung des Nicht-Ver-

 Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Homo subiectus. Zur zweideutigen Subjektivität des Menschen,“ in Seinkönnen. Der Mensch zwischen Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, hg. von Ingolf U. Dalferth und Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, S. 19 – 33.

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stehens? Wenn es uns auffällt, dass wir nicht verstehen, sollen wir versuchen zu verstehen, was es bedeutet, dass wir es nicht tun. Was heißt Verstehen des Nicht-Verstehens? Wie verstehen wir nicht? Wie sollen wir verstehen, dass wir nicht verstehen? Was sollen wir dabei verstehen? Was ist die Pointe im „dialektischen Widerspruch“ des Paradoxes? Der Widerspruch betrifft unsere Erwartungen, durch die wir „uns selbst haben“: wie wir uns in der Zeit orientieren, indem wir etwas als für uns bedeutungsvoll verstehen. Unsere Erwartungen zeigen, wie wir uns als Menschen sehen – und zwar, indem wir uns Zeit für uns nehmen. Wir können uns in unsere Erwartungen verstricken, so dass wir die Zeit aus der Zeit herausnehmen – die Zeit als die Zeit des Anderen, auf uns zukommend. Indem wir in der Zeit so situiert sind, dass wir uns auf die eine oder andere Weise Zeit nehmen, sind wir Adressaten des dialektischen Widerspruchs. Das Paradox ist in diesem Sinne existenziell. Wie sollen wir dann das Verstehen des Nicht-Verstehens bestimmen? Es liegt im existenziell-dialektischen Widerspruch eine Forderung: Wir sollen verstehen, dass wir nicht verstehen; wenn wir aber verstehen, dass wir nicht verstehen, verstehen wir anders. Was gefordert wird, ist also, dass wir unser Verstehen ändern. Wenn wir es sind, die so verstehen, wie können wir dann anders verstehen? Müssen wir nicht dazu bewegt werden? Werden wir es, indem wir die Erfahrung des Nicht-Verstehens machen? Wenn wir verstehen, dass wir das Andere nicht verstehen, in Bezug auf welches wir uns selbst haben, können wir dazu kommen, anders zu denken. Aber tun wir es? Es gilt beiderlei: Wir können unser Verstehen nicht einfach ändern, weil wir es sind, die so verstehen. Anderes kann uns aber auch nicht einfach dazu bringen, anders zu verstehen, weil wir dies selbst tun sollen. Dass es um eine Forderung geht, bedeutet, dass es eine offene Frage ist, ob wir es in der Tat tun. Wir können uns dazu entschließen, aber es muss sich erst zeigen, dass wir es tun. Ob wir es tun, hängt davon ab, wie wir uns darin verstehen, dass wir nicht verstehen. Verstehen, dass wir uns nicht verstehen, ist in der sokratischen Tradition, die Kierkegaard weiterzudenken versucht, für menschliches Selbstverstehen entscheidend. Das Kapitel über das absolute Paradox in Kierkegaards Philosophischen Brocken können wir als einen Text über die Schwierigkeit des Selbstverstehens interpretieren. Es geht nicht einfach um die Grenze und die Endlichkeit menschlichen Verstehens. Was in Frage steht, ist, wie wir – als verstehend – zu verstehen sind. Verstehen zu verstehen heißt hier, dass wir uns selbst nur verstehen, wenn wir einsehen, dass wir in unserem Verstehen auch Widerstand dagegen leisten können, uns selbst zu verstehen. Wir sollen uns sowohl mit uns als auch gegen uns verstehen. Wird das Verstehen des Paradoxes – Verstehen des Nichts-Verstehen – damit ein paradoxes Verstehen?

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Dass Verstehen zur conditio humana gehört, zeigt sich genau darin, dass wir auch zu verstehen haben, was es heißt, dass wir nicht verstehen. Dem absoluten Paradox gegenüber haben wir nicht die Option zu verstehen oder nicht. Wenn wir es zu verstehen meinen, haben wir es nicht verstanden. Dass es nicht zu verstehen ist, das haben wir zu verstehen.Wir haben darin uns selbst zu verstehen, und zwar dies, dass das Problem darin liegt, wie wir uns verstehen wollen. Diese kritische Dimension legt aber auch einen normativen Charakter des Verstehens frei: Dass wir zu verstehen haben, enthält die Forderung, dass wir darüber Rechenschaft ablegen sollen, wie wir uns verstehen. Wir sollen für uns einstehen, indem wir mit uns verstehen. Dass wir in unserem Verstehen uns selbst suchen, scheint menschlich, allzu menschlich zu sein. Damit können wir unter dem Eindruck stehen, dass menschliches Verstehen das entleert, was wir zu verstehen meinen. Wäre das einfach so, wäre es unverständlich, warum es für uns ein Problem ist, wenn wir nur uns selbst in unserem Verstehen suchen und wenn die Leidenschaft des Verstehens um sich selbst kreist. Hätten wir nicht die Möglichkeit, anders zu verstehen, wäre es auch unverständlich, wie wir uns mit anderen verbinden können. Das hat damit zu tun, dass und inwiefern Verstehen Umgang mit der Zeit ist: Wir befinden uns nicht einfach und je schon in unserem Verstehen von anderen und der Welt zwischen uns. Wir verstehen vor allem so, dass wir zum Verstehen kommen. Wenn wir meinen, dass wir verstanden haben, was zu verstehen ist, stellen wir uns anders. Wir tun etwas, das bedeutet, dass wir den Anderen nicht verstehen. Wie hängen die beiden Möglichkeiten des Verstehens miteinander zusammen? Einerseits können wir meinen, dass wir das verstanden haben, was wir zu verstehen meinen. Andererseits können wir die Erfahrung des Verstehens machen, indem wir zum Verstehen kommen. Wir können verhindern, dass wir verstehen, indem wir zu verstehen meinen. Spielt die erste Möglichkeit aber nicht in die zweite hinein? Wenn wir dazu kommen, den Anderen zu verstehen, tun wir das nicht, indem wir erfahren, dass wir den Anderen gerade nicht – wie wir meinten – verstanden haben? Diese Erfahrung des (Nicht‐)Verstehens bedeutet noch nicht, dass das Verstehen paradox bestimmt ist. Zunächst müssen wir die kritische Dimension des Paradoxes als ein Verstehen des Verstehens festhalten: Dass wir das Paradox nicht verstehen können, ändert etwas für uns. Dies sollen wir verstehen. Was ist es, das wir damit verstehen sollen? Nicht nur, was es heißt zu verstehen, sondern auch, was es heißt, sich als Mensch zu verstehen. Darin liegt die Frage, was es heißt, dass wir als Menschen (selbst) verstehende Wesen sind. Als Menschen haben wir eine doppelte Möglichkeit des Verstehens, die uns nicht einfach zur Verfügung steht, sondern die Bedeutung unseres Tuns betrifft: Wir können den

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Anderen so verstehen, dass wir seine Identität festlegen, indem wir ihn auf uns selbst zurückführen (wir verstehen ihn ja von uns her); und wir können dazu kommen, dass wir verstehen, dass der Andere anders ist, als wir ihn verstanden haben. Wir verstehen, indem uns klar wird, wie wir ihn nicht verstanden haben. Wir sollen auch dazu kommen, uns als Menschen zu verstehen. Obwohl wir mit uns vertraut sind wie mit keinem anderen, ist Selbstverstehen schwierig in einem anderen Sinne als es schwierig ist, den Anderen zu verstehen. Das Problem liegt gerade im Verstehen. Dass es kein direktes Selbstverstehen gibt, liegt daran, dass wir uns gegen uns selbst verstehen müssen. Wenn wir das Verstehen von uns inszenieren, indem wir unsere Identität als Projekt verstehen, ist die Frage, ob wir verstehen, was wir dadurch mit uns tun. Wie kann das (Nicht‐)Verstehen des Paradoxes ein paradoxes Verstehen bedeuten? Erstens geht es nicht nur darum, dass unser Verstehen begrenzt ist. Wenn das alles wäre, würde unser Verstehen in Ordnung sein bis zu dem Punkt, an dem ihm durch das Paradox widersprochen wird. Dass wir nicht verstehen, muss vielmehr mit unserem Verstehen zu tun haben. Es muss wie eine Blindheit sein, die wir gerade dadurch tragen, dass wir zu verstehen meinen. Worin sollte aber eine solche Blindheit des Verstehens bestehen? Vielleicht darin, dass im Verstehen die Möglichkeit liegt, das zu entleeren, das wir zu verstehen meinen. Dies geschieht, wenn wir zu uns sagen, dass wir uns selbst oder einen anderen Menschen verstanden haben. Wenn wir unserer eigenen Blindheit erliegen, ist es schwierig zu sagen, ob wir daran schuld sind oder nicht. Diese Zweideutigkeit können wir versuchen, durch die Rede von Sünde einzukreisen. Zweitens erschöpft der Drang danach, das zu beherrschen, was wir zu verstehen versuchen, nicht den menschlichen Charakter des Verstehens. Eine andere Möglichkeit tritt damit hervor, und zwar dass wir selbst verstehen sollen, dass wir nicht verstehen. Mit dieser Bestimmung sind wir in der Sphäre menschlichen Verstehens. Könnten wir hinter diese Sphäre zurückgehen, würden wir uns selbst überspringen. Was verstehen wir, wenn wir verstehen, dass wir das Paradox nicht verstehen? Wir werden anders mit uns situiert. In der Abschließenden unwissenschaftlichen Nachschrift lässt Kierkegaard Johannes Climacus sagen, dass das Christentum „die zeitliche Existenz paradox betont.“⁶ Dies sollen wir als Existierende verstehen. Wir kommen dazu, unsere Existenz anders zu verstehen. Wenn es möglich ist, eine Ethik des Sehens aus den Der Liebe Tun herauszulesen,⁷ kann dies ein Beispiel für ein paradox bestimmtes Verstehen geben – ein

 SKS 7, 267 / AUN1, 288 – 289, 205.  Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Ethics of Vision,“ Kapitel 24 in diesem Buch.

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Beispiel, das die Verbindung von Paradox, Verstehen und Liebe verdeutlicht: Wir haben die Aufgabe, den Anderen als einen anderen zu sehen – und zwar als einen anderen als denjenigen, den wir sehen. Den Anderen auf diese Weise zu sehen erfordert, dass wir etwas mit uns tun. Wir sollen versuchen zu verstehen, was wir selbst tun, wenn wir versuchen, den Anderen zu verstehen. Es ist ein paradoxes Verstehen in dem Sinne, dass den Anderen zu verstehen bedeutet, ihn als einen Anderen zu sehen – als wir ihn sehen.

8 Gott denken? Was bedeutet es, das Absolute als Gott zu denken? Wir können versuchen, den Unterschied dadurch festzulegen, dass Gott nicht nur das Unendliche, sondern der Unendliche ist. Dies ist aber eher eine Weise, die Frage zu reformulieren als eine Antwort zu geben. Der weitere Schritt, dass Gott nicht nur der Grund, sondern über den Grund hinaus ist, so dass der Grund für uns Menschen Abgrund wird, deutet an, dass es um die Bedingungen einer Antwort geht. „Letzten Endes“ gewinnt eine andere Bedeutung. Zunächst wird deutlicher, dass das Absolute nicht nur das ist, womit unser Verstehen – letzten Endes – endet. Es stellt auch unseren Anfang in Frage. Nicht nur haben wir uns jeweils über uns hinaus in Bezug auf etwas Anderes, demgegenüber wir uns verstehen. Gott als das absolut Andere ist ein Gegenüber, das nur so ins Spiel kommt, dass Gott dem Spiel zuvorkommt. Gott gegenüber, als dem absoluten Gegenüber, werden wir als Menschen selbst Adressat. Wir treten so hervor, dass wir uns als Menschen selbst zu verstehen haben, auch wenn wir es nicht wollen. Greifen wir noch einmal auf den Begriff des absoluten Paradoxes zurück. Das absolute Paradox kann in die Richtung ausgelegt werden, dass es darum geht, Gott zu denken, der uns Menschen so zuvorkommt, dass wir je schon angesprochen sind. Wir können Gott nicht denken, wenn wir denken, dass wir uns erst zu Gott verhalten sollen. Wenn es uns mit dem Gottesgedanken ernst ist, können wir uns nur so denken, dass Gott unserem Denken und Verhalten zuvorkommt. Wie sollen wir dies verstehen? Wir müssen hier versuchen, die beiden Gedanken zusammenhalten: Einerseits ist Gott kein Gegenüber, mit dem wir verhandeln können – wie mit einem anderen Menschen. Andererseits ist Gott das absolute Gegenüber. Das Letzte kommt in folgender Passage in Kierkegaards Die

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Krankheit zum Tode zum Ausdruck: „welch eine unendliche Betonung aber legt sich auf das Selbst, wenn man zum Maßstabe Gott empfängt!“⁸ Wie Gott zu denken ist, wird damit in der Frage zugespitzt: Wie ist Gott sowohl als Gegenüber wie auch als kein Gegner zu denken? Die Frage stellt uns als Menschen in Frage. Wir sind ein Selbst dem gegenüber, zu dem wir uns so verhalten, dass wir uns in Bezug darauf verstehen. Wir nehmen dies Andere als Maßstab. Wenn ein Mensch Gott als Maßstab bekommt, ändert sich der Maßstab. Die Bedingung dafür, einen Maßstab zu haben, wird eine andere. Wir werden daran erinnert, dass wir Menschen sind. In den Brennpunkt rückt das (Sich‐) Messen oder das (Sich‐)Identifizieren, das darin impliziert ist, einen Maßstab zu haben. Wenn ein Mensch Gott als Maßstab bekommt, wird ihm sein eigener Maßstab entzogen. Er wird sich selbst gegenübergestellt – als derjenige, der sich mit sich selbst identifiziert. Er soll sich an einem unendlichen Maßstab messen, der sein Messen unmöglich macht und ihn gegen sich selbst kehrt. Indem unsere Identität durch Selbst-Identifikation grundsätzlich in Frage gestellt wird, wird das Selbstverstehen paradox bestimmt. Dass die Rede von Gott eine Rede vom Menschen sein muss, bedeutet nicht, dass erstere sich in letzterer auflöst. Im Gegenteil wird letztere durch erstere verschoben. Als Menschen können wir uns von unserem Menschsein wegreden. Das können wir nicht nur durch die Rede von Gott, sondern auch durch eine selbstbewusste humane Rede, in der wir zu wissen meinen, was ein Mensch ist. Gott zu denken gibt uns nicht zuletzt die Möglichkeit, so an unser Menschsein erinnert zu werden, dass unser Maßstab dafür, was es heißt ein Mensch zu sein, selbst in Frage gestellt wird.⁹

 SKS 11, 193 / KT, 78.  Herzlichen Dank an Claudia Welz für die sprachliche Revision meines Textes und für Kommentare, die mich veranlasst haben, viele Formulierungen zu revidieren.

Part Two: Phenomenology

Chapter 14 Self-Givenness and Self-Understanding 1 Phenomenology? How to make sense of the question: Kierkegaard and phenomenology? What is it about? It is, of course, about reading Kierkegaard, but it is also about asking the question: what is phenomenology? Instead of taking our point of departure in some established idea of phenomenology, we should look at the motive in calling what one is doing phenomenology. This approach is in line with how phenomenology begins or establishes itself. Positions labeling themselves phenomenological are in search for the meaning of phenomenology. Therefore, to be discussed in the following is: Kierkegaard and the question of phenomenology. Where to begin then? Following a phenomenological approach, let us begin by reflecting on the phenomenological project and the problem of beginning. If we do so, we are likely to stumble over the strange, non-natural character of this project. If we define phenomenology as the attempt to go back to the phenomena, we must ask ourselves: What is the point of going back to that which shows itself? Isn’t it too obvious that we should begin with the phenomena? Does this require a move on its own? Making a method out of this move (going back to the phenomena) only makes sense if something has come in between, so that we are not simply dealing with the phenomena. But what comes in between? It cannot just be something interfering from outside. Rather, it must have to do with our own ways of approaching the phenomena. We are not just dealing with the phenomena, but are doing so in the form of traditions, opinions, or fossilized interpretations and ideas about what the phenomena in question are. This means that the question about what the phenomena are is not really a question to us. Phenomenology is not just “reading off” the phenomena. Rather, as logos, phenomenology is a countermove, directed against that which comes in between. But this leaves a phenomenological approach with the problem: how to account for what comes in between? Let us call this the problem of negativity. If phenomenology claims to show that we are already “out there,” in contact with that which shows itself to us, why are we in need of phenomenology as a countermove? Let us first look at the reflective method of going back to that which is already given to us. The project of phenomenology is radical. It is a search for the beginning. This is odd, inasmuch as we have already begun, taking part in https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-020

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traditions that have begun before us. That which is given to us is already interpreted, and we have already begun interpreting it without really being aware of what we are doing. The only way to begin again, then, is to ask the question of beginning. The claim of phenomenology to be a radical, that is, philosophical method lies in reclaiming the idea that philosophy begins in questioning. It is reflective in questioning our preconceived interpretations, and this is only possible by going back to die Sachen selbst (the things themselves). But this reflective move itself is provoked by the problem of negativity. Phenomenology as a radical quest is made possible because we do not simply deal with the phenomena. In order to understand for ourselves the motive of phenomenology we must therefore make a double claim: phenomenology is the search for the beginning in going back to die Sachen selbst, but we cannot simply or directly begin with die Sachen selbst because we have already begun. What comes in between is not only traditions already operative in our ways of seeing, established opinions, or unquestioned interpretations. There is not only something we do not see and something still to be seen, but also the tendency to overlook, ignore, or forget that which we see or know. The second part of the claim constitutes the difficulty that phenomenology itself faces. Can we reach the beginning except through that which has come in between, that is, by questioning our own interpretations? In a first move, phenomenology appears to be anti-hermeneutical. It is “against interpretation” in pointing out that we are not just caught up in traditions. In a second move, however, phenomenology itself must become hermeneutical. 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. What I have presented here as a systematic outline of the motive and the project of phenomenology is itself a reflection on the history of phenomenology. It points back primarily to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (and lecture courses leading up to Sein und Zeit) where we can find both the motive of beginning anew, in a search for the beginning of questioning, and the difficulty facing this beginning. What is the connection between the two, the motive and the difficulty? The hermeneutical turn of phenomenology applies to both: to the question of beginning (in the sense of appropriating a sense of questioning), and to the countermove that must not only look once more, as it were, into die Sachen selbst, but can only do so by re-reading traditions having formed us. In the hermeneutical turn of phenomenology, there is a double critical insight at work. First, as Heidegger points out, a phenomenon in a distinctive sense, in need of an explicit exhibiting (Aufweisung), is “something that does not show itself initially for the most part.” What in this sense shows itself only “in a “disguised” (“verstellt”)

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way” is the being of Beings (das Sein des Seienden).¹ Second, we tend to overlook what is closest to us, our subjectivity (anticipating our reading of Kierkegaard). We do not ask what it is, or if we do, it is difficult for us to understand. We know what we are in being ourselves, and yet, we turn out to be terra difficultatis (land of trouble)² to ourselves when we try to understand ourselves.³ 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 reminder. It is about seeing once more, because we can, and indeed tend to, overlook and forget what we know. In Heidegger’s re-reading of tradition, in the genesis of Sein und Zeit, Aristotle and Kierkegaard are of particular importance, also in terms of method.⁴ Aristotle’s insight is that it takes something to reach the beginning of the problem, the question or the issue (die Sache). There are two beginnings: the first is where we are beginning our search, the second where die Sache selbst begins. Kierkegaard’s thought is also a search for beginning, and it is so in re-reading tradition. Furthermore, it is also about how to think about our own existence. In question is human existence that is both our own and common. This puts remarkable constraints on our thinking. Reflecting on the conditions for existential communication, Kierkegaard points to what (in anticipating Heidegger) could be called the issue of formal indication. Interpersonal communication about issues concerning human existence depends on the participants understanding for themselves what the communication is about.⁵

2 A Passing Glance: Reading Kierkegaard Let us now make a second start: how to read Kierkegaard? Let us begin by observing a remarkable feature in Kierkegaard’s texts. Almost in passing, Vigilius

 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, p. 33 / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag 1972, p. 35.  Augustine, Confessions, Volume II: Books 9 – 13, ed. and trans. by Carolyn J.-B. Hammond, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2016 (Loeb Classical Library), p. 111.  Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 69 / Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pp. 43 – 44.  Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Berkeley: University of California Press 1993.  For a discussion of the question of beginning in Heidegger’s “Natorp-Bericht” (1922) in relation to Kierkegaard, see Arne Grøn, “Die hermeneutische Situation – die Hermeneutik der Situation,” in Heidegger und die Griechen, ed. by Michael Steinmann, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2007, pp. 233 – 60.

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Haufniensis (the vigilant observer of life in Copenhagen and the pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety) mentions “the slightest touch, a passing glance, etc.” that is sufficient to provoke inclosing reserve to disclose itself involuntarily, and he continues: “The disclosure may declare itself in words, as when the unhappy man ends by thrusting his concealed secret upon every one. It may declare itself in facial expression, in a glance, because there is a glance by which one involuntarily reveals what is concealed.”⁶ Kierkegaard’s texts are abounding with indications like these, pointing – in passing – to what is passing by, that is: to phenomena, which we live by and easily ignore. Let me take just two other passages. In a passage in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author, points out that what makes communication so difficult dialectically is that the receiver is an existing person, and he continues: “To stop a man on the street and to stand still in order to speak with him is not as difficult as having to say something to a passerby in passing, without standing still oneself or delaying the other, without wanting to induce him to go the same way, but just urging him to go his own way.”⁷ Continuing this line of pointing to phenomena of communication, let me add one more passage from The Concept of Anxiety. Here Vigilius Haufniensis mentions “silence and the power of the eye” as a method that an inquisitor may use in order to provoke an obdurate criminal to confess: “A man with a bad conscience cannot endure silence. If placed in solitary confinement, he becomes apathetic. But this silence while the judge is present, while the clerks are ready to inscribe everything in the protocol, this silence is the most penetrating and acute questioning.”⁸ In seeking to understand what Kierkegaard’s texts are about, we encounter passages pointing to silence, touch (even the slightest), and passing glances. What do such indications and references mean? What do they tell? Should we just read them in passing? Or should we pause, halt, and come to reflect? Maybe the texts are also about what, for example, a passing glance means, as an indication of what it is to be human, situated in a world of passing glances. Describing the world in which humans live and move, the passages quoted remind us about what we tend to overlook: what it is to be thus situated. Thus, they point to human subjectivity. To be an existing subject implies being on one’s way in life and, being on one’s way, being exposed to encounters and glan-

 SKS 4, 430 / CA, 129.  SKS 7, 251 / CUP1, 277.  SKS 4, 426 / CA, 125.

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ces in passing by, being in communication with others having each their way to go. It is to exist as an embodied and embedded self. In reading Kierkegaard’s texts, we encounter figures in movements, situated in a world of seeing and being seen, expression and silence, disclosure and concealment. We may come to resituate ourselves in our world, being ourselves on our ways in life and exposed to what we encounter. Reading the text, then, is a sort of reminder. It is about coming to see for ourselves. I cannot here follow this line of thought further, but just indicate what I have in mind: if we are looking for a hermeneutics of reading in Kierkegaard, it would also have phenomenological features. Let us move one step further. In reading passages as the ones just quoted, abounding with indications of situated subjectivity, we may ourselves come to ask the pivotal question in Kierkegaard’s texts: what is it to be what we are? The texts not only point to phenomena that we live by and most often overlook; they also point to the reader, in exploring features of human subjectivity. Especially one feature is accentuated: concern. It is so in a characteristic twofold manner. Kierkegaard’s texts both address “their” reader as the one concerned and take concern as a key theme in investigating what it is to be a self. Claiming that reading is about coming to understand for ourselves does not imply that it is about self-understanding in contrast to understanding the world. It is about self-discovery in the sense of being reminded of what we tend to overlook, that is, phenomena we live by and tend to overlook or ignore. In being reminded we encounter ourselves as the one overlooking. Subjectivity, however, is not only at work in overlooking. It is also what we overlook or ignore. Asking the question of subjectivity, then, requires a countermove. The Postscript in which Kierkegaard has Johannes Climacus conceptualizing existence as specifically human brings the problem of negativity into the foreground. Climacus addresses the question of subjectivity as a countermove to a culture of forgetting what it means to exist. In contrast to what he diagnoses as the prevailing understanding of human subjectivity, namely that it requires no effort to understand subjectivity, Climacus insists on the problem in becoming a subject and in understanding what this means. I have deliberately begun in what appears to be the margin of Kierkegaard’s texts, asking how to read in a sort of phenomenological vein, in order to come to ask the question of subjectivity. Kierkegaard’s way of coining key themes such as existence, choice, and anxiety has prefigured and formed modem thought. Yet, the reception of Kierkegaard’s thought often takes the form of schematic interpretations. In particular, he is seen as advocating a notion of subjectivity that lacks a sense of the body, the social, and the world. Although Kierkegaard is

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commonly taken as a thinker of subjectivity, there is a need to rediscover what is implied in his thought on subjectivity. Such a rediscovery could amount to a reclaiming of the question of subjectivity. My argument is that it is crucial to understand how the very approach to subjectivity is complicated. Precisely because subjectivity concerns us, as a matter of what and who we are, it tends to escape our grasp. In dealing with subjectivity, subjectivity itself comes in between. We can only understand what subjectivity means if we take into account the possibility, or even tendency, of forgetting what it means to exist. We only come to understand the question of subjectivity if we realize that subjectivity is a problem to itself. In this perspective, it is important to read Kierkegaard’s thought of subjectivity as a countermove, in response to possibilities of forgetting what it means to be a subject. In order to understand the question of subjectivity a phenomenological approach in reading Kierkegaard is helpful. In the following I’ll focus on the issue of subjectivity that is crucial and problematic both in phenomenology and in Kierkegaard. It is about the problem of subjectivity, not subjectivity as foundation for relating to the world, but subjectivity as relating.

3 Phenomenology of Subjectivity If we take phenomenology as a search for the beginning, in the form of a countermove, how should we move on? The first step is to focus on how that is given, which is given to us. In this first emphasis (how) there is a second: how it is given to us. The point in the second emphasis is not to reduce what is given to subjectivity, but to let subjectivity appear as already situated. Subjectivity is itself given, but how? In focusing on how something appears to us, phenomenology cannot take subjectivity as just one issue among others. Subjectivity is the dative of manifestation. Furthermore, subjectivity is implied in the very project of phenomenology. The project is to begin ourselves, against pre-established ideas, opinions, or traditions that have formed us, and that we may ourselves share without actually seeing and thinking for ourselves. Phenomenology thus harbors a motive of appropriating, in questioning. Already at this point, phenomenology faces the critical difficulty: how does subjectivity – the dative of manifestation – come to appear? How can phenomenology account for the subjectivity it presupposes, both as the dative of manifestation and as questioning? Subjectivity does not appear in the same way as that which directly appears to subjectivity. We are not given as that which is

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given to us. Yet, we are given to ourselves. Consciousness means that the world manifests itself, but how does consciousness itself appear? Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is about this difficulty. To put it most briefly, consciousness relates to its object, but does not relate to itself as an object. Yet, it comes to experience itself in experiencing the world. In failing to understand that which it takes as its object, consciousness encounters its own ideas of the object and the world. But only in encountering another self-consciousness that can itself relate and reverse the perspective, consciousness comes to see itself as consciousness. Hegel’s answer to the difficulty of subjectivity coming to appear to itself is his phenomenology, which is about experiencing experience,⁹ as a long detour of self-understanding. It is about coming to understand ourselves. To this, we can give a phenomenological response in claiming that, in this long detour in coming to understand ourselves, we are already given to us. The process of coming to understand ourselves requires self-givenness. Although we are not given to ourselves as objects are, subjectivity implies that we are immediately given to ourselves, in being ourselves. How to account for this self-givenness? In continuing the first step dealing with how the given is given to us, we can focus on how subjectivity is co-given as the dative of manifestation. In something being given to us, we are given to ourselves. Subjectivity manifests itself in how something appears to us. That is, subjectivity lies in relating to the given, to the situation in which it is given, and to the world as horizon for understanding the situation. Still, we are not just given to ourselves. Self-givenness implied in subjectivity does not amount to the given being given to us, or to the mineness of my experiences. On the contrary, in order to account for my experiences being mine, I must take into account that I am the one relating to that which is given to me. I am involved in experiencing. If I experience something that changes how the world is to me, I am myself changed in that I come to see differently.¹⁰ If subjectivity is not given as something is given to us, but in something being given to us, how is it given as subjectivity? The answer just indicated runs: as our relating to that which is given to us. But this implies that subjectivity does not show itself to us as an object. Subjectivity is self-manifestation in the

 In making experiences, consciousness comes to experience itself. In German, this can be described as “Erfahrung mit Erfahrung.” Compare the original title of Phenomenology of Spirit: “Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewusstseins” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. by Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clarimont, Hamburg: Meiner 1988, pp. 547– 548).  Compare the notion of experience as reflective in Hegel’s phenomenology (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 66 – 67).

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strong sense that it manifests itself. In relating it makes itself manifest. Does subjectivity as self-manifestation require that in relating, we relate to ourselves? In seeking an answer to this question we would profit from re-reading Kierkegaard. Having this one-step-further outline of the project of phenomenology in mind that emphasizes the question of subjectivity as self-givenness and as coming to appear to itself, let us briefly consider the project in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. ¹¹ Why does Kierkegaard focus on the phenomenon (or phenomena) of anxiety, so much as to write a book about its concept? The question he asks is: what does anxiety show about being human? He answers that a human being is a synthesis that relates to itself as body and as soul. The implication is that it is given to itself as a task. But this first answer implies a second. In anxiety, a human being comes to experience itself as a self. The first, anthropological, answer (human being is a synthesis) interprets the second (experiencing oneself in being in anxiety). In Kierkegaard’s approach, anxiety is self-experience as self-discovery in the emphatic sense of coming to see oneself as a self. Once this experience of oneself is made, everything is changed. We are then selves in having to carry ourselves with us in relating to the world. 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. Being in anxiety is a way of relating oneself, but what is it that one relates to? It is nothing, Kierkegaard says; it is not a thing or an object, but a possibility that imposes itself upon us: the possibility of freedom or spontaneity in the sense of ourselves making a beginning. What shows itself to us in anxiety, then, is subjectivity, but subjectivity only appears in that it comes to appear to itself. This is not a matter of choice; we do not set out to appear to ourselves; rather, it happens to us in anxiety. Why anxiety? Let us briefly consider the following famous passage: Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down … Freedom succumbs in this dizziness … In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.¹²

 See Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Jeanette B.L. Knox, Macon: Mercer University Press 2008.  SKS 4, 365 – 66 / CA, 61.

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The ambiguity of anxiety implies the intertwinement of subjectivity as passivity and subjectivity as activity. One becomes dizzy or anxious, yet one relates in anxiety (this is brought out in the possibility: “suppose he had not looked down”). What one encounters in anxiety is oneself as relating. In anxiety, we come to appear to ourselves in “standing out” from the world to which we relate. We are given to ourselves, but given in ourselves relating. But this implies that, although we relate, our relating is not something we first consider to do (to relate) and then do it (as if relating were something we enacted or executed). In an important sense, we are relating. What anxiety discloses is that we are given to ourselves, not as an object, but as self-relating. This reopens the question of self-givenness. Self-givenness not only means that we are given to ourselves (in something being given to us); it also means to be given as a self. In fact, the two senses go together. To experience oneself as a self changes one’s life. It means to face the question: how am I to live the life that is mine? It is important to note that this question about one’s decision, or what to make out of one’s life, presupposes the experience of oneself as given. This brings out the implication in talking about subjectivity as self-given. As co-given with the world, as the dative (given to us in something being given to us), subjectivity is not simply what we make out of it, or what we make ourselves into. Rather, it is implied in asking: what do we make out of ourselves? As humans, we can seek to explain how subjectivity emerges in terms of circumstances and conditions. We can claim to be what we are in virtue of circumstances and conditions. Yet, there is a limit to this explanation. Subjectivity only emerges as subjectivity in taking itself as subjectivity. This is the critical distinction in The Concept of Anxiety between sinfulness (circumstances and conditions of the world in which we come to be ourselves, and that we can use in trying to explain what we have done, especially why we have failed) and sin (that is, oneself bringing evil into the world). To come to experience oneself as a self changes the conditions upon which one lives. One now has to live with the awareness that not only can one change one’s life – one also does so whether one wants to or not. In The Concept of Anxiety, the point is made in terms of history. Humans are embedded beings. Not only according to Hannah Arendt, but also according to Kierkegaard, humans are born in order to begin, but it is only possible to begin in a history in which one has already begun. It is only possible to lead a life that is already one’s own in the sense that one is the one to live this life. Yet, we are ourselves to begin in this history. We are to live this life of ours. The decisive moment referred to in the passage about dizziness is not a moment in which one makes a decision, but the moment one comes to realize that one is a self to make decisions and to carry the weight of what one does and

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thinks. In this moment, Kierkegaard states, one’s history begins. We come to have a history of our own, but only in experiencing that we have already begun, being ourselves embedded in a historical context. The question implied – how to begin having already begun – grows out of the problem: how do we come to appear to ourselves? What is described and analyzed in The Concept of Anxiety, then, is human subjectivity coming to itself, as selfhood. The analysis of anxiety can be read as a phenomenology of subjectivity. Arguing along this line, I have not only Hegel’s phenomenology in mind. What is important is the problem that a phenomenology of subjectivity thus understood addresses. It is a problem inherent in the project of phenomenology: how is subjectivity given to itself? The point is that subjectivity coming to appear to itself is a matter of subjectivity. The problem in understanding how subjectivity can be given (because as subjectivity it is not given as that which is given to subjectivity) pertains to subjectivity. It is about the difficulty of self-consciousness. Human subjectivity only appears as self-consciousness to others, if it relates to itself, and it only relates to itself as self-relation: being given to itself as self, having to lead a life of its own. This is self-manifestation in a strong sense. Subjectivity is not only co-given in something being given to subjectivity; it manifests itself, and it does so because it appears to itself. In an intensified sense, subjectivity manifests itself in relating to itself, facing the question: what do I make out of myself? Self manifests itself as self-relating. The Concept of Anxiety deals with the phenomenon of anxiety in asking: what does anxiety show? What shows itself in anxiety is the possibility of freedom. But in anxiety one can also relate in such a way that one becomes unfree. This is brought out in chapter 4 of the book on anxiety about evil and anxiety about the good. Following Kierkegaard’s suggestion, we can read the book as a treatise on situated freedom and the positions that a human subject can take in relating to the world, to others, and in this to itself. Both insights – on self-relating and on negativity – point to Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. Before following this lead, let us briefly review where this interpretation of a phenomenology of subjectivity in The Concept of Anxiety brings us. A first point is that coming to appear as subjectivity means to appear to oneself, and that this changes one’s history: one comes to have a history of one’s own to live, in taking part in a history in which one already has begun. What is accentuated here is that human subjectivity is embodied and embedded

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as subjectivity.¹³ The task is to spell out what being embodied and embedded means in terms of subjectivity. Second, 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.

4 Phenomenology of Despair The Sickness unto Death opens with the famous definition of selfhood: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”¹⁴ This definition could be taken as if the self directly relates itself to itself, or as if selfrelation amounts to self-reflection. The next move, however, argues that a self does not establish itself. Instead it is given to itself. Later, in the second part of the book, the self is defined as a self in relation to that to which it relates.¹⁵ Holding these two definitions together, I’ll suggest reformulating the definition of selfhood as follows: self is to relate (oneself) and, in relating (oneself), to relate to oneself. As a self, one does not establish oneself or one’s relation to oneself. Instead, one is self-relation in relating. Still, this is an opening definition. It is supposed to open up an investigation that unfolds what selfhood means. As in The Concept of Anxiety, the argument is that such an investigation must take the form of observing and describing how a self comes to appear as a self and this implies: how it comes to appear to itself. But in The Sickness unto Death, negativity is built into the form of presentation. This “development” (as Kierkegaard has Anti-Climacus put it) of the self unfolding itself now takes place through a negative detour. Kierkegaard’s book on selfhood becomes what the title indicates: an analysis of forms and figures of despair (the sickness unto death) defined as: not being oneself. What is here put into the foreground is what “comes in between.” This is not only ignoring or forgetting, but resistance in the sense of not wanting to be oneself. What comes in between is oneself: not wanting to be oneself. Let us take a phenomenological approach to this. It is not self-evident what it means: not to want to be oneself. How does it appear? How do we want not to be ourselves, or, for that matter, how do we want to be ourselves? At least not in the same way as we want to do something, for example, go for a journey, move, educate ourselves, marry, or apply for a job. Wanting or not to be ourselves is not  See Arne Grøn, “The Embodied Self: Reformulating the Existential Difference in Kierkegaard,” Chapter 6 in this volume.  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.

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a separate, distinct choice we can make. Rather, it is a matter of what we are doing and wanting in what we are doing and wanting. It is a choice in one’s choices. It is how we relate to ourselves in what we are doing. This reflects how one is given to oneself. We are given to ourselves as selves, that is: in what we are doing, in relating. But this does not mean that we are transparent to ourselves. As in Hegel’s phenomenology, the process of coming to understand oneself takes time. It is slow and inert. Moreover, Kierkegaard also points to a resistance in understanding oneself that makes the process negative in an intensified sense. Negativity is built into the mode of presentation, but it is not integrated into the development of self-understanding, as it seems to be in Hegel. Rather, it is the constant possibility, or even tendency, of failing, falling, or fleeing. Defining self as self-relating implies that we are not simply what we are. We also relate to ourselves. What we are can be a problem to ourselves. It is even possible to relate to ourselves in not wanting to be ourselves. This can take forms of weakness, but it can also be more defiant, claiming to be what we construct ourselves to be. Consequently, the process of coming to understand oneself is complicated, turning self-understanding into a matter of self-acknowledgment. The process is twisted, but this is a twist of self-understanding. The difficulty is not just that we want not to be ourselves. It is also to acknowledge oneself as the one we already are, also in wanting not to be ourselves, for example, in wanting to construct ourselves differently. There is self in this difficulty. As in anxiety, we come to experience ourselves in despairing, and in both cases this does not happen in a straightforward manner. If it did we would turn into an object for ourselves. The difficulty we encounter pertains to the ways we relate, that is, our ways of seeing others and the world. But this means that in this difficulty, we come to appear not just as given to ourselves, but given in an intensified mode: as to be acknowledged. That is, the way we come to appear points back to our relating to ourselves. We also come to appear in not wanting to be ourselves. The fact that we do not just acknowledge ourselves points to the problem implied in the question of self-givenness and self-understanding. We are given to ourselves, yet we do not simply understand ourselves. As indicated, the insight into the difficulty of self-understanding is not exhausted by saying that we are not simply what we are because we relate to ourselves. Rather, in the process of coming to understand oneself – even in not wanting to be oneself – one is already oneself. Although we must acknowledge that we are not just what we are (because we relate to what we are), in a critical sense we are ourselves: being oneself is not just a matter of becoming oneself. We are already the one having to become oneself, or the one wanting or not wanting to be one-

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self. In this sense, one is given to oneself also in the process of self-understanding, in being the one to understand oneself. Therefore, the reformulation of the definition of selfhood I gave must be further refined: in relating to others and to the world that we more or less share with others, we relate to ourselves (wanting, or not wanting, to be ourselves), but in this we are self-related. The fact that – even though we relate to ourselves in the form of not wanting to be ourselves – we are the one not wanting to be oneself, is reflected in the strange self-experience of not succeeding in getting rid of oneself.¹⁶ What I have done so far in this section is to discuss in a systematic approach what is at stake in Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair as an investigation into selfhood. I am not going into any detailed interpretation.¹⁷ I’ll only draw attention to one feature of the central part of this analysis, section C.B in the first part of The Sickness unto Death. This feature has to do with the question of method. How is despair to be analyzed? Kierkegaard’s definition of despair reflects his definition of selfhood: despair is misrelation in the self-relation.¹⁸ This definition tells us where to look. In despairing, something is at stake for the one in despair. What is at stake is the very relation to one’s own life. Therefore, the analysis of despair must focus on the self in despair, or to be more precise, on the ways one relates in despair. That explains why this key section operates with figures (Skikkelser) and their movements, as Hegel’s Phenomenology does. In Hegel, figures (Gestalten) of consciousness are ways of relating to the world, to others, and, in this, ways of relating to oneself. The process of coming to self-understanding turns on figures of consciousness acting and suffering, relating and experiencing themselves in relating. In Kierkegaard, figures of despair are ways of relating to what happens to oneself and, in this, they are ways of self-relating, but they are so in an intensified mode, marked by the constant negative possibility, or tendency, of failing oneself. As mentioned, in this negative process (described in section C.B) the self also comes to appear to itself. Although it seeks to get rid of itself, it cannot. This means that the self comes to appear, not simply in coming to understand itself, but as a self to be understood. It comes to appear through the difficulty of self-understanding. Kierkegaard describes the negative process, “the development,” as a process of self-consciousness. It is not quite clear what this means, but I think that the insight just formulated offers an answer. What comes to appear is the self that fails, or even resists, in understanding itself, but in this it is  SKS 11, 133 / SUD, 17.  I have argued elsewhere in detail for reading this section as a phenomenology of despair. See Arne Grøn, “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,” Chapter 20 in this volume.  SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.

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given to itself, as the self to be acknowledged. Not wanting to be oneself means not acknowledging oneself, but in not acknowledging oneself one is still given to oneself. As in The Concept of Anxiety, it is pointed out that subjectivity shows itself as subjectivity to itself, in becoming and coming to itself, but in The Sickness unto Death the question of negativity is intensified. Where does this leave us with the question of phenomenology? If we take it as a question of phenomenology, and not simply measure our reading of Kierkegaard on a preconceived idea of phenomenology, the problem of negativity is of critical importance. As a search for the beginning, phenomenology is a countermove, directed against that which comes in between. The point is that what comes in between is not just to be left out, without any significance, but must itself be a question of what is at issue (die Sache, or truth). The truth we reach must tell something about the untruth, through which we reach it. I’ll argue that this is a critical motive in Hegel’s phenomenology, as well as in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. Almost on a programmatic note, Anti-Climacus declares that the truth of subjectivity is to be reached only through the negative detour of forms of despair.¹⁹ But in this detour of self-understanding, we are already given to ourselves: as the one not being oneself. This means that the problem of self-givenness and self-understanding, which is at the core of phenomenology, is complicated. We are not just given to ourselves. We are given to understand ourselves. What we are is also how we understand ourselves, but there is a critical point to this: self-understanding requires self-acknowledgment. Although we are self-interpreting animals,²⁰ we do not just come to understand ourselves in a process of self-understanding, as Hegel seems to claim. Rather, this process is about, or makes manifest, the difficulty of self-understanding; being involved in this process, we come to face a resistance, and in this we experience ourselves. There is self in the resistance against self-understanding. In a critical sense, then, the process of coming to understand oneself is about self-understanding. This is what is at stake, and not just given. Coming to understand ourselves requires that we come to understand differently and change how we view ourselves. However, seeing ourselves differently is not something we can do in a direct or straightforward choice. If we choose to change our view, the question still is whether we actually do so. It is a matter of changing our position or attitude toward ourselves, and this means: to change

 SKS 11, 159 / SUD, 44.  Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985, pp. 45 – 76.

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the way we relate, that is, to change (ourselves). How is this possible? The change required must, according to The Sickness unto Death, take the form of self-acknowledgment. This self-acknowledgment implies that we understand that we do not understand ourselves. That is: acknowledging the difficulty, and even the resistance, of self-understanding becomes part of self-understanding. But even if we, in the process of self-understanding, encounter ourselves in more enigmatic forms than in Hegel’s phenomenology, we are given to ourselves in the primitive sense of being the one to acknowledge oneself. What I have presented here is not just an exegesis of Kierkegaard. Rather, it addresses the question of phenomenology in reading Kierkegaard. It is, however, also about reading Kierkegaard’s texts. A phenomenological approach in reading is about reopening the questions we encounter, in particular the question of subjectivity. In this double perspective, it makes sense to operate with the idea of a negative phenomenology in reading Kierkegaard. The method in The Sickness unto Death is to look for what is implied in what appears, or what is hidden in what is shown.²¹ It is critical toward appearances, looking for decisions at stake in what we let appear. Humans do something about appearances: we make things look. But we also come to appear, in making things appear.

5 Seeing – and Not Seeing The critical approach to appearances not only deals with how we let things appear or not. It is also about seeing and not seeing. As we can make things appear, in view of others (or us) seeing, our seeing is a matter of paying attention to. The question is: What are we doing in seeing? In particular what do we not see in seeing? I have argued for reading Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in terms of a dialectics and an ethics of vision.²² In seeing the other who is there to be seen, how do we see her? It is possible to see her in ways that deprive her of significance. Thus, ignoring her is a way of seeing her. But this indicates that, in seeing others in ways depriving them of significance, one can also depend on others. For example, seeing the other with the eyes of arrogance is a way of telling her how she should see herself: as inferior to the one seeing her. Whether one succeeds in the

 Compare, for example, the phrase: “The externalities under which the despair conceals itself” (SKS 11, 186 / SUD, 73).  Arne Grøn, “Ethics of Vision,” Chapter 24 in this volume.

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project of arrogance, then, depends on the other. If she resists, the project is likely to fail. The other is given to us to be seen, and yet, in a critical sense it is up to us to see her. The question to ask oneself is what it means to see the other as the other: in herself, beyond our seeing her. This is, I would claim, what is at stake in seeing the other as our neighbor. Seeing the other is in an important sense about not identifying her. Although she is given to us, she is not to be taken as what we take her to be. In seeing, it is easy to ignore what we ourselves are doing. Yet, we also encounter ourselves. Although it is up to us to see the other and to pay significance to her, and although it takes an effort to see her, we are not free to see her as we like. In the ways we see her, we ourselves come to appear. This is brought forth in the first, opening discourse in Works of Love. Love is given in and through questions, first and foremost the question: does love exist? In order to find an answer we may go out in the world and see whether love is there to be found. Kierkegaard’s discourse here performs a reversal of perspective: love is to see love. That is, the question is: How do we see when looking for love? Do we see with the eyes of love? Works of Love is about the (in)visibility of the other, but also about love’s appearing. As the title indicates, love is not to be seen as an inner emotion, but is in its deeds. If we are moved in love, we must show this in what we are doing. It is not about how love comes to appear, but how we make it appear. In this sense, a discourse on love must focus on the phenomena of love. Yet, the ambiguity just mentioned enters into the foreground. Why is love linked to questions about deceit and change? On the one hand, love must manifest itself, and, on the other, it is not simply to be judged by appearances. What is it, then? According to the answer just given, love is a matter of seeing – the other. “Love’s appearing” must be qualified, but this also goes for “seeing.” The question is how we show ourselves in seeing the other. In a sense, then, appearing and seeing intertwine. Still, love cannot be reduced to what we make out of love. Seeing the other is a matter of seeing that she is beyond what we take her to be. Likewise, love cannot be measured in terms of what we do. If we try, what we do changes its nature. It is no longer a work of love. This means that it is only possible to act out of love if we see love as a gift.²³ If we would speak of love’s manifestations, then, we can only do so if our ways of seeing can be called into question.

 Compare the last discourse in the first part of Works of Love: “Our Duty to Remain in Love’s Debt to One Another” (SKS 9, 175 – 203 / WL, 175 – 204).

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6 Experience and Decision As should be clear from what I have said, my argument is not about phenomenology providing some sort of basis for what Kierkegaard says as a religious writer. However, if we want to understand Kierkegaard as a religious writer, we should reflect upon how he is so, for example, his existential approach, his ways of problematizing and questioning. Quite often, Kierkegaard has been interpreted in terms of a schematic contrast between experience and faith, with the understanding that in experience, humans are autonomous, while faith is a decision beyond decisions we make as it were. As indicated, I’ll argue that the question of self-experience in Kierkegaard is not only more complex, but undermines this schematic contrast. His analyses of anxiety and despair, for one, are dealing with experiencing oneself in the negative. Moreover, experience and decision are concepts we use in order to understand our situation. That is, we must account for how we think in terms of experience and decision, and such an account must show what we talk about. If we make a decision, what it means to us is still open. It will depend on how we live our life. In making a decision, then, we are involved not only as the subject making the decision, but also as the one living and bearing the decision. The decision one makes depends on whether one is “decided.” In the activity of making a decision, there is a double passivity implied: first, in coming to make the decision; second, in carrying the decision through in one’s life. What I have in mind here is that we cannot avoid a phenomenological approach if we want to account for our situation, not least in terms of experience and decision. Faith as faith in a new beginning given as a gift relates to our history. Having already begun, we are given a new beginning that does not simply replace our own beginning. This is a paradoxical possibility in that our life is not replaced, but – as this life – made new, not as our own doing, and yet as a possibility for our own doing. In what sense, then, is faith a decision? We do not produce or establish this possibility, we cannot make it into our own, it is given to us, and yet, we are to take it as a possibility for us, changing our lives. The paradoxical structure means that we cannot take the possibility of faith simply as part of the life it concerns. This has to do with the way it concerns this life. We cannot reach or reconstruct this possibility from the life it concerns. And yet, we are to understand what it means in terms of this life.

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7 Self-Givenness and Self-Understanding If phenomenology is going back to that which shows itself to us, it has to give an account of that which “comes in between.” In the movement back we encounter subjectivity, but subjectivity as relating to the world. This does not mean that subjectivity is simply “worldly.” Subjectivity is embodied and embedded, but it is so as subjectivity: as relating to the world. It is in the world, relating to the world. A phenomenological approach, however, is also a countermove to established ways of dealing with subjectivity. Often it seems to go without saying that subjectivity is “only” subjective, that is: something that can either be left out in scientific procedures or cultivated in, for example, artistic practices. While the implication of the first option seems to be that we can have approaches to the world that are without subjectivity, the second is often taken as dealing with our ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world. These various options show that subjectivity is not simply given, but can be ignored or cultivated. Where does this leave a phenomenological approach? A first answer would be to ask: what about the subjectivity already implied in ignoring or cultivating subjectivity? A phenomenological approach must seek to give an account that points to the subjectivity implied or ignored in ways of dealing with subjectivity. As I have argued, the further implication is that, although it points to subjectivity as selfgivenness, a phenomenological approach has to account for ways of dealing with subjectivity. How is it possible that human subjectivity can show itself in ignoring, forgetting, or cultivating subjectivity? In the outlined reading of Kierkegaard’s main texts on subjectivity, I have focused on his approach, in particular on the role that the problem of negativity plays for his method. Thus, the emphatic definition in the Postscript of subjectivity as passion, interiority, and appropriation is a countermove to ways of dealing with subjectivity, inscribed in contemporary culture, which is diagnosed as ways of forgetting human subjectivity. In terms of both approach and account, the question is: how to account for subjectivity as self-givenness, if it is possible for us to ignore or forget what we are? I have suggested a double answer: first, the possibility of ignoring and forgetting testifies to our subjectivity; second, in forgetting, ignoring, or not wanting to be what we are, we are the ones forgetting, ignoring, or not wanting. We are given to ourselves also in the negative. But this makes the task of understanding ourselves both more pertinent and complicated. We are given to ourselves as ourselves to be understood and acknowledged. However, this implies that selfgivenness is not a stable, basic feature of human subjectivity, but at stake in self-understanding. Reconsi-

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dering the project of phenomenology in reading Kierkegaard may bring us to question ideas often associated with phenomenology.

Chapter 15 Phenomenology of Despair – Phenomenology of Spirit 1 Existential thinking Kierkegaard’s existential thinking has in a critical sense formed philosophy after Hegel – yet it also reflects deep motifs in Hegel’s thought. Reconsidering this intricate relation, what is at stake for us? Of course, this is an open question that cannot be answered in such a way as to be left behind. What I would like to do here is to probe one – or rather one form of – answer. My suggestion is to look at the negative approach in Kierkegaard’s existential thinking, first and foremost in his analysis of despair, and to focus on how question (Sache) and method are intertwined.¹ In what sense are the figures of despair (Fortvivlelsens Skikkelser), described in The Sickness unto Death, figures of spirit? Can The Sickness unto Death be read as a phenomenology of despair in the context of a phenomenology of spirit? My aim is twofold: firstly, to re-read the negative analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death against the background of what I take to be the negative point of departure in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript and, secondly, to outline a renewed answer to the question: what is it in the question (concerning human existence or selfhood) that is reflected in the negative method? Thus, both in terms of method and question the key issue will be negativity. Let us first take a look at how existential thinking begins in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The Postscript forms the notion of existence as human existence upon which later philosophies of existence draw. Two features are crucial here: being in becoming and subjectivity as self-relation. Human existence is “in becoming”: “to exist is to become.”² It is important to note that this does not translate being into becoming. Rather, human existence

 The seminal paper on Kierkegaard’s negativistic approach is Michael Theunissen, “Kierkegaard’s Negativistic Method,” in Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, ed. by Joseph H. Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press 1981, pp. 381– 423; see also Michael Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993; Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Jeanette B.L. Knox, Macon: Mercer University Press 2008; Arne Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet. Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1997.  SKS 7, 183 / CUP1, 199. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-021

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is being in becoming. The question then is whether we, in becoming, become ourselves. In becoming, we are relating to ourselves. The Postscript accentuates existence in order to let humans’ way of being come into view, thereby inaugurating existential thinking. Yet, it does not offer a direct exposé of what existential thinking means. Rather, Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author, takes his point of departure in a remarkable fact of human existence: in existing, one can be distracted or even distract oneself from the fact that one is an existing human being. In accentuating existence as the human being’s way of being, the Postscript draws our attention to the enigmatic character of human existence. What are the implications of this move? If we wish to rethink the possibility of an existential approach, we should reflect upon how it begins. In reading the Postscript, we do not look into a treatise on human existence. Rather, we are ourselves to look for the point of departure. This is more a matter of finding than choosing. What it is to exist as human comes to the fore in questions humans ask themselves concerning their existence: in existing, they are brought to ask what this means. Yet, the problematic character of human existence is not just there to be described, taking as lead the questions humans ask themselves. It redoubles itself in that humans can also forget what it means to exist, as Climacus claims. But we do not simply forget this. We only do so by avoiding asking questions that point to the problematic character of our existence. More than that, we can also lose the sense of asking such questions. Thus, the point of departure for existential thinking is to be found in the negative. It concerns the situation in which we are placed as readers of the Postscript: “My main thought was that, because of the copiousness of knowledge, people in our time have forgotten what it means to exist,” Climacus declares.³ The situation is negative in a double sense. People are not simply in a state of not knowing what it means to exist. Rather, they are ignorant due to what they take themselves to know. That is, they have forgotten what it means. Not understanding themselves as existing human beings means not taking themselves to be human in the emphatic sense of realizing this. This is the possibility of being “absent-minded” (distrait). The enigmatic character of human existence lies in its self-relation. It is enigmatic to itself. When we ask the question of existence (what it means to exist), what is in question is existence itself, but for us existing. It is in question not only in terms of the questions we ask ourselves. Existence also turns out to be

 SKS 7, 226 / CUP1, 249.

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problematic in the sense that, in existing, we can cover it up – also by the questions we ask, or do not ask. This complication in terms of question is to be reflected in the method. It is a task to come to see the problematic character of human existence. Existential thinking must be a countermove. It is itself called forth by a problem in the very existence it is to think. If we exist in such a way that we forget what this means, we do not simply come to live a different form of life. We come to live a life we do not understand. However, realizing that we do not understand is a way of understanding ourselves. The Postscript points to a different kind of not understanding: humans seeking to forget that they are human. Forgetting to be human does not just happen to humans, but takes place in and through our ways of taking ourselves, in how we know what we claim to know. Existential thinking is a countermove against this kind of oblivion of human existence. It is to remind ourselves of the fact that we are human. In that sense, it takes part in what it seeks to think. Here we have a first indication of the intertwinement of question and method. The question of existence – what it means to exist – concerns the problematic character of human existence. This is where existential thinking is to begin. But the very beginning is complicated in that the question itself can be forgotten. And this has implications in terms of method. The Postscript insists on the question: what it means to exist. The question is to be asked in a concerned mode, realizing that the one asking is concerned. She is in this sense a self. It is easy to overlook that she as a self is socially situated. The tendency to forget is not invented by oneself, as it were. Neither is it simply inscribed in human existence as such. Rather, it presents itself as a tendency of “the age.” It is almost as if time – the age – has forgotten what it means to exist. The tendency to forget the question that points to the difficulty of existence appears to inhere in ways of existing: ways of being the social beings we are. When forgetting, we are under the influence of time – yet we are the ones forgetting. We forget as people “in our time.” But if we are distracted, we are the ones not asking the question. We let ourselves be absent-minded.

2 Movements, Positions, Figures If the approach of existential thinking is negative taking its point of departure in the fact that we, as humans, can forget what it means to exist, we still need to describe in positive terms what it is to exist. Existing, we are in becoming, and we are so in being moved and moving ourselves. In relating to the world, we make movements; we are ourselves in movement: moving, we are moved.

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Self-relation is implied in this. Therefore, an existential analysis must focus on how humans, in existing, situate themselves in relating to others and to a world more or less shared with others. The implications of existential thinking in terms of method are often overlooked. This also goes for the interpretation of Kierkegaard. His texts deal with movements, positions and figures: movements made by someone existing, and positions taken by her in and through her movements.⁴ The one making these movements, taking her position, can be seen as a figure that makes her appearance in a world shared by others who may be seeing her. Reading Hegel from this perspective, we can discern a sort of existential approach. His phenomenology concerns the relation of relating to the world, relating to others, and relating to oneself. These relations take place in movements in which humans take themselves, others, and the world to be in certain ways. Figures of spirit are ways of relating in this sense of “taking to be.” Returning to Kierkegaard, can we then understand his negative existential approach as a phenomenology of spirit? In earlier studies, I have argued that Kierkegaard’s analyses of anxiety and despair can be read in terms of a phenomenology of subjectivity.⁵ What is meant by phenomenology here? Firstly, Kierkegaard’s existential thinking works not least by describing phenomena such as anxiety, despair, hope, faith, and love – all of which comprise different phenomena to be captured by other notions such as (un‐)certainty, pride, humility, envy, jealousy, trust and mistrust. (It would therefore be more precise to speak of phenomena of, e. g., despair or hope.) Particularly important are various forms of courage (Mod), such as patience (Taalmodighed: the courage to endure time – and to bear oneself in time),⁶ and “bold confidence” of “free spirit” (Frimodighed: the courage to stand to oneself in relating to others).⁷ What is the point in describing such phenomena? I think the answer is twofold: We can point to the phenomena in question as ways of relating. The phenomena are subjective in the sense that we, in existing, relate to others, situating ourselves in a world more or less shared with others. The phenomena described are ways of existing. Secondly, describing the phenomena is to insist that we

 See Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, pp. 38 – 41.  See, for example, Arne Grøn, “Phänomenologie der Subjektivität. Überlegungen zu Kierkegaards Abhandlung über die menschliche Freiheit,” Chapter 21 in this volume.  See in particular the first of the two upbuilding discourse from 1844, “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience” (SKS 5, 185 – 205 / EUD, 181– 203).  See the second of the four upbuilding discourses from 1844 “The Thorn in the Flesh” (SKS 5, 328 / EUD, 340).

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should look once more, actually seeing what we think we see. It is to point towards what we tend to ignore – in the final analysis, what it means to exist. Maybe we should add a third point. Particularly important are not only phenomena of courage, but also phenomena of concern. To be more precise, concern and courage go together. They do so as phenomena or indications of spirit. Being concerned, we can lose courage. It is a matter of attitude in relating to others, situating ourselves in a world shared – or not shared – with others. Can we then discern a phenomenology of spirit also in terms of self-understanding (taken in the sense of coming to understand ourselves)? In what sense can self-understanding be an enterprise shared with others? In what sense is describing phenomena, such as anxiety and despair, also a matter of communication? As indicated, the phenomena described in Kierkegaard’s texts are also movements we make in existing, and these movements can be gestures of communication in which we make ourselves appear, uttering ourselves, addressing the other, seeking the other’s response, not least in terms of recognition. This is not only reserved for explicit gestures of communication. Rather, self-manifestation inheres in the phenomena of self-relating that are in focus in The Sickness unto Death. We relate to ourselves not only in explicit self-reflection. Rather, selfreflection draws upon self-relation being already at play in relating to the world and to others. In what we do towards others, in responding to what happens to us, we relate to ourselves, take ourselves in certain ways. That is why we, in what we do, make us appear. In existing, we come to appear. Relating, we “stand out” from ourselves. In outlining phenomenology in the first sense as a reflected description of phenomena as ways of relating to a world more or less shared with others, we can see the contours of a phenomenology in the second sense: as a describing and analyzing account and exposition of figures of consciousness. As indicated, figures (Gestalten) of consciousness mean forms of relating to a world, relating to others, and – in relating to others and the world – relating to oneself. Do such figures appear in isolation, or do they form – or “figure” – a process of figures? Can we in Kierkegaard find something like a phenomenology of spirit in Hegel’s sense? In earlier studies,⁸ I have argued that we do find a process of figures of consciousness in The Sickness unto Death, section C in Part One, entitled: “The Figures of this Sickness (Despair)”.⁹

 See Arne Grøn, “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,” Chapter 20 in this volume.  In Danish: “Denne Sygdoms (Fortvivlelsens) Skikkelser.” The Hong-translation reads: “The Forms of This Sickness (Despair),” but “Skikkelser” point to the problem of how despair appears and how it is seen. “Skikkelse” suggests a human being approaching us.

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However, before going into this, I would like to sketch a third sense of phenomenology. As indicated, phenomenology takes the form of a countermove. This is already to be seen in phenomenology in the first sense. It does not simply describe phenomena, but reflect upon our ways of seeing. More than that, it can also point to complications in the way the phenomenon – as that which manifests itself by itself – shows itself. This goes especially for existential phenomena as anxiety and despair. In The Concept of Anxiety, anxiety comes into view as self-disclosure. In anxiety, we encounter ourselves. Yet we do not just manifest ourselves. We come to appear also in hiding ourselves. In The Sickness unto Death, despair is brought into view as a complex phenomenon – or rather as a variety of complex phenomena – which can also make itself unapparent. Describing the phenomena of despair thus takes the form of interpreting how the figure in question shows itself. Not least important is how the figure makes itself figure in what it says. In this third sense, we are moving towards a hermeneutical phenomenology, or existential hermeneutics. In the following, I shall focus on phenomenology in the second sense, having the question of the context of phenomenology of spirit in mind. What is at stake here is the meaning of a history of spirit. This can be indicated by a twofold question concerning subjectivity and negativity. Firstly, what is to be brought out in phenomenology as a countermove, in the context of the analysis of despair? The answer I am looking for – more systematic than exegetical in nature – is that the phenomenological countermove is necessary in order to get into view the ambiguity of subjectivity as intertwinement of passivity and activity, suffering and acting. It is about showing the intricacy in the existential movements made by the figure in question. Relating to others and a world more or less shared is not only a matter of acting, but also of suffering. That is why we can come to appear in relating ourselves to the world and to others and the world between us. Secondly, how is the ambiguity of subjectivity a matter of spirit? The concept of spirit takes intensified negative possibilities with it, including the possibility of spiritlessness. Thus, the notion of negativity is to be refined.

3 Figures of Consciousness Let us now focus on the analysis of the figures of despair in the first part of The Sickness unto Death. It consists of two sections. While the first (C.A.) only considers despair “with regard to the constituents of the synthesis,”¹⁰ finitude / infin-

 SKS 11, 145 / SUD, 29.

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itude, possibility / necessity, the second (C.B) deals with “despair as defined by consciousness.”¹¹ What does this mean? The forms of despair considered in C.A. are abstract, forming as it were the keyboard on which the analysis of the concrete figures of consciousness plays. In what sense is a figure of consciousness concrete? As consciousness, it relates to what it experiences. In experiencing, it can be changed. There is history to consciousness. What it means to despair we cannot tell from the exposition in C.A., precisely because it abstracts from consciousness and thereby from history. When a person comes to despair, she relates to herself in relating to that which has happened to her. She is affected in her sense of self by what she has experienced. How she is conscious of what happens to her brings into question how she takes herself. Therefore, consciousness is “decisive with regard to the self.”¹² How the person despairs – how her despair develops in the course of time – is a matter of how she takes herself in taking what affects her. As consciousness, she relates to that of which she is conscious, thereby taking herself towards that which affects her. Only when considering despair within the category of consciousness it is possible to outline a process in which figures of despair come to figure as existential possibilities, which can help us to orient ourselves. As indicated already in the beginning of the first part of The Sickness unto Death, despair – as a sickness of the spirit or the self – can take three forms: “in despair not to be conscious of having a self (not despair in the strict sense); in despair not to will to be oneself; in despair to will to be oneself.”¹³ This structures the exposition in C.B.. In the process described here, the two main forms of figures are the second, the despair in weakness (defined as in despair not to will to be oneself), and the third, the despair in defiance (defined as in despair to will to be oneself). It turns out that one cannot be described without taking the other into the account. In the despair in weakness hides a form of defiance, and vice versa. This resembles section C.A. in which despair of finitude and despair of infinitude, for example, are also dialectically related. But in contrast to C.A., C.B. describes a process of intensification of despair in terms of consciousness. However, the process begins with a form of despair “that is ignorant of being despair.”¹⁴ This first form could be interpreted as a minimal form of despair. Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author, speaks of “despair at its minimum”: it “is a state that – yes, one could humanly be tempted almost to say that in a    

SKS SKS SKS SKS

11, 157 / SUD, 42. 11, 145 / SUD, 29. 11, 129 / SUD, 13. 11, 157 / SUD, 42.

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kind of innocence it does not even know that it is despair.”¹⁵ Therefore, “it is almost a dialectical issue whether it is justifiable to call such a state despair.”¹⁶ If in this first form consciousness were simply lacking, how could we then come to figures of consciousness, in the double sense of consciousness of that which comes from outside, happening to oneself, and consciousness of oneself? If the process to be described in C.B. is about intensification of consciousness, what is required as the first form must also be a figure of consciousness. What does it mean that this first figure is not simply ignorant of having a self, but “despairing ignorance”?¹⁷ Such question should make us look more closely at how the process begins. Again, question and method intertwine. My suggestion is that the beginning turns out to be complicated in the sense that in this first figure of despair the presupposition of the exposition of the process is in question: consciousness. From the beginning, we face the double question: what is despair, and what is consciousness? The beginning is about what is at stake in the process to be described in C.B.

4 Unconscious Despair? Or: Differences in Perspective The first form of despair – not knowing itself to be despair – is “not despair in the strict sense.”¹⁸ Is it then, strictly speaking, despair? Kierkegaard has Anti-Climacus emphasize: “every moment he [the one despairing] is in despair he is bringing it upon himself”.¹⁹ We are only in despair when we despair. But if we do not even feel ourselves despairing, if we do not experience ourselves as being in despair, it is as if despair only happens to us. What is it that Anti-Climacus seeks to bring into view when speaking of the first form of despair being “ignorant of being despair”?²⁰ Before beginning his exposition, Kierkegaard lets Anti-Climacus discuss the approach to the phenomenon in question, in terms of views or perspectives to be taken. Anti-Climacus distinguishes between “the common view” (den vulgaire Betragtning) and the view of “the physician of the soul.”²¹ The second view

      

SKS 11, 157 / SUD, 42. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13. SKS 11, 133 / SUD, 17. SKS 11, 157 / SUD, 42. SKS 11, 139 – 140 / SUD, 23.

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turns the first one upside down: “That one is in despair is not a rarity; no, it is rare, very rare, that one is in truth not in despair.”²² How is this claim to be justified? The second view inverses the question so that the problem is not how a human being gets into, but how she avoids or gets out of despair. This inversion of the common view is in need of a justification that shows what the common view overlooks. The common view “completely overlooks that not being in despair, not being conscious of being in despair, is precisely a form of despair.”²³ Again, this claim is in need of an account. Anti-Climacus then brings into view the apparently opposite phenomenon: “Despair can be affected.”²⁴ Pointing to this possibility not only justifies that “the physician of the soul” (den Sjelekyndige, the one knowing also by acquaintance the soul) moves beyond what the person in question says about herself. The very fact that a person affects despair – saying herself to be in despair – is of importance: “this very affectation is despair.”²⁵ What does this further – let us call it existential and phenomenological – move mean? My suggestion is that it points to the subjectivity in question in the following sense: In relating to what happens to herself, a person is to bear and to endure herself, as she relates. What she does means something to her, which is not just – as a matter of course – the meaning she herself acknowledges. It is not simply a matter of her attaching meaning to what she does. Not only may what she has done come to mean something differently to her. It is also a matter of acknowledgement. We can make ourselves blind to what we are doing. What Anti-Climacus calls “the common view,” refers to what we say about ourselves. According to this view, when someone claims not to be in despair, he is not in despair. However, the very act of referring to what we claim ourselves to be opens up the question: are we as we say ourselves to be? We are the one claiming ourselves to be in this way. Can we put ourselves into words? Being ourselves is already at play in seeking to say who we are. What we are trying to say concerns us as the one saying this. The very act of saying or claiming means something in terms of being the one saying this. We are not just who we are and then trying to say who we are. The question is already how we are who we are. In the context of a phenomenology of spirit, we can make the distinction between two perspectives: what the person – or figure – says about herself (seeking to say how it is for her to be herself), and what “the one knowing the soul,” the    

SKS 11, 139 / SUD, 23 Ibid. SKS 11, 140 / SUD, 24. Ibid.

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view from outside, sees in what the person shows – in and through what she says. The distinction between a view “für es” (for the figure itself) and “für uns” (for us observing the figure) is crucial in order to understand the exposition in The Sickness unto Death, not only in C.B., but also in terms of the relation of the two parts of the book.²⁶ Actually, we must distinguish three perspectives: the “for itself,” the “common” view claiming the “for itself” view, and the view of the “one acquainting herself” with the soul as the “for us” view. This further distinction concerns our view as readers. We cannot just place ourselves in the latter view – we also take part in the “common” view. Or to put it differently, we are ourselves to be measured by the view of “the one being acquainted with the soul.” The second perspective (“for us”) is a view from outside in contrast to the first perspective of the figure itself. Does the second perspective introduce a standard from outside into the description of the phenomenon? Anti-Climacus clearly states that the analysis of despair has a standard (Maalestok): “[I]f there is to be any question of despair, man must be regarded as defined by spirit [maa man betragte Mennesket under Bestemmelsen Aand].”²⁷ Therefore, he can claim: “But to be unaware of being defined [bestemmet] as spirit is precisely what despair is.”²⁸ What does it mean, then, that despair is “a qualification [Bestemmelse] of the spirit”?²⁹ Firstly, what does it mean to be aware of being defined (or determined) as spirit? What kind of “knowing” is it? The first form of despair is marked by “unconsciousness” or “ignorance.” It does not know itself to be despair. This kind of knowing is acknowledging: ³⁰ When Anti-Climacus states that one could be “tempted almost to say that in a kind of innocence it does not even know [ikke veed af] that it is despair,”³¹ the point is that this first form of despair is marked by this ignorance, not knowing or acknowledging that it is despair. This is what the account of despair that is ignorant of being despair must show. The account is also in this sense phenomenological.

 Arne Grøn, “The Relation Between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness unto Death,” Chapter 17 in this volume.  SKS 11, 141 / SUD, 25.  Ibid.  SKS 11, 140 / SUD, 24.  In Danish: “men veed ikke af det” (SKS 11, 160). The Hong translation “but is ignorant of the fact” (SUD, 45) does not capture the kind of knowing implied in “at vide af”: ‘knowing of’ in the sense of acknowledging.  SKS 11, 157 / SUD, 42.

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Secondly, describing the first form of despair marked by ignorance of being despair, we must also show what it means that this despair is a qualification of spirit. But how does being defined as spirit show itself in the negative? The answer, I think, is to be found in the fact that also the one not knowing (acknowledging) himself to be in despair relates to himself. This comes to the fore in the ways the “customary” view speaks, not going beyond “appearances”: “It assumes that every man must himself know best whether he is in despair or not. Anyone who says that he is in despair is regarded as being in despair, and anyone who thinks he is not is therefore regarded as not.”³² Appearances are also what we let – or want to let – appear. This is a critical point for my argument. Kierkegaard begins his exposition of the figures of despair in C.B. with a figure apparently representing the “minimum” of despair. Yet, this figure already thinks and speaks, and it does so about itself, in relating to others. Moreover, it speaks or claims itself to be free of despair. This means that “we” do not need to bring in the standard that a human being is defined as spirit. We do not need first to bring the figure to speak. It does so already, claiming itself to be what it knows itself to be. Not “knowing” oneself to be in despair is thus a way of “knowing” oneself – in the same way as we only forget what it means to exist in and through our ways of knowing. There are different forms of knowing oneself: one is to know oneself in acknowledging that one cannot claim to know oneself, another is to know oneself in claiming to be what one claims to be. What then do “we” do? Orienting ourselves by the figure of the one being acquainted with the soul (den Sjelekyndige), we do not simply observe as spectators (in German: zusehen). What we do, in observing, is to turn the figure towards itself. The figure taking itself to be what it is, in immediacy, betrays itself: it shows itself to be different from what it claims. And it does so in claiming just to be what it is. How does the figure show itself not just to coincide with what it claims itself to be? Anti-Climacus points to anxiety: [T]here very likely is not one single living human being…who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that…he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence [lader sig mærke med, at den er derinde] at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain.³³

 SKS 11, 139 / SUD, 22– 23.  SKS 11, 138 / SUD, 22.

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Anxiety is self-disclosure also in the sense that we show ourselves not to coincide with ourselves. Later, Anti-Climacus declares: “Despite its illusory security and tranquility, all immediacy is anxiety and thus, quite consistently, is most anxious about nothing.”³⁴ What is meant by “despite its illusory security and tranquility”? The security is a matter of assuring oneself, “speaking oneself into” feeling secure, against the unrest and anxiety that one carries around. Being defined as spirit shows itself precisely, albeit negatively, in this self-assured and self-assuring security. The unapparent phenomena – unrest, anxiety – show that we carry ourselves along. The self-relation we cannot avoid manifests itself in the effort to avoid it. Despite ourselves, we cannot avoid ourselves. When we do not understand ourselves as spirit, or take ourselves as a self, we have ourselves differently: in a sort of self-assuring movements. We cannot avoid taking ourselves in one way or the other. Consequently, Anti-Climacus claims that the despair, which is ignorant of being despair, hides a will – to ignorance. The will hides itself in this ignorance. Therefore, he must qualify his description of the phenomena in question: Actual life is too complex merely to point out [udvise] abstract contrasts such as that between a despair that is completely unaware of being so and a despair that is completely aware of being so. Most often the person in despair has a dim idea of his own state, although here again the nuances are myriad. To some degree, he is aware of being in despair, feels it the way a person does who walks around with a physical malady but does not want to acknowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness … he may try to keep himself in the dark about his state through diversions and in other ways, for example through work and busyness as diversionary means, yet in such a way that he does not entirely realize why he is doing it, that it is to keep himself in the dark.³⁵

This means that “there is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing.”³⁶ A person can seek “to obscure his knowing.”³⁷ Ignorance is not “original” but “later,” being “produced [frembragt].”³⁸ The one despairing can make himself ignorant of his own state. But this is not something he simply decides to do. It is not a matter of direct intention. Rather, it works precisely through diversion. This implies that one knows, by

    

SKS 11, 141 / SUD, 25. SKS 11, 163 / SUD, 48. Ibid. SKS 11, 201 / SUD, 88. Ibid.

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oneself,³⁹ but seeks to avoid this knowing by becoming diverted. In that sense, the intuitive insight is to be affirmed that one cannot be in despair without somehow knowing one to be so. All this means that the “unconscious” despair – the first form of despair – is not a minimal form of despair that constitutes a straightforward figure with which the process begins. Rather, it amounts to a complicating possibility always in play: the possibility of spiritlessness. This is not spirit not yet being there, but the attempt not to understand oneself as spirit. In this sense, spiritlessness takes spirit. It is a phenomenon of spirit, to be accounted for by a phenomenology of spirit.

5 The Process If we ask where to find the analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, the best candidate would be the section C.B. in Part One. What we find here is the exposition of the figures of despair. The exposition takes the form of describing a process in which the figures unfold themselves, observed by us. It is despair considered within the category of consciousness. The process displays an intensification of despair in terms of consciousness. This process of figures of consciousness begins with an ambiguous figure: unconscious despair. I have discussed this opening figure at some length because it tells something crucial about the character of the process that it opens up for. In reconsidering the opening figure, we face the twofold question: what is despair, and what is consciousness? This is what is to be shown in the phenomenology of the figures of despair considered as figures of consciousness. In contrast to the opening figure, all the figures subsequently described declare themselves to be in despair. Within each of the two main forms – the despair in weakness and the despair in defiance – we find subseries of figures. Thus, within the despair in weakness (defined as in despair not to will oneself) a difference opens up between despair, which is simply despair in weakness, and despair, which also despairs about its weakness. This is a difference in consciousness. The second figure can be seen as responding to the first. It is not only reflected in relation to the first, but also reflects upon the first. Also within despair in weakness in the narrow (first) sense, we can observe an intensification of despair in terms of consciousness. The very first figure is characterized by immediacy. Despair here is “only a suffering, a succumbing

 The notion of con-science (Samvittighed): knowing “with” (con) oneself.

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to the pressure of external factors; in no way does it come from within as an act.”⁴⁰ Something happens to the person and brings him to despair. On a closer look, this figure is problematic in much the same way as the unconscious despair being ignorant of despairing. Its problematic character makes the approach difficult. The one despairing does not see what he is doing: that he despairs. He is “conversely situated.”⁴¹ That is not something that just befalls him; rather it is how he situates himself, without realizing: he “is not aware, so to speak, of what is going on behind him. He thinks he is despairing over something earthly and talks constantly of that over which he despairs, and yet he is despairing of the eternal, for the fact that he attributes such great worth to something earthly…this is in fact to despair of the eternal.”⁴² What is Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus doing here? He does not simply look on, but introduces a standard (Maalestok): Despair “is indeed the loss of the eternal and oneself.”⁴³ However, he introduces this definition of despair by turning the figure towards itself. He brings to light how the figure is conversely situated in what it is doing. The consideration by Anti-Climacus takes up what the figure says about itself. In saying that it is in despair, it attributes such decisive meaning to the loss it suffers that it makes the loss into a loss of the eternal. Again, describing the phenomena of despair is to describe movements made by the one despairing, movements of situating himself. Anti-Climacus, the observer, re-situates the figure, turning it back upon itself. This movement made by the observer, leads to the next figure. Despair is somewhat modified in that the individual in despair to a certain degree comes to ponder over his self: “It means something for such an individual to talk about being despair.”⁴⁴ What gradually shows itself to the individual (the figure) is what he himself does: attributing significance to what happens to him, thereby determining himself. He can be brought to the point of “totalizing,” despairing over the earthly. Consciousness is intensified into a “new consciousness – that of his weakness”: “If the preceding despair was despair in weakness, then this is despair over his weakness”.⁴⁵ The insight into the despair in weakness – developed from within this figure – is an insight into what the one despairing is doing by himself. This opens up the possibility of “definitely turning away

     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

11, 165 / SUD, 51. 11, 167 / SUD, 52. 11, 175 – 176 / SUD, 61. 11, 176 / SUD, 61. 11, 169 / SUD, 54. 11, 176 / SUD, 61.

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from despair to faith and humbling himself under his weakness.”⁴⁶ But if one resists this humbling move and does not acknowledge having been weak, one continues holding oneself in despair. The point made concerns existential movements. It is dialectical in an existential sense. If one does not acknowledge oneself, one is not free to be oneself. Instead, one becomes self-enclosed by what one is doing to oneself. This ambiguous self-relation is “inclosing reserve [Indesluttethed].”⁴⁷ This leads to the second main figure, the despair in defiance: in despair to will to be oneself. The self that one wills to be is a self-constructed self. In constructing oneself, one does not will to be oneself as the one who one already is – already in seeking to be someone else. What comes to appear in this process is not only self-consciousness. Intensified is an ambiguous self-relation: (not) willing to be oneself. The one despairing shows himself not to be the one he wills to be. He is also the one suffering in defiance: being the one (not) willing to be oneself is to be in despair. Let us step back and ask: what is the significance of the process described, especially the transition from despair of weakness to despair in defiance? The process of figures begins with despair as “only a suffering”⁴⁸ and lets gradually despair as a doing appear. This opposition between suffering and doing is combined with another, implied in the question whether despair comes from without or from within. Interpreted along these lines, the process in which despair in weakness (intensified as despair of weakness) is succeeded by despair in defiance is a movement from a suffering despair coming from outside to an acting despair coming from within. What first appeared as equal forms of despair is now being described as a process in which the first turns into the second. Thus, the despair of defiance turns out to be the primary form, making manifest what it means to despair. The process described is indeed to be interpreted. On a closer look, it is more dialectical than simply moving from a suffering form of despair to an active form. In play is also what the figures say and think (in German: meinen). This is appearance to a second degree by which the figures conceal themselves, but this “appearance” (in German: Schein) to be brought to light also goes into the figures themselves. Thinking that despair comes from without hides what the one despairing himself is doing: attributing significance to what

 Ibid.  SKS 11, 177 / SUD, 63.  SKS 11, 165 / SUD, 51.

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comes from outside. What is more, the process does not end in an active despair. Rather, the moment of suffering is intensified in the inclosing reserve. Furthermore, it is not clear that a suffering form of despair must come from without and an active from within. If someone despairs over himself, he also suffers from himself, subjected to himself. How then is the process to be interpreted? In its course, it becomes manifest what despair means: having lost oneself. However, it is important to distinguish between the two meanings attached to the process: that it consists in the transition of the despair of weakness to the despair in defiance, especially when interpreted as the transition from suffering to active despair, and that the process uncovers what it means to despair. In the latter sense, it means a “progress” in the consciousness of despair, making manifest what it is to despair. Apparently, Kierkegaard brings the two meanings together. When despair increasingly shows itself as defiance, it becomes manifest what despair means. Why then is it important to distinguish here? The one despairing is to come to understand what this means, to despair, thereby facing the task of acknowledging what he is doing. But the process described shows more than that. The telos of the process is not just to come to understand what despair means, but also to come to understand that consciousness and will are intertwined. The process is negative also in terms of telos in that it describes human possibilities of failing the task (coming to understand oneself) in a still more intense manner.

6 A Negative Phenomenology? In The Sickness unto Death, “figures of despair” are figures of consciousness. A figure (Gestalt, Skikkelse) is a way of relating to the world and in this relating to itself. In the process described in C.B., the one despairing is to come to understand that he is in despair and what this means. Consciousness in despair is to turn into consciousness of despair. However, in this process of self-consciousness there is inertia or even resistance. It is a process of figures that do not understand themselves. This already indicates the role of negativity in the process. The figures of (self)-consciousness only come to understand what it is to be in despair by realizing that they do – or rather did – not understand themselves. The beginning of the process described in C.B. is also remarkable in this light. As indicated, the beginning is twofold. First we have “unconscious” despair, and next despair in “immediacy.” While the first “speaks itself free” of despair, the second declares itself to be in despair. It is decisive that both speak about themselves, taking themselves to be what they claim to be. Already caught in language, they can contradict themselves.

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Thinking itself not to be in despair, the “unconscious” despair does not form a straightforward initial figure. Rather, it constitutes a complex possibility, which complicates the telos of the process, thereby indicating the possibility of a process of avoiding understanding oneself as spirit. This radical possibility being placed in the beginning qualifies the negative character of the phenomenology of despair. This means that the process is also about the possibility of failing the telos of the process: to come to understand what it means to do what one is doing, namely despairing, thereby coming to understand what it means to be a self. The process depicts self-consciousness in becoming, but precisely in becoming the outcome is open and self-consciousness at stake. Also in this sense, the phenomenology of despair is a phenomenology of spirit. The negative or broken character of the process has to do with the existential meaning of self-consciousness. Consciousness and will are intertwined so that consciousness becomes a matter of the will. This does not imply that one is in control of one’s consciousness. On the contrary, in question is the will in terms of the person willing. What is the will hiding in what the person claims herself to be? The process moving beyond the shift of the despair in weakness to despair of weakness traces not only inertia, but also a counter-will, resisting the demand of becoming manifest. Thus, the intensified negative possibility of avoiding understanding oneself as spirit (spiritlessness) indicated in the opening figure of “unconscious” despair accompanies the whole process. Even when the insight into the definition (or determination) of spirit is achieved, this definition can be not only missed but also lost. In terms of the Postscript, abstraction understood as becoming absentminded or thoughtless forgetting what it means to be spirit, is a constant possibility – of spirit. If the process is about what it means to despair, what is the answer? To cut a long story short, 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. This radical negative possibility – to be distinguished from the intensified negative possibility of spiritlessness – accentuates the existential character of the process of (self)-consciousness described and interpreted in a negative phenomenology.

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7 An Existential and Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Spirit When reconsidering Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in the context of a phenomenology of spirit, what are the possibilities open to us? My suggestion was to focus on the intertwinement of question and method. What is in question? Let me summarize by making the following two points. Firstly, I have argued that we should insist on the problematic character of human existence. Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair is about the fact that humans encounter themselves as a problem, not just in the sense that it calls for self-understanding, but also in the deeper sense that their self-understanding is part of the problem. This is indicated by the negative point of departure in the Postscript that humans can forget what it means to exist and – we should add – forget the point in asking the question. In The Sickness unto Death, the very approach to the phenomena of despair to be described is complicated by the intensified possibility of avoiding seeing oneself as spirit: as a self, facing the demand to answer for oneself. But this possibility requires a self. Spiritlessness is a possibility of spirit. Therefore, what we should do is to seek to give an account of selfhood that takes the intensified negative possibility into account. Secondly, what is needed then is a more refined analysis of the subjectivity implied in a phenomenology of despair as a phenomenology of spirit. I have argued that in reconsidering Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair the key issue is the interplay of suffering and doing. What is the subjectivity of suffering? If suffering inheres in existing, how is the “act” of existing to be understood? Existential thinking is put to a test in the analysis of despair. If we construe this analysis in terms of passivity and activity, the critical point is that the person suffering in despair is the subject of despair. How should we understand that the one suffering is also doing something to himself in despairing, to the point of “totalizing” his despair? What then about the method? Question and method are intertwined in the sense that what is in question complicates the approach to the question (Sache). To be further explored is the possibility of an existential and hermeneutical phenomenology of spirit. It is hermeneutical in that phenomenology – as logos – concerns that which is overlooked or not seen in that which is seen. In the analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, we find ourselves between Hegel and Heidegger.⁴⁹ A figure of consciousness shows itself in such a way that it also conceals itself. However, in the analysis of despair we also move beyond both Hegel and Heidegger. We encounter a complication in self-relation that has

 See Arne Grøn, “Self-Givenness and Self-Understanding,” Chapter 14 in this volume.

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to do with the concept of spirit. This is to be seen especially in the figure opening the analysis, the “unconscious” despair, and in the open closing figure, the negativity of the self-inclosing despair. The hermeneutical phenomenology is existential in that a human being relates to herself in relating to the world: in situating herself, in taking positions. In despairing, the person in despair also relates to herself in relating to what happens to her – if not she were not despairing. This leads us back to the question: how should we account for the subjectivity implied? Being subjected to despair, in suffering, the person can come to see herself as incapable of relating to and situating herself in the world. Thereby, the task of self-understanding in terms of coming to understand oneself is intensified. This calls for a more refined analysis of the subjectivity implied.

Chapter 16 Time, Courage, Selfhood 1 Edification and Subjectivity In Being and Time, Heidegger reduces Kierkegaard’s influence to three footnotes. However, one of these footnotes can serve as a point of departure here – for a journey, which will lead us back to key issues in Being and Time such as concern and temporality. In this footnote, Heidegger claims that there is more to be learnt philosophically from Kierkegaard’s edifying discourses than from his “theoretical” works (with the exception of The Concept of Anxiety).¹ This claim may come as a surprise. If one is looking for a philosophical approach in Kierkegaard, his pseudonymous works seem to be the obvious choice. They contain direct reflections on philosophical issues, such as subjectivity and temporality; indeed, one of the pseudonymous works, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, coins the very concept of existence as the way humans are being situated as humans. Moreover, in their form the pseudonymous writings experiment with questions and different perspectives on how humans are situated in living their lives. By contrast, Kierkegaard’s edifying discourses appear to speak within a given religious framework. This leaves us with two questions. How can an edifying discourse be philosophically challenging (as indicated in Heidegger’s remark)?² What makes an edifying discourse edifying? I’ll begin with the second and end with the first question. But this offers only the framework for discussing what is at issue here: how are we to understand human subjectivity? This is the pivotal question, which comes in between beginning and end. Let me briefly indicate what I have in mind. To be edified concerns one’s sense of self in relating to others and to the world in between. To edify concerns one’s sense of the other. Maybe even more important, the need for both (to be edified and to edify) testifies to what is at stake in our human ways of relating  “Thus more is to be learned philosophically from his ‘edyfing’ writings than from his theoretical work – with the exception of his treatise on the concept of anxiety” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, p. 225 / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1972, p. 235).  Let us leave aside the question whether a philosophical discourse could be or indeed should not be edifying. There is a point in saying that Kierkegaard’s edifying discourses are not philosophical treatises. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-022

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to others and to the world – namely the courage to live the life, which is ours. Put in more exegetical terms, my suggestion is to discuss the question of subjectivity, associated with Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, in the context of his edifying discourses. More systematically, the idea is that the difficulties we face when we seek to understand the subjectivity implied in edification challenge a philosophical account of human subjectivity. What makes an edifying discourse edifying? The edifying character of a discourse is a matter of the “how” of the discourse. If what is said is to be edifying, it must concern the one to be edified. What should be edifying cannot be put forward as something to be taught and learnt, one being the teacher, the other the one to learn. This means that not only Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, also his edifying discourses deal with the question: how is it possible to communicate about ethical and religious questions, which concern each of us in our own ways of relating to others and the world we more or less share? Kierkegaard seeks an answer in an indirect communication, which aims at the addressee as the one who is to give her own response. How is it possible to communicate inwardness? “Inwardness” here means how we relate to that which concerns us. To edify requires seeing the other as the one who is to live her life in relating to others and to a shared world. However, this implies a dialectics of vision: the edifying is about how the one to be edified is being seen – in view of how she sees herself. An edifying discourse must, in its very form, indicate what it means to edify. It must address its reader or listener as someone to be edified. What is implied in this: “as someone to be edified”? To edify or to “build up” means to give hope to and to give courage to another human being. This implies that what we do can affect the other in her ways of relating to her life. Yet, an act can only edify if it points to the other herself, or, to be more precise, it can only edify if she comes to hope and to have courage. Although edification seems to fall on the side of the one edifying, it concerns how the other to be edified relates to her life or to herself in living her life. But why is a human being to be edified? The critical point is that a human being can lose the courage to be herself in living her life. She can despair.³ Yet, as someone who can despair she is already a self. This is the self implied in “as someone to be edified.” As someone who can despair a human being can be someone to be edified. What are the implications for understanding human subjectivity?

 Therefore, there is an intricate relation between Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death (the analysis of despair and selfhood) and his Works of Love (reflections on love as edifying).

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In discussing this question, we should not leave behind the opening question about the form of the edifying discourses. The “how” of the discourse first and foremost means: how the discourse addresses its reader or listener. In order to be edifying the discourse must, in the very act of communication, in addressing its reader, take its addressee as a self. ⁴ Thus, subjectivity is in question in the very form of the edifying discourse: how does the discourse see the addressee seeing herself? But this only opens up the field of questions indicated in the title of my paper. I’ll discuss these issues – time, courage, and selfhood – as questions of human subjectivity in interpreting the second of the two edifying discourses from 1844 entitled “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience,” published in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. My reason for selecting this discourse is that it focuses on the danger to which an edifying discourse responds. This danger – to lose one’s soul – and the task of preserving one’s soul, in patience, point to the selfhood of the addressee as a human being: as a self relating to itself. Let us dwell a bit more on how the edifying discourse – and indeed edification – implies subjectivity in its very form. The “how” and the “what” of the edifying discourse are intertwined. What the discourse says must be of concern for the reader. It deals with questions, which must involve the one reading the discourse so that they are questions the reader can ask for herself. The subjectivity of the addressee implies that she is concerned. However, she is not simply concerned. To be concerned is a matter of how we are so (concerned). But whether and how we are concerned affects how we live our life. The reader is addressed as someone who is to understand herself through the question of concern. She is addressed as concerned in her mode of being (to put it in Heidegger’s terms) so that she can be concerned in and about how she actually lives her life. This is reflected in the way the edifying discourse points to, or designates, its addressee. As Kierkegaard’s prefaces to each of the collections of discourses from 1843 and 1844 tell, the discourse “seeks” its reader as “that single individual [hiin Enkelte].”⁵ What is implied in this gesture? It reminds the reader of herself or himself. The discourse takes the reader as a subject – it even elaborates on what this implies. The reader is taken into the discourse as its reader, as this singular individual. This is a both universalizing and singularizing move: each and everyone can be “its reader,” but only as oneself and no other. Thus, the dis-

 The discourse thereby turns itself into a sort of subject. Important is, however, that the discourse only performs or “acts” by way of the addressee being designated or pointed to as a subject.  SKS 5, 183 / EUD, 179.

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course addresses its reader as a subject, not only as the one to read, but also as the one concerned in reading. However, turning the reader into the subject of discourse in the double sense of the one to read and the one (to be) concerned is a rather complicated enterprise. In the context of the one relating to the other in edification, the question is: must the one writing the discourse seek to disappear as a subject in order to let the reader appear as the one concerned? Implied in the discourse being edifying is that the one writing or speaking (den Talende) is not a teacher (as the “Preface” says).⁶ Rather, the speaker is to be included in the discourse – as addressee, too. Yet, does this not mean that the “thou” as addressee disappears? How are the one addressing and the one being addressed situated in their relating to each other? Does edification include both so that the one speaking is also to be edified? These questions indicate that the edifying discourses are not easily described in terms of being either monological or dialogical. What is remarkable is that they deal with inwardness as a common field of questions and questioning. There is a kind of universality to the edifying discourses. We share the condition of being singular individuals. This comes forth in the move permeating the discourses – the move towards the question: what it is to be human. In response to this question, the edifying discourses point to what we already are: a self, oneself. Yet, the discourses are not on anthropology, nor on theory of selfhood. Rather, they show what is implied in the questions, which anthropology and theory of selfhood seek to answer: what it is to be a human being, and to be a self. Let us now turn to the discourse “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience.”

2 To Preserve One’s Soul The prelude of the discourse leads the reader to the theme: “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience.”⁷ It takes an effort to understand what it means to preserve one’s soul. Indeed, the whole discourse is about this understanding, which in itself requires patience. Reading is already a matter of patience – in coming to understand. The discourse begins by pointing to the moment of decision, from the outside as it were: “How someone in the hour of danger and in the moment of terror

 Ibid.  SKS 5, 185 – 190 / EUD, 181– 187.

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displayed a strength of soul that might truly be called wondrous has often been witnessed with amazement and told with admiration.”⁸ The discourse then addresses the reader – as an observer: If you have never seen this, my listener, you have nevertheless heard about it. You may have heard how someone had thoughtlessly frittered away his life and never understood anything but wasted the power of his soul in vanities, how he lay on his sick bed and the frightfulness of disease encompassed him and the singularly fearful battle began, how he then for the first time in his life understood something, understood that it was death he struggled with, and how he then pulled himself together in a purpose that was powerful enough to move a world, how he attained a marvelous collectedness for wrenching himself out of the sufferings in order to use the last moment to catch up on some of what he had neglected, to bring order to some of the chaos he had caused during a long life, to contrive something for those he would leave behind.⁹

How is the reader situated? In having heard about “someone” who, facing death, has “pulled himself together in a purpose that was powerful enough to move a world,” we – the readers – may also come to understand “something,” that is, to think for ourselves: being reminded that we are also going to die we may come to see the life we live and to pull ourselves together in living our life. This motif ¹⁰ – death as detour to life – is only touched upon in the discourse, but later it is unfolded in the last of the Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions entitled “At a Graveside”¹¹ and in a discourse in Works of Love, “The Work of Love in Recollecting One Who Is Dead.”¹² Let us note how Kierkegaard accentuates the role of understanding in dealing with the moment of decision. Coming to a decision, which concerns our life, requires that we come to understand with resoluteness. This already indicates that the moment of decision is about the context in which we take the decision. It is about our life taken as a whole. Pointing to the moment of decision is only a first move in the discourse. It is followed by a remarkable further shift in focus, which figures as the turning point in the discourse. This is announced as follows: “However, if a person discovered the danger while all speak of peace and security…”¹³ What is required is

 SKS 5, 185 / EUD, 181.  SKS 5, 185 – 186 / EUD, 181.  The motif figures prominently in Heidegger’s Being and Time in terms of “anticipation of death [Vorlaufen zum Tode].”  SKS 5, 442– 469 / TD, 69 – 102.  SKS 9, 339 – 352 / WL, 345 – 358.  SKS 5, 186 / EUD, 182.

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not only to come to the moment of decision, but to discover and to come to understand the danger. What danger? As the discourse notes: “…the dangers can be very diverse.”¹⁴ It continues: “People are prone to pay attention to earthly dangers.”¹⁵ We may object: are not all dangers earthly in so far as we humans live an earthly life? What is meant by the contrast: “eternal danger”? To cut a long story short, let me suggest that the eternal danger concerns our attitude towards earthly dangers. It concerns how we deal with our human condition in terms of “the shortness of life and the certainty of death.”¹⁶ “So, since life is uncertain, there is something one desires to preserve, desires to keep safeguarded for oneself.”¹⁷ We desire to preserve what matters to us. But what is truly worth preserving? We may think that this is simply what matters to us, but what does simply matter to us? Even the way we take ourselves is open to question. It is in this perspective we must understand the turning point of the discourse. It is about the one reading being turned toward herself in relating to the world. It is about what is truly worth preserving, and “what else could that be but a person’s soul?”¹⁸ However, the discourse has not yet reached its pivotal theme: “to preserve one’s soul.” To understand what this means requires that we realize what the danger is. If a person wants to safeguard his earthly goods he can seek to find “an out-of-the-place place in the world” where he can safely deposit his treasure.¹⁹ Here the critical difference between earthly dangers and the eternal danger comes to the fore: “But if a person wanted to preserve his soul in that way he would indeed have lost it.”²⁰ Why? If we deposit ourselves, for example in having our soul saved in the way we see the world, this is something we do. Depositing one’s soul is already a matter of how we are ourselves in relating to the world. If we want to secure our soul, in keeping ourselves out-of-place or untouched by what happens to us or by what we do, we do something to ourselves, which would affect us so that we, by that very act, would lose ourselves. We would not be able to understand what it means that we are ourselves implied in the very act of safeguarding ourselves.

      

SKS 5, 187 / EUD, 183. Ibid. SKS 5, 188 / EUD, 184. Ibid. SKS 5, 189 / EUD, 185. SKS 5, 189 / EUD, 186. Ibid.

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If the person seeking to preserve his earthly goods dared not deposit it, “but carried it around with him day and night and in this way ran the risk of losing it at every moment,” it would be terrible. But this is the way we “have” our soul: we risk at every moment to lose it because we carry the danger around with us. What then is the danger? It is to lose one’s soul, and this concerns one’s way of relating to oneself, or, rather, the self-relation implied in relating to oneself. If we would say “that the soul is the only certainty and that, although people can take away everything else, they still allow a person to keep his soul,”²¹ we have not yet discovered the danger, which one should respond to in preserving one’s soul. The danger is only to be discovered if one is “being anxious about preserving [one’s] soul.”²² If one would take one’s soul as the safe hiding place – an outof-the-world place in the world – one ignores that this very act of hiding and taking oneself is about one’s soul. Therefore, we only come to understand what it means to preserve one’s soul if we realize that we carry the danger with us, the danger of losing our soul. If we would speak in those terms, we may be tempted to think that we lose our soul through something that happens to us. But would we then lose our soul? The implicit claim in the discourse is that to lose one’s soul is not something that happens to us. Only we can lose our soul. Why? Again, we must try to unpack what it means to speak of one’s soul. It is a matter of how we take ourselves in taking what happens to us. The danger, then, against which one must preserve one’s soul, is that we can betray ourselves. This is an almost formal indication (to use Heidegger’s term). In order to understand what is implied we are to “fill in” the indication: to betray oneself. We may object: if losing one’s soul is not something that happens to oneself, in that it is caused by what affects oneself, this would leave us unaffected. This is a quite common way to misunderstand inwardness. To insist that only we can lose our soul (it does not “happen” to us) does in no way imply that what happens to us is of no concern to us. On the contrary, what happens to us affects us, and because it concerns us, we are concerned. In order to understand what it means to lose one’s soul we should wonder: how is it possible, in the first place? The possibility of losing one’s soul has to do with how we are concerned. We can lose ourselves in being concerned. This is implied in speaking of preserving one’s soul. How then does one preserve one’s soul? There is only one means, the discourse claims, and “this means is patience.”²³ Why?

 SKS 5, 190 / EUD, 186.  Ibid.  SKS 5, 190 / EUD, 187.

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3 In Patience Patience is already required in coming to understand what is truly to be preserved and what the danger definitely is. “To preserve ones soul in patience – that is, through patience to ascertain what it is that one is to preserve.”²⁴ What is meant by “patience”? The Danish word is “Taalmodighed,” which can be spelled out as: the courage (Modet) to endure or to bear (til at taale). What is it that one is to endure or to bear in patience? We are to endure what happens to us. This is probably what first comes to our mind. To endure what happens to us may require courage. However, we are not only to endure what happens to us, but also to bear what we do. Does this take courage? At least it often demands patience to carry through what one has set out to do. But what about carrying the weight of what one has done? This may also take courage in that this weight is to be carried in living one’s life. In all of these cases – in enduring what happens to us, in carrying through what one has decided to do, and in bearing the weight of what one has done – we deal with time. Patience as “Taalmodighed” is the courage to endure time and to bear oneself in time. And in the context of the discourse, as it takes time to come to understand, it also takes the courage of patience to understand what the danger is. It requires that we have the courage to bear ourselves. The discourse claims that a person gains his soul “in no other way than by preserving it, and therefore patience is the first and patience is the last, precisely because patience is just as active [handlende] as it is passive [lidende] and just as passive as it is active.”²⁵ It may be confusing that patience is depicted as a subject outside the subject, as it were: patience does something to us. At the end of the discourse, Kierkegaard comments: We have spoken as if patience were outside a person; we are well aware that this is not so. And nevertheless I ask you…was it nevertheless not so at times, when concern and your laboring thoughts piled up deliberations that were of no benefit except to give birth to new deliberations, that then the plain, simple, but nevertheless forgotten words of patience prodded you from another direction, was it not as if patience stood on the outside.²⁶

When “patience” is as active as it is passive, and vice versa, it is the person who is acting and who is suffering. It is the person herself who is to preserve her soul. If patience is the means to preserve her soul, the person herself is in patience.

 Ibid.  Ibid.  SKS 5, 204 / EUD, 202.

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Why then is it necessary to depict patience as a force outside the person? Even if, or rather because, we are to be patient, patience is not something we can simply “do” or “enact.” Whether we are patient is a matter of how we relate, from moment to moment. It is about enduring time and about bearing ourselves, but this is difficult. We are engaged in “the long battle with an indefatigable enemy, time, and a multifarious enemy, the world.”²⁷ In this battle, it is easy to become impatient. If we are impatient, how do we then become patient? We do not just decide to be patient and then become so. Instead, we are reminded to be patient, for example through words of patience prodded us “from another direction.” Although it is our patience (we are the ones to be patient), patience also comes to us, as a sort of gift. In patience, we struggle with time – and with ourselves in time, for example with our wishes and expectations. In patience, we are not just patient, but seek to be patient in enduring time. Patience concerns how one relates, or takes oneself, in relating to the world and to others. But this is what preserving one’s soul is about. It is about self-relation in time. In seeking to preserve one’s soul one relates to oneself – in realizing that one also carries the danger against which one is to be preserved. In preserving one’s soul, one is the one to preserve, but also the one to be preserved. The discourse “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience,” then, is about self-preservation, but seen in this radical perspective that concerns what it is to be a self: being a self, we can lose ourselves. Again, how is this possible? We lose and gain ourselves in and through what we otherwise do. There can be specific acts of betrayal, which means that we betray ourselves, but we can also lose ourselves, little by little. The critical point is that self-preservation in the sense of preserving one’s soul is to preserve oneself against oneself. It is to “be true to oneself,”²⁸ which again is a matter of how we place ourselves in and through what we do. How then is patience – or being reminded to be patient – edifying? The demand to endure can in itself be edifying in that it breaks off concerns that can tum into worries in an almost self-encircling movement. However, what is edifying is not only the demand to endure, but also the experience of patience. It is the experience that it is possible to bear oneself in and through time. In a deep sense, then, the theme of the discourse on preserving one’s soul in patience is time: it is how to deal with time to which we are ourselves exposed: “What in-

 SKS 5, 195 / EUD, 192.  SKS 5, 193 / EUD, 190.

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deed is this existence, where the only certainty is the only one about which nothing can be known with certainty, and that is death?”²⁹

4 Temporality In sum, the discourse “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience” deals with the radical possibility, which is inherent in selfhood: to lose and to gain oneself in time, as self-relation in time.³⁰ There are even unapparent ways of losing oneself, in letting oneself be diverted in time, in that time “comes in between.”³¹ For example, we deal with time in wishing and in intending, and the danger is to come to live in wishing³² and in intending,³³ as it were. If doing so, we tend to avoid bearing ourselves in time. It takes patience to preserve one’s soul because we are related to ourselves in time, from moment to moment, in relating to the world and to others – not least in wishing and having a purpose. Whereas there are unapparent ways of losing oneself, it takes an effort to gain and to preserve oneself. Still, whether we succeed in gaining and preserving ourselves is a matter of being patient, in relating to time, from moment to moment. Although time – and how we as selves are temporal – is a key issue in the edifying discourse on preserving one’s soul, the discourse is not a philosophical treatise on temporality. It deals with the problem of time – as it is experienced by a human being subjected to time. We are subjected to time as subjects facing the question: what do I make out of myself? In and of itself, time does not reveal what edification means, but, as the edifying discourses show, there is a crucial connection between edification and the problem of time. What edification means can only be understood in the light of the problem, which time presents to human beings – in their being human. The discourses seek to illuminate experiences of time, experiences in which time presents itself as a problem in the first place. This indirect method may be called phenomenological in that the edifying discourses describe experiences of time by articulating and, to some extent, analyzing ways of relating to time. In order to bring the problems in question closer to the reader, the discourse seeks to bring into view what it talks about. There is method to it: bringing into view is necessary because we humans tend to overlook what is closest to     

SKS 5, 198 / EUD, 195. See Arne Grøn, “Temporality in the edifying discourses,” Chapter 7 in this volume. SKS 5, 191 / EUD, 188. SKS 5, 192– 193 / EUD, 189 – 190. SKS 5, 193 / EUD, 190 – 191.

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us, our own ways of relating. The discourses are in this sense also expeditions into inwardness – as a land of trouble still to be discovered (to speak in Augustinian terms). Arguing for a phenomenological approach also implies that we need to ask from the beginning, as it were: what if inwardness is a relationship to time – or relating to time? Patience is the means to preserve one’s soul because patience is to endure time and to bear oneself in and through time. Therefore, the discourse performs a shift in focus from the moment of decision to moments of decision. Resoluteness becomes a matter of patience. Decision is stretched out in time, in enduring time. Still, we may wonder: why does the discourse make this displacement – from the moment of decision to decision in time? Because the danger against which we are to preserve ourselves is a danger, which accompanies us all the way as the possibility of betraying ourselves. In accentuating the task of preserving one’s soul in patience, the discourse indirectly points to the decision, which takes place from moment to moment, maybe without us noticing. This is also the danger to which the discourse responds: that we can lose ourselves through what we do without realizing what we do. The negative background is to be read into the positive claim that the critical decision is taken from moment to moment: “If patience has helped until now, then it is appropriate to use its assistance again in order to understand in all quietness that the most crucial issues are decided slowly, little by little, not in haste and all at once.”³⁴

5 Courage and Concern Patience and expectancy are ways of relating to time.³⁵ Underlying or rather implicit are concern and courage. Patience is courage, expectancy draws on concern. Courage and concern are “deep” ways of relating in that they are about, and at stake in, how we relate to time. To lose courage in the sense of the courage to be oneself in living one’s life is to lose one’s soul. What then about concern? The edifying discourse addresses its reader as a concerned being. We are beings for whom things matters. We are affective beings in being concerned, or rather being concerned is how we deal with our being affective. But concern is ambiguous. A human being is, in her mode of being, concerned, and yet she

 SKS 5, 201 / EUD, 199.  See the second of the two edifying discourses from 1844, “Patience in Expectancy” (SKS 5, 206 – 224 / EUD, 205 – 226).

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can be captured by her own concerns: “Not only did he lose his soul who danced the dance of pleasure until the end, but also the one who slaved in worry’s deliberations and in despair wrung his hands night and day.”³⁶ “Worry’s deliberations” is in Danish “Bekymringens Overveielse,” that is: the one being concerned (bekymret) can enslave herself in her concerns or worries. As the discourse observes, a human being is in danger in being exposed to time and the world. We can be diverted in time and be absorbed in the world, thereby not coming to lead our own life. Yet, we do not simply lose ourselves. We only do so ourselves. We only lose ourselves to “the world” if we let ourselves be diverted in time and be absorbed in “the world,” that is: in what we take to be the world. Patience as the courage to endure can be considered as a counter-act, directed against ways of letting oneself be diverted or absorbed. However, patience is not a specific act, but a way of relating through our acts, from moment to moment. Furthermore, it is directed against the danger, which we, as selves, carry around with us: to give up ourselves or to despair. Here, concern enters the picture again. The danger of losing oneself does not just consist in letting oneself be diverted or be absorbed, but in trapping oneself in what one is doing, in being concerned. Against this, patience consists in re-directing one’s concern, as the concern to preserve one’s soul. The task in preserving one’s soul, then, is to keep one’s spirit or courage, or to preserve oneself in preserving one’s courage. This indicates how the addressee of the edifying discourse is seen as a human being. As humans we are, in a critical sense, courage. Being courageous, one is exposed: one’s inner – one’s relation to oneself – can be affected by what happens to oneself. In losing courage, one can come to despair, that is: one can come to give oneself up. But the discourse points to this danger in the intensified form: not only is one, in giving oneself up, the one who gives up; we can also betray oneself so that we lose our soul in and through what we are ourselves concerned about and striving for. Therefore, to preserve one’s soul – to remain true to oneself – demands that one also struggles with oneself.

6 Negativity and Edification Edification appears to seek out what is positive and to indulge in a positive or even moralistic rhetoric. This is one reason for making the claim, as Hegel

 SKS 5, 191 / EUD, 187.

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does, that philosophy should not be edifying. But as we have seen, edification in Kierkegaard deals with negativity. It depends on a negative detour.³⁷ We only understand the edifying character of the discourse if we see what the discourse is a response to. As the discourse on preserving one’s soul in patience shows, the edifying discourse responds to the radical possibility of losing oneself in time, by trapping oneself in concerns and by losing the courage to be oneself in living one’s life. In reading the edifying discourse, we should be attentive to the field of questions in which we as readers are situated. What a philosophical reading of the discourse can do is to focus on this field of problems to which the discourse responds. The discourse deals with these problems in an existential mode, as problems, which a human being encounters in seeking to understand the life she is living. We, the readers, are addressed as humans concerned about what it is to be human. The discourse on preserving one’s soul in patience accentuates the task of coming to understand oneself, and it does so in an indirect and negative way, which is remarkable. First, the human condition is marked by uncertainty; humans are exposed to time and can be subjected to a loss, which affects them in the way they live their lives. Second, the discourse leads the reader to ask where the danger lies. The point is not to deny that we are exposed to dangers in terms of a loss, which will change our life. Rather, the discourse re-directs the vision of the reader: in seeking to preserve what we are concerned about we can overlook an even more critical danger. This is the danger, which we carry around with us, which is difficult to understand. Self-understanding in this sense takes patience. It takes patience to understand what it means that we, as humans, can lose ourselves, and that this is our own possibility. What makes it possible to speak edifyingly, and what is implied in this form of communication? In a sense, it is precisely the negative possibility, which makes an edifying discourse possible. The addressee – the one to be edified – is a concerned being. She can be addressed in her concern for that which matters to her. In being thus concerned, she can be affected so as to lose her courage. But – as the discourse on preserving one’s soul in patience calls attention to – we are situated with ourselves, so that we can be affected not only by the loss we experience, but by ourselves, even in our concern for safeguarding what matters to us. The edifying discourse takes the one to be edified as a self, but it also elaborates what is implied in this: as selves, relating to ourselves, one can lose one’s soul, but as selves, we can also be given the courage to preserve oneself in patience, that is, to bear oneself.

 See Arne Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet. Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1997.

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7 Selfhood Let me conclude by focusing on our guiding question of selfhood. The edifying discourse addresses its listener or reader as someone to be edified. What is implied in this gesture? In communicating, it points to the act of communication and to the act of understanding. But the discourse can only indicate (formally, as it were) the act of understanding, which is left to the reader. In addressing the reader, it uses a sort of detour, speaking first of “someone” we might have heard of, then of what it is to be a human being, and, finally, it speaks directly to the reader, as a “thou.” What is the implication? As we have seen, the edifying discourse addresses the reader as someone who is concerned, but how we – the readers – are concerned is again left open. We are situated in an imaginative field of possibilities in which to orient ourselves. Yet, in and through these possibilities the question of what it is to be a human being resonates. As humans, we are concerned by what happens – and what may happen – to us. What are we to make out of ourselves? The critical point is what we can make out of ourselves. Thus, we can be captured by ourselves in our concerns. We can lose ourselves precisely in and through the ways we are concerned. If we, in order to be able to accept ourselves, are concerned about becoming something other and something more than who and what we are, we are in despair, according to The Sickness unto Death. Or, in the words of the edifying discourse, we are not true to ourselves. We may argue that it is not defined or fixed who we are, and that we are defined by the fact that we can change. Yet, in changing we are the one who changes and the one to change. If we do not bear through what we decide to undertake, we do not “define” ourselves, but keep ourselves in possibilities. We can lead ourselves astray – both by defining ourselves in terms of possibilities and by not seeing our possibilities. How are possibilities our most own (to use Heidegger’s term)? In the edifying discourse, we – the readers – are already committed by ourselves. It may be difficult to find out how, but this is about coming to understand oneself rightly.³⁸ “Rightly” need not imply that there is a pre-given standard for understanding oneself. Rather, it is about the way one understands oneself – whether one appropriates oneself, that is: acknowledges oneself or not as the one to answer for oneself. In understanding oneself “rightly,” one can also come to understand others, as it is indicated in the discourse.

 SKS 5, 191 / EUD, 188.

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As we have seen, this gives a clue to understanding why patience is the means to preserve one’s soul. In patience, one struggles with time and with oneself in time. Patience concerns self-relation in time. What one is to understand – in understanding oneself – is that one is the one to endure and to bear oneself. And this requires patience. How, then, can an edifying discourse be philosophically challenging? The edifying discourse on preserving one’s soul in patience challenges a philosophical account of selfhood. It pushes the question of selfhood to the point: how we are selves is a matter of what we can do to ourselves. The critical insight is that one only preserves one’s soul against oneself. One carries the danger around with oneself, the danger of losing oneself in giving oneself up (despairing), in self-enclosing concern, and in losing the courage to acknowledge oneself. These possibilities have to do with our being subjected to time. We change without wishing and intending to change, but we also change in and through what we do – and we can do so without recognizing ourselves. Therefore, if we want to give an account of selfhood, it is not sufficient to describe structures of being concerned, as Heidegger does. The question is how we are ourselves implied in being concerned. Not only can we “fall,” we can also capture ourselves in being concerned. Therefore, concern and courage go together. To preserve one’s soul appears to be another way of formulating that a human being is concerned about itself. However, the negative approach of the edifying discourse – seeking to understand what the danger is that makes the task of preserving one’s soul crucial – indicates that being a self is complicated in its very structure of being concerned in ways of relating. The radical possibility of losing oneself is inscribed in the structure of being a self that is concerned. The edifying discourse on preserving one’s soul is to be understood in response to this difficulty in being oneself. This is not least what makes it philosophically challenging.³⁹

 Thanks to José Miranda Justo for helpful comments to an earlier version of this paper.

Chapter 17 The Relation Between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness Unto Death 1 Problems of Composition Even though The Sickness Unto Death is a relatively small book, it is often thought to be the primary work of the immense Kierkegaardian authorship. Perhaps its limited scope even speaks in its favor. While a central work like the Postscript offers a broad and often diffuse exposition, The Sickness Unto Death seeks concentrated expression and particularly like The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness Unto Death has a closed character. But no matter how well rounded and succinct this main Kierkegaardian work might seem, it is ever so enigmatic upon closer inspection. The composition of the book presents problems that have substantial significance. This especially applies to the overall composition: the relation between the two parts of the book. Strangely enough, the reputation that The Sickness Unto Death has received in the Kierkegaardian secondary literature rests upon selected parts of this little book: firstly, upon the famous prelude of one and a half pages (A.a) and secondly, upon the large C-section concerning the forms or figures of despair. The remaining sections of the work fall more or less outside. That applies in particular degree to the whole of the second part of the book. Although compositionally professed to be an independent second part, Part Two is often ignored in the literature. This means that the work does not get interpreted in its entirety. A unified interpretation of The Sickness Unto Death must particularly answer the question of what the relation is between Part One and Part Two.

2 Human or Theological Self? The fact that very little attention has been paid to the question of how the two parts of The Sickness Unto Death relate to each other might be due to the fact that Anti-Climacus himself apparently answers it in a simple way. This occurs in a summary at the beginning of Part Two. Since the passage is of central importance, I will cite it in its entirety, but permit me to begin by omitting both its middle and latter parts.

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The preceding section concentrated on pointing out a gradation in the consciousness of the self; first came ignorance of having an eternal self (C.b.a), then a knowledge of having a self in which there is something eternal (C.b.b), and under this, in turn (a.l.2.β), gradations were pointed out. This whole deliberation must now dialectically take a new direction. The point is that the previously considered gradation in the consciousness of the self is within the category of the human self, or the self whose criterion is the human being [Mennesket]. But this self takes on a new quality and qualification by being a self directly before God. This self is no longer the merely human self but is what I, hoping not to be misinterpreted, would call the theological self, the self directly before God.¹

There does not seem to be anything to misinterpret. Part One of The Sickness Unto Death has to do with the human self, whereas Part Two is about the theological self. Thus, Gregor Malantschuk maintains that in The Sickness Unto Death, “Part One only deals with the Socratic-human existence-relations, whereas Part Two delves into the central Christian qualifications.”² The forms of despair that are described in Part One “are still within the scope of the Socratichuman.”³ Knowledge of the eternal, of which there is mention in Part One, is knowledge, “which the human being arrives at by absorption into himself, just as was the case with Socrates.”⁴ It is, however, far from simple to use the key, which Anti-Climacus gives for the interpretation of Part One. Indeed, if from the cited passage one returns to Part One, one must get the contrary impression that the key does not fit. For, in Part One there is not merely reference to a human self, and certainly not to the merely “Socratic-human existence-relations.” Although I will not go into an elaborate reading of Part One, I will, to begin with, have to show the lines of connection between the work’s two parts, starting with Part One. That which is most striking at first is that the prelude (A.a) of Part One closes with the definition of faith, which is repeated word for word at the end of Part Two, and which thus happens to stand as a conclusion to the work as a whole. The definition is repeated with direct reference back to the beginning of Part One. The Sickness Unto Death ends with the words: “This contrast

 SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79; translation modified.  Gregor Malantschuk, Fra Individ til den Enkelte. Problemer omkring Friheden og det etiske hos Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel Boghandel 1978, p. 174– 175.  Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. and trans. by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971, p. 345 (The Danish orginal: Gregor Malantschuk, Dialektik og Eksistens hos Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel Boghandel 1968, p. 327).  Gregor Malantschuk, Frihedens Problem i Begrebet Angest, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1971, p. 109. That is said about Sickness Unto Death in general, but must apply to Part One of the work.

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[sin/faith], however, has been advanced throughout this entire book, which at the outset introduced in Part One, A.a, the formula for the state in which there is no despair at all: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. This formula in turn, as has been frequently pointed out, is the definition of faith.”⁵ One might object that the formula is abstract, and that in A.a, where it is introduced, there is no explicit mention of God, but rather of “the power that established it [the self].”⁶ The original addition of “in God” was omitted by Kierkegaard.⁷ Nevertheless, the more indefinite formula is repeated word for word at the end of the work, and already within the framework of the first half of the work it is replaced by “God.” As Anti-Climacus draws attention to at the end, there is, all throughout the book, the reminder of the definition of faith. In the first subsection in C.a on the despair of infinitude, the following is said: “for the self is healthy and free from despair only when, precisely by having despaired, it rests transparently in God.”⁸ Previously – as early as A.b – Anti-Climacus has likewise replaced the prelude’s more indefinite formulation that the self is “established by another” with the meaning-laden words that “God, who made the human being a relation, releases it from his hand, as it were.”⁹ That it is not a question of an indefinite instance, but a “before God,” is emphasized later on in Part One. In the section on unconscious despair (C.b.a), it is said that the measure of what is despair and what is not, is the ethical-religious qualification: “spirit or, negatively, the lack of spirit, spiritlessness.” It is explained thus: Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something…every such existence is nevertheless despair.¹⁰

Part One thus stresses that the opposite of being in despair is having faith, as it was already defined in the prelude.¹¹

 SKS 11, 242 / SUD, 131.  SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.  Pap. VIII 2 B: 170, 2.  SKS 11, 146 / SUD, 30.  SKS 11, 132 / SUD, 16; translation modified.  SKS 11, 160 – 161 / SUD, 45 – 46.  SKS 11, 163 – 164 / SUD, 48 – 49.

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But Part One of The Sickness Unto Death says even more about the faith, which is without despair, and about the God whom faith believes in. The central passage is the section on necessity’s despair in C.a. Not least from a theological perspective is this passage remarkable. Compositionally, it is not only a link in the description of the figures of despair, but it also explains the opposition between despair and faith, which, above all else, the work is all about. Anti-Climacus refers here to that which he calls “authentic hope” and “authentic despair.”¹² According to the “merely human manner of speaking,”¹³ hope is something, which a human being can have more or less of, depending on time and age. The time of youth is thus especially rich in hope. Authentic hope, on the other hand, is an ultimate hope. Authentic despair is to lack possibility in such a way that one gives up hope, and authentic hope is the answer to this despair – it is to hope “in spite of.” The fundamental opposition between despair and faith hereby is established: authentic hope being faith in an emphatic sense. “What is decisive is that for God everything is possible,” declares Anti-Climacus.¹⁴ This “everything” must not be understood vaguely, but rather like this: that the ultimate decision only arises when a person no longer sees possibility for himself and thus would despair. When humanly speaking there is no possibility, “then the question is whether he will believe that for God everything is possible, that is, whether he will believe.”¹⁵ The faith about which Anti-Climacus here emphatically speaks is a paradoxically determined faith: the believer himself understands that he humanly speaking is without possibility, and nevertheless he believes in possibility. Faith is, Anti-Climacus emphasizes, dialectical or filled with tension. Its nature is one of struggle. The believer sees and understands the situation humanly speaking, but believes in spite of that understanding. It is not faith in any general religious sense, not knowledge of the eternal, which a person arrives at by absorbing himself in himself, but rather faith in a granted and received possibility. Anti-Climacus here reformulates the paradoxical definition of faith that was already given in Fear and Trembling. ¹⁶ Faith is believing that for God everything is possible, that is to say, that there is possibility where, humanly speaking, there is no possibility. In The Sickness Unto Death, that which precedes the response of

 SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 38.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid.  The knight of faith believes in getting back the whole of existence again, “that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible” (SKS 4, 141 / FT, 46).

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faith is not infinite resignation,¹⁷ but despair as humanly giving up hope. That which is contradicted is the human understanding, which is also the believer’s. Anti-Climacus himself maintains that faith emphatically understood is faith by virtue of the absurd: “But this is the very formula for losing the understanding; to believe is indeed to lose the understanding in order to win God.”¹⁸ The faith that is the opposite of despair contradicts that which a human being can discern for and by himself. It is hope for possibility in spite of the fact that one sees that the situation is, humanly speaking, impossible. When Anti-Climacus seemingly dissolves God into possibility – God is this, that everything is possible¹⁹ – he defines God as the one who corresponds to the situation, which is, humanly speaking, impossible. The emphatic definition of faith, which Anti-Climacus has put forth in the section on necessity’s despair, now comes into play in the exposition on the figures of weakness and defiance in C.B.²⁰ He defines them contrapunctually in relation to the decisive possibility of “definitely turning away from despair to faith and before God humbling himself under his weakness.”²¹ That which the self in despair will not do is “in faith, humble itself under its weakness.”²² This is the possibility from which the one in despair closes himself off. Anti-Climacus can therefore maintain that despair hereafter takes the form of inclosing reserve (Indesluttethed): “not willing to be oneself and yet being self enough to love oneself.”²³ The despair of defiance is now more clearly, albeit negatively, defined by the phrase “before God.” One will in despair be himself, but note well a self, which he himself invents, “severing the self from any relation to a power that has established it, or severing it from the idea that there is such a power.”²⁴ This description – “in defiance it wants to tear itself loose from the power that establish-

 Johannes de silentio says that “infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith” (SKS 4, 140 / FT, 40), but he also summons up “a pair of poetic individualities,” which he “disciplines with despair” (SKS 4, 178 / FT, 88).  SKS 11, 153– 154 / SUD, 38.  SKS 11, 156 / SUD, 40.  Throughout this essay, the Danish word Skikkelser is translated by “figures.” As pointed out in the heading to section C, the analysis of despair becomes an analysis of the figures of despair: “The Forms of This Sickness (Despair) [Denne Sygdoms (Fortvivlelsens) Skikkelser]” (SKS 11, 145 / SUD, 29). See also “C. Figures of Despair [C. Fortvivlelsens Skikkelser]” (Pap. VIII 2 B: 151).  SKS 11, 176 / SUD, 61.  SKS 11, 177 / SUD, 62.  SKS 11, 177 / SUD, 63; translation modified.  SKS 11, 182 / SUD, 68.

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ed it”²⁵ – applies, however, only to the first active form of the despair of defiance. In the suffering or passive [lidende] form, the self “for spite wants to force itself upon it [i.e, the power that established it], to obtrude defiantly upon it, wants to adhere to it out of malice.”²⁶ One feels that one has become evidence against the goodness of existence.²⁷ This suffering or passive defiance is described as an offense to the whole of existence. Even though there is vague reference here to “existence” (Tilvœrelsen), as before to “a power,” the possibility, which the one in despair does not want is defined paradoxically: “Hope in the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible – no, that he does not want”²⁸ That which one does not want is to become “a nothing in the hand of the ‘Helper’.”²⁹

3 The Question of the Criterion The conclusion of all this must be that Part One of The Sickness Unto Death is not merely anthropologically, but also theologically revealing. It gives the decisive definition of faith, deploys it even as a paradoxically determined faith, and understands God correspondingly not just as the power, which has established the self, but also as the absurd, that everything is possible. How, then, in his summary in Part Two, can Anti-Climacus maintain that Part One is about the human self? To begin with, we must again take a look at the cited passage with which I began. Before we examine the passage more closely, I will quote its middle part, which I omitted at first: And what infinite reality [Realitet] the self gains by being conscious of existing before God, by becoming a human self whose criterion is God! A cattleman who (if this were possible) is a self directly before his cattle is a very low self, and, similarly, a master who is a self directly before his slaves is actually no self – for in both cases a criterion is lacking. The child who previously has had only his parents as a criterion becomes a self as an adult by getting the state as a criterion, but what an infinite accent falls on the self by having God as the criterion! The criterion for the self is always: that directly before which it is a self, but this in turn is the definition of “criterion.”³⁰

     

SKS 11, 187 / SUD, 73. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 11, 185 / SUD, 71. Ibid. SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.

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This acts as an addition explaining the key, which has just been put forward with the distinction between the human and the theological self. The addition makes it clear that the passage has to do with the criterion of the self. The criterion of the self means that by which a person measures himself, in other words that in relation to which he sees himself as a self. Let us look again at the beginning of the passage. Anti-Climacus starts by referring to “the preceding section,” i. e., to Part One of the book. He does not, however, refer to the first part as such, but to C.B: “The preceding section concentrated on pointing out a gradation in the consciousness of the self; first came ignorance of having an eternal self (C.b.a), then a knowledge of having a self in which there is something eternal (C.b.b), and under this, in turn (α.l.2.β), gradations were pointed out.”³¹ As I argued elsewhere,³² C.b describes and analyzes a progression of figures of consciousness wherein there is a complex interplay between two points of view: on the one hand, that of the figures of consciousness in question, and, on the other hand, that of the diagnostician. It is an interplay between what the figure itself says and means, and what “we” see. At the same time, this interpretation solves the problem that results from Anti-Climacus’ summary passage. That to which Anti-Climacus refers is, as noted above, not Part One of The Sickness Unto Death as such, but rather C.b, the theoretical-process account of the figures of despair, and, what is more, the very own point of view of the figure in question. In his summary, Anti-Climacus speaks of the various gradations in the consciousness of the self. This consciousness is the very consciousness belonging to the figure in question. The key that Anti-Climacus gives in his summary should thus be understood in this way: it is the figure itself in question that has “the human being” as the criterion. It is the figure itself that finds itself “within the qualification: the human self.” The criterion here is the figure’s own, what it measures itself by; in other words, how it sees itself. From the passage it is, however, not clear what it means to have “the human being” as the criterion. It is natural to take it to mean that one understands oneself from the point of view of “the others.” This possibility is accentuated in finitude’s despair and is indicated in C.b, first and foremost, in the descriptions of the despair of spiritlessness and of immediacy.³³ To have “the human bein” as the criterion can, however, also mean that the conception, which the person in question has of himself – what he is as a human being – is unbroken. This is the reading that is emphasized in C.b. The

 SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.  See Arne Grøn, “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,” Chapter 20 in this volume.  SKS 11, 149 – 151 / SUD, 33 – 35.

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analysis in Part One shows that the conceptions that a person has of himself tend to go in circles. They become self-confirming. That means that one measures oneself according to one’s own conceptions. When one takes oneself as the criterion, the self-conception remains unbroken. That the criterion of the self is the self’s own criterion does not exclude that there is yet another criterion at work within Part One and especially within C.b. Anti-Climacus does not merely reproduce the self’s own criterion, but wants on the contrary to show that its self-conception falls short. Part One’s analysis of the figures of despair discloses that a human being is a self, so to speak, against that which it wants to have itself be. The individual figure is represented by being turned toward itself. Anti-Climacus can describe and analyze the figures of despair in this way by maintaining a criterion other than the self’s own. This becomes especially clear in the section on unconscious despair, where the criterion particularly is at stake; Anti-Climacus here describes a figure as being in despair – contrary to what it thinks about itself. As previously cited, Anti-Climacus observes that with regard to “the criterion for what is and is not despair, the category [Bestemmelse] that must be applied is the ethical-religious: spirit or, negatively, the lack of spirit, spiritlessness.”³⁴ The category of spirit is the criterion that Anti-Climacus argues for in the whole of Part One. Despair is “a qualification [Bestemmelse] of spirit.”³⁵ Part One of The Sickness Unto Death is thus qualified by a point of view other than “the human self,” the self’s own criterion. This second point of view is the diagnostic, which is accentuated by the heading of Part One: “The Sickness Unto Death Is Despair.” The heading refers back to the “Introduction,” where it is said that Christianity has discovered a miserable condition, that “the human being as such does not know exists. This miserable condition is the sickness unto death.”³⁶ When Part One wants to show that the sickness unto death is despair, at the same time it seeks to define what despair means: to give up hope. AntiClimacus can therefore turn the heading around: “Despair Is the Sickness unto Death” (as the heading of A). The figures of despair are measured by a criterion, which is not their own. The self’s criterion here becomes the criterion by which the self shall be measured, whereby it can be shown what the self is not. This sense of criterion appears in the last part of the passage that contains Anti-Climacus’ summary of Part One. I quote:

 SKS 11, 161 / SUD, 45 – 46; translation modified.  SKS 11, 133 / SUD, 17.  SKS 11, 124 / SUD, 8.

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Just as only entities of the same kind can be added, so everything is qualitatively that by which it is measured, and that which is its qualitative criterion [Maalestok] is ethically its goal [Maal]; the criterion and goal are what define something, what it is, with the exception of the condition in the world of freedom, where by not qualitatively being that which is his goal and his criterion a person must himself have merited this disqualification. Thus the goal and the criterion still remain discriminatingly the same, making it clear just what a person is not – namely, that which is his goal and criterion.³⁷

This last part of the passage emphasizes the normative character of the criterion. The criterion in this sense is the category of spirit; that is, that a human being is destined to be a spirit. In his summary, Anti-Climacus accentuates the key word in Part One: criterion. In Part One’s analysis of despair and its figures, there is a complex relation between two kinds of criteria: that of the self and that of the diagnostician. The analysis is carried out with the qualification of spirit as the criterion, but it is not just a criterion that the diagnostician introduces from without. Anti-Climacus wants to show the meaning of the qualification of spirit by the figures themselves, as their self-conceptions collapse from within. In this way, the criterion itself is tested in the description and the analysis of the figures of despair.

4 Despair and Sin (A) The “gradation in the consciousness of the self,” which is pointed out in C.b, is an increase in the consciousness of the self – that is, the self whose consciousness is being described and analyzed. It is the figure itself, which has “the human being” as a criterion, and this criterion already falls short in the analysis of Part One. Nevertheless, Anti-Climacus begins Part Two by indicating a shift in level with regard to Part One. How should it be understood? By way of reply, I will sketch a reading of Part Two that follows its division into sections A and B. Anti-Climacus’ formula for the shift in level from Part One to Part Two is that “sin is the intensification of despair.”³⁸ Whereas Part One describes and analyzes despair and its figures, Part Two talks about sin. While the definition of faith remains unchanged in Part Two, the concept of sin is apparently that which shall establish the dividing line between the first and second parts. But even if Part One does not directly mention sin, it does describe the actuality of sin. This can be shown in two ways. In the first place, if we take as our

 SKS 11, 193 – 194 / SUD, 79 – 80.  SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77.

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point of departure the definition of sin that Johannes Climacus gives in Philosophical Fragments – namely, that sin is to be in untruth “through one’s own fault,” to be unfree and bound “by oneself”³⁹ – it becomes clear that Part One of The Sickness Unto Death describes forms of self-inflicted enslavement. The analysis of the figures of despair even elucidates the meaning of the phrase “by oneself”: if one will be one’s own master, one becomes enslaved in relation to oneself. The analysis of despair becomes, therefore, an analysis of inclosing reserve (Indesluttethed), which Vigilius Haufniensis defines as closing oneself up within oneself such that one makes oneself a prisoner.⁴⁰ In the second place, if we take as our point of departure the way in which Anti-Climacus more closely defines what sin is in Part Two of The Sickness Unto Death, we see, correspondingly, that in a certain sense he repeats Part One. According to Part Two sin is wilfulness or disobedience,⁴¹ but that is what Part One describes: the unfreedom of wilfulness. The despair of defiance, which Anti-Climacus calls “the despair of self-assertion,”⁴² consists in that the self by itself in despair “wants to be master of itself or to create itself.”⁴³ When Anti-Climacus in section A of Part Two wants to elucidate what sin is, he displays an insight, which, all things considered, was established in Part One: the insight that the problem lies in the will. As the analysis of unconscious despair already pointed out, there is “in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing.”⁴⁴ It is upon this interplay that Anti-Climacus now expounds as he shows that the will is “dialectical.”⁴⁵ That Part One describes the actuality of sin explains why Anti-Climacus can conclude The Sickness Unto Death by saying that “throughout this entire book” he has advanced the opposition between sin and faith.⁴⁶ In so far as the opposition between sin and faith applies to the whole book, The Sickness Unto Death is not divided into two parts where the first part is about despair and the second part about sin. But then in what sense is there a shift in level from Part One to Part Two? As mentioned, Anti-Climacus indicates the shift by maintaining that sin is “the in-

       

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 224 / PF, 15 – 16. 4, 424– 426 / CA, 123 – 124. 11, 195 / SUD, 81. 11, 170 / SUD, 54. 11, 182 / SUD, 68. 11, 163 / SUD, 48. 11, 206 / SUD, 94. 11, 242 / SUD, 131.

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tensification of despair.”⁴⁷ That means that the self acquires “a new quality and qualification.”⁴⁸ But the despair, which, according to the heading of Part Two, is sin is that despair, which was described and analyzed in Part One. This is apparent precisely from the formulations, which indicate the shift in relation to Part One: “Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself. Thus sin is intensified weakness or intensified defiance.”⁴⁹ As the heading to Part One refers back to the “Introduction,” Part Two refers back to the analysis of the figures of despair, namely the despair of weakness and of defiance. Part Two does not give an independent analysis of despair, but rather bases itself upon the analysis found in Part One. Given this, Part Two can be viewed as an interpretation of, or a commentary on, C.b in Part One. This explains the odd impression, which the reading of Part Two leaves behind. Even if Part Two were to say something new in relation to Part One, it does not function as an independent part. It does not stand up well when compared with Part One, wherein the crucial thing was already said. Even though this impression has to be differentiated, it is still the case that Part Two does not contradict Part One, but on the contrary reiterates it. Anti-Climacus makes mention of a repetition by saying that “this whole deliberation must now dialectically take a new direction.”⁵⁰ “This whole deliberation” is the account and analysis in C.b. Anti-Climacus himself thus indicates that Part Two of The Sickness Unto Death relates to section of C.b of Part One. It reiterates Part One by turning the deliberation in a new way. How, then, is the deliberation turned? The shift, according to Anti-Climacus, consists in that despair is intensified as sin. But this “intensification” is something, which takes place in the figure that is being described. It is the self’s consciousness that is changed. The change consists in that the self understands itself as placed “directly before God.”⁵¹ “The emphasis is on before God, or with a conception of God.”⁵² The turning consists in that the criterion is changed, but, mind you, it is the self’s own criterion. That which is turned is the figure itself. That means that Anti-Climacus can resume the description of the figures of despair from C.b. This takes place in section B, “The Continuance of Sin,” which stands in direct continuation of C.b of Part One. With section B, Part Two not only interprets C.b, but advances the progression, which was outlined in C.b.

     

SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77. SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79. SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77. SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79. Ibid. SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77.

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The B-section of Part Two has a process- or consciousness-theoretical character just as C.b does. Let us take a brief look at section B.

5 The Progression (B) Anti-Climacus himself draws the connection from B back to C.b of Part One: First came (in Part One) ignorance of having an eternal self, then knowledge of having a self in which there is something eternal. Then (in the transition to Part Two) it was pointed out that this distinction is included under the self that has a human conception of itself or that has man as the criterion [Maal]. The counterpart to this was a self directly before God, and this constituted the basis for the definition of sin.⁵³

When Anti-Climacus here is talking about “Part One,” it is again C.b to which he is referring. Just as in the passage I quoted in the beginning,⁵⁴ Anti-Climacus traces the progression in C.b, but then adds: “Now a self comes directly before Christ, a self that in despair does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself.”⁵⁵ Thus a new figure is described here, but the gradation that now is pointed out is drawn in and simultaneously carries further the progression from C.b. There is an “intensification” taking place not only in relation to C.b, but also within B. While the shift in level with relation to C.b consists in the fact that “sin is the intensification of despair,”⁵⁶ B delineates “the intensification of sin.”⁵⁷ Anti-Climacus himself accentuates the various steps in this “intensification of sin.” The first step is that “sin is despair.”⁵⁸ That first step, which summarizes the introductory definition of sin,⁵⁹ is actually only indicated as the point of departure.⁶⁰ Section B does not begin by describing that step, but instead, under

 SKS 11, 225 / SUD, 113 [translator’s comment: compare this passage with SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79. The Danish word “Maal” can mean both “criterion” and “goal.” In this particular context of The Sickness Unto Death, the way that Kierkegaard plays on the double meaning of the Danish word cannot be carried over into English].  SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.  SKS 11, 225 / SUD, 113.  SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77.  SKS 11, 236 / SUD, 125.  SKS 11, 220 / SUD, 109.  “Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself” (SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77).  That it nevertheless is the first step is evident from the summary that Anti-Climacus gives in B.c. After first having mentioned that “sin is despair,” he remarks: “Then comes despair over one’s sin” (SKS 11, 236 / SUD, 125; my italics).

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the heading of “The Continuance of Sin,” gives a radical definition of sin, which opens up the way for the continuing progression. It reads in brief thus: “The state of sin is a worse sin than the particular sins; it is the sin [Synden].”⁶¹ Anti-Climacus’ conclusion indicates what the continuing progression comes to deal with: “Therefore ‘the continuance of sin,’ which is now to be discussed, does not mean the particular new sins as much as the state of sin, which in turn becomes the internal intensification of sin, a conscious remaining in the state of sin, so that the law of motion in intensification, here as everywhere else, is inward, in greater and greater intensity of consciousness.”⁶² The progression in B delineates “the internal intensification of sin,” just as in C.b the progression is on the “intensification of the consciousness of the self.”⁶³ According to the introductory definition of sin, “the self infinitely intensified by the conception of God is part of sin and is likewise the greatest possible consciousness of sin as an act.”⁶⁴ Thus, the progression presupposes the introductory remark that sin is consciousness.⁶⁵ It is actually not until the second step that the process gets set into motion. After having indicated the point of departure with the catch phrase that “sin is despair,” Anti-Climacus begins B.a by indicating the new step: “the intensification is the new sin of despairing over one’s sin.”⁶⁶ Whereas sin was initially defined as the “intensification” of despair, the “intensification” of sin now gets described as despair over one’s sin. One is oneself conscious of being in sin, but one remains with this consciousness in sin: “the state of sin is the sin, and this is intensified in a new consciousness.”⁶⁷ The “intensification” here consists in “a new demonic closing up [Sluttethed] within oneself.”⁶⁸ One closes oneself up within oneself by making oneself impervious to the good. This gives a link between the second step, despair over one’s sin, and the third step (B.b), “The Sin of Despairing of the Forgiveness of Sin (Offense).”⁶⁹ The difference is that in the third step the good against which one defends oneself is not merely defined as that which one should do (so that one must repent for not having done it), but as the forgiveness of sins. The step

        

SKS 11, SKS 11, SKS 11, SKS 11, SKS 11, SKS 11, Ibid. SKS 11, SKS 11,

218 / SUD, 106. 220 / SUD, 108 – 109. 212 / SUD, 99. 212 / SUD, 100. 203 / SUD, 89. 221 / SUD, 109. 222 / SUD, 110; translation modified. 225 – 236 / SUD, 113 – 224.

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from B.a to B.b signifies a further “intensification”: “At this point the intensification of the consciousness of the self is the knowledge of Christ, a self directly before Christ.”⁷⁰ This step is decisive. The way Anti-Climacus states it is that sin “becomes more and more decisively itself.”⁷¹ Anti-Climacus can therefore briefly reformulate the analysis of the figures of despair – of weakness and of defiance – since the point now is not about “being oneself but about being oneself in the category of being a sinner.”⁷² In relation to C.b, that means an “intensification” in the consciousness of the self: “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.”⁷³ The conclusion of B.b reads that despair over the forgiveness of sins is offense.⁷⁴ Despair as offense is now intensified in the fourth step (B.c), the sin of declaring Christianity to be untruth and a lie. Here is not the place to describe this progression more closely. Instead, I will point out what the progression described in B is all about. The progression delineates “the intensification of sin,” but in an ambiguous way. On the one hand, there is the telos of the progression: that the self is to attain consciousness of itself as this single individual. It is this insight that the self shall achieve. But, on the other hand, the progression has a negative character: it delineates a steadily more intensive aversion, a will against attaining consciousness of itself as the single individual. This negative character is even ambiguous. Firstly, there is reference to a steadily more undisguised aversion in such a way that B.c ends in parallel with the rebellion of defiance in C.b of Part One; secondly, spiritlessness and indifference are diagnosed (to which I will return shortly). That there indeed is a joint progression between C.b of Part One and B in Part Two is evident precisely from the telos of the progression and its negative character. The point made in the prelude to C of Part One is not fully developed until section B of Part Two: “The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self.”⁷⁵ Part Two deals with the double intensifying of consciousness and will. That the problem lies in the will is shown in that the self with steadily more intensifying consciousness remains in the state of sin. Here the B-section of Part Two describes a more thor-

     

SKS 11, 225 / SUD, 113. SKS 11, 236 / SUD, 225; translation modified. SKS 11, 225 / SUD, 113. Ibid. SKS 11, 235 / SUD, 124. SKS 11, 145 / SUD, 29.

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ough progression than in C.b, as the self’s consciousness and criterion are changed. What, then, is the relation between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness Unto Death? On the one hand, there is a single progression in C.b of Part One and in B of Part Two. The point of the two sections concerning the “intensification” of the consciousness of the self. Throughout both C.b and B the telos is to attain consciousness of the self. The point of view of the diagnostician – the category of spirit – is the same in the two sections. The diagnostician knows what despair means; he recognizes the sickness unto death. The definition of despair that the figure itself arrives at in C.b – that despair is to have lost oneself and the eternal – also applies to Part Two. In this sense, sin is despair: not to be oneself. In B of Part Two, on the other hand, a progression is delineated over and above that in C.b. That which is changed in relation to C.b is the self’s own point of view, that is, the self whose despair is described. During this progression, which the self’s consciousness undergoes, the diagnostician’s criterion – the category of spirit – is simultaneously elucidated. This confirms that Part Two also represents a kind of phenomenology of consciousness or spirit. The telos of the progression is that the self attains consciousness of itself as this single individual. That which the diagnostician wants to show he demonstrates by means of the figure itself, namely the self’s consciousness. In contradistinction to a Hegelian phenomenology, the progression in C.b and in B of Part Two has a negative character. The telos of the progression is that which, in a decisive sense, is not actualized in the process. In Part Two, it becomes clear that the consciousness, which is negatively exposed, is that of the age (samtiden). As early as C.b of Part One, there was polemical reference to being “also a Christian” in Christendom.⁷⁶ In B.b, Christendom is finally diagnosed. “Well, the state of Christendom is actually despair of the forgiveness of sins; but this must be understood in the sense that Christendom is so far behind that its state never becomes apparent as being that. Even the consciousness of sins is not reached.”⁷⁷ This last citation explains the role that section A plays in Part Two. Seeing that B does that which Part Two should do – namely, turn the deliberation from C.b – A might seem to be superfluous. What A does is to reintroduce the doctrine of sin that the age has forgotten. A concludes with an appendix whose heading both poses a question and in parenthesis announces “the moral”: “But Then in a Certain Sense Does Not Sin Become a Great Rarity?

 SKS 11, 168 / SUD, 52.  SKS 11, 228 / SUD, 117.

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(The Moral).”⁷⁸ This appendix on the rarity of sin, or of the consciousness of sin, runs parallel with section B on the universality of despair in Part One. The appendix reformulates the diagnosis of spiritlessness, but more explicitly as a diagnosis of “that so-called Christendom.”⁷⁹ This appendix on spiritless ignorance shapes the background for the delineation of the progression in B, in so far as it gives the contemporary-critical point of view under which this delineation must be seen. This confirms the reading I have put forth elsewhere, namely that unconscious despair is not just a simple starting figure, but a possibility that complicates the whole progression.⁸⁰ Thus, when the progression that is described in C.b and B has to do with coming to oneself, it is also in Kierkegaard, in a certain sense, the age, which shall attain consciousness of itself – but only negatively. This negative aim plays a polemical role in the exposition. That which is directly shown in B is a constantly clearer dissociation from Christianity, but that which is indirectly exposed is the spiritlessness or indifference of the age. The former – offense, or rather the possibility of offense – is played out against the latter. The way that is described in C.b of Part One and B of Part Two is the way that the age – that so-called Christendom – must go in order to come to itself. It is in this negative sense that The Sickness Unto Death contains a phenomenology of spirit or spiritlessness.

6 The Cure The polemical aim – the necessity of rediscovering the doctrine of sin and offense – explains, to a certain extent, that The Sickness Unto Death, at least theologically viewed, is a torso. No matter how well balanced the book might appear, it has an open ended, unfinished character. It deals with despair as a sickness, not as a curative remedy.⁸¹ Anti-Climacus often speaks of salvation, cure and health, but they are, so to say, in the margins of the book. In the negative account on the figures of despair, faith’s possibility is contrapunctually delineated. This leads back to the crucial question for the interpretation of The Sickness Unto Death: in what sense is it necessary to go through every negativity in order to reach the truth?⁸²     

SKS 11, 212– 216 / SUD, 100 – 104. SKS 11, 214 / SUD, 102. Grøn, “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?” SKS 11, 123 / SUD, 7. SKS 11, 228 / SUD, 44. This essay was translated by Noel S. Adams.

Chapter 18 Transcendence of Thought: The Project of Philosophical Fragments 1 Thought-Project In Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus proposes a project, a thoughtproject, as he calls it.¹ The project is construed as a hypothesis: “If the situation is to be different, then the moment in time must have such a decisive significance that for no moment will I be able to forget it, neither in time nor in eternity.”² If things are to be otherwise than the Socratic position holds, then for no moment will it be possible to forget the significance of the moment, but whether things actually are otherwise is “an altogether different question,” Climacus claims at the end of the book.³ Since the project is a hypothesis, it remains undecided whether it is truer than the Socratic. Also at the end of the book, Climacus explains the nature of his thought-project: “To a certain extent, however, I have wanted to forget this, and, employing the unrestricted judgment of a hypothesis, I have assumed that the whole thing was a whimsical idea of my own, one that I did not wish to abandon before I had thought it through.”⁴ What Climacus wanted to forget is this: “No philosophy (for it is only thought) …has ever had this idea – of which in this connection one can say with all multiple meanings that it did not arise in any human heart.”⁵ The whole thing, which consists of fragments, concerns something that, according to the hypothesis, Climacus is not able to forget for even a moment, but that he, assuming the hypothesis, wants to forget. “This, as you see, is my project!,” he declares after having presented it in Chapter I.⁶ The project is a thought-project, it must be thought through. The fragments are philosophical, taking philosophy as “only thought.” The project, however, aims at one thing: a radical transcendence of thought. The question I will pose can be formulated simply: what does this mean? “This” refers both to the project as a project on the transcendence of thought, and to the

 SKS 4, 218 / PF, 9.  SKS 4, 222 / PF, 13; see also: “[T]his was what we wanted to assume as the hypothesis” (SKS 4, 225 / PF, 17).  SKS 4, 306 / PF, 111.  SKS 4, 305 / PF, 108.  SKS 4, 305 / PF, 109.  SKS 4, 229 / PF, 21; in Danish: “See dette er mit Projekt!” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-024

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fact that the project itself is performed by thought, moves in thinking, and thus presupposes or even embodies the thought that it seeks to transcend. So the question is this: what does transcendence of thought mean? What are the implications of the project itself? This double question affects the overall view of the book. The form – the form of communication – of Philosophical Fragments has been investigated: it is said to be hypothetical, indirect, and ironic.⁷ In Fragments, Climacus emphasizes the hypothetical form. And in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he speaks of the “indirect form” of the Fragments. ⁸ What is important here, however, is that the form is puzzling due to the project itself. The communication of the book seems to be direct or straightforward, putting forward two positions, which are alternatives in the strong sense: if not A (the Socratic), then B. The hypothesis develops an alternative that is claimed to determine the situation for the one asking about the truth understood as the truth of her or his existence. The project of the book, however, is not straightforward, but awkward. It turns things upside down. The project deals with that which a human being cannot think of or imagine:⁹ that which “did not arise in any human heart,” to quote Climacus paraphrasing I Corinthians 2:9: “what no eye has seen nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived.” Consequently, Climacus presents as a thoughtproject that which is not thought of or conceived. The project is about a radical transcendence of thought – conceived of as a thought-project. What is the point of this form (the thought-project)? One answer is that the project polemically presents Christianity, which everyone claims to know, once more, as something unknown. This motivates the project, but the form also pertains to the project itself. The form of the thought-project – which gives rise to the question of who has invented it – sets the project itself off: to think something that we cannot think of. The form is paradoxical – due to the project itself.

 See C. Stephen Evans, “The Role of Irony in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2004, pp. 63 – 79.  SKS 7, 249 / CUP1, 274.  In Danish, this last sentence would read: “det, som intet menneske kan tænke sig til.” “At tænke sig til” means to reach something on one’s own by thinking of or imagining possibilities, but it also has the implication that, in so doing, we relate ourselves to that which we think of or imagine.

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2 The Alternatives Let us start by looking briefly at the two alternative positions established by the project. It is claimed that this is not just one set of alternatives among many, but rather the set of alternatives that determine the subject or the situation of the subject asking for the truth: either we have the truth within ourselves and reach it by ourselves (this we can call the A position) – or we are ourselves outside the truth in the sense that we are in untruth and that we are in untruth through a fault of our own or due to ourselves, which means that we are defined as untruth (this we can call the B position). The two positions are presented as alternatives, marked by the parallel prepositions: either to have the truth within ourselves, or to be outside the truth and to have become so through ourselves.¹⁰ This seems to be a simple set of alternatives. Either the truth is within me or I am outside the truth. If the alternatives are taken straightforwardly, then the A position (the Socratic) could be seen as a position of immanence and the B position (the Christian) as a position of transcendence. Consequently, the alternatives also seem to be global. It is not only a distinction between a Socratic and a Christian position. The Socratic position would represent any position of human immanence or idealism.¹¹ If it is taken globally as the position of human immanence, then Philosophical Fragments could be interpreted as establishing the distinction between a natural theology and a theology of revelation.¹² Natural theology would then deal with the truth we as humans can reach on our own insofar as the truth is within us and emerges from us due to what we can think of or imagine. And if we, as seekers of the truth according to the B position, are defined as being in untruth by our own doing, then the B position could be taken as the global denunciation of natural theology. The very idea that the truth is within us and can be reached through ourselves, becomes the core of being in untruth. What the B position declares to be sin, the state of being in untruth

 In Danish: “i eller uden for, ved sig selv.” The A position is described as follows: “[T]he truth in which I rest was in me and emerged from me” (SKS 4, 221 / PF, 12); in Danish: “[T]hi Sandheden, i hvilken jeg hviler, var i mig selv og kom frem ved mig selv.” And the B position: One is “defined as being outside the truth…or as untruth” (SKS 4, 222 / PF, 13), and “to be that through one’s own fault” (SKS 4, 224 / PF, 15).  According to Niels Thulstrup, Socrates “symbolizes Idealism.” The Socratic “is identical with philosophical Idealism as formulated in Greece by Plato and in Germany by Hegel” (Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. and ed. by David Swenson, revised by Howard V. Hong, and with an introduction by Niels Thulstrup, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1962, p. lxviii). This is an example of how the alternative is made into a simple, straightforward one.  For a critical appraisal, see Jakob Wolf, Den skjulte Gud. Om naturlig teologi, Frederiksberg: Anis 2001, pp. 103 – 112.

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through one’s own fault, is the position of human immanence: we are in untruth, through our own fault, precisely by thinking that we can reach the truth on our own.¹³ Philosophical Fragments has in fact been influential by providing a dogmatic scheme, and in this reception of the thought-project, especially in dialectical theology, the crucial point is exactly the key notion of the project: that which we cannot think of or imagine, but have to hear or to be told. I would like to propose that we reflect upon and reformulate what is at stake in the use of this key notion: to think of or to imagine. ¹⁴ I will move through the following steps: First, I will very briefly make the point – which will be further developed in the steps that follow – that thinking in the sense of thinking of embodies subjectivity. It involves subjectivity in the non-trivial sense that thinking is part of our subjectivity inasmuch as it also carries the subjectivity we are. Second, this notion of thought embodying subjectivity is developed through an analysis of the notion of understanding, which is most often overlooked in interpretations of Kierkegaard in general and of Fragments in particular. Third, the role of understanding points to the human condition in the sense of the condition, which obtains between humans, the condition of being human. This gives a first clue for reinterpreting the relation between the A and B positions. Fourth, the argument asserts furthermore that what is at stake in the Fragments is the limit of the human. This is developed through an interpretation of what I call the dialectics of the limit. The issue of the transcendence of thought is reformulated as the dialectics of the limit of the human. Fifth, this means that subjectivity is at issue in the problem of transcendence. The implication is that immanence and transcendence are not two spheres. Transcendence is not a position that one can take, but announces itself in the untruth of subjectivity, in the limit where we encounter ourselves, and in the reversal of perspective where we ourselves become the addressee. In asking what is at stake in the figure of thinking of and imagining, my ambition is to reformulate the dialectical point in the transcendence of thought, in an indirect criticism of – but also a reformulation of – a central motif in dialectical theology. Transcendence, as the limit of the human, does not take us into a sphere that imagination cannot enter. On the contrary, the dialectical point is that we can only be contradicted in the very act of imagining and thinking. As the sixth and final step, the critical importance of understanding is once more brought into focus. We can only relate on the condition of (mis)understanding. If we cannot understand the paradox, then we will have to understand that we cannot understand. What is required is that

 SKS 4, 224 / PF, 15.  In Danish: “at tænke sig til” (see footnote 9 above).

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we understand ourselves in this non-understanding. Even if the paradox is not to be understood, it is still possible to misunderstand it. The very possibility of misunderstanding (e. g., in trying to explain the paradox) shows that we cannot escape the condition of understanding.

3 Thinking, Imagination, Subjectivity Given that the thought-project is about that which cannot be thought of, we must first ask what is meant by thinking. That thinking, both in the sense of reflective thought and in the sense of thinking of, is the medium of Philosophical Fragments can be seen not only from the project as a thought-project, but also from the question Climacus asks after having presented his project: “But is what has been elaborated here thinkable?”¹⁵ Later, at another critical point he asks: “But is a paradox such as this conceivable?”¹⁶ These questions indicate that thinking in the sense of thinking-of has a more ambiguous role to play than first defined by the project as a project on that which cannot be thought of. The project itself is to be thought, and to be thought through. In order to understand what the project means, we must think of or imagine the consequences of the project. How are we to think of ourselves in the light of the project? As just indicated, in thinking as thinking of there is imagination at work. The question about what we can think of or imagine concerns our subjectivity. What we can imagine tells something about how we view ourselves, others, and the world between us. In this sense, thinking is not just a human faculty, but a matter of what we are and who we are as humans. We are selves in the medium of imagination, as Anti-Climacus later puts it in The Sickness unto Death. ¹⁷ The dialectical point to be developed is this: it is only because we are ourselves through thinking and imagining that the thought-project is about that which we cannot think of or imagine. Thinking of and imagining belong to the way we are as humans. Thinking embodies subjectivity in the sense that we are ourselves in thinking. It is part of and takes part in our existence. This notion of the embodiment of thought is a point of departure to be developed, first through an analysis of the concept of understanding in Fragments.

 SKS 4, 228 / PF, 20; in Danish: “Men lader det her Udviklede sig tænke?”  SKS 4, 252 / PF, 47; in Danish: “Lader nu et saadant Paradox sig tænke?” See the crucial passage: “That meaninglessness, however, is unthinkable in a sense different from our stating that that fact and the single individual’s relation to the god are unthinkable” (SKS 4, 298 / PF, 101). We will return to this passage later. See also SKS 4, 292 / PF, 95: “if this is thinkable.”  SKS 11, 146 – 147 / SUD, 30 – 31.

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4 Understanding As already indicated, understanding (Forstaaelse) has often been overlooked in interpretations of the Fragments. Let me therefore give a more detailed outline. First, it must be noted that there is a pervasive use of the word “to understand” (at forstaae) and its cognates in the Fragments. We move as readers of the book in a universe of understanding and misunderstanding. In the “Interlude,” for example, it is a matter of understanding the past, namely in terms of the conflict or even contradiction between certainty and uncertainty, “the discrimen [distinctive mark] of something that has come into existence.”¹⁸ “Any apprehension of the past that wants to understand it thoroughly by constructing it has only thoroughly misunderstood it,”¹⁹ Climacus declares. Second, in this universe of understanding and misunderstanding, what is to be understood? What we seek to understand is one another. This comes to the fore in Chapter II of the Fragments, where the movement of incarnation is understood in terms of love’s (mis)understanding: “for only in love is the different made equal, and only in equality or in unity is there understanding.”²⁰ This is “love’s understanding [Kjærlighedens Forstaaelse]” that requires that the “bold confidence [Frimodighed]” of the other be maintained.²¹ The theme of the discourse, however, is an unhappy love for which the only, but imperfect, human analogy is the unhappiness, which comes from the lovers “being unable to understand each another.”²² According to the B position, “the learner,” as the one seeking the truth, is “in untruth, indeed, is there through his own fault – and yet he is the object of the god’s love,” but if the equality cannot be brought about, the love becomes unhappy, “for they are unable to understand each other.”²³ But only the god “understands the misunderstanding [forstaaer Misforstaaelsen].”²⁴ The relation between humans and the god is a relation of (mis)understanding and difficult understanding: “But that which makes understanding so difficult is precisely this: that he [the learner] becomes nothing and yet is not annihilated;

 SKS 4, 279 / PF, 79.  Ibid.; translation modified.  SKS 4, 232 / PF, 25.  SKS 4, 235 / PF, 28.  SKS 4, 233 / PF, 25.  SKS 4, 235 / PF, 28.  SKS 4, 233 / PF, 26. This is the god’s “unfathomable sorrow” (SKS 4, 235 / PF, 28): to understand that it is “nearly impossible” to make himself understood, “to maintain the learner’s bold confidence, without which understanding and equality disappear and the love is unhappy” (SKS 4, 235 / PF, 28).

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that he owes him [the god as the teacher] everything and yet becomes boldly confident; that he understands the truth, but the truth makes him free.”²⁵ The relation of love is a relation of (mis)understanding in a critical sense: “And the situation of understanding [Forstaaelsens Forhold] – in its frailty, how close it is at every moment to the border of misunderstanding when the anxieties of guilt disturb the peace of love!”²⁶ The human condition of understanding is its frailty. In the relation of understanding, we are close to the border of misunderstanding. In this relation of (mis)understanding one another, one is to understand oneself. To seek the truth in which one rests is to understand oneself. Understanding oneself, however, is only possible in relation to the other, and in understanding oneself as an other. This is brought out in Chapter III of the Fragments. In the section on “Dialectics of the Limit,” we will follow this line of thought that points to consciousness of sin as consciousness of oneself as another. But understanding is already at issue in relating to the absolute paradox. In the “Appendix” to Chapter III, the relation of the paradox is formulated in terms of mutual understanding and love’s understanding: “If the paradox and the understanding [Forstanden] meet in the mutual understanding [Forstaaelse] of their difference, then the encounter is a happy one, like erotic love’s understanding – happy in the passion to which we as yet have given no name.”²⁷ This is in line with Chapter II, but the issue of alterity and non-understanding in understanding the truth is accentuated. The understanding in which the paradox and reason come together is faith’s understanding. Faith is “the condition for understanding the truth” when we are in untruth by our own doing.²⁸ What kind of understanding is this? Faith is not a blind decision without understanding, it implies an understanding. But in what sense? Let us first note that Climacus himself asks: “How, then, does the learner come to an understanding with this paradox, for we do not say that he is supposed to understand the paradox but is only to understand that this is the paradox.”²⁹ The issue of (mis)understanding is once more of critical importance. Although we, on the B position, are in untruth in seeking the truth, we have to relate to the truth in relation to which we can see ourselves as being in untruth. The critical question then is this: how do we relate to the paradox? The requirement is that we relate to the paradox as paradox. But we can only relate to the paradox as paradox in     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 4, 4, 4, 4,

237 / PF, 30 – 31. 240 / PF, 34. 253 / PF, 49. 223 / PF, 14. 261 / PF, 59.

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understanding that this is the paradox. Climacus’ critical distinction between understanding the paradox and “only” understanding that this is the paradox makes a strong demand of the subject who can only relate to the paradox in understanding. We shall “come to an understanding with” the paradox, which requires that we come to see that this is the paradox. This reflective demand on “only” understanding appears when Climacus, after having defined the paradox as “the eternalizing of the historical and the historicizing of the eternal,” declares: “Anyone who understands the paradox any other way may retain the honor of having explained it, an honor he would win by his unwillingness to be satisfied with understanding it [nøies med at forstaae det].”³⁰ It takes “courage simply to understand.”³¹ Thus, how we relate to the paradox depends on how we understand it. Second, we must once more ask: what kind of understanding is this? What is the implication of not understanding the paradox, but understanding that this is the paradox? 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. The notion of paradox is in this sense a critical notion. The implication of understanding the paradox as paradox is that we come to understand something, which we did not understand, namely, what it means to be in untruth in the sense of being trapped by ourselves and to be set free from ourselves. The understanding of this implication is developed for example in Works of Love. It changes the way we view ourselves and the other. I will extract two points from this analysis of the notion of understanding. First, understanding has to do with the relation between oneself and the other, both in the sense of the other human being and in the sense of the Other that as the other than human is the measure of being human.³² The point can be pushed even further in that the relation itself takes place in (mis)understanding one another. Second, understanding in this sense embodies subjectivity: we relate in understanding, and in understanding we carry ourselves with us. When Climacus puts a reflective demand on understanding, it is due to the subjectivity of understanding: (mis)understanding is a matter of who we are. We relate to others in understanding, and in this relating to others we relate to ourselves. Understanding implies being this singular subjectivity, oneself in

 SKS 4, 263 / PF, 61.  Ibid.  SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.

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relation to others. This gives a first clue to reinterpreting the relation between the A and the B position.

5 The Human Condition Understanding has to do with being human; it embodies the human condition. Let us move a step further in this direction by reconsidering the alternative proposed by Climacus. On a closer look, the alternative turns out not to be simple. The A position (the Socratic) formulates the condition under which the alternative, the B position, is to be understood. It harbors an understanding of the human that also obtains within the B position. Let me substantiate this claim.³³ Socrates “artistically exemplified what he had understood,” Climacus says in the beginning of Chapter I. He explains: Socrates was and continued to be a midwife “because he perceived that this relation is the highest relation a human being can have to another.” And, Climacus adds, “in that he is indeed forever right, for even if a divine point of departure is ever given, this remains the true relation between one human being and another [mellem Menneske og Menneske bliver dette det sande Forhold].”³⁴ Also with respect to the “act of consciousness” of discovering that I am in untruth, “the Socratic principle applies: the teacher is only an occasion…because I can discover my own untruth only by myself [ved mig selv], because only when I discover it is it discovered, not before, even though the whole world knew it.”³⁵ In the beginning of Chapter II, Climacus repeats: “Between one human being and another [mellem Menneske og Menneske], this is the highest: the pupil is the occasion for the teacher to understand himself; the teacher is the occasion for the pupil to understand himself.”³⁶ “The Socratic understanding” was that “the teacher stands in a reciprocal relation.”³⁷ Thus, the catchword or key phrase is: “between one human being and another.” The condition that shall obtain between one human being and another is the human condition in the sense that it makes us human. It is the condition for being human in this relation between us.

    

See Arne Grøn, “Sokrates og Smulerne,” in Filosofiske Studier, vol. 15, 1995, pp. 97– 107. SKS 4, 219 / PF, 10. SKS 4, 223 / PF, 14; note again the preposition: “by myself [ved mig selv].” SKS 4, 231 / PF, 23. Ibid.

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“Between one human being and another, to be of assistance is supreme [Mellem Menneske og Menneske er det at være Forhjælpende det Høieste].”³⁸ This is repeated not only in Chapter II, but also in the rest of the book. I quote from the beginning of Chapter IV: “[F]or between one human being and another the Socratic relationship is indeed the highest, the truest.”³⁹ And as a sort of conclusion, also in Chapter IV: “Everything is structured Socratically, for the relation between one contemporary and another contemporary, provided that both are believers, is altogether Socratic: the one is not indebted to the other for anything, but both are indebted to the god for everything.”⁴⁰ That is, within the framework of the B position, the alternative to the Socratic, the Socratic obtains concerning the relation between one human being and the other. This is made explicit in Chapter V, set against a different hypothesis, the consequence of which is meaningless. “Let us assume something different,”⁴¹ Climacus begins, let us assume that the follower at second hand receives the condition, faith, from the contemporary follower. The consequence is that the latter becomes the god for the former. But this consequence is meaningless. It violates the human condition. “But if the one who comes later also receives the condition from the god, then the Socratic relation will return – but, please note, within the total difference consisting of that fact and the relation of the single individual (the contemporary and the one who came later) to the god.”⁴² The Socratic relation returns within the total difference. “Our project,” Climacus explains, “went beyond Socratic only in that it placed the god in relation to the single individual, but who indeed would dare come to Socrates with such nonsense – that a human being is a god in his relation to another human being?” Climacus continues by making explicit that what is required is to acquire the Socratic understanding within the B position: “No, with a heroism that in itself takes boldness to understand, Socrates understood how one human being is related to another. And yet the point is to acquire the same understanding within the formation as assumed – namely, that one human being, insofar as he is a believer, is not indebted to someone else for something, but is indebted to the god for everything.”⁴³ In this passage, thinking and understanding are once more at issue. First, the point is to acquire the Socratic understanding, that is, to understand how

     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

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

237 / PF, 31. 258 / PF, 55. 267 / PF, 66. 297 / PF 101. 298 / PF, 101. 298 / PF, 101– 102.

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one human being is related to another, or, in other words, to understand the human condition as the condition of being human. Second, the non-understanding in relation to the paradox is contrasted to the meaninglessness of the different hypothesis. Thus, Climacus declares: That meaninglessness, however, is unthinkable in a sense different from our stating that that fact and the single individual’s relation to the god are unthinkable. Our hypothetical assumption of that fact and the single individual’s relation to the god contains no self-contradiction, and thus thought can become preoccupied with it as with the strangest thing of all. That meaningless consequence, however, contains a self-contradiction; it is not satisfied with positing something unreasonable, which is our hypothetical assumption, but within this unreasonableness it produces a self-contradiction: that the god is the god for the contemporary, but the contemporary in turn is the god for a third.⁴⁴

While the consequence of the different hypothesis is meaningless in that it contains a self-contradiction, the paradox is not meaningless; it contains no selfcontradiction.⁴⁵ While the meaningless consequence will deter or frighten thought away from assuming the hypothesis,⁴⁶ thought can, on Climacus’ hypothesis, become occupied with the paradox as the strangest thing of all. Through the Socratic, Climacus formulates the condition that shall obtain between ourselves as human beings in the quest for truth. This also holds for the alternative to the Socratic. The A position formulates the condition under which the B position is to be understood. This I have called the human condition. The human condition as the condition of being human is a condition that shall apply between humans. It is a condition for understanding ourselves. To understand what it is to be human is also to understand how one human being is related to another. But as we saw, we are related to one another in the relation of understanding or misunderstanding. The relation between humans is itself a matter of understanding. Thus, understanding the human condition, or the condition of being human, is part of the human condition. But the relation of understanding is also the possibility of misunderstanding. The way we are humans in understanding ourselves is marked by frailty. This applies to understanding one another, but also to self-understanding. The demand that each individual understands for herself the truth in which she can rest makes understanding part of

 SKS 4, 298 / PF, 101.  See C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason. Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1992, pp. 100 – 103; Grøn, “Sokrates og Smulerne.”  SKS 4, 298 / PF, 101.

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our common humanity.⁴⁷ But in seeking to understand the truth we can be in untruth. How is this radical form of self-misunderstanding to be understood? At this point, we should ask two questions: what is it to understand oneself as being in untruth? And how is the limit of the human to be understood? The human condition implies understanding the limit of the human. In the limit of the human, self-understanding is at issue. It is the limit of understanding, and yet we have to understand the limit as limit in order to be human. In the next step, I will take the issue of self-understanding and the dialectics of the limit as leitmotifs in interpreting Chapter III of the Fragments. The question of the limit will lead us back to the problem of the transcendence of thought.

6 Dialectics of the Limit So far, we have two basic insights that seem to point in opposite directions: the first key issue in Fragments is the transcendence of thought in the sense of that which we cannot think of or imagine. The second key notion in Climacus’ thought-project is understanding, which is indispensable as part of our human condition. The middle chapter of the book, Chapter III, not only deals with the problem of transcendence, but it performs the problem as the problem of transcendence of thought. In an another essay, I have made the suggestion that the chapter should be read as a radicalized version of the dialectics of the limit.⁴⁸ Let me briefly explain this. Kant’s critical project, to show the limit of human reason, is already dialectical in the sense that the limit is a limit for reason. It is reason investigating into its own limit. To draw the limit of reason already puts reason at work. Hegel’s criticism of Kant in the “Introduction” to Phenomenology of Spirit relates to the dialectics of the limit. To draw a limit presupposes that we have an idea of what is beyond the limit. When reason delimits itself it is already beyond the limit. In order to understand this movement, Hegel refers to the concept of experience. When we experience something different from what we had expected, then our view can be changed. Experience in this sense implies transcendence, not in the sense of transcendence of the limits of experience, but as a transformation of our view of the world and of ourselves.

 SKS 4, 221 / PF, 12.  See Arne Grøn, “Die Aufgabe der Religionsphilosophie,” in Kerygma und Dogma, vol. 47, 2001, pp. 111– 125.

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In Chapter III of the Fragments, the problem inherent in the thought-project reaches its climax, and it does so, I will argue, in the dialectics of the limit: to draw the limit of thought involves the idea of that which cannot be thought of or imagined, but this limit also questions the one who asks about the limit. Chapter III therefore combines two issues: self-knowledge or self-understanding and the dialectics of the limit. The dialectic is intensified: the thought, which 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. The god as the absolutely Other then, ironically, becomes the projection of thought itself: What then is the Unknown? It is the frontier [Grændsen] that is continually arrived at, and therefore when the category of motion is replaced by the category of rest it is the different, the absolutely different. But it is the absolutely different in which there is no distinguishing mark…it [the understanding or reason] cannot absolutely negate itself but uses itself for that purpose and consequently thinks the difference in itself, which it thinks by itself.⁴⁹

Climacus then concludes: “But this difference cannot be grasped securely [lader sig ikke fastholde]. Every time this happens, it is basically an arbitrariness, and at the very bottom of devoutness there madly lurks the capricious arbitrariness that knows it itself has produced the god.”⁵⁰ This is an impasse. What is the way out? Earlier in the chapter, Climacus has coined the phrase: “the paradox is the passion of thought.” In thought, there is a movement of transcendence: “This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”⁵¹ This could be read as the problem inherent in Climacus’ own thought-project: to think that which thought cannot think. But it is also this movement of transcendence, which leads into our impasse. In the transcendence of thought, thought encounters itself. Seeking to think that which cannot be thought of or imagined we use ourselves, we think and imagine, and thus we encounter ourselves thinking and

 SKS 4, 249 / PF, 44– 45; in the earlier translation of David F. Swenson, revised by Howard V. Hong, the last sentence reads: “The Reason cannot negate itself absolutely, but uses itself for the purpose, and thus conceives only such an unlikeness within itself as it can conceive by means of itself” (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 55). The Danish text reads: “[T]hi absolut kan den [Forstanden] ikke negere sig selv, men benytter sig selv dertil, og tænker altsaa den Forskjellighed i sig selv, som den tænker ved sig selv.” The prepositions “within itself” (“i sig selv”) and “by itself” (“ved sig selv”) are here used to mark off what thinking does: it thinks or conceives the difference in itself that it thinks or conceives by itself.  SKS 4, 250 / PF, 45.  SKS 4, 243 / PF, 37.

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imagining. We are ourselves in the impasse. We are ourselves in the thought that encounters itself. In this sense, thought embodies our subjectivity. However, this is not only an impasse, but it is also a critical experience. Consequently, the next move taken by Climacus is a double one: first, if we are to know something about the unknown, the god, we must come to know that it is “the absolutely different”⁵² by coming to know that it is “absolutely different from” ourselves,⁵³ but this we cannot achieve by ourselves, as we saw. We cannot make ourselves come to know this, but must “come to know this from the god” as the absolutely different.⁵⁴ But if a human being “does come to know this, it cannot understand this and consequently cannot come to know this, for how could it understand the absolutely different?”⁵⁵ Understanding here embodies the human condition. If we as humans are to understand the absolutely different from us, we cannot escape ourselves – we can only think that which is different from us within and by ourselves. To understand the god as the absolutely different implies to understand ourselves as “absolutely different from the god,” and how could we come to know ourselves as absolutely different when we only understand by ourselves? The second move then is the following. We only understand that the god is absolutely different from us if we understand ourselves as different in the radical sense that we do not know ourselves. This is consciousness of sin. If we come to understand that we are ourselves in untruth, by ourselves, then we come to under, not the absolutely different from us, but ourselves as absolutely different from the god. We cannot come to understand this on our own, and yet, we have to understand it by ourselves – by understanding ourselves as different from what we thought, or, to be more precise, in understanding that we do not understand ourselves. Consciousness of sin is a radically displaced self-consciousness. Here we have the second clue to a reformulation of the A and B positions as alternatives (the first clue being the notion of understanding the human condition). Chapter III takes the Socratic ignorance as point of departure. If there has ever been someone who is supposed to know what it is to be a human being, it is Socrates. But Socrates, “the connoisseur of human nature [Menneskekjenderen],” “became almost bewildered about himself when he came up against the difference; he no longer knew whether he was a more curious monster than Typhon or whether there was something divine in him.”⁵⁶ In one sense, then, not only the     

SKS 4, 249 / PF, 45. SKS 4, 251 / PF, 46. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 4, 251– 252 / PF, 47.

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problem of transcendence inherent in the thought-project, but also the alternative between the A position and the B position is performed or rather re-performed in Chapter III: negativity, the Socratic ignorance, is intensified as untruth.

7 Subjectivity and Transcendence Through the dialectics of the limit, the problem of transcendence is reformulated – as the problem of the transcendence of thought. Let us now move a step further in our project of unfolding and discussing the implications of the thoughtproject for a radical transcendence of thought. This move will lead us back to the point made in our first move, namely that in thinking and imagining we carry ourselves with us. That thought embodies subjectivity is the dialectical point in the transcendence of thought. In the dialectics of the limit, we encounter subjectivity in thought’s passion for that which cannot be thought. The issue of subjectivity is raised, but in a way that makes it difficult to interpret.⁵⁷ As we saw, transcendence as a movement of thought is thought’s passion. This movement of transcendence, however, is also that which leads us into the impasse. When thought seeks to think the absolutely different, it encounters itself. Thought’s movement of transcendence does not yield transcendence of thought. In this sense, the project of transcendence of thought fails. But this negative experience made in Chapter III is also crucial. That thought encounters itself when it attempts to think the absolutely different from thought, shows the subjectivity embodied or carried with us in thought. What we need is to reinterpret this experience and to see what is at stake here. The basic argument is that thought uses itself in the attempt to think the unknown and to negate itself in order to think the absolutely different from thought. In thinking and imagining, we carry ourselves with us. This is what I just called the dialectical point: when transcendence of thought as a human project fails, and when Climacus in his thought-project is aiming precisely at that which we as humans cannot think of or imagine, then the answer to our failure is not to be found in a sphere outside thought and imagination. We will not be able to place ourselves in a sphere without imagination.  The alternative either to have the truth within and through oneself or to be in untruth through oneself already accentuates the problem of subjectivity. This is brought out in the Postscript. In this essay, I have focused on the movement taking place in the thought-project, pointing out that this is a complex movement of subjectivity: it is a transcendence of subjectivity, in that we, in thinking and understanding, carry ourselves with us.

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The reason for this lies with us. It is a matter of our own subjectivity, the relation that we are, in the sense that we relate ourselves to that which we seek to understand. The implication is that immanence and transcendence are not two spheres. Immanence is where we are, and we are not able to go beyond ourselves in a sphere of transcendence. In other words, transcendence is not a sphere in which we can place ourselves. The reason for this is that in thinking and imagining what transcendence is, we carry ourselves with us. Thinking and imagining embody a movement of transcendence, but in this transcendence of thought we are ourselves the subject. Transcendence is not a position that we can take. On the contrary, the position of transcendence is defined by our being in untruth. The B position, as I have called it, is precisely a paradoxical one. We are in the B position by being in untruth, which means that we are not in a position of transcendence. What then is transcendence if it is not a position? 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. In this, subjectivity is determined in its relation to itself. The argument can be pushed one step further: it is exactly because we carry ourselves along, in thinking and imagining that we can be contradicted and our imagination broken and reversed.⁵⁸ Works of Love moves in this universe of imagination. It is a book on the “difference of inversion.”⁵⁹ The paradox harbors, so to speak, the subjectivity that is to be determined, contradicted and transformed. The concept of paradox is a critical one. The paradoxical-religious is not a position or a stance that one can take. Along this line, the concept of revelation could be taken as a critique of human imagination seeking to transcend the human condition by imagining what the absolutely different is. The discourse on “The Duty to Love the People We See” in Works of Love could be read in this critical mode. The argument also has the implication that the problem of an Anknüpfungspunkt, the human by virtue of which we hear that which did not arise in the heart of any human being, must be reformulated. The argument is that human subjectivity is embodied, singular, in the sense that we are ourselves subjected to what we do. We carry ourselves with us when we relate to something. What is at stake here is the understanding of our human condition. Transcendence of thought then does not lead us beyond ourselves, but on the contrary points

 See Arne Grøn, “Imagination and Subjectivity,” in Theologische Literaturzeitung, vol. 128, 2003, pp. 717– 726.  SKS 9, 162 / WL, 162.

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to the limit of the human, in the sense that the human comes to the fore at the limit. Thus transcendence of thought is a dialectics of the limit. It is so not only in the sense that the limit of thought presupposes thought, or that the limit is only to be drawn by thought, as a limit for thought itself. 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 it fails to think that which is absolutely different and thus encounters itself in its own limit.

8 Passion of Distinction: to Understand or not to Understand Finally, let me return once more to the issue of understanding. I have mentioned two basic insights that seem to point in opposite directions: that Fragments is about the transcendence of thought as that which we cannot think of, and that understanding is part of the human condition. One might argue that the alternative in Fragments is in fact an alternative between faith and understanding. We would then have two spheres: a sphere of immanence, understanding, and a sphere of transcendence, faith. This, however, would not solve the problem of transcendence but, on the contrary, reduce the complexity of the problem. As we have seen, faith itself harbors an understanding, and the paradox itself is to be understood as the paradox. Of course, one might object that the paradox cannot be understood, but saying this is only the first part. The second part is that it is easy to misunderstand the paradox. The very possibility of misunderstanding the paradox implies that the whole business is to understand what the paradox means as that which we cannot think of or imagine. We will have to understand in order not to misunderstand. If, for example, we seek to understand the paradox in the sense of explaining it, we will be caught in misunderstanding. This implies that we will have to understand that the paradox is not something to be explained. If it matters to us – and in passion it does matter – then it is of critical importance how we relate to that which we do not understand or even cannot understand. The negative experience demonstrated in Chapter III consists of the fact that we cannot think the absolutely different from us because we use ourselves in thinking, but this also means that we cannot escape ourselves in relating to it either. We can only relate to the paradox on the condition of (mis)understanding it. As already mentioned, after having presented his thought-project, Climacus poses the question: is this thinkable? And later: is such a paradox conceivable? What is required in relation to the paradox seems to be quite straightforward,

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namely to “relinquish the understanding [at opgive sin Forstand].”⁶⁰ To believe it is to believe it “despite the understanding [tiltrods for Forstanden] and my inventive talents,” but then these words “I believe it” become “a very disquieting aber,” because no one can accept the report of faith directly and immediately.⁶¹ The relation to the paradox is accentuated as the question of how I relate. And we only relate on the condition of (mis)understanding. If I believe despite the understanding, faith is not a blind decision. First, the understanding harbored by faith is determinate in and through the understanding that I believe in spite of. Second, the reference or appeal to thought in the question posed by Climacus (“is this thinkable?”) is important. It is a matter of what thought – i. e., we as thinking subjects – can think in the sense of understanding. While the consequence of the different hypothesis is meaningless, thought, on Climacus’ hypothesis, can become preoccupied with the paradox as the strangest thing of all. The paradox is “something unreasonable.”⁶² The Danish word “Urimelighed” implies that something does not square (rimer ikke), it is not reasonable (rimeligt), which means that the paradox as unreasonable contradicts our expectations and conceptions (Forestillinger). That the paradox is “the strangest thing of all [det Besynderligste af Alt]” has the implication that we become strange to ourselves in the light of the paradox. We look strange (besynderlige) to ourselves. And in this we will have to think for ourselves. Third, if we cannot understand, we will have to understand that we cannot understand. We will have to understand this by ourselves, and we will have to understand ourselves in not understanding the paradox. This confirms that understanding is part of the human condition, which leads us back to subjectivity being embodied in thinking and understanding. We cannot escape ourselves in relating to the paradox. On the contrary, in relation to the paradox the problem of the subjectivity that we are is accentuated. In Fragments, there is an emphasis on the issue of relation, but this disappears if the set of alternatives is construed as alternatives between a position of immanence and a position of transcendence. The non-understanding of the paradox is a way of relating to it. We must understand ourselves in not understanding the paradox. Therefore, the distinction becomes crucial: to understand or not to understand. Understanding is not dispensable. The fact that we carry ourselves with us in (mis)understanding gives us the obligation to account for what we understand and what we do not understand.

 SKS 4, 299 / PF, 103.  SKS 4, 301 / PF, 104.  SKS 4, 298 / PF, 101.

Chapter 19 Der Begriff Verzweiflung 1 Der Ansatz in der Krankheit zum Tode Wenn vom Beginn der Krankheit zum Tode die Rede ist, meint man gewöhnlich die formelhafte Sequenz, die thetisch-fragend mit den Worten beginnt: „Der Mensch ist Geist. Aber was ist Geist? Geist ist das Selbst. Aber was ist das Selbst?“ Zuvor aber bietet Kierkegaard etwas, das einem Resumé dessen ähnelt, was dann kommt: „Verzweiflung ist eine Krankheit im Geist, im Selbst, und kann so ein Dreifaches sein: verzweifelt sich nicht bewußt sein, ein Selbst zu haben (uneigentliche Verzweiflung); verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein wollen, verzweifelt man selbst sein wollen.“¹ Auch wenn dieser „Vortext“ als Überschrift zum Abschnitt A.a auftaucht, exponiert er den gesamten ersten Hauptabschnitt (d. h. den ersten Teil) der Krankheit zum Tode: „Die Krankheit zum Tode ist Verzweiflung,“ da er die Analyse der Verzweiflung vorgreifend zusammenfaßt. Unmittelbar wirft die Dreiteilung der Verzweiflung im „Vortext“ zwei Fragen auf: Was ist „uneigentliche“ Verzweiflung? Wie verhalten sich die beiden Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung zueinander? Auf die letztere Frage gibt Kierkegaard eine direkte Antwort. Er bemerkt in der folgenden Sequenz (A.a), dass letztlich alle Verzweiflung in die zweite Form eigentlicher Verzweiflung, verzweifelt man selbst sein zu wollen, „aufgelöst und auf sie zurückgeführt werden kann.“² Etwas später heißt es jedoch umgekehrt, dass „die zweite Form von Verzweiflung, verzweifelt man selbst sein zu wollen, zurückgeführt werden kann auf die erste, verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen.“ Dass Kierkegaard nicht vergessen hat, was er kurz zuvor gesagt hat, geht aus dem Zusatz hervor: „ebenso wie wir im Vorhergehenden die Form verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein wollen aufgelöst haben in die Form verzweifelt man selbst sein wollen.“³ Kierkegaard behauptet also, dass die beiden Formen von eigentlicher Verzweiflung aufeinander zurückgeführt werden können. Aber sind beide gleichrangig? Gibt es nicht eine Grundform der Verzweiflung? Mit anderen Worten: Was bedeutet Verzweiflung eigentlich? Was ist Verzweiflung ihrem Begriffe nach?

 SKS 11, 129 / KT, 8.  SKS 11, 130 / KT, 9.  SKS 11, 136 / KT, 16. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-025

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Fängt Kierkegaards Begriff der Verzweiflung die charakteristischen Züge des Phänomens Verzweiflung ein? Michael Theunissen greift diese beiden Fragen in seinem Buch Der Begriff Verzweiflung auf: Gibt es so etwas wie eine uneigentliche Verzweiflung?⁴ Oder gibt es nur eigentliche Verzweiflung – und zudem nur in einer Grundform? Es geht Theunissen nicht nur darum, die Verzweiflungsanalyse Kierkegaards von deren eigenen Voraussetzungen her zu rekonstruieren, sondern auch darum, die Art und Weise in Frage zu stellen, in der Kierkegaard die Sache (das Phänomen) angeht, nämlich sein Vor-Verständnis der Verzweiflung als einer Krankheit im Selbst. Der Begriff Verzweiflung ist so etwas Seltenes wie ein philosophisches Buch über Kierkegaard. Schon im Stil zeichnet es sich aus. Es versucht nicht nur, die innere Systematik in der abschließenden Verzweiflungsanalyse Kierkegaards so direkt und klar wie möglich darzustellen, sondern auch deren Grundannahmen zu kritisieren. Die konzentrierte Darstellung setzt voraus, dass dem Leser der Kierkegaardsche Text gegenwärtig ist, und auch dann erfordert das Buch Theunissens noch eine langsame und wiederholte Lektüre. Ich möchte im Folgenden die Argumentation Theunissens in Hauptzügen vorstellen, um dann der Frage nachzugehen, ob seine Kritik an der Analyse der Verzweiflung bei Kierkegaard haltbar ist.

2 Die Negativismus-These Kierkegaard beginnt den „Vortext“ in der Krankheit zum Tode mit der Aussage, Verzweiflung sei eine Krankheit im Geist oder im Selbst. Direkt werden also Verzweiflung und Selbst miteinander verknüpft. Dies geht auch aus dem folgenden Beginn (A.a) hervor, der stichworthaft bestimmt, was es heißt, dass der Mensch ein Selbst ist, um dann zum Verhältnis zwischen den beiden Formen von eigentlicher Verzweiflung zurückzukehren. Gerade diese einleitende Sequenz wird in Theunissens kleinem Buch Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards negativistische Methode eingehend analysiert.⁵ Es handelt sich hier um die deutsche Ausgabe eines Artikels, der 1981 auf Englisch erschienen ist.⁶ Für das Verständnis des Buches Der

 Michael Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993.  Michael Theunissen, Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards negativistische Methode, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991.  Michael Theunissen, „Kierkegaard’s Negativistic Method,“ in Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, hg. von Joseph H. Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press 1981, S. 381– 423.

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Begriff Verzweiflung ist es erforderlich, dass ich kurz auf den Hauptgedanken dieses Aufsatzes eingehe. Wie der Untertitel angibt, will Theunissen hier das beleuchten, was er den Negativismus Kierkegaards nennt. Er unterscheidet zwischen einem inhaltlichen und einem methodischen Negativismus und konzentriert sich vor allem auf den letzteren. Die Frage ist also, wie Kierkegaard am Beginn der Krankheit zum Tode verfährt. Theunissen teilt den Abschnitt A.a in zwei Teile ein, einen ersten, der sagt, was das Selbst ist, und einen zweiten, der die beiden Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung einbezieht. Die Methode klären heißt das Verhältnis zwischen diesen beiden Teilen zu bestimmen. Theunissen vertritt nun die These, dass Kierkegaard von der Verzweiflung ausgeht, wenn er sagen soll, was das Selbst ist. Diese These steht scheinbar im Widerspruch zu dem Umstand, dass Kierkegaard zunächst bestimmt, was das Selbst ist. Und nicht nur dies. Im „Vortext“ ist die Verzweiflung als eine Krankheit im Selbst bestimmt worden. Kierkegaard muss, das ist deutlich, einen Vorbegriff vom Selbst besitzen, um über Verzweiflung als eine Krankheit im Selbst sprechen zu können. Deshalb differenziert Theunissen seine These: Wenn Kierkegaard sagen soll, was das gesunde Selbst ist, geht er von dem Negativem, der Verzweiflung aus.⁷ Die Negativismus-These enthält damit indirekt eine Bestimmung dessen, was das Selbst bedeutet. Auch wenn Kierkegaard in hypostasierender Form vom Selbst spricht, ist es recht verstanden nicht eine Substanz oder eine vorgegebene Bestimmung. Selbst übersetzt Kierkegaard in Selbstsein, das wiederum als ein Selbstwerden verstanden wird. Das Selbst ist ein Prozess, da man nur man selbst werden kann, indem man die Möglichkeit der Verzweiflung überwindet.⁸ Die einleitende Sequenz in der Krankheit zum Tode liefert Theunissen zufolge keine dogmatischen Thesen, sondern Hypothesen in dem Sinne, dass hier gesagt wird, was erforderlich ist, damit so etwas wie Verzweiflung existieren kann. Im Vorwort zu Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung aus dem Jahre 1991 erwähnt Theunissen, dass dieses Buch eigentlich nicht die Verzweiflung, sondern „das von ihr her gesichtete Selbst“ zum Gegenstand habe. Eine Untersuchung, die diesen Mangel beheben soll, „hätte vornehmlich die Verkürzungen und Verfälschungen aufzudecken, die aus der Vorentscheidung folgen, als Verzweiflung nur gelten zu lassen, was sich aus der Perspektive der Bedrohung des Selbstseins darbietet.“⁹ Hiermit ist programmatisch angegeben, worum es in dem Buch Der

 Theunissen, Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, S. 30 – 31.  Ibid., S. 33 – 34.  Ibid., S. 6.

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Begriff Verzweiflung geht, nämlich darum, eben die Art und Weise anzufechten, in der die Verzweiflung im „Vortext“ zur Krankheit zum Tode auf den Begriff gebracht wird, d. h. als ein verfehltes Selbstverhältnis. Schon in Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung bemerkt Theunissen, es handele sich im „Vortext“ um einen „Vorbegriff,“ der in der nachfolgenden Analyse der Verzweiflung lediglich konkretisiert, nicht aber verändert wird. Der Vorbegriff (Verzweiflung als Krankheit im Selbst) gibt den Rahmen an, in dem sich die gesamte Analyse der Verzweiflung vollzieht. Theunissen möchte nun in einer „transzendierenden Kritik“ diesen Rahmen sprengen. Der Begriff Verzweiflung besteht aus zwei „Studien.“ Eine erste Studie versucht, die Analyse der Verzweiflung bei Kierkegaard von einem einzigen Grundsatz her immanent zu rekonstruieren. Eine zweite Studie überschreitet den Rahmen dieser Analyse, um ihre Voraussetzungen kritisch zu hinterfragen. Dem schließt sich eine „zusammenfassende Schlußbetrachtung“ über die Dialektik in der Krankheit zum Tode an.

3 Grundform der Verzweiflung? Kierkegaard führt, wie gesagt, die beiden Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung aufeinander zurück. Dies ist eine Formel, die verführerisch wirken kann. Aber wenn die eine Form von Verzweiflung sich auf die andere zurückführen läßt, die dann wiederum auf die erste zurückgeführt werden kann, wäre zu fragen, was denn nun eigentlich auf was zurückgeführt wird. Theunissen behauptet, Kierkegaards Analyse der Verzweiflung habe eine existenzdialektische Grundvoraussetzung, die so lautet: „Wir wollen unmittelbar nicht sein, was wir sind.“¹⁰ Die Analyse der Verzweiflung läßt sich so rekonstruieren, dass sie sich von diesem Grundsatz her begreifen läßt. Dies stimmt insoweit mit dem überein, was Kierkegaard selbst behauptet: Verzweifelt sich selber los sein wollen sei die „Formel für alle Verzweiflung.“¹¹ Aber Kierkegaard sagt auch, dass es zwei Grundformen eigentlicher Verzweiflung gebe, zudem scheint er die zweite – in der Gestalt der Verzweiflung des Trotzes – zur primären zu machen. Die von Theunissen vorgeschlagene Rekonstruktion beinhaltet also, dass das, was Kierkegaard auch sagt, von seiner eigenen Analyse her korrigiert wird, und zwar in dreierlei Hinsicht.

 Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 18.  SKS 11, 135 / KT, 16.

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Erstens ist nicht unmittelbar einsichtig, warum Kierkegaard die andere Form eigentlicher Verzweiflung bestimmt als verzweifelt man selbst sein wollen. Man selbst sein wollen ist ja gerade das, was man soll, aber hier will man es also verzweifelt. Das Selbst, das man sein will, ist nicht das Selbst, das man ist, sondern eines, das man sich selbst schafft oder konstruiert.Wenn man verzweifelt man selbst sein will, so liegt das daran, dass man nicht man selbst sein will, sondern ein anderer als der, der man ist. Die zweite Form der eigentlichen Verzweiflung führt uns also auf die erste: verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen, zurück. Zweitens übersetzt Kierkegaard im Folgenden die zweite Form – verzweifelt man selbst sein wollen – in Verzweiflung des Trotzes. Wenn er die zweite Form eigentlicher Verzweiflung zur primären machen will, so deshalb, weil Verzweiflung letztlich Trotz ist. Oder besser die fehlende Selbstannahme – die fehlende Demut, sich selbst anzunehmen – ist im Trotz gegenüber der Macht begründet, die einen gesetzt hat. Das, was Kierkegaard Trotz nennt, bezeichnet jedoch unterschiedliche Phänomene. Die Verzweiflung des Trotzes bestimmt er dadurch, dass man sich eigenmächtig selbst schaffen will. Das Selbst will „verzweifelt über sich selbst verfügen, oder sich selbst erschaffen, sein Selbst zu dem Selbst machen, das er sein will.“¹² Trotz heißt hier also, sich selbst (um)konstruieren wollen. Eine solche Umkonstruktion unterscheidet den Trotz zugleich von der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit. Wenn der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit zugleich Trotz zugrunde liegen soll, muss es sich also um Trotz in einem anderen Sinne handeln: nämlich dass man etwas Unmögliches will – ein anderer sein will als der, der man ist. Das Unmögliche ist aber nicht nur, ein anderer sein zu wollen, sondern bereits, nicht man selbst sein zu wollen. Bislang hat das Wort Trotz zwei Bedeutungen erhalten: sich selbst umkonstruieren und etwas Unmögliches wollen (ein anderer sein wollen, als man selbst). Trotz im eigentlichen Sinne jedoch ist hiervon wiederum unterschieden. Das, was Kierkegaard selbst am Ende seiner Analyse über die Verzweiflung des Trotzes betont, ist der Trotz als offener Aufstand gegen Gott. Dies ist ein dämonischer Trotz, wo ein Mensch an sich selbst leidet – und also nicht er selbst sein will – zugleich aber auf seinem Leiden als einer Anklage gegen Gott insistiert. Diese im eigentlichen Sinne trotzige Verzweiflung besteht eben nicht darin, dass man sich umkonstruieren will, vielmehr hält man an sich selbst fest als dem, der man ist. Das, was eigentlich Trotz ist, fällt somit nicht unter die generelle Bestimmung der Verzweiflung des Trotzes, nämlich sich selbst aktiv umschaffen zu wollen. Vielmehr insistiert man auf dem, der man ist – und an dem man leidet.

 SKS 11, 182 / KT, 68.

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Drittens behauptet Kierkegaard, wie erwähnt, dass es neben den beiden Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung eine uneigentliche gebe. Theunissen selbst stellt in Frage, ob es eine solche – wie Kierkegaard selbst sagt – „uneigentliche“ Verzweiflung gibt. Kierkegaard erklärt das so, dass dies die Verzweiflung sei, die „unwissend ist darüber, dass sie Verzweiflung ist, oder die verzweifelte Unwissenheit, die nicht weiß, dass sie ein Selbst hat, ein ewiges Selbst.“¹³ Es handelt sich mit anderen Worten um unbewußte Verzweiflung. Aber „wir können jedoch nicht verzweifelt sein, ohne es irgendwie zu wissen.“¹⁴ Theunissen deutet statt dessen die uneigentliche Verzweiflung als eine minimale, aber darum auch andere Form dessen, verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen: „Als uneigentlich Verzweifelte wollen wir insofern nicht wir selbst sein, als wir uns zu unserem vorgegebenen Dasein erst gar nicht in das Verhältnis setzen, in welchem wir es wollen oder nicht wollen können.“¹⁵ Die uneigentliche Verzweiflung erweist sich als eine uneigentliche Form der Verzweiflung, nicht man selbst sein zu wollen. Der radikale Unterschied zu dieser ersten Form eigentlicher Verzweiflung besteht darin, dass es sich bei der uneigentlichen Verzweiflung um ein Nichtwollen handelt, das nicht einmal ein Wollen ist, „in ihm kommt es zu einem Wollen einfach nicht“. Es handelt sich also nicht bloß um eine Verzweiflung der Schwachheit, sondern um eine schwache Verzweiflung „mit dem niedrigsten Intensitätsgrad.“¹⁶ Was hiermit korrigiert wird, ist Kierkegaards Auffassung von dem, was seine eigene Analyse zeigt. Der springende Punkt liegt in der Beurteilung des Verhältnisses zwischen den beiden Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung.¹⁷ Kierkegaard versteht dies so, dass die beiden Formen aufeinander zurückgeführt werden können. Theunissens wichtigstes Argument gegen das Selbstverständnis Kierkegaards ist, dass in dieser Rückführung eine Asymmetrie bestehe. Die zweite Form, verzweifelt man selbst sein zu wollen, meint, wie wir gesehen haben, dass man nicht man selbst sein will, sondern sich selbst umschaffen will: das Selbst, das man sein will, ist das Selbst, das man selbst konstruiert. Das Umgekehrte aber gilt nicht ohne Weiteres. Es läßt sich eine Verzweiflung denken, wo man nicht man selbst sein will, ohne dass man sich deshalb selbst umschaffen will. „Während also das verzweifelte Selbstseinwollen nicht ohne sein Gegenteil denkbar ist, kann das verzweifelte Nichtselbstseinwollen unab-

 SKS 11, 158 / KT, 39.  Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 31.  Ibid., S. 33.  Ibid.  Vgl. Alastair Hannay, „Basic Despair in The Sickness unto Death,“ Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, S. 15 – 32.

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hängig von seinem Anderen vorkommen. Es stellt die ursprünglichere Form von Verzweiflung dar.“¹⁸ Die Frage aber ist, ob dies zutrifft. Ist es möglich, nicht man selbst sein zu wollen, ohne dass man sich selbst anders haben möchte, als man ist? Sich nicht zu sich selbst bekennen, scheint zu beinhalten, ein anderer sein zu wollen, als der, der man ist. Wenn man nicht ein anderer sein will, als der, der man ist, warum sollte man dann nicht man selbst sein wollen? Wenn man verzweifelt ein anderer sein will als man selbst, braucht man keine ausgesprochene Vorstellung von diesem „Anderen“ zu haben. Entscheidend ist, dass man sich in dieser Vorstellung von sich selbst distanziert: Das, was man sein will, ist eben gerade ein „anderer“ als der, der man ist. Wenn Verzweiflung so bestimmt wird, dass man sich seiner selbst entledigen will (und also nicht man selbst sein will), scheint sie dadurch gekennzeichnet zu sein, dass man in diesem Sinne von sich selbst Abstand nimmt (und also ein anderer sein will als der, der man ist). Theunissen begründet die angeführte Asymmetrie nicht näher. Soweit ich sehen kann, will sein Einwand eine andere Art von Verzweiflung ans Licht bringen, die Kierkegaard übersieht. Es gibt eine Verzweiflung, wo man unter seinem Dasein leidet, „ohne es durch ein Fremdes zu überformen.“¹⁹ Es handelt sich hier mit anderen Worten um eine Verzweiflung, die in der Ohnmacht gegenüber meinem Dasein besteht. Das Problem besteht hier nicht darin, dass ich mich selbst umschaffen will, bevor ich mich selbst annehmen kann. Es beginnt vielmehr damit, dass ich ohnmächtig unter meinem Dasein leide, ohne die Kraft zu haben, es zu verändern. Das Problem ist hier nicht, dass ich ein anderer sein will, sondern dass ich vielmehr nicht imstande bin, mein Leben zu verändern. Man kann fragen, ob Theunissen hier lediglich eine immanente Korrektur anbringt. Die Grenze zwischen einer Rekonstruktion und einer transzendierenden Kritik scheint insofern nicht trennscharf zu sein, als Theunissen schon hier auf das hinweist, was wir auch als Verzweiflung kennen.²⁰ Jedenfalls scheint er sich nun der These zu nähern, dass Verzweiflung im eigentlichen Sinne Widerfahrnis ist.

 Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 28.  Ibid.  Das wird dadurch gestützt, dass Theunissen erst in der zweiten Studie bringt, was eine weitere Begründung der Asymmetrie zu sein scheint, jetzt aber als Argument dafür, dass auch eine Asymmetrie zwischen Handeln und Leiden bestehe: Es gibt Formen von Verzweiflung, die einem reinen Erleiden nahekommen; vgl. Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 88.

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4 Verzweiflung – Erfahrung und Handeln Bis jetzt hat Theunissen eine immanente Rekonstruktion von Kierkegaards Analyse der Verzweiflung mit einer „vorsichtigen Korrektur“ der Begrifflichkeit, die Kierkegaard in seiner Analyse gebraucht, vorgenommen.²¹ Wie erwähnt geht Theunissen in der zweiten Studie in Der Begriff Verzweiflung einen entscheidenden Schritt weiter, indem er hier eine „transzendierende Kritik“ der Verzweiflungsanalyse Kierkegaards vorlegen will. Ich habe bereits angedeutet, dass die Trennung zwischen immanenter Rekonstruktion und transzendierender Kritik vielleicht nicht so scharf ist, wie Theunissen sie machen will. Teils muss er – wie wir gesehen haben – in der immanenten Rekonstruktion auf das Phänomen Verzweiflung hinweisen, teils kann man fragen, ob die transzendierende Kritik nicht über weite Strecken eine Rekonstruktion darstellt. Wir wollen deshalb zunächst sehen, was in der zweiten Studie kritisiert wird. Theunissen setzt sich eigentlich erst hier mit den Voraussetzungen auseinander, von denen her Kierkegaard das Phänomen Verzweiflung angeht. Die Kritik Theunissens gilt dem Ansatz in der Krankheit zum Tode, nämlich der ersten Bestimmung im „Vortext,“ dass Verzweiflung eine Krankheit im Selbst sei. Verzweiflung ist ein Mißverhältnis, aber ein Mißverhältnis im Selbstverhältnis (wie es in der einleitenden Sequenz in A.a heißt). Kurz: Verzweiflung ist, dass man nicht man selbst ist. Diese Grundvoraussetzung in der Verzweiflungsanalyse Kierkegaards stellt Theunissen in Frage. Wenn die Rekonstruktion gezeigt hat, dass die erste Form eigentlicher Verzweiflung (verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen) die primäre ist, so bestätigte sie die Voraussetzung der Verzweiflungsanalyse. Diese „noch elementarere Voraussetzung“ ist die, „dass alle Verzweiflung in den Kreis des Selbstverhältnisses eingeschlossen sei.“²² Verzweiflung wird definiert „als Defizienz eines auf die Exekution des eigenen Daseins reduzierten Selbstverhältnisses,“²³ sie wird „mit der Defizienz des Sich-zu-sich-Verhaltens“ identifiziert.²⁴ In gewisser Weise ist es nun die Methode der Verzweiflungsanalyse Kierkegaards, die angefochten wird: Verzweiflung und Selbst werden so miteinander verknüpft, dass das Verständnis dessen, was Verzweiflung ist, sich an der Frage des Selbstverhältnisses orientiert. Mit diesem Vorverständnis dessen, was als Verzweiflung zu gelten hat, fängt Kierkegaard einerseits „nicht alles an der Verzweiflung“ ein, andererseits geht    

Ibid., S. 14. Ibid., S. 61. Ibid., S. 76. Ibid., S. 119.

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ihm „manches ins Netz, was, näher betrachtet, keine Verzweiflung ist.“²⁵ Das eine „durch den Ausschluß von allem an der Verzweiflung, was über die Verzweifeltheit des Selbstverhältnisses hinausreicht,“ das andere „durch den Einschluß einer Defizienz des Sich-zu-sich-Verhaltens, die in Wahrheit keine Verzweiflung ist.“²⁶ Obwohl Theunissen das, was er in der zweiten Studie unternimmt, eine transzendierende Kritik nennt, hebt er hervor, dass es sich nicht nur um eine Kritik von außen handele. Um produktiv zu sein, muss die Kritik den Text Kierkegaards von innen aufbrechen; sie muss an die Stellen anknüpfen, wo Kierkegaard selbst den Ansatz transzendiert, den er in der Krankheit zum Tode entfaltet. Und es gibt vor allem eine Passage, in der sich ein alternativer Ansatz geltend macht. Es handelt sich um die beiden zusammengehörenden Abschnitte über „Verzweiflung über das Irdische oder über etwas Irdisches“ sowie „Verzweiflung am Ewigen oder über sich selbst.“ Diese Passage sollte ihrer Intention nach lediglich die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit entfalten. Aber Kierkegaard beginnt außerhalb des Rahmens, den der Ansatz des „Vortextes“ abgesteckt hatte, indem er von der Verzweiflung spricht, die auftritt, wenn einem etwas widerfährt. Zwar handelt die Passage davon, dass diese Verzweiflung eigentlich eine Verzweiflung am Ewigen oder über sich selbst ist, aber in Kierkegaards eigenem Text ist die Frage aufgetaucht, ob die Verzweiflung nicht auch von außen komme.²⁷ Auch wenn Theunissen an den Kierkegaardschen Text anknüpfen kann, muss seine transzendierende Kritik dennoch eine alternative Auslegung der Verzweiflung geltend machen. Dieses alternative Verständnis zeichnet sich nur indirekt in der Kritik ab. Der Gedankengang ist in aller Kürze dieser: Verzweiflung ist grundlegend Widerfahrnis und Erleiden (was Kierkegaard übersieht), aber auch Handeln (was Kierkegaard zwar betont, aber zugleich mißdeutet). Verzweiflung ist also eine Einheit von Erleiden und Handeln. Nun kann man meinen, dass Kierkegaard eben dies selbst herausstellt, wenn er von dem Dialektischen in der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit und des Trotzes spricht: dass in der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit Trotz und in der Verzweiflung des Trotzes Schwachheit ist. Denn Kierkegaard scheint teils Schwachheit mit Erleiden zu identifizieren, teils den Trotz als ein Handeln hervorzuheben. Er behauptet jedoch mehr als dies, dass ein dialektisches Verhältnis zwischen Schwachheit und Trotz bestehe. Die bewußtseinstheoretische Analyse der Ge-

 Ibid., S. 59.  Ibid., S. 63.  SKS 11, 175 / KT, 60.

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stalten der Verzweiflung (Abschnitt C.b im ersten Teil der Krankheit zum Tode) deckt einen Prozess auf, wo die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit durch die des Trotzes abgelöst wird. Die erwähnte Passage hat somit die Funktion, zu zeigen, dass die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit als die Verzweiflung, nicht man selbst sein zu wollen, selbst in die Verzweiflung des Trotzes umschlägt, verzweifelt man selbst sein zu wollen.²⁸ Und es ist hinzuzufügen, dass diese Passage faktisch bereits nachweisen soll, dass die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit darin besteht, nicht man selbst sein zu wollen. Wie Kierkegaards Begriff des Trotzes heterogen ist, ist sein Begriff der Schwachheit zweideutig. Indem er die Verzweiflung über etwas auflöst in Verzweiflung über sich selbst, kann Kierkegaard die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit mit der Verzweiflung identifizieren, nicht man selbst sein zu wollen. Aber die Schwachheit – wendet Theunissen ein – kennzeichnet „darüber hinaus ein Erleiden, das etwas ganz anderes ist als Nichtselbstseinwollen.“²⁹ Kierkegaard bemerkt selbst, dass Verzweiflung auf dieser Stufe wesentlich „die der Schwachheit, ein Erleiden“ ist. Er fügt zwar hinzu, dass ihre Form sei, verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen, aber als eine solche Verzweiflung über sich selbst ist sie nach Kierkegaard selbst nicht wesentlich ein Erleiden, sondern „Selbsttätigkeit…, Handlung.“³⁰ Kierkegaards Darstellung schwingt deshalb zwischen „der Schwachheit des Erleidens“ und „der Schwachheit des Nichtselbstseinwollens.“³¹ Das erste macht Kierkegaard zum Ausgangspunkt für die Passage, während er in der Überschrift für die Passage das letztere mit der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit identifiziert. Die Pointe Theunissens ist nun, dass ein Mensch etwas erfahren muss, an dem er leidet, damit überhaupt von Verzweiflung die Rede sein kann. In diesem Sinne ist Verzweiflung grundlegend Widerfahrnis. Etwas bringt den Menschen zur Verzweiflung; er kann dann daran leiden, selbst verzweifelt zu sein. In beiden Fällen handelt es sich um eine Erfahrung, „die als solche ein Widerfahrnis ist.“³² Das bedeutet, dass die Schwachheit verstanden als Erleiden Vorrang hat vor der Schwachheit des Nichtselbstseinwollens. „Eine Verzweiflung, der Schlimmes widerfahren ist und die damit auch selbst widerfährt, ist ursprünglicher als eine, die in der Defizienz der Exekution des eigenen Daseins aufgeht, ursprünglicher

    

SKS 11, 175 – 178 / KT, 60 – 64. Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 70. SKS 11, 169 / KT, 53. Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 74. Ibid., S. 71.

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auch als der ursprünglichste Modus dieser Defizienz, das verzweifelte Nichtselbstseinwollen.“³³ Kierkegaard zeichnet aber, wie erwähnt, einen Prozess, in dem die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit zur der des Trotzes wird. Hierin scheint zu liegen, dass der Trotz zeigt, was Verzweiflung eigentlich ist, nämlich Verzweiflung über sich selbst. Die Begründung ist die, dass der Trotz mehr aktiv und reflektiert ist. Kierkegaards Theorie der Verzweiflung enthält Theunissen zufolge einen Kern von Wahrheit. Ein Mensch, der über etwas verzweifelt, muss dieses Etwas zum „Ganzen“ (dem Irdischen) machen. In diesem Sinne stellt die Verzweiflung ein Handeln dar.³⁴ Verzweiflung ist also nicht nur ein Erleiden (an etwas verzweifeln), sondern auch Handeln (dass diesem Etwas eine unendliche Bedeutung gegeben wird). Aber dieses Handeln ist nicht ohne weiteres Trotz. Wenn Kierkegaard den nachfolgenden Trotz in die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit zurückverlegt, vermischt er in der Weise Handeln und Trotz, dass sich ein diffuser Begriff von Trotz über das ganze Phänomen der Verzweiflung ausbreitet. Theunissen wendet zudem ein, Kierkegaard löse faktisch die Einheit in der Verzweiflung zwischen Erleiden und Handeln auf. Kierkegaard beschreibt, wie erwähnt, einen Prozess, bei dem die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit durch die des Trotzes ersetzt wird. Es handelt sich um einen Prozess, wo wir mit der Unmittelbarkeit als reines Erleiden beginnen und in reinem Handeln enden. In der Beschreibung dieses Prozesses liegt eine Hegelsche Pointe, nämlich dass der Schluß die Wahrheit ans Licht bringt: Im Laufe des Prozesses wird aufgedeckt, was Verzweiflung eigentlich ist. Das, was deutlich wird, ist nach Theunissen die Überzeugung Kierkegaards, „eine Verzweiflung, die ihren Namen verdient, sei nur Handlung.“³⁵ Die Verzweiflung über etwas, mit dem der Prozess beginnt, löst sich in Schein auf, und das, was sich als eigentliche Verzweiflung erweist, ist etwas, was das Subjekt selbst durch eine Reflexion über sich selbst hervorbringt. Verzweiflung wird zu einem Handeln, nämlich Trotz, „der durchaus unmittelbar vom Selbst kommt“ (wörtlich bei Kierkegaard „der direkt vom Selbst kommt“).³⁶ Kierkegaards Begriff der Verzweiflung fängt so nicht den Zusammenhang zwischen Erleiden und Handeln ein, der das Phänomen kennzeichnet, mit dem wir es zu tun haben, die Verzweiflung.

   

Ibid., S. 71– 72. Ibid., S. 89. Ibid., S. 95 – 96. SKS 11, 176 / KT, 62.

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5 Phänomen und Geschichte Theunissens transzendierende Kritik hängt daran, dass er das Vorverständnis Kierkegaards von dem hinterfragen kann, was Verzweiflung ist, und zur „Sache.“ dem Phänomen Verzweiflung selbst vorstoßen kann. Es gibt also eine Sache, die wir mit Kierkegaard in der Weise gemeinsam haben, dass wir sie eigenständig auslegen können. Während die Kierkegaardliteratur oft unter der selbstauferlegten Begrenzung leidet, Kierkegaard nur innerhalb eines vermeintlich Kierkegaardschen Universums auszulegen, und sich damit in einer ständigen „Sachferne“ bewegt, möchte Theunissen die Theorie Kierkegaards über Verzweiflung diskutieren.³⁷ Wie wir gesehen haben, will er zeigen, dass Kierkegaards Begriff der Verzweiflung nicht ohne weiteres das Phänomen einfängt; vielmehr verstellt dieser Begriff auch den Blick für das, was Verzweiflung ist. Im Vorwort zu Der Begriff Verzweiflung bemerkt Theunissen fast programmatisch, dass er Kierkegaard ernst nehmen möchte, indem er „seinen Beitrag zur Sache“ prüft. Und er fügt hinzu: „Maßstab der Prüfung ist ein zu einem nicht unbeträchtlichen Teil alternatives Verständnis der Sache.“³⁸ Die beiden Kierkegaardbücher Theunissens zeichnen sich somit auch durch ihre hermeneutischen Überlegungen aus. Theunissen hebt nicht nur die oft übersehenen methodischen Aspekte bei Kierkegaard selbst hervor, sondern stellt reflektiert die Frage nach der Methode in der Kierkegaardauslegung. Die Beachtung des methodischen Problems hängt bei Theunissen eng mit einem Sinn für das Geschichtliche zusammen. Eine Auslegung der „Sache“ muss versuchen, die geschichtlichen Bedingungen mitzureflektieren, unter denen die Auslegung sich vollzieht, oder anders gesagt die Geschichte, mit der wir die Sache verstehen. Das wirft jedoch die Frage auf, ob es so etwas wie die „Sache“ gibt. Theunissen bemerkt, dass die Idee einer phänomenologischen Beschreibung, die zur Sache selbst gehen will, oft die Geschichte ausklammert. Das Phänomen aber, mit dem wir es hier zu tun haben, die Verzweiflung, ist selbst geschichtlich. Es existiert nur als „ein je schon gedeutetes.“³⁹ Wie aber ist es dann möglich, den Anspruch zu erheben, eine bestimmte Deutung (in diesem Falle die Kierkegaards)

 Den Ausdruck entnehme ich aus Michael Theunissen, „Antwort,“ in Kritische Darstellung der Metaphysik. Eine Diskussion über Hegels „Logik,“ hg. von Hans F. Fulda, Rolf-Peter Horstmann und Michael Theunissen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1980, S. 47. Es wäre erhellend – würde aber zu weit führen – die Verbindung zu den hermeneutischen Überlegungen im früheren Werk Theunissens herzustellen. Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Dialektik og dialogik,“ Fønix, Bd. 7 (4), 1983, S. 252– 264.  Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 9.  Ibid., S. 66; vgl. Theunissen, Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, S. 25, 29.

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der Verzweiflung zu hinterfragen und zur „Sache“ vorzudringen? Soweit ich sehen kann, muss die Antwort diese sein: Dass die Verzweiflung schon gedeutet ist, heißt nicht, dass es das Phänomen nicht gäbe. Das, was bereits gedeutet ist, sind bestimmte Erfahrungen, die wir gemacht haben oder machen. Wenn es möglich ist, ein gegebenes (Vor)verständnis der Verzweiflung zu hinterfragen, so deshalb, weil wir auf diese geschichtlich bestimmten Erfahrungen verweisen können. Dass das Phänomen selbst geschichtlich ist, beinhaltet, dass es stets gedeutet ist, aber auch, dass sich diese Deutung auf bestimmte Erfahrungen bezieht. Die verschiedenen Deutungen können an der „Sache“ nachgeprüft werden, indem man diese Erfahrungen erneut zu deuten versucht. Es ist nach Theunissen nicht möglich, Kierkegaards geschichtlich situierte Deutung der Verzweiflung an einem übergeschichtlichen Begriff der Sache zu messen. Das Phänomen selbst ist in dem Sinne geschichtlich, dass der Begriff der Verzweiflung „selbst Geschichte in sich aufnimmt.“⁴⁰ Theunissen hebt zwei „Brüche“ oder Zäsuren in dieser Geschichte hervor. Die erste Zäsur besteht darin, dass Verzweiflung zu einer Totalitätsbestimmung wird, was in dem Wort Verzweiflung zum Ausdruck kommt. Die Verzweiflung existiert auf dem Hintergrund eines totalisierten Zweifels, aber ein solcher ist nur dadurch möglich, dass der Glaube das ganze menschliche Dasein betrifft.Verzweiflung als Totalbestimmung setzt folglich das Christentum voraus.⁴¹ Die andere Zäsur ist der Nihilismus. Verzweiflung ist auch in dem Sinne ein geschichtliches Phänomen, dass sie zur Erfahrung eines radikalen Sinnverlusts wird. Kierkegaard deutet Verzweiflung „als Reflex eines geschichtlich bestimmten Nihilismus.“⁴² Eine Darstellung der Verzweiflung scheint deshalb selbst den Nihilismus reflektieren zu müssen. Theunissen sieht im Nihilismus eine geschichtliche Bedingung, auf die Kierkegaard reagiert, aber in der Weise, dass sein Entwurf einer Alternative zu einer verzweifelten Existenz nicht selbst von nihilistischen Erfahrungen freigehalten werden kann.⁴³ Das zeigt sich daran, dass sich die Ethik Kierkegaards an einem Existenzideal orientiert, das in sich selbst inhaltsleer ist. Darauf werde ich zurückkommen. Es ist zu beachten, dass Kierkegaard selbst sowohl Angst als auch Verzweiflung als geschichtliche Phänomene auslegt. Im Begriff Angst entwirft er die Geschichte der Angsterfahrung und sieht selbst bedeutende Brüche oder Zäsuren in dieser Geschichte. So ist Geistlosigkeit als eigentlicher Verlust von Geist ein

   

Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 67. Ibid., S. 68. Ibid., S. 69. Ibid., S. 65.

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Phänomen der Christenheit. Und in der Krankheit zum Tode bemerkt er, dass man natürlich Erfahrungen der Verzweiflung im Heidentum machen könne, dass aber Verzweiflung hier nicht als eine umfassende Möglichkeit verstanden werde. Das Phänomen werde im Heidentum so verstanden, dass es einzelne gebe, die zufällig verzweifeln.⁴⁴ Kierkegaard behauptet dagegen, dass Verzweiflung eigentlich in dem Sinne eine „totale“ Möglichkeit sei, als diese Möglichkeit teils dem menschlichen Dasein als ganzem gelte, teils den Menschen als solchen auszeichne. Und als eine solche Totalbestimmung gehört die Verzweiflung mit einem paradox akzentuierten Begriff von Glauben zusammen. Hiermit nähern wir uns dem Verständnis der Verzweiflung als desperatio.

6 Verzweiflung als desperatio Nicht ohne Grund hat die einleitende Sequenz in der Krankheit zum Tode in der Kierkegaardliteratur einen besonderen Status. Kierkegaard liefert hier, was er selbst für ein „vorzügliches Schema“ hielt.⁴⁵ Die einleitende Sequenz formuliert konzentriert und – wie es scheint – endgültig Kierkegaards grundlegende Bestimmung dessen, was ein Mensch ist. Theunissen nimmt in seiner Auslegung ernst, dass diese Bestimmung durch eine Analyse der Verzweiflung gegeben wird, die im „Vortext“ herausgestellt wird. Theunissens Auslegung ist radikal, indem er erstens die „Grundoperation“ Kierkegaards aufdecken will, nämlich das Selbst „negativ“ von der Verzweiflung her zu verstehen (den Negativismus), zweitens die Verzweiflungsanalyse von innen zu rekonstruieren versucht und schließlich drittens die Grundlage dieser Analyse anficht, nämlich dass Verzweiflung als ein Mangel im Selbstverhältnis ausgelegt wird. Es handelt sich hier nicht nur um eine Lektüre „von außen;“ es gelingt Theunissen wirklich, die bekannten Textpassagen aufzubrechen, so dass deutlich wird, dass Kierkegaard einige Entscheidungen getroffen hat, die einer philosophischen Diskussion bedürfen. Die Bedeutung seiner Interpretation liegt nicht zuletzt darin, dass Schlüsselbegriffe wie Trotz, Schwachheit, Erleiden und Handeln – ganz zu schweigen von der Verzweiflung selbst – die Selbstverständlichkeit verlieren, die sie sich in der Kierkegaardliteratur erworben haben. Aber hat Theunissen Recht in seiner Kritik? Es erscheint unmittelbar richtig, dass ein Mensch verzweifelt sein kann, ohne dass dies daran liegt, dass er nicht er selbst sein will.Verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein wollen muss bedeuten, dass man

 SKS 11, 160 / KT, 42.  SKS 20, 365 / DSKE 4, 416 – 417.

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sich nicht zu dem bekennen will, der man ist. Aber ein Mensch kann gerade verzweifeln, indem er seiner Lage in die Augen sieht. Dass er verzweifelt, braucht nicht zu bedeuten, dass er ein anderer sein will als der, der er ist. Er kann vielmehr daran verzweifeln, dass die Welt, in der er beheimatet ist, zusammenbricht. Was unterstreicht, dass die Verzweiflung dadurch entsteht, dass einem etwas widerfährt, an dem man leidet. Wenn Kierkegaard Verzweiflung und Nichtselbstseinwollen miteinander verknüpft, so ist das nicht unmittelbar einleuchtend, sondern verlangt eine besondere Argumentation. Ich möchte im folgenden versuchen, eine solche Argumentation zu rekonstruieren. Zunächst möchte ich etwas zurückgreifen. Theunissen bestreitet, wie erwähnt, dass es so etwas wie die von Kierkegaard so benannte uneigentliche Verzweiflung gebe. Er rekonstruiert sie so, dass es sich um ein Nichtwollen handelt, das nicht einmal so viel Wollen ist, dass es zum Widerwillen dagegegen wird, man selbst zu sein. Kierkegaards Darstellung der uneigentlichen Verzweiflung ist in vieler Weise problematisch. Schon indem er sie „uneigentliche“ Verzweiflung nennt, scheint er sich von dem zu distanzieren, dessen Wirklichkeit er zu beschreiben vorgibt. Sie ist eigentlich nicht Verzweiflung, da jede Verzweiflung „begrifflich gesehen“ bewußt ist, wie Kierkegaard selbst bemerkt.⁴⁶ Seine Lauheit dem gegenüber, was er selbst zu beschreiben vorgibt, wird noch deutlicher: Das wirkliche Leben ist zu mannigfaltig, als dass es nur solche abstrakten Gegensätze zeigte, wie den zwischen einer Verzweiflung, die vollkommen unwissend darüber ist dass sie es ist, und einer Verzweiflung, die vollkommen dessen bewußt ist es zu sein. Allermeist ist sicherlich der Zustand des Verzweifelten ein, jedoch wieder mannigfaltig abgetöntes, Halbdunkel hinsichtlich des eigenen Zustandes.⁴⁷

Soweit ich sehen kann, ist die uneigentliche Verzweiflung eine ungleich komplexere Größe als ein minimales Nichtwollen. Theunissen deutet sie, wie gesagt, als eine minimale Form des Nichtselbstseinwollens. Der radikale Unterschied zur eigentlichen Form besteht nach ihm darin, dass es sich um ein Nichtwollen handele, das nicht einmal ein Wollen sei. Man will nicht (man selbst sein), aber so abgeschwächt, dass der fehlende Wille nicht deutlich wird. Dies ist jedoch nur dadurch möglich, dass dieses Nichtwollen „indifferent“ ist (wie Theunissen es selbst nennt).⁴⁸ Aber man ist nicht nur ohne weiteres indifferent, man macht sich indifferent.

 SKS 11, 145 / KT, 25.  SKS 11, 163 / KT, 46.  Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 34.

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Dies wird durch die Bemerkung Kierkegaards bestätigt, dass in aller Dunkelheit und Unwissenheit „ein dialektisches Zusammenspiel von Erkenntnis und Wille“ sei.⁴⁹ Wenn Theunissen einwendet, dass wir nicht verzweifelt sein können, ohne „irgendwie“ zu wissen, dass wir es sind, ist die Frage, ob Kierkegaard dies nicht bejahen würde.Wir wissen es „irgendwie,“ aber sozusagen gegen uns selbst. Wir machen uns unwissend. Man kann versuchen, „z. B. durch Arbeit und Geschäftigkeit als Mittel der Zerstreuung bei sich selbst eine Dunkelheit aufrecht zu erhalten über seinen Zustand,“ zudem so, dass es einem nicht deutlich wird, dass man es tut.⁵⁰ Kierkegaard betont allgemein, dass Verzweiflung nicht bloß etwas sei, das einem widerfährt; man tut selbst etwas, man „zieht sie sich zu.“⁵¹ In der uneigentlichen Verzweiflung tut man zudem dies, dass man sich selbst daran hindert, auf die Verzweiflung aufmerksam zu werden.⁵² Diese Deutung wird dadurch untermauert, dass Kierkegaard die uneigentliche Verzweiflung mit Geistlosigkeit, verstanden ethisch-religiös als Verlust von Geist, in Verbindung bringt.⁵³ Es ist darum wichtig, diesen komplexen Charakter der sogenannten uneigentlichen Verzweiflung hervorzuheben, weil dies zu zeigen scheint, dass das Selbstverhältnis – das, was ein Mensch mit sich selbst tut – für die Frage entscheidend ist, ob dennoch von Verzweiflung die Rede sein kann. Wir wollen nun noch einmal die entscheidende Passage über die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit heranziehen. Sie läßt sich so lesen, dass Kierkegaard weiß, was er tut, wenn er mit der Verzweiflung über etwas (Irdisches) beginnt und mit der Verzweiflung, nicht man selbst sein zu wollen, schließt: Er versucht hier gerade seine Voraussetzung zu sichern, dass Verzweiflung eine Krankheit im Selbst ist. Bereits im Abschnitt A.c wurde die These aufgestellt, dass derjenige, der über etwas verzweifelt, eigentlich über sich selbst verzweifelt.⁵⁴ Die Überschrift zum ersten Hauptabschnitt (also dem ersten Teil) der Krankheit zum Tode lautet wie erwähnt: „Die Krankheit zum Tode ist Verzweiflung.“ Unmittelbar danach – in der Überschrift zu A – wird die Identifikation von hinten gelesen, aber so, dass man eine Begründung erwartet: „Dass Verzweiflung die Krankheit zum Tode ist.“ Die Überschrift zum letzten Unterabschnitt in A – nämlich A.c – wiederholt fast als

 SKS 11, 163 / KT, 46.  Ibid.  SKS 11, 132 / KT, 12.  SKS 11, 159 / KT, 42.  Es würde zu weit führen, hier näher die skizzierte Deutung der uneigentlichen Verzweiflung zu begründen.Vgl. Arne Grøn, Angst bei Søren Kierkegaard. Eine Einführung in sein Denken, übers. von Ulrich Lincoln, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1999, vor allem im Zusammenhang mit dem Abschnitt: „Die Allgemeinheit dieser Krankheit (der Verzweiflung)“ (SKS 11, 138 – 144 / KT, 18 – 27).  SKS 11, 134 / KT, 14.

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Zitat: „Verzweiflung ist: ‚Die Krankheit zum Tode‘.“ Die Begründung, die gegeben wird, ist offenbar die, dass Verzweiflung eine Krankheit im Selbst ist. Entscheidend aber ist, dass zugleich das Selbstverhältnis, das Verzweiflung ist, als Krankheit zum Tode bestimmt wird. Darauf werde ich gleich zurückkommen. Die Passage über die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit wiederholt nicht nur die Behauptung in Abschnitt A.c, dass Verzweiflung über etwas eigentlich Verzweiflung über sich selbst ist. Sie erklärt, dass Verzweiflung über etwas Irdisches eigentlich Verzweiflung über das Irdische ist. Das besagt, dass man, um über etwas zu verzweifeln, diesem Etwas eine unendliche Bedeutung beimessen muss. Die Passage kann deshalb eine verborgene Verzweiflung am Ewigen in die Verzweiflung über das Irdische hineinlesen. Hierin liegt auch nach Theunissen der Kern der Wahrheit in der Verzweiflungsanalyse Kierkegaards: „Wer über etwas Irdisches verzweifelt, macht dieses Etwas, das auch stets etwas Einzelnes ist, zum Irdischen im ganzen, und er könnte es nicht dazu machen, lebte er nicht in einer Verzweiflung am Ewigen.“⁵⁵ Die Passage reformuliert darauf die Formel für alle Verzweiflung: Verzweiflung ist „das Ewige und sich selbst verloren haben.“⁵⁶ Das aber heißt, dass Verzweiflung über etwas nicht ohne weiteres in Verzweiflung über sich selbst aufgelöst wird. Teils wird ein Handeln aufgedeckt, das in der Verzweiflung liegt, nämlich dass man das Etwas, über das man verzweifelt, zum Ganzen macht, teils wird die Verzweiflung über sich selbst mit der Verzweiflung am Ewigen verknüpft. Theunissen wendet nun ein, dass Kierkegaard in dem Prozess, in dem die Passage über die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit die erste Stufe darstellt, eine doppelte Reduktion vollziehe: Verzweiflung über etwas im Sinne einer Erfahrung werde aufgelöst in das Verzweifeltsein des Selbstverhältnisses. Und die Einheit zwischen Leiden und Handeln, welche die Verzweiflung kennzeichnet, breche Kierkegaard auf, indem der Prozess in Unmittelbarkeit als ein reines Erleiden beginne und in reinem Handeln ende. Aber behauptet Kierkegaard, dass es ein reines Erleiden und ein reines Handeln gebe? Das erste scheint eindeutig der Fall zu sein. Im Abschnitt über Verzweiflung über das Irdische oder über etwas Irdisches beginnt Kierkegaard mit der „reinen Unmittelbarkeit“. Hier ist Verzweiflung „ein bloßes Erleiden…, sie kommt in keinerlei Weise von innen her als Handlung.“⁵⁷ Das stimmt jedoch nicht mit dem überein, was Kierkegaard kurz zuvor sagt, dass es nämlich „ohne Trotz…

 Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 89.  SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61.  SKS 11, 165 / KT, 48.

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keine Verzweiflung“ gebe.⁵⁸ Und ebenso unmittelbar danach schiebt Kierkegaard eine Parenthese ein zur Rede vom Unmittelbaren: „soweit denn in der Wirklichkeit Unmittelbarkeit ganz ohne alle Reflexion vorkommen kann.“⁵⁹ Kierkegaard scheint sich hier von seinen eigenen abstrakten Konstruktionen zu distanzieren, so wie zuvor bei der Rede von einer unbewußten Verzweiflung. Die Frage ist offenbar auch für Kierkegaard, ob es eine solche Verzweiflung gibt, bei der man nicht selbst darauf reagiert, dass man verzweifelt. Das reine Erleiden würde darin bestehen, dass man allein über das verzweifelt, was einem widerfährt. Man ist nur Opfer dessen, was einem zustößt. Dass es ein „reines“ Erleiden ist, muss bedeuten, dass man selbst nichts tut. Das wird im Folgenden als ein Selbstbetrug aufgedeckt, denn es kann erst dann von Verzweiflung über etwas die Rede sein, wenn man selbst dem, was einem widerfährt, Bedeutung zumißt. Soweit ich sehen kann, ist die reine Unmittelbarkeit (das reine Erleiden) eine Selbstauffassung, die sich eben als unhaltbar erweist. Kierkegaards Beschreibung verhält sich auch hier zu einer Bewußtseinsgestalt, die etwas über sich selbst besagt, nur nennt sich „der Unmittelbare“ nun selbst verzweifelt, während der unbewußt Verzweifelte sich von der Verzweiflung freisprach. Wie aber steht es mit dem reinen Handeln? Theunissen behauptet, Kierkegaard nehme an, die Verzweiflung, die ihren Namen verdiene, „sei nur Handlung.“⁶⁰ Dies ist ein entscheidender Punkt, denn mit einer solchen Annahme wird die Verbindung zwischen der Verzweiflung und dem, was einem Menschen widerfährt, abgebrochen. Aber es ist für mich schwer ersichtlich, dass Kierkegaard dies annimmt. Der Prozess, den er beschreibt, endet – darauf macht Theunissen selbst aufmerksam – nicht in reinem Handeln, sondern in der dämonischen Verzweiflung, wo das Moment des Erleidens gerade intensiviert wird. Auch wenn die Verzweiflung mir selbst gilt, bezieht sie sich auf das, was ich erfahre und woran ich leide. Wie wir oben gesehen haben, ist die dämonische Verzweiflung ein leidender Trotz, bei dem ich an dem in mir selbst festhalte, an dem ich leide, und wo ich mich also nicht selbst umdichten will. Wenn Theunissen behauptet, dass Verzweiflung grundlegend Widerfahrnis sei, rehabilitiert er, was Kierkegaard scheinbar konsequent in seiner Verzweiflungsanalyse abwertet, nämlich dass etwas einem Menschen widerfährt. Kierkegaard hat hier jedoch ein polemisches Anliegen.⁶¹ Das, von dem er abwertend

 SKS 11, 165 / KT, 47.  SKS 11, 165 / KT, 49.  Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 96.  Das deutet Theunissen selbst an, indem er die Möglichkeit erwähnt, dass das, was Kierkegaard in Schein auflöst, nicht „die Realität, die zum Verzweifeln ist,“ sei, sondern die Auffassung, dass Verzweifeln eine „Augenblickssache“ sei (ibid., S. 138).

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spricht, ist die Auffassung, in der ich meine Verzweiflung zu etwas mache, das mir widerfährt.⁶² Das, was man dabei nicht sieht, ist, dass man sich selbst das Verzweifeln zuzieht – dass man also selbst verzweifelt.⁶³ Mit seiner Polemik will Kierkegaard deutlich machen, dass Verzweiflung auch ein Handeln ist. Scheinbar meint Kierkegaard jedoch nicht nur, dass die Verzweiflung auch vom Subjekt komme, sondern dass sie allein von innen komme.⁶⁴ Der Eindruck, dass die Verzweiflung von außen komme, löst sich offenbar in Schein auf: „Denn wenn das Irdische dem Selbst genommen wird und der Mensch verzweifelt, so ist es, als käme die Verzweiflung von außen her, wiewohl sie doch allezeit aus dem Selbst kommt.“⁶⁵ Das, was von außen kommt, wird zu einem bloßen Anlaß reduziert, während die Quelle der Verzweiflung das Subjekt selbst ist. Die Verzweiflung entsteht durch die Reflexion des Subjekts auf sich selber. Die Reflexion „ersetzt etwas in der Welt durch etwas am eigenen Dasein. Dasjenige Etwas, das Gegenstand der widerfahrenden Verzweiflung war, gerät damit aus dem Blick.“⁶⁶ Es ist jedoch zu fragen, ob die Verzweiflung für Kierkegaard in einem anderen Sinne von innen kommt als eben dem, dass sich das Subjekt verzweifelt macht. Damit von Verzweiflung gesprochen werden kann, muss das Subjekt dem Etwas, das es erfährt, unendliche Bedeutung beimessen. Insofern kann man sagen, dass die Verzweiflung daher rührt, dass das Subjekt selbst etwas tut: Es mißt diesem Etwas unendliche Bedeutung bei. Aber es macht sich ja gerade verzweifelt über dieses Etwas. Es ist noch immer dieses Etwas, das von außen den Anlaß zur Verzweiflung liefert. Zu Beginn des Abschnitts „Verzweiflung am Ewigen oder über sich selbst“ heißt es, dass Verzweiflung über das Irdische eigentlich auch Verzweiflung über sich selbst sei.⁶⁷ Verzweiflung über das Irdische wird nicht in dem Sinne in Schein aufgelöst, dass der Verzweifelte nicht auch über das Irdische verzweifelt. Wenn Kierkegaard sagt, dass diese Verzweiflung eigentlich auch Verzweiflung am Ewigen sei, spricht er davon, was sie bedeutet. Die Diagnose, die er stellt, vermittelt eine Einsicht, zu der der Verzweifelte selbst gelangen soll,

 Kierkegaard verhält sich – Hegelsch ausgedrückt – zu einer Bewußtseinsgestalt, die schon von sich selbst und seiner Verzweiflung spricht, z. B. SKS 11, 130 / KT, 9: „Wofern ein Verzweifelter auf seine Verzweiflung, wie er meint aufmerksam ist, nicht sinnlos von ihr spricht, wie von etwas, das ihm widerfährt,“ und SKS 11, 132 / KT, 11– 12: „wie viel der Verzweifelnde…da von seiner Verzweiflung als von einem Unglück rede.“  SKS 11, 131– 132. / KT, 10 – 11.  Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 62.  SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61.  Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 94.  SKS 11, 175 / KT, 60.

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nämlich zu verstehen, was seine eigene Verzweiflung bedeutet: dass er am Ewigen verzweifelt. Nun beschreibt Kierkegaard jedoch Verzweiflung am Ewigen so, dass sie eine andere Verzweiflung ist als die Verzweiflung über das Irdische. Er bedient sich hier einer Hegelschen Figur der Umkehrung. Die Verzweiflung potenziert sich zu „einem neuen Bewußtsein,“ indem sie nicht mehr die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit ist, sondern Verzweiflung über seine Schwachheit: „Der Verzweifelte versteht selbst, dass es Schwachheit ist, sich das Irdische so zu Herzen zu nehmen, dass es Schwachheit ist zu verzweifeln.“⁶⁸ Aber er verzweifelt dennoch, trotz seines Selbstverständnisses, und „dadurch kehrt sich denn der ganze Gesichtspunkt um;“ er verzweifelt nun „über sich selbst,“ darüber, dass er verzweifelt.⁶⁹ Kierkegaard hebt hervor, dass „diese neue Verzweiflung“ vom Selbst kommt. Das ist insoweit bei aller Verzweiflung der Fall, aber der Unterschied besteht darin, dass die Verzweiflung nun dem Verzweifelten selbst gilt. Er verzweifelt über sich selbst – darüber, dass er verzweifelt. Auch wenn das Selbstverhältnis der Verzweiflung hier potenziert ist, bemerkt Kierkegaard dennoch, dass die Verzweiflung „mittelbar-unmittelbar [Wörtlich: indirekt-direkt] vom Selbst, als Gegendruck (Reaktion)“ kommt. Und er fügt hinzu: „darin unterschieden vom Trotz, der durchaus unmittelbar [Wörtlich: direkt] vom Selbst kommt.“⁷⁰ Die Verzweiflung über sich selbst, wo man selbst versteht, dass man am Ewigen verzweifelt, ist noch immer an das Irdische, durch das man verzweifelt, gebunden. Die Verzweiflung läßt sich dadurch zu Trotz potenzieren, dass der Anlaß der Verzweiflung lediglich von innen kommt, indem der Verzweifelte an sich selber leidet. Hier besteht jedoch ein entscheidender Unterschied. Während der, der verzweifelt, selbst zu der Einsicht gelangen soll, dass er am Ewigen verzweifelt und damit über sich selbst, wenn er über das Irdische verzweifelt, soll er gerade die potenzierte Verzweiflung des Trotzes vermeiden. Es ist also zu unterscheiden zwischen der Verzweiflung über sich selbst, die in Schwachheit am Ewigen verzweifelt, und der Verzweiflung, die trotzig an sich selbst leidet. Um von der Verzweiflung erlöst zu werden, ist es erforderlich, dass ich auf meine Verzweiflung aufmerksam werde (nämlich dass ich verzweifelt bin und was dies bedeutet), nicht aber, dass die Verzweiflung zu Trotz potenziert wird. Vielmehr wird die Verzweiflung zu Trotz potenziert, weil man sich nicht richtig hin „zum Glauben“

 SKS 11, 176 / KT, 60 – 61.  SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61.  SKS 11, 176 – 177 / KT, 62.

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bewegt.⁷¹ Die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit ist damit nicht nur eine Übergangsfigur zur Verzweiflung des Trotzes. Was bedeutet es nun, dass Verzweiflung eigentlich Verzweiflung über einen selbst ist? Um diese Frage zu beantworten, möchte ich an die Behauptung Theunissens anknüpfen, dass die Krankheit zum Tode die „zweite“ Ethik Kierkegaards darstelle.⁷² Ich meine, dass es durch eine eingehende Analyse der Krankheit zum Tode möglich ist, diese Behauptung zu begründen, aber es bedarf eines Zusatzes. Wenn man eine zweite Ethik bei Kierkegaard finden will, so muss man sie in der Krankheit zum Tode und in Der Liebe Tun suchen. Die beiden Werke sind im Zusammenhang zu interpretieren – schon deshalb, weil die Verzweiflungsanalyse in Der Liebe Tun eine zentrale Rolle spielt, und zwar gerade in bezug auf das rechte Selbstverhältnis. Wenn Kierkegaard behauptet, dass Verzweiflung ein Mißverhältnis im Selbstverhältnis ist, so ist zu fragen, was das für ein Selbstverhältnis ist, das Verzweiflung ist. Der Ansatz Kierkegaards (Verzweiflung als verfehltes Selbstverhältnis) erfordert gerade eine nähere Bestimmung dessen, in welchem Sinne das Selbstverhältnis Verzweiflung ist. Die Rolle, welche die Verzweiflungsanalyse in Der Liebe Tun spielt, ergibt sich aus Abschnitt II.A in der ersten Folge. Kierkegaard beschreibt hier, wie Liebe zu Verzweiflung werden kann. Wenn er das „Du sollst“ des Gebotes der Nächstenliebe betont, so geschieht dies auf dem Hintergrund dieser Beschreibung der Verwandlung der Liebe in Verzweiflung.⁷³ Wir finden hier als Stichwort die Formel für Verzweiflung: „Verzweiflung ist ein Mißverhältnis im innersten seines [eines Menschen] Wesens…Verzweiflung heißt, dass einem Menschen das Ewige fehlt.“⁷⁴ Gerade in diesem grundlegenden Abschnitt II.A wird gezeigt, wie das Selbstverhältnis zu Verzweiflung werden kann. Kierkegaard nimmt ernst, dass das Gebot der Nächstenliebe eine Forderung enthält, sich selbst zu lieben. Diese Forderung wird wiederum auf einem negativen Hintergrund gesehen: Wenn der Geschäftige seine Zeit und seine Kraft im Dienste eitler, unbedeutender Unternehmungen vergeudet, geschieht das dann nicht, weil er nicht gelernt hat, sich recht selbst zu lieben? Wenn der Leichtsinnige sich selber mit wegwirft beinahe wie ein Nichts im Narrenspiel des Augenblicks, geschieht das dann nicht, weil er nicht gelernt hat, sich selbst recht zu lieben? Wenn der Schwermütige wünscht, des Lebens, ja seiner selbst ledig zu werden, geschieht das dann nicht, weil er nicht lernen will, im strengen und ernsten Sinne

 SKS 11, 179 / KT, 65.  Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 19.  Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Kærlighedens gerninger og anerkendelsens dialektik,“ Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, Nr. 4, 1994, S. 261– 270.  SKS 9, 47 / LT, 47.

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sich selbst zu lieben? Wenn ein Mensch, weil die Welt oder ein anderer Mensch ihn treulos verraten haben, sich der Verzweiflung ergibt, welches ist dann seine Schuld (denn von seinem unschuldigen Leiden sprechen wir hier nicht), wenn nicht die, dass er sich selbst nicht auf die rechte Weise liebt? Wenn ein Mensch selbstquälerisch Gott einen Dienst zu tun glaubt, indem er sich selbst martert, welches ist dann seine Sünde, wenn nicht die, dass er sich selbst nicht recht lieben will? Ach, und wenn ein Mensch vermessen Hand an sich legt, ist dann seine Sünde nicht eben die, dass er sich selbst nicht richtig liebt in dem Sinne, in welchem ein Mensch sich selbst lieben soll? ⁷⁵

Kierkegaard unterscheidet in der eingeschobenen Parenthese zwischen einem unschuldigen Leiden und Verzweiflung, wo man selbst schuldig ist. Bei den beschriebenen negativen Phänomenen ist gemeinsam, dass es sich um – zwar ganz unterschiedliche – Formen von Selbst-Aufgabe handelt. Die Aussage Kierkegaards, dass Verzweiflung ein Mißverhältnis im Selbstverhältnis sei, erfordert, wie gesagt, eine nähere Bestimmung dessen, was das für ein Selbstverhältnis ist, das Verzweiflung ist. Soweit ich sehen kann, ist die Antwort, dass dies ein Selbstverhältnis ist, wo ein Mensch „sich selbst verliert“ oder sich selbst aufgibt in dem Sinne, dass er seinen Mut oder seine Hoffnung auf gibt. Verzweiflung versteht Kierkegaard als desperatio, als Aufgabe von Hoffnung. Dies ist nicht nur eine Deutung, die ich von außen in die Krankheit zum Tode hineintrage. Die Verzweiflung, welche die Krankheit zum Tode ist, wird als Hoffnungslosigkeit bestimmt.⁷⁶ Und im Abschnitt über die Verzweiflung der Notwendigkeit, dem auch Theunissen eine zentrale Bedeutung zumißt,⁷⁷ werden „das wahre Hoffen“ und „das wahre Verzweifeln“ einander gegenübergestellt.⁷⁸ Das wahre Verzweifeln wird in der Passage über die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit als Verzweiflung am Ewigen bestimmt.Verzweiflung ist, „das Ewige…verloren zu haben,“⁷⁹ und das bedeutet, den Glauben an das verloren zu haben, was erlöst und aufrichtet. Wenn man über etwas verzweifelt, setzt einen das in der Verzweiflung fest; aber es setzt einen nur fest, indem man am Ewigen verzweifelt als dem, das einen aus der Verzweiflung erlöst.⁸⁰ Verzweifeln heißt letztlich, dass man nicht daran glaubt, dass eine „Möglichkeit“ besteht, und das bedeutet, die Hoffnung aufzugeben.⁸¹

      

SKS 9, 30 – 31 / LT, 27– 28. SKS 11, 133 / KT, 13. Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 123 – 124. SKS 11, 153 / KT, 35. SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61. SKS 11, 175 / KT, 60. SKS 11, 153 / KT, 34– 35.

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Nach Theunissen entdeckt Kierkegaard eine selbständige Form der Verzweiflung in der praesumptio, dass nämlich das Subjekt sich im Stolz anmaßt, selbst „seine Zukunft vorwegzunehmen.“ Kierkegaard macht zudem dies und nicht die desperatio zum Schwerpunkt in der Verzweiflung.⁸² In dem Prozess, in welchem die Verzweiflung des Trotzes die der Schwachheit ablöst, erweist sich die Verzweiflung primär in einem eigenmächtigen Willen, sich selbst zu konstruieren oder trotzig zu behaupten. Dennoch bemerkt Theunissen schließlich, dass Kierkegaards Theorie der Verzweiflung auf die desperatio als „das tieferliegende Fundament“ zurückgreift. Dies tut sie, indem sie alle Verzweiflung in der Verzweiflung am Ewigen fundiert.⁸³ Theunissen hat früher hervorgehoben, dass Verzweiflung am Ewigen heißt, dass man „das Zutrauen zu ihm“ verliert.⁸⁴ Man verzweifelt am Ewigen als dem „Rettenden.“⁸⁵ Am Ewigen verzweifeln heißt also, das „Zutrauen zum Rettenden“ verlieren.⁸⁶ Was als transzendierende Kritik angelegt war, scheint mir eher eine Rekonstruktion zu sein.⁸⁷ Die oben von mir vorgeschlagene Auslegung des Selbstverhältnisses der Verzweiflung schließt keineswegs aus, dass die Verzweiflung auch Erfahrung von Verlust ist. Man gerät vielmehr in Verzweiflung, indem man an etwas leidet, aber wenn das zu Verzweiflung werden soll, muß man selbst etwas tun: dem Verlust unendliche Bedeutung beimessen. Und dies tun heißt gerade, die Hoffnung oder den Mut verlieren – und eben dies ist am Ewigen verzweifeln. Kierkegaards Verknüpfung der Verzweiflung am Ewigen mit der Verzweiflung als einem Selbstverhältnis hat deshalb sehr wohl einen Sinn. Wenn man verzweifelt, tut man selbst etwas, man gibt nämlich die Hoffnung oder den Mut auf, und man tut dies gegen sich selbst: Man gibt seine Hoffnung auf, verstanden als die Hoffnung, aus der man lebt, oder man gibt es auf, von der Hoffnung zu leben. Und das bedeutet, dass man – mit einer entscheidenden Formulierung aus der Krankheit zum Tode – „sich selbst verliert.“ Die Formel für alle Verzweiflung wird, wie bereits zitiert, dahingehend reformuliert, dass die Verzweiflung darin bestehe, dass man „das Ewige und sich selbst verloren hat.“⁸⁸ Es liegt nahe, gegen Kierkegaard einzuwenden, dass es Verlust gibt, der in der Tat von unendlicher Bedeutung ist. Den Verlust eines geliebten Menschen wertet Kierkegaard scheinbar ab zu einem Verlust von etwas Äußerlichem oder gar zu

      

Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 128 – 130. Ibid., S. 133. Ibid., S. 101. Ibid., S. 108 – 110. Ibid., S. 133. Ibid., S. 109 – 110, S. 124. SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61.

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einer Frage der Vorstellung vom Selbst. Vor allem in Der Liebe Tun unterscheidet Kierkegaard aber zwischen Trauer und Verzweiflung. Ausgangspunkt ist eben, dass es schwer sein kann, der Verzweiflung z. B. beim Verlust eines geliebten Menschen zu entgehen. Es gibt Verlust oder Schläge, die so schmerzhaft sind, dass es schwer fällt, nicht zu verzweifeln. Die Verzweiflung ist in einem gewissen Sinne das, was am nächsten liegt. Eben deshalb wird es zu einer Forderung, dass man nicht verzweifeln soll. Am Schluß des Abschnitts „Du sollst lieben“ in Der Liebe Tun wird betont, dass dieses „Du sollst“ der Ewigkeit das „Erlösende“ sei. Dies wird dadurch entfaltet, dass Trauer und Verzweiflung einander gegenübergestellt werden: Ich soll nicht die Erlaubnis haben, mich wider des Lebens Schmerz zu verhärten, denn ich soll trauern; aber ich soll auch nicht die Erlaubnis haben zu verzweifeln, denn ich soll trauern; und doch soll ich auch nicht die Erlaubnis haben, dass ich aufhöre zu trauern, denn ich soll trauern. Ebenso mit der Liebe. Du sollst nicht die Erlaubnis haben, dich wider dieses Gefühl zu verhärten, denn du sollst lieben; aber du sollst auch nicht die Erlaubnis haben, verzweifelt zu lieben, denn du sollst lieben; und ebensowenig sollst du die Erlaubnis haben, dies Gefühl in dir zu verpfuschen, denn du sollst lieben. Du sollst die Liebe bewahren, und du sollst dich selbst bewahren, mit und in dem Bewahren deiner selbst sollst du die Liebe bewahren.⁸⁹

Man soll trauern, aber nicht verzweifeln, das heißt: Man soll vermeiden, dass die Trauer zu Verzweiflung wird.Während die Trauer beim Verlust gefordert ist, ist die Verzweiflung etwas, das man vermeiden soll. Der Sinn ist also nicht, dass man sich nicht durch den Verlust getroffen fühlen soll. Sich durch den Verlust unberührt machen wäre gerade eine Form der Verzweiflung. Dass man trauern soll, heißt, den Verlust, an dem man leidet, ernst zu nehmen; zu verzweifeln heißt natürlich auch, den Verlust schwer zu nehmen, aber in einer Bewegung zurück auf sich selbst. Die Bewegung wird selbstbezogen. Der radikale Unterschied zwischen Trauer und Verzweiflung ist der, dass man in der Verzweiflung selbst die Hoffnung und den Mut fahren läßt. Die Krankheit zum Tode, die in der Verzweiflung ist, besteht darin, dass das Leben für einen erstirbt. Was in unterschiedlicher Weise geschehen kann – durch Gleichgültigkeit oder Langeweile, durch Geschäftigkeit, wo man vergißt, was etwas für einen bedeutet, oder durch den Verlust, der einem den Lebensmut nimmt. Es ist an der Zeit, die Argumentation zusammenzufassen. Damit von Verzweiflung die Rede sein kann, muss man dem Etwas oder dem Verlust, über den man verzweifelt, eine unendliche Bedeutung beimessen. Die Handlung, als die sich die Verzweiflung erweist, besteht darin, dass man selbst etwas tut (unend SKS 9, 50 / LT, 50.

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liche Bedeutung beimißt) und dass man etwas mit sich selbst tut (man mißt dem, an dem man leidet, unendliche Bedeutung für einen selbst zu). Das Selbstverhältnis, welches die Verzweiflung ist, ist Selbstverlust, da man mehr oder weniger ausdrücklich die Hoffnung aufgibt. Wenn ein Mensch die Hoffnung fahren läßt, tut er etwas an sich selbst; er schließt sich ein, letztlich macht er sich unberührt oder indifferent. Das aber tut er nicht nur an sich selbst, er tut es auch sich selbst gegenüber – und „verliert“ in diesem Sinne sich selbst. Im Gegensatz dazu „bewahrt“ ein Mensch sich in der Hoffnung, indem er sich dem Kommenden öffnet. Diese Auslegung des Selbstverhältnisses der Verzweiflung schließt, wie erwähnt, nicht aus, dass man über einen erlittenen Verlust verzweifelt. Die Verzweiflung beginnt vielmehr damit, dass einem etwas zustößt. Erst dadurch, dass sie zum Trotz potenziert wird, betrifft die Verzweiflung nur einen selbst – wodurch sie nur noch mehr verkehrt wird. Wenn Theunissen einwendet, dass nach Kierkegaard „alle Verzweiflung in den Kreis des Selbstverhältnisses eingeschlossen“ sei,⁹⁰ so deckt sich dies insoweit mit dem, was Kierkegaard selbst als Diagnose stellt: Die Verzweiflung ist eine Krankheit im Selbst, weil der Verzweifelte unfrei um sich selbst kreist. Dieses In-sich-selbst-Kreisen, das Kierkegaard immer deutlicher in der Verzweiflung aufspürt, macht es ihm möglich, die Verzweiflung ethisch-religiös als Sünde zu bestimmen. In den verschiedenen Gestalten, die die Verzweiflung annehmen kann, sieht Kierkegaard unterschiedliche Formen der Selbstaufgabe, wo man eben nicht von sich selbst freikommt. Es fragt sich nun, ob es nicht eine Grenze für dieses Verständnis der Verzweiflung als Selbstaufgabe und In-sich-selbst-Kreisen gibt. Wenn ein Mensch ohnmächtig darüber verzweifelt, dass seine Welt zusammenbricht, kann es schwer sein, zu sehen, dass eine solche ohnmächtige Verzweiflung selbstbezogen sein soll. Aber wenn ein Mensch in seiner Ohnmacht verzweifelt, tut er in einem gewissen Sinne noch immer etwas an sich selbst; er kann sich in sich selbst so einschließen, dass er ein Verständnis seiner Situation bewahrt und zudem ein Leben lebt, das er selbst als ein Scheinleben auffaßt. Die Ohnmacht kann jedoch auch in der Weise nach innen schlagen, dass er in der Verzweiflung zugrunde geht. Die Frage ist deshalb, ob es Formen der Verzweiflung gibt, bei denen Kierkegaards ethisch-religiöse Bestimmung keinen Sinn ergibt. Kierkegaard braucht nicht zu leugnen, dass es Situationen gibt, die zum Verzweifeln sind. Sein Gesichtspunkt ist der ethische, dass man gerade in solchen Situationen nicht sich selbst erlauben darf, zu verzweifeln. Die Hoffnung, die man nicht aufgeben darf, ist auch eine Hoffnung trotz der Situation. Wenn Kierkegaard das grundlegende

 Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, S. 61.

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Selbstverhältnis in der Verzweiflung betont, so liegt hierin indirekt die Pointe, dass dieses Selbstverhältnis auch die Möglichkeit eröffnet, der Verzweiflung zu widerstehen. Theunissen zufolge beurteilt Kierkegaard Verzweiflung „nach den Kriterien eines Selbstseinwollens, das in seiner Leere vom Nichts affiziert ist.“⁹¹ Die Ethik Kierkegaards droht inhaltslos zu werden, da das in der Verzweiflungsanalyse implizierte Existenzideal, man selbst zu werden, teils jeden an sich selbst verweist, teils „nichts als die Exekution des je Eigenen verlangt.“⁹² Der einzelne Mensch soll das Dasein übernehmen, an dem er verzweifelt. Diese Leere, die an dem Existenzideal haftet, verknüpft Theunissen, wie gesagt, mit dem geschichtlichen Umstand, dass der Nihilismus, den Kierkegaard selbst als Verzweiflung deutet, die Zeit beherrscht. „Die Ethik, die dem Einzelnen die Pflicht auferlegt, sein nichtiges Dasein wider seinen unmittelbaren Willen zu exekutieren, nimmt diesen Gang der Dinge ernst. Die Leere des von ihr postulierten Selbstseinwollens ist der Preis, den ihr die geschichtliche Lage abverlangt.“⁹³ Aber erstens scheint zwischen einer solchen doppelbödigen Auslegung des Nihilismus und dem, was Theunissen selbst als den „Negativismus“ Kierkegaards hervorhebt, ein entscheidender Unterschied zu existieren. Soweit ich sehen kann, ist die Einsicht, dass wir von negativen Erfahrungen ausgehen müssen, wenn wir erkunden wollen, was es heißt, man selbst zu werden, nicht von vornherein an ein inhaltsleeres Existenzideal gebunden. Und zweitens ist gerade die „zweite“ Ethik nicht durch ein solches Ideal bestimmt. Kierkegaards Begriff der Verzweiflung als Selbstaufgabe und In-sich-selbst-Kreisen ist, wie gesagt, bereits ethisch bestimmt. Die „zweite“ Ethik, die durch die Verzweiflungsanalyse bestimmt wird, ist nicht inhaltsleer. Das rechte Selbstverhältnis besteht nicht nur in der „Exekution des je Eigenen“. Das Selbstverhältnis und das Verhältnis zum anderen Menschen sind so miteinander verwickelt, dass die Forderung lautet: „Du sollst dich selbst lieben, ebenso wie du den Nächsten liebst, wenn du ihn liebst als dich selbst.“⁹⁴ Zu sich selbst in das rechte Verhältnis kommen erfordert, dass man sich nicht nur zum „Eigenen“ bekennt, sondern auch zu dem, was einen selbst mit dem anderen Menschen verbindet.⁹⁵

 Ibid., S. 65.  Ibid.  Ibid., S. 66.  SKS 9, 30 / LT, 27.  Zu diesem Begriff des Allgemeinmenschlichen, siehe Grøn, Angst bei Søren Kierkegaard, S. 142– 154. Übersetzt von Eberhard Harbsmeier.

Chapter 20 Kierkegaards Phänomenologie? 1 Phänomenologie So wie Søren Kierkegaard darauf Wert legte, dass er einst in den Straßen Kopenhagens spazierenging und mit allen möglichen Menschen redete, dreht sich sein Denken um Bewegungen, Stellungen und Gestalten. Es handelt sich um Bewegungen, die ein Existierender macht, und Stellungen, die ein Existierender durch die Bewegungen, die er vollzieht, einnimmt. Der, der die Bewegungen vollzieht und die Stellungen einnimmt, bildet eine Gestalt, die wahrgenommen werden kann und die sich zu erkennen gibt. Bereits diese stichworthaften Bestimmungen könnten zu der Frage Anlaß geben, ob es sich bei Kierkegaard um eine phänomenologische Methode handelt. Die Antwort auf diese Frage hängt natürlich davon ab, was man unter Phänomenologie versteht. Ich möchte zwischen zwei Bedeutungen des Wortes unterscheiden, die für Kierkegaard relevant sind. Erstens möchte ich behaupten, dass sowohl in den pseudonymen als auch in den erbaulichen Schriften Phänomenbeschreibungen eine ebenso entscheidende wie übersehene Rolle spielen. Es handelt sich um Phänomene wie z. B. Mißtrauen, Mut, Geduld, Sanftmut, Neid, Eifersucht, Hoffnung,Vergebung, Stolz und Demut. Wenn ich den Ausdruck Phänomene verwende, so gibt es dafür durchaus Anhaltspunkte bei Kierkegaard selbst. Ich verweise lediglich auf den Begriff Angst, Kap. IV. Hier heißt es, in diesem Buch gehe es um „die psychologischen Stellungen der Freiheit zur Sünde.“¹ Diese Stellungen werden Phänomene genannt, die wahrgenommen werden. Das Phänomen kann übergeordnet sein wie z. B. die Angst vor dem Bösen, zur Reue pontenziert. Dieses Phänomen zeigt sich z. B. in „Stolz, Eitelkeit, Zorn, Haß, Trotz, Hinterlist, Neid.“² Aber das Phänomen ist nicht nur das, was sich in verschiedenen Äußerungen zu erkennen gibt; das Wort Phänomen wird auch von den Äußerungen gebraucht, die wahrgenommen werden, wie Stolz und Eitelkeit. So zeigt sich das Dämonische in „den unterschiedlichsten Erscheinungen [Phänomenen].“ Es kann „sich äußern…als Gemächlichkeit, die ‚ein andermal‘ denkt; als Neugierde, die zu nicht mehr als Neugierde wird, als unredlicher Selbstbetrug; als weibische Weichlichkeit, die sich anderer

 SKS 4, 420 / BA, 121.  SKS 4, 418 / BA, 120. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-026

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vertröstet; als vornehmes Ignorieren; als alberne Betriebsamkeit.“³ In diesem Zusammenhang spricht Vigilius Haufniensis von den „negativen Erscheinungen [Phänomenen].“⁴ Zweitens gibt es bei Kierkegaard Ansätze zu einer Phänomenologie im Hegelschen Sinne, wo wir auf Beispiele für eine beschreibende und analysierende Darstellung von Gestalten des Bewußtseins stoßen. Man kann fragen, ob solche Beschreibungen und Analysen bei Kierkegaard nicht zu vereinzelt auftreten und zu wenig ausgeführt sind. Wenn von so etwas wie einer Hegelschen Phänomenologie die Rede sein soll, darf es sich nicht nur um Einzelbeschreibungen handeln, sondern um einen einheitlichen Prozess. Ich möchte nun versuchen, die Behauptung zu begründen, dass im ersten Teil (dem „ersten Abschnitt“) C in der Krankheit zum Tode unter der Überschrift: „Die Gestalten dieser Krankheit (der Verzweiflung)“ eben ein solcher Prozess von aufeinanderfolgenden Gestalten des Bewußtseins vorliegt.⁵ Das bedeutet, dass ich der Frage nicht weiter nachgehe, ob es bei Kierkegaard eine Phänomenologie im ersteren Sinne der Beschreibung von Phänomenen gibt, auch wenn dies m. E. ein besonders fruchtbarer Zugang nicht zuletzt zu den erbaulichen Schriften ist und wenngleich diese Frage auch für das Verständnis der Krankheit zum Tode relevant ist, da die Analyse der Verzweiflung Beschreibung und Analyse von Phänomenen wie Stolz, Demut und Trotz einschließt. Auch der weiteren Frage möchte ich hier nicht nachgehen, ob die beiden Bedeutungen von Phänomenologie, zwischen denen ich hier unterschieden habe, bei Kierkegaard nicht zusammenhängen, da es sich in beiden Fällen um Phänomene nach Art des Sich-Verhaltens handelt. Wenn ich die Behauptung nachprüfen will, dass es sich im ersten Teil C in der Krankheit zum Tode um etwas handelt, das einer Hegelschen Phänomenologie ähnelt, so geschieht dies nicht nur, um das Verhältnis zwischen Hegel und Kierkegaard zu erhellen. Es geht in erster Linie darum, einen Beitrag zur Klärung der Methode Kierkegaards im ersten Teil der Krankheit zum Tode zu leisten. Ich stelle, genauer gesagt, die Behauptung auf in einem Versuch, einige Probleme zu lösen, die entstehen, wenn man dieses Kierkegaardsche Hauptwerk einer eingehenderen Lektüre unterzieht. Und eben darum geht es: eine eingehende Lektüre der Krankheit zum Tode in einer systematischen Intention, die ich am Ende kurz angeben werde.

 SKS 4, 438 / BA, 143.  SKS 4, 439 / BA, 144.  Um unnötige Verwirrung zu vermeiden, nenne ich im Folgenden die beiden „Abschnitte“ der Krankheit zum Tode den ersten bzw. zweiten Teil.

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2 Strukturprobleme Die Krankheit zum Tode fasziniert bereits durch ihre Form. Es handelt sich um eine in sich geschlossene Darstellung, knapp in ihren Formulierungen, ziseliert formelhaft, in der Waage zwischen dem Erhellenden und dem Rätselhaften. Gleichzeitig wirkt der erste Teil disproportioniert. Zwei Textstücke ziehen gleichsam allen Aufmerksamkeit auf sich. Das erste ist der formelhafte Auftakt (A.a), ein Text von anderthalb Seiten, der als Eingang des ganzen Buches erscheint mit einem exponierenden „Vortext“ vor dem eigentlichen Auftakt. Das zweite Textstück ist die Analyse der Gestalten der Verzweiflung, der dafür den Großteil des ersten Teils ausmacht, auch wenn dieser Text der Disposition zufolge nur einen der drei Hauptabschnitte A, B und C im ersten Teil darstellt.⁶ Der Leser muss das Gefühl haben, dass C der erste Teil ist: die Analyse der Gestalten der Verzweiflung. Dieser Eindruck ist sowohl richtig als auch falsch. Richtig, insofern C die Analyse der Verzweiflung bietet oder durchführt, um die es im ersten Teil geht. Falsch, insofern diese Analyse nicht nur den Eingang des Auftakts und die Exposition des „Vortexts“ voraussetzt, sondern auch das, was zwischen dem Auftakt und C (also den Rest von A sowie den ganzen Abschnitt B) liegt. Man kann nicht einfach vom Auftakt zu C springen. Das möchte ich im Folgenden zu zeigen versuchen, indem ich vor allem Abschnitt B in die Auslegung der unbewußten Verzweiflung einbeziehe. Wie nun ist C aufgebaut? Es handelt sich um eine Beschreibung und Analyse „der Gestalten dieser Krankheit (der Verzweiflung),“ wie es in der Überschrift heißt. Die Analyse fällt in zwei Teile, die ich einen synthesetheoretischen (A) bzw. einen bewußtseinstheoretischen Teil (B) nennen möchte. Es ist nicht leicht zu entscheiden, wie sich die beiden Teile der Analyse zu einander verhalten. Die Überschrift gibt an, dass es sich um zwei unterschiedliche Perspektiven handelt: C.a⁷ betrachtet Verzweiflung so, dass lediglich auf die Momente der Synthese reflektiert wird. In C.b geht es um Verzweiflung unter der Bestimmung Bewußtsein. Was aber bedeutet das? Sind C.a und C.b als Parallelen einzuordnen, oder handelt es sich um eine Abfolge von C.a zu C.b? Sehen wir darauf, wie C beginnt. C.a ist ein kleiner Auftakt vorangestellt, dessen erste Zeilen so lauten: „Die Gestalten der Verzweiflung müssen sich abstrakt ausfindig machen lassen, indem man die Reflexion auf die Momente

 SKS 11, 145 – 187 / KT, 25 – 74.  Um der Verwirrung zu entgehen, zu der Kierkegaard Anlaß gibt, nenne ich die Unterabschnitte a und b im Hauptabschnitt C C.a bzw. C.b.

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richtet, aus denen das Selbst als Synthesis besteht.“⁸ Von Anfang an wird dem Leser klargemacht, dass die Analyse, die auf die Momente der Synthese reflektiert, abstrakt ist. Dass sie von etwas absieht, bemerkt auch die Überschrift zu C.a: „Verzweiflung auf die Art betrachtet, dass nicht darauf reflektiert wird, ob sie bewußt ist oder nicht.“ Aber die Frage, von der damit abgesehen wird, nämlich ob die Verzweiflung bewußt ist oder nicht, ist von entscheidender Bedeutung. Das geht schon aus dem kleinen Auftakt vor C.a hervor. Hier heißt es zunächst etwas unbestimmt, Verzweiflung müsse „hauptsächlich“ unter der Bestimmung Bewußtsein betrachtet werden, aber kurz darauf wird kategorisch festgestellt: „So ist denn das Bewußtsein das Entscheidende.“ Der dazwischen liegende Text erzählt teils, dass das, was den qualitativen Unterschied zwischen Verzweiflung und Verzweiflung ausmacht, die Frage ist, ob sie bewußt ist oder nicht, teils, dass alle Verzweiflung „begrifflich gesehen“ bewußt ist.⁹ Hiermit haben wir eine erste Angabe zum Verhältnis zwischen C.a und C.b. Insofern Verzweiflung hauptsächlich so zu betrachten ist, wie C.b dies tut, ist C.b die Hauptsache. In C.a wird von dem abgesehen, von dem wir nicht absehen können: dem Bewußtsein.Was gibt also Bewußtsein? Die Antwort ist: Konkretion. Die Gestalten, die C.a aufdeckt, sind abstrakt. Konkret sind die Gestalten des Bewußtseins. Erst wenn wir die Gestalten der Verzweiflung unter der Bestimmung des Bewußtseins sehen, ist es möglich, einen Ablauf nachzuzeichnen. In C.a wird nicht direkt ein Prozess geschildert, sondern abstrakte Möglichkeiten: C.a liefert – in Stichworten – die Klaviatur, auf der die Beschreibung und die Analyse der konkreten Gestalten des Bewußtseins spielen. Ich muss es bei dieser Andeutung bewenden lassen.¹⁰ C.a hat auch die Funktion, C.b Konturen zu verleihen. C.a beschreibt abstrakte Formen oder Möglichkeiten, wobei die Frage nach dem Bewußtsein ausgeklammert wird. Aber die Gestalt, welche die Verzweiflung annimmt, läßt sich nur beschreiben, wenn wir sehen, dass sich der Mensch in der Verzweiflung zu sich selbst verhält. Die Verzweiflung nimmt selbst Gestalt an je nach dem, ob man sich ihrer bewußt ist oder nicht. Das bedeutet nicht, dass sich die einzelne Gestalt isoliert betrachten ließe. In der synthesetheoretischen Beschreibung (C.a) wurde der dialektische Sachverhalt herausgestellt, dass eine „Form von Verzweiflung,“ z. B. die Verzweiflung der Unendlichkeit, nur zu verstehen ist, indem man das Gegenteil einbezieht, die Endlichkeit, nämlich als das, was der Verzweiflung der  SKS 11, 146 / KT, 25.  Ibid.  Die Frage ist, ob es im Lichte von C.b nicht möglich ist zu zeigen, dass auch ein Prozess in C.a enthalten ist. Meine Pointe wäre, dass dieser Prozess eben erst im Rückblick von C.b beschrieben werden kann.

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Unendlichkeit fehlt.¹¹ Das dialektische Verhältnis macht sich nun auch in der bewußtseinstheoretischen Beschreibung bemerkbar, wenn auch anders als in der synthesetheoretischen: C.b beschreibt zwei Hauptgestalten der Verzweiflung, aber es zeigt sich, dass die eine nicht beschrieben werden kann, ohne dass man die andere einbezieht. Die eine Hauptgestalt hat etwas von der anderen in sich. In der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit verbirgt sich eine Form von Trotz, und in der Verzweiflung des Trotzes eine Form von Schwachheit. Aber im Unterschied zu C.a wird nun ein Prozess dargestellt – von Figuren oder Gestalten des Bewußtseins. Der Prozess bezeichnet eine Potenzierung der Verzweiflung, und das, was diese Steigerung bewirkt, ist der Grad an Bewußtsein.¹² Die Beschreibung dieses Prozesses ist in dem exponiert, was ich den „Vortext“ zur Krankheit zum Tode genannt habe. Es heißt hier, dass die Verzweiflung „ein Dreifaches“ sein kann.¹³ Insofern besteht eine direkte Verbindung vom Beginn (dem Vortext vor dem Auftakt in A.a) zur „eigentlichen“ Beschreibung der Gestalten der Verzweiflung in C.b. Die erste Gestalt des Prozesses ist das, was im Vortext „uneigentliche Verzweiflung“ genannt wird, wo man sich der Verzweiflung nicht bewußt ist. Das aber bedeutet, dass der Prozess mit einer Form von Verzweiflung beginnt, die aus dem Rahmen fällt, da ihr eben das fehlt, was Ausgangpunkt für die Beschreibung war, nämlich das Bewußtsein. Dieses Problem wird durch das unterstrichen, was in dem kleinen Auftakt in C gesagt wurde.

3 Unbewußte Verzweiflung? Dieser Auftakt vor C.a ließ uns in etwas festfahren, was man eine Aporie nennen könnte: Alle Verzweiflung ist dem Begriffe nach bewußt, und doch besteht der entscheidende Unterschied darin, ob die Verzweiflung bewußt ist oder nicht.¹⁴ Um diesen Unterschied geht es in dem Prozess, der in C.b beschrieben wird, wo es darum geht, zum Bewußtsein über seine eigene Verzweiflung zu gelangen. Wenn aber Verzweiflung als solche bewußt ist, wenn ihre Gestalten Gestalten des Bewußtseins sind, wie ist es dann möglich, von einer Verzweiflung zu reden, die nicht bewußt ist? Das entscheidende Problem ist der Begriff einer unbewußten Verzweiflung. In dem exponierenden „Vortext“ wurde diese erste Form der Verzweiflung, verzweifelt sich nicht bewußt zu sein, ein Selbst zu haben, „uneigentliche Verzweiflung“ genannt. Die Frage ist also: Ist eine unbewußte Ver   

SKS 11, 146 / KT, 26. SKS 11, 157 / KT, 39. SKS 11, 129 / KT, 8. SKS 11, 146 / KT, 25.

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zweiflung eigentlich Verzweiflung? Dies ist das erste Problem, das ich diskutieren möchte. Das Problem betrifft nicht nur den internen Zusammenhang in der Analyse der Gestalten der Verzweiflung, sondern auch die Sache selbst. Kann man verzweifelt sein, ohne sich dessen bewußt zu sein? Ist dies dann Verzweiflung? Wäre Verzweiflung dann nicht etwas, das einem lediglich widerfährt? Kierkegaard hat in einem Textabschnitt, der zwischen dem Auftakt des Anfangs und C liegt, betont, dass man nur in der Verzweiflung ist, indem man sie sich zuzieht.¹⁵ Aber wenn man die Verzweiflung nicht einmal merkt und sich nicht als verzweifelt erfährt, dann geschieht Verzweiflung lediglich. Kierkegaard gibt an, dass die Bewegung in C.b von dem „Minimum der Verzweiflung“ zum „Maximum der Verzweiflung“ verläuft. Das Minimum der Verzweiflung wird beschrieben als „ein Zustand, welcher (ja es dergestalt zu sagen könnte man menschlich versucht sein) in einer Art von Unschuld noch nicht einmal davon weiß, dass es Verzweiflung ist.“¹⁶ Die Frage ist, „ob man das Recht habe einen solchen Zustand Verzweiflung zu nennen.“¹⁷ Die Überschrift zu C.b.a macht nun deutlich, dass das Minimum der Verzweiflung die unbewußte Verzweiflung ist: die Verzweiflung, die sich dessen nicht bewußt ist, dass sie Verzweiflung ist. Dies ist jedoch nicht das erste Mal, dass die uneigentliche Verzweiflung in der Krankheit zum Tode auftritt. Der merkwürdige Abschnitt B, der zwischen dem Abschnitt A des Auftakts und dem Abschnitt C der Analyse eingeschoben ist, trägt die Überschrift: „Die Allgemeinheit dieser Krankheit (der Verzweiflung)“ und beginnt so (indem er das Bild vom Arzt aus dem Vorwort aufnimmt): „Gleich wie der Arzt wohl sagen muss, es lebe vielleicht kein einziger Mensch der ganz gesund ist, ebenso müsste man, wenn man den Menschen recht kennte, sagen, es lebe kein einziger Mensch, ohne dass er denn doch ein bißchen verzweifelt ist.“¹⁸ Diese Behauptung steht direkt der „gewöhnlichen Betrachtung der Verzweiflung“ entgegen, die annimmt, „ein jeder Mensch müsse es ja von sich selber am besten wissen, ob er verzweifelt sei oder nicht.“¹⁹ Es handelt sich also um zwei Betrachtungen, die einander entgegenstehen, die des Arztes oder des Seelenkundigen einerseits und die allgemeine oder „vulgäre“ andererseits. Die erste Betrachtungsweise verhält sich zu der zweiten, indem sie die Vorstellung von dem, was das Übliche ist, auf den Kopf

    

SKS 11, 132 / KT, 12. SKS 11, 157 / KT, 39. Ibid. SKS 11, 138 / KT, 18. Ibid.

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stellt: „Es ist nicht eine Seltenheit, dass einer verzweifelt ist; nein, das ist das Seltene, das gar Seltene, dass einer in Wahrheit es nicht ist.“²⁰ Die Frage wird also so gewendet, dass das Problem darin besteht, der Verzweiflung zu entgehen. Diese Umkehr der üblichen Betrachtungsweise verlangt eine nähere Begründung, die zeigen muss, was diese übliche Betrachtung übersieht. Die gewöhnliche Betrachtung „übersieht ganz, dass es gerade eine Form von Verzweiflung ist es nicht zu sein, nicht sich dessen bewußt zu sein, dass man es ist.“²¹ Aber dies ist wiederum eine Behauptung, die einer Begründung bedarf. Scheinbar ist es möglich, ein Argument für diese Behauptung dem unmittelbar entgegengesetzten Phänomen zu entnehmen, dass ein Mensch „Verzweiflung vorgeben kann.“ Er spielt Verzweiflung, indem er sich als verzweifelt ausgibt, es aber nicht ist. Was er über sich selbst sagt, darf also nicht ernst genommen werden. Wenn die Verzweiflung gespielt ist, ist sie ja nicht echt. Aber Kierkegaard will mit dem Hinweis auf die gespielte Verzweiflung nicht nur begründen, dass der Seelenkundige hinter das zurückgeht, was ein Mensch über sich selbst sagt. Kierkegaard geht einen Schritt weiter und mißt eben dem Umstand Bedeutung bei, dass ein Mensch „affektiert“ sagt, er sei verzweifelt. Er bemerkt, „eben diese Affektiertheit ist Verzweiflung.“ Dies wird so erklärt, dass ein Zustand, eine Verstimmtheit, die vorgetäuscht wird, nicht viel zu bedeuten hat, aber „eben dies, dass sie nichts Großes zu bedeuten hat und haben wird, ist Verzweiflung.“²² Dass sich die Sichtweise verändert, wird durch das wiederholte „eben“ angegeben. Kierkegaard hatte behauptet, es sei „eben“ eine Form von Verzweiflung, sich dessen nicht bewußt zu sein, dass man es ist. Hierin liegt jedoch, dass man verzweifelt ist, sich dessen nur nicht bewußt ist. Die Behauptung lief aber auch darauf hinaus, dass es „eben“ eine Form von Verzweiflung sei, „es nicht zu sein.“²³ Was hat das zu bedeuten? Die einzige Art und Weise, diese Behauptung zu rechtfertigen, scheint darin zu bestehen, einen Maßstab von außen einzuführen. Dass die Analyse der Verzweiflung einen Maßstab verwendet, geht aus der parenthetischen Bemerkung hervor: „Wenn man von Verzweiflung reden will, muss man den Menschen unter der Bestimmung Geist betrachten.“²⁴ Kierkegaard behauptet deshalb: „Verzweiflung ist eben, dass der Mensch sich dessen nicht bewußt ist als Geist bestimmt zu sein.“²⁵ Das heißt, dass man so hinlebt, dass man

     

SKS 11, 139 / KT, 19. Ibid. SKS 11, 140 / KT, 20. SKS 11, 139 / KT, 19. SKS 11, 141 / KT, 21. Ibid.

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sich nicht „bewußt würde als Geist, als Selbst.“²⁶ Verzweiflung ist eben dies, sich nicht dessen bewußt zu sein, ein Selbst zu haben (wie es in der Formel des Vortexts für die uneigentliche Verzweiflung hieß). Dies wiederholt jedoch lediglich das Problem. Wie ist das, sich nicht dessen bewußt zu sein, ein Selbst zu haben, Verzweiflung? Da alle Verzweiflung dem Begriffe nach bewußt ist, scheint die unbewußte Verzweiflung eine Verzweiflung vor der Verzweiflung oder ohne Verzweiflung zu sein. Wie kann dies, sich nicht dessen bewußt zu sein, als Geist bestimmt zu sein, eben Verzweiflung sein, wenn Verzweiflung eine „Bestimmung des Geistes“ ist?²⁷ Soll dennoch von Verzweiflung die Rede sein, scheint dies zu erfordern, dass wir bzw. der Seelenkundige selbst mit dem Maßstab kommen: der Bestimmung Geist. Dass es sich um Verzweiflung handelt, obwohl sich der Verzweifelte dessen nicht bewußt ist, verzweifelt zu sein, scheint eine rechthaberische Behauptung von außen zu sein.²⁸ Aber wenn es eine Behauptung von außen ist, welche Wirklichkeit hat dann die Bestimmung Geist? Kierkegaard diskutiert dieses Problem nicht eigentlich, aber es gibt verschiedene Angaben in seinem Text, derer wir uns bedienen können. Ich möchte dem folgenden Umstand entscheidende Bedeutung zumessen: Die Bestimmung Geist erweist ihre Wirklichkeit darin, dass auch der, der nicht verzweifelt ist oder sich nicht bewußt ist, es zu sein, sich dennoch zu sich selbst verhält. Das zeigt sich gerade in der Weise, in der sich die übliche Betrachtung äußert: „Sie nimmt an, ein jeder Mensch müsse es von sich selber am besten wissen, ob er verzweifelt ist oder nicht. Wer da von sich selber sagt, er sei es, der wird für verzweifelt angesehen; wer aber meint, er sei es nicht, der wird auch nicht dafür angesehen.“²⁹ Der Mensch, der unter der Bestimmung Geist betrachtet werden soll, verhält sich bereits zu sich selbst: Er „meint von sich selbst,“ nicht verzweifelt zu sein, er „sagt von sich selbst,“ es nicht zu sein. Meine Pointe ist, dass das Minimum an Verzweiflung, mit dem Kierkegaard beginnen möchte, eine Figur oder Gestalt ist, die bereits spricht und von sich selbst spricht: Sie sagt „von sich,“ von Verzweiflung frei zu sein. Insofern brauchen wir nicht erst mit dem Maßstab von außen zu kommen, dass ein Mensch als solcher Geist ist.Wir brauchen die Figur nicht erst zum Reden zu bringen, sie redet

 SKS 11, 142 / KT, 23.  SKS 11, 139 – 140 / KT, 19 – 20.  Kierkegaard fragt, wie erwähnt, selbst, ob man das Recht hat, einen Zustand Verzweiflung zu nennen, der nichts davon weiß, Verzweiflung zu sein. Er antwortet: „Dass dieser Zustand gleichwohl Verzweiflung ist und mit Recht so genannt wird, ist Ausdruck für das, was im guten Sinne des Wortes die Rechthaberei der Wahrheit heißen muss“ (SKS 11, 157 / KT, 40).  SKS 11, 139 / KT, 18 – 19.

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bereits selbst. Womit wir es als Betrachter zu tun haben, ist eine Gestalt, die bereits etwas von sich selbst behauptet, mit anderen Worten ein Selbstbewußtsein. Was soll die Betrachtung der Gestalt nun tun? Sie soll zeigen, dass das Verständnis, das die Gestalt von sich selbst hat, nicht haltbar ist, und sie soll dies an dem zeigen, was die Gestalt selbst zu erkennen gibt. Soweit ich sehen kann, ist dies auch die Pointe in Kierkegaards Text. Sie ist zwar nicht ganz deutlich: „Es gelingt darum wohl auch nicht durch das Leben hindurchzuschlüpfen mit dieser Unmittelbarkeit. Und gelingt es diesem Glücke hindurchzuschlüpfen, ja, das hilft nur wenig, denn es ist Verzweiflung.“³⁰ Die letzte Behauptung (dass es sich um Verzweiflung handelt, selbst wenn man davon nicht gezeichnet ist) scheint wiederum zu erfordern, dass ein Maßstab von außen eingeführt wird. Dennoch scheint die Pointe die zu sein, dass sich die Unmittelbarkeit selbst verrät. Das geht vor allem aus der bemerkenswerten Rolle hervor, die die Angst gerade in dem Abschnitt über die Allgemeinheit der Verzweiflung spielt. Dieser Zwischenabschnitt (B), den ich als einen Abschnitt über die unbewußte Verzweiflung zu lesen versucht habe, beginnt, wie bereits zitiert, mit der Behauptung: Wenn man den Menschen recht kennen würde, müsste man sagen, „es lebe kein einziger Mensch, ohne dass er denn doch ein bißchen verzweifelt ist.“ Die Fortsetzung lautet so: „ohne dass da doch tief im Innersten eine Unruhe wohne, ein Unfriede, eine Disharmonie, eine Angst vor einem unbekannten Etwas, oder vor einem Etwas, mit dem er nicht einmal sich getraut, Bekanntschaft zu schließen, eine Angst vor einer Daseinsmöglichkeit oder eine Angst vor sich selber.“³¹ Später in B wird hinzugefügt: „Alle Unmittelbarkeit ist ihrer eingebildeteten Sicherheit und Ruhe zum Trotz Angst.“³² Auch wenn kategorisch von „aller“ Unmittelbarkeit die Rede ist, muss man fragen, was das für eine Unmittelbarkeit ist, die hier im Zusammenhang mit der Allgemeinheit der Verzweiflung auftritt. Die Unmittelbarkeit wird hier eingeführt, weil sie vor allem ohne Verzweiflung sein müsste. Die unausgesprochene Frage ist, wie dies möglich ist. Die Antwort scheint in der etwas unmotivierten Hinzufügung zu liegen: „ihre eingebildete Sicherheit und Ruhe.“ Die Unmittelbarkeit ist mit ihrer Sicherheit und Ruhe ohne Verzweiflung. Es handelt sich also um eine Unmittelbarkeit, die Sicherheit und Ruhe besitzt. Die Verbindung zwischen Angst und Sicherheit besteht nun nicht nur darin, dass die Angst zeigt, dass die Sicherheit eingebildet ist, oder dass die Angst trotz der eingebildeten Sicherheit in der Unmittelbarkeit ist. In der Sicherheit sieht Kierkegaard den Umstand, dass

 SKS 11, 142 / KT, 22.  SKS 11, 138 / KT, 18.  SKS 11, 141 / KT, 22.

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man sich sichert – eben gegen die Unruhe und Angst. Er kann deshalb die Angst in der Sicherheit oder besser im Drang nach Sicherheit aufspüren. Die Unmittelbarkeit, von der die Rede ist, enthält eine Vorstellung von sich selbst, indem sie sich selbst durch Sicherheit zu bestätigen versucht. Aber das bedeutet, dass die Unmittelbarkeit gegen sich selbst gewendet werden muss. Sie ist nicht das, was sie zu sein meint, und sie zeigt dies selbst, indem sie sich selbst zu sichern sucht. Dass die Sicherheit, von der die Rede ist, eine behauptete oder sogenannte Sicherheit ist, geht aus dem folgenden Passus hervor, wo noch einmal herausgestellt wird, was „eben“ Verzweiflung ist: „Indes es ist, darin wird mir der Seelenkundige wohl Recht geben, es ist das Allgemeine, dass die meisten Menschen dahinleben ohne sich so recht dessen bewußt zu werden dass sie bestimmt sind als Geist – und daher denn alle die sogenannte Sicherheit, Zufriedenheit mit dem Leben usw., usw., welches eben Verzweiflung ist.“³³ Die sogenannte Sicherheit wird also darauf zurückgeführt, dass man lebt, ohne sich recht bewußt zu sein, als Geist bestimmt zu sein. Ich deute dies so, dass die Bestimmung Geist ihre Wirklichkeit negativ in der sogenannten Sicherheit usw. erweist. Es handelt sich um ein Selbstverhältnis, dem man nicht entweichen kann: Man sucht sich gegen die Angst zu sichern. Wenn man sich nicht selbst als Geist oder Selbst versteht, muss man sich in einer anderen Weise haben: als Sicherheit. Die Frage war, ob denn uneigentliche Verzweiflung – eine Verzweiflung, von der der Verzweifelte selbst nichts weiß – eigentlich Verzweiflung ist. Diese Frage hat sich nun verschoben, indem die Unwissenheit, von der hier die Rede sein sollte, in Verdacht geraten ist. In der verzweifelten Unwissenheit darüber, ein Selbst zu sein, verhält man sich zu sich selbst. In einem gewissen Sinne macht man sich unwissend. Dass sich in der Unwissenheit ein Wille zur Unwissenheit verbirgt, gibt Kierkegaard selbst an: „In aller Dunkelheit und Unwissenheit ist da nämlich ein dialektisches Zusammenspiel von Erkenntnis und Wille.“³⁴ Dies wird zwar am Anfang des Abschnitts über die bewußte Verzweiflung gesagt, aber unter Hinweis zurück auf die unbewußte Verzweiflung. Der zentrale Passus lautet so: „Das wirkliche Leben ist zu mannigfaltig, als dass es nur solche abstrakten Gegensätze zeigte, wie den zwischen einer Verzweiflung, die vollkommen unwissend darüber ist dass sie es ist, und einer Verzweiflung, die vollkommen dessen sich bewußt ist es zu sein. Allermeist ist sicherlich der Zustand des Verzweifelten ein, jedoch wiederum mannigfach abgetöntes, Halbdunkel hinsichtlich des eigenen Zustandes. Der Mensch weiß es allerdings soso in einem gewissen Maße bei sich

 SKS 11, 142 / KT, 23; Hervorhebung von mir.  SKS 11, 163 / KT, 46.

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selbst, dass er verzweifelt ist, er merkt es sich selber an, so wie einer es sich selber anmerkt, dass er eine Krankheit im Leibe sitzen hat, aber er will nicht recht zugeben, was es mit der Krankheit ist.“³⁵ Der Verzweifelte kann „durch Zerstreuungen und auf andre Weise, z. B. durch Arbeit und Geschäftigkeit als Mittel der Zerstreuung“ versuchen, „bei sich selbst eine Dunkelheit aufrecht zu erhalten über seinen Zustand.“³⁶ Der Verzweifelte kann sich also unwissend machen – über seinen eigenen Zustand. Deshalb hat der Seelenkundige wie der Arzt „nicht unbedingt Zutrauen zu der eigenen Aussage des Menschen über sein Befinden.“³⁷ Der Unterschied zwischen dem, eine Krankheit im Körper zu tragen, und an einer Krankheit des Geistes zu tragen, besteht darin, dass man die letztere Krankheit kennen sollte, da sie ja gerade das Selbstverhältnis betrifft. Die intuitive Einsicht, dass man nicht verzweifelt sein kann, ohne sich seiner Verzweiflung bewußt zu sein, würde Kierkegaard insofern bestätigen, würde aber hinzufügen, dass das Merkwürdige darin besteht, dass man dennoch darüber in Unwissenheit sein kann, dass man verzweifelt ist. Der Allgemeinheit der Verzweiflung entspricht ihre Verborgenheit, und dies zeigt den Charakter der Krankheit: dass es sich um eine Krankheit im Selbstverhältnis handelt. Sie ist dies so radikal, dass der Verzweifelte kraft des Selbstverhältnisses die Krankheit vor sich selbst verbergen kann. Dies wird am Ende von B (dem Abschnitt über die Allgemeinheit der Verzweiflung) gesagt, wo betont wird, dass das besondere (hinzukommende) Elend eintreffen kann, dass die Krankheit „so tief in einem Menschen versteckt sein kann, dass er nicht einmal selber etwas davon weiß.“³⁸ Diese Möglichkeit ist „ein grauenhafter Ausdruck mehr für diese Krankheit.“³⁹ Oder wie es später heißt, die Unwissenheit über die Verzweiflung ist „eine neue Negativität.“⁴⁰ All dies bedeutet, dass die unbewußte Verzweiflung keine minimale Verzweiflung ist, die eine einfache Anfangsfigur darstellen würde, gar vor dem eigentlichen Beginn. Sie ist vielmehr eine komplizierte und gefährliche Möglichkeit: der Versuch, sich nicht als Geist zu verstehen. Das wird nun dadurch unterstrichen, dass Geistlosigkeit in die unbewußte Verzweiflung eingelesen wird. Bisher habe ich mich in erster Linie auf den Abschnitt B über die Allgemeinheit der Verzweiflung bezogen. Wenn wir zum ersten Unterabschnitt in C.b gehen, der explizit von der unbewußten Verzweiflung

     

Ibid. Ibid. SKS 11, 139 / KT, 19. SKS 11, 143 / KT, 24. SKS 11, 143 / KT, 23; Hervorhebung von mir. SKS 11, 159 / KT, 41; Hervorhebung von mir.

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handelt, wird die Frage nach der Unwissenheit wieder aufgenommen. Es heißt: „Es ist mit der Unwissenheit im Verhältnis zur Verzweiflung wie mit im Verhältnis zu Angst (vgl. Der Begriff Angst von Vigilius Haufniensis), die Angst der Geistlosigkeit wird eben an der geistlosen Sicherheit erkannt.“⁴¹ Etwas später wird die „Unwissenheit (des Menschen) darüber, dass er verzweifelt ist,“ mit der Geistlosigkeit identifiziert.⁴² In dieser Unwissenheit ist der Verzweifelte „gewissermaßen davor sicher aufmerksam zu werden.“⁴³ Aber dies ist der Verzweifelte nur durch das, was er selbst tut: sich sichern, wodurch er an der Unwissenheit festhält. Darüber unwissend zu sein, dass man verzweifelt ist, ist also eine hervorgebrachte Unwissenheit.

4 Der Prozess Auch wenn die unbewußte Verzweiflung eine komplexe Figur ist, wird sie außerhalb des Prozesses von Bewußtseinsgestalten angesiedelt, der in C.b beschrieben wird. Soweit ich sehen kann, ist der Grund dafür der, dass sie sich von Verzweiflung frei wähnt. Die Gestalten, die in dem Prozess geschildert werden, sagen dagegen alle von sich selbst, dass sie Verzweiflung sind. Die Abfolge von Bewußtseinsgestalten, die Kierkegaard in C.b beschreibt, verdiente eine detaillierte Analyse. Eine solche vermag ich hier nicht zu geben, ich will aber statt dessen einige methodische Knotenpunkte in der Abfolge aufzeigen. Der exponierende „Vortext“ unterscheidet zwischen zwei Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung: verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen und verzweifelt man selbst sein zu wollen.⁴⁴ In der vorläufigen Darlegung in A geschieht eine doppelte Rückführung, die erste Form der Verzweiflung wird auf die zweite zurückgeführt,⁴⁵ und die zweite wird auf die erste zurückgeführt.⁴⁶ In beiden Fällen will man sich verzweifelt „loswerden.“⁴⁷ Das wird nun in C.b entfaltet, wo die beiden Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung als Verzweiflung der Schwachheit (verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein wollen) bzw. Verzweiflung des Trotzes (verzweifelt man selbst sein wollen) beschrieben werden.

      

SKS 11, 159 / KT, 41. SKS 11, 159 / KT, 42. Ibid. SKS 11, 129 / KT, 9. SKS 11, 130 / KT, 10. SKS 11, 135 / KT, 16. Ibid.

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Innerhalb von jeder der beiden Hauptformen (eigentlicher) Verzweiflung gibt es eine Abfolge von Gestalten. Sehen wir zunächst auf das, was nach der Überschrift „Verzweiflung der Schwachheit“ ist. Innerhalb der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit wird unterschieden zwischen der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit und der Verzweiflung über seine Schwachheit, oder richtiger zwischen der Verzweiflung, die bloß die der Schwachheit ist, und dann der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit, die auch Verzweiflung über ihre Schwachheit ist.⁴⁸ Der Unterschied ist deutlich ein Unterschied im Bewußtsein, aber wohlgemerkt so, dass die spätere Gestalt in bezug auf die erste reflektiert ist und wohl eigentlich auch auf die erste reflektiert. Aber auch innerhalb der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit im engeren Sinne ist von einer Steigerung die Rede. Die erste Figur ist die Verzweiflung der Unmittelbarkeit. Sie ist dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass die Verzweiflung hier „ein bloßes Erleiden ist, ein dem Druck der Äußerlichkeit Unterliegen, sie kommt auf keinerlei Weise von innen her als Handlung.“⁴⁹ Etwas widerfährt einem, stößt einem zu und bringt einen zur Verzweiflung. Diese Figur scheint jedoch genauso problematisch zu sein wie die unbewußte Verzweiflung. Man kann fragen, ob sie als Verzweiflung der Unmittelbarkeit überhaupt Verzweiflung ist. Als verzweifelt ist man sich selbst zugewandt, aber in der „reinen“ Unmittelbarkeit hat das Selbst keine Reflexion in sich.⁵⁰ Kierkegaard deutet selbst an, dass die reine Unmittelbarkeit eine Konstruktion ist. So wie er kurz zuvor darauf verwies, dass das Leben der Wirklichkeit zu mannigfaltig ist, um solche abstrakten Gegensätze wie den zwischen einer vollkommen unbewußten und einer vollkommen bewußten Verzweiflung aufzuweisen, macht er in einer eingeschobenen Parenthese den Vorbehalt: „soweit denn in der Wirklichkeit Unmittelbarkeit ganz ohne alle Reflexion vorkommen kann.“⁵¹ Der Ausgangspunkt für die Beschreibung der Gestalt ist denn auch an anderer Stelle zu suchen. Er ist mit dem Umstand gegeben, dass „der Unmittelbare“ sich verzweifelt nennt,⁵² während der unbewußt Verzweifelte sagt, nicht verzweifelt zu sein. Aber auch wenn der Unmittelbare sich verzweifelt nennt, handelt es sich um eine „absonderliche Verkehrtheit“ und eine „vollkommene Mystifikation.“ Der Unmittelbare ist selbst verkehrt und mystifiziert sich selbst. Die Verzweiflung vollzieht sich

    

SKS 11, 176 / KT, 60. SKS 11, 165 / KT, 48. SKS 11, 165 / KT, 49. Ibid. SKS 11, 167 / KT, 50.

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„hinter seinem Rücken, ohne sein Wissen“.⁵³ Diese verkehrte Stellung wird später kurz so erklärt: Aber der Verzweifelte, so wie er im Vorhergenden dargestellt worden, ist nicht darauf aufmerksam gewesen, was da, sozusagen, hinter seinem Rücken geschieht; er vermeint über etwas Irdisches zu verzweifeln und spricht immerzu davon, worüber es sei, dass er verzweifle, und doch verzweifelt er am Ewigen; denn dies, dass er dem Irdischen so großen Wert beilegt…heißt ja eben am Ewigen verzweifeln.⁵⁴

Was tut Kierkegaard hier? Mit seiner Betrachtung führt er einen Maßstab ein: Verzweiflung ist eigentlich, „das Ewige und sich selbst verloren haben.“⁵⁵ Aber er tut mehr als dies. Er wendet die Figur, die Verzweiflung der Unmittelbarkeit, gegen sich selbst. Es besteht ein Widerspruch zwischen dem, was die Figur zu tun meint (über etwas Irdisches zu verzweifeln), und dem, was sie mit dem tut, was sie sagt (am Ewigen verzweifelt). Die Figur, die sich nach rückwärts umgedreht hat, wird also umgekehrt in die richtige Richtung. Die Frage ist, ob diese Rückwendung und Rückbeugung der Figur an sich selbst nur für uns stattfindet, die wir die Figur betrachten. Entscheidend ist, dass die Figur von sich selbst spricht: sie nennt sich verzweifelt. Die Betrachtung greift das auf, was die Figur von sich selbst sagt: Indem sie sich verzweifelt nennt, mißt sie ihrem Verlust so entscheidende Bedeutung bei, dass sie selbst den Verlust zu einem Verlust des Ewigen und des Selbst macht. Die Rückführung der Figur, die der Betrachter vornahm, geht nun auf die nächste Figur über. Der erste weitere Schritt ist die Unmittelbarkeit, die nicht mehr „rein“ ist, sondern „ein gewisses Maß von Besinnung auf das eigene Selbst“ enthält.⁵⁶ In dieser Reflexion in sich stößt der Unmittelbare vielleicht auf „die eine oder andere Schwierigkeit in der Zusammensetzung des Selbst.“⁵⁷ Das heißt, dass die Verzweiflung nicht mehr nur von außen kommt. Der entscheidende Schritt besteht jedoch darin, dass das Selbst mit der „Ganzheitsbestimmung“ das Irdische den wirklichen Verlust unendlich vermehrt.⁵⁸ Die nebengeordneten Glieder in der Überschrift: „Verzweiflung über das Irdische oder über etwas Irdisches“ zeigen in Wirklichkeit eine Bewegung an, eine Totalisierung oder Verunendlichung des Verlusts.⁵⁹ Diese Formel „verzweifeln

      

Ibid. SKS 11, 175 – 176 / KT, 60. SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61. SKS 11, 169 / KT, 53. Ibid. SKS 11, 174– 175 / KT, 59 – 60. SKS 11, 165 / KT, 48.

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über das Irdische“ ist also ein erster dialektischer Ausdruck für die nächstfolgende Form von Verzweiflung,“ nämlich „die Verzweiflung am Ewigen oder über sich selbst.“⁶⁰ Hierin ist bereits inbegriffen, dass Verzweiflung am Ewigen eine andere Form von Verzweiflung bedeutet. Wir befinden uns zwar noch immer innerhalb der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit, jetzt aber als Verzweiflung über seine Schwachheit. Das Bewußtsein „potenziert“ sich „zu einem neuen Bewußtsein, dem von seiner Schwachheit.“⁶¹ Man wird sich seiner Verzweiflung bewußt, dass sie Schwachheit ist. Die Einsicht in die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit (dass es Schwachheit ist, über das Irdische zu verzweifeln) eröffnet die Möglichkeit, „richtig abzubiegen von der Verzweiflung fort und zum Glauben hin.“⁶² Aber statt dessen hält man sich selbst in der Verzweiflung fest, indem man sich nicht zu seiner Schwachheit bekennen will. Man will sich nicht zu sich selbst bekennen, aber wird sich selbst eben nicht los. Dies schlägt um in ein zweideutiges Selbstverhältnis: Man „haßt gewissermaßen sich selber,“⁶³ man will sich nicht zu seiner Schwachheit bekennen, aber dies deshalb, weil man „Selbst genug ist um sich selber zu lieben“⁶⁴ – man ist in gewisser Weise zu stolz, sich zu seiner Schwachheit zu bekennen. Diese Zweideutigkeit ist Verschlossenheit. Und – bemerkt Kierkegaard – „von jetzt ab kommen wir dazu, von Verschlossenheit zu handeln, welche das gerade Gegenteil zu Unmittelbarkeit ist.“⁶⁵ Hiermit zeichnet sich die zweite Hauptgestalt ab, die Verzweiflung des Trotzes, verzweifelt man selbst sein zu wollen. Die Potenzierung der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit bedeutet eine Steigerung des Bewußtseins: von seiner Verzweiflung und damit von sich selbst. Der Trotz oder die Selbstbehauptung, die dennoch in der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit verborgen lag, kommt in der Weise zum Vorschein, dass die letzte Figur, die Verzweiflung der Verschlossenheit, eigentlich die Verzweiflung des Trotzes ist. Oder besser, die Verzweiflung des Trotzes erfordert ein Bewußtsein davon, warum man nicht man selber sein will, sei erfordert m.a.W. ein Bewußtsein von dem, was man dann will.⁶⁶ Man will man selbst sein, aber man will es verzweifelt: Man will das Selbst, über das man selber verfügt – und will dann nicht man selbst sein als der, der man schon ist. Insofern kann auch die

      

SKS 11, 175 / KT, 60. SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61. Ibid. SKS 11, 177 / KT, 62. Ibid. SKS 11, 177 / KT, 62– 63. SKS 11, 181 / KT, 67.

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andere Formel: verzweifelt man selbst sein wollen, auf die erste zurückgeführt werden: verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen. Die Verzweiflung der Verschlossenheit ist wie erwähnt ein zweideutiges Selbstverhältnis, da man nicht man selbst sein will und dennoch sich Selbst genug ist, um sich selbst zu lieben. In der steigenden Bewegung potenziert sich diese Zweideutigkeit: man selbst sein zu wollen und doch nicht man selbst sein zu wollen. In der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit ist die Zweideutigkeit kaum da: Man will nicht man selbst sein, aber es wird nicht deutlich, wie man sich dann statt dessen will. In der Verzweiflung des Trotzes will man deutlich sich selbst, aber um nicht man selbst sein zu wollen. Diese Zweideutigkeit potenziert sich in der dämonischen Verzweiflung, die „die am höchsten potenzierte Form der Verzweiflung, welche verzweifelt sie selbst sein will,“ ist.⁶⁷ In der dämonischen Verzweiflung hält man an der Verzweiflung fest, man hält sie „in der Verschlossenheit…verschlossen.“⁶⁸ Wir wollen nun einen Schritt zurücktreten und die Passage von der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit zu der des Trotzes als einen Gesamtprozess sehen. Welche Bedeutung hat dieser Prozess? Wenn wir in der einleitenden Darlegung (A) hörten, dass die beiden Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung sich aufeinander zurückführen lassen, so hatte es den Anschein, die beiden Formen seien gleichberechtigt. In C.b wird jedoch ein Prozess beschrieben, der von der einen, der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit, zu der anderen, der des Trotzes führt. Der Prozess hat also die Pointe, dass die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit durch die des Trotzes abgelöst wird. Zunächst müssen wir fragen, was es bedeutet, dass Kierkegaard die beiden Formen eigentlicher Verzweiflung – verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen und verzweifelt man selbst sein zu wollen – auf die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit bzw. des Trotzes zurückführt. Nach Kierkegaards eigenen Angaben schreibt er die Formen der Verzweiflung in einen Gegensatz zwischen Leiden und Handeln ein. Er beschreibt scheinbar einen Prozess, der mit der Verzweiflung als einem „bloßen Erleiden“ beginnt, der aber immer deutlicher die Verzweiflung als ein Handeln aufdeckt.⁶⁹ Dies wird mit einem anderen Gegensatz kombiniert, nämlich der Frage, ob die Verzweiflung von außen oder von innen kommt. Die Verzweiflung der Unmittelbarkeit ist ein reines Leiden, da sie in keiner Weise „von innen her als

 SKS 11, 187 / KT, 74.  SKS 11, 186 / KT, 73.  SKS 11, 165 / KT, 48.

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Handlung“ kommt.⁷⁰ Der Prozess zeigt dann, dass Verzweiflung eigentlich von innen kommt, als Handlung. So gedeutet ist der Prozess, in dem die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit durch die des Trotzes abgelöst wird, eine Bewegung von einer leidenden Verzweiflung, die von außen kommt, zu einer handelnden Verzweiflung, die von innen kommt. Dieser Prozess zeigt zugleich, was Verzweiflung eigentlich ist, da sie „immer“ von innen kommt.⁷¹ Das bedeutet, dass der Trotz durch diesen Prozess sich als die primäre Form der Verzweiflung erweist. Das, was sich zunächst als gleichberechtigte Formen von Verzweiflung ausnahm, stellt zusammen einen Prozess dar, in dem die erste Verzweiflung in die zweite umschlägt. Die Verzweiflung des Trotzes ist das Primäre, indem sie zeigt, was es heißt zu verzweifeln. Die Auslegung, die ich hier angedeutet habe, scheint Sinn zu machen. Der beschriebene Prozess wird einigermaßen eindeutig, indem er von der leidenden Verzweiflung, die von außen entsteht, zu einer handelnden Verzweiflung übergeht, die von innen kommt. Ist diese Deutung aber haltbar? Zunächst ist festzustellen, dass der Prozess nicht ohne weiteres von der leidenden zur handelnden Verzweiflung verläuft. Teils stellt Kierkegaard selbst in Frage, ob es eine solche bloß leidende Verzweiflung gibt, mit der der Prozess beginnen soll, teils endet der Prozess nicht bloß in einer handelnden Verzweiflung; vielmehr wird das Moment des Leidens in der dämonischen Verzweiflung intensiviert. Es leuchtet auch nicht ein, warum eine leidende Verzweiflung von außen kommen soll und eine handelnde von innen. Wenn ein Mensch über sich selbst verzweifelt, leidet er an oder unter sich selbst; vielleicht ist es leichter, sich dem zu widersetzen, was einem von außen zustößt. Wie ist der Prozess von der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit zu der des Trotzes dann zu verstehen? Kierkegaard mißt dem Prozess die entscheidende Bedeutung bei, dass sich im Verlaufe zeigt, was Verzweiflung ist. Dies geschieht dadurch, dass noch ein Unterschied in die Beschreibung des Prozesses eingebaut wird, nämlich der Unterschied zwischen dem, über etwas Irdisches zu verzweifeln und über das Irdische zu verzweifeln, und dann zwischen diesen und dem, am Ewigen oder über sich selbst zu verzweifeln. Dieser Unterschied ist entscheidend, wenn man verstehen will, was Verzweiflung ist. Mitten in dem Prozess heißt es: „Verzweiflung ist, ganz richtig, das Ewige und sich selbst verloren haben.“⁷² Dies verleiht dem Prozess einen bemerkenswerten Charakter. Es wird nicht nur ein Prozess der Gestalten der Verzweiflung nachgezeichnet. Im Verlauf selbst

 Ibid.  SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61.  Ibid.

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wird „Schein“ aufgedeckt, indem es sich zeigt, dass das, was sich zunächst als Verzweiflung ausnahm, eigentlich keine Verzweiflung ist. Durch den Prozess sind wir zu einem Kriterium dafür gelangt, wann wir von Verzweiflung im eigentlichen Sinne sprechen können. Sowohl in der vorläufigen Bestimmung als auch in der Beschreibung des Prozesses, den die Gestalten der Verzweiflung ausmachen, sucht Kierkegaard nach dem, was „eigentlich“ Verzweiflung ist. Er scheidet nicht nur eine uneigentliche Verzweiflung aus. Innerhalb dessen, was demgegenüber „eigentliche“ Verzweiflung ausmachen sollte, gibt es Formen von Verzweiflung, denen scheinbar ihr Status als eigentliche Verzweiflung aberkannt wird. Sie enthalten zwar ein Bewußtsein, verzweifelt zu sein, aber dieses Selbstbewußtsein erweist sich dennoch nicht als haltbar. Es verhält sich jedoch nicht so einfach, dass diese unmittelbaren Formen von Verzweiflung sich nur in Schein auflösten. Denn die Verzweiflung der Unmittelbarkeit ist dennoch Verzweiflung. Dies ist nicht etwas, was Kierkegaard nur von außen behauptet. Der Mensch, der unmittelbar daran verzweifelt, dass ihm etwas zustößt, nennt sich selbst verzweifelt. Aber er versteht nicht, worin seine Verzweiflung besteht oder was sie bedeutet. Nicht seine Verzweiflung, sondern seine Auffassung von sich selbst wird in Schein aufgelöst. Das bedeutet nun, kurz gesagt, dass Kierkegaard dem Prozess der Gestalten der Verzweiflung zwei unterschiedliche Bedeutungen beimißt, die nicht zusammenhängen müssen. Erstens besteht der Prozess darin, dass die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit in die des Trotzes übergeht. Zweitens deckt der Prozess auf, was Verzweiflung ist; der Prozess bedeutet einen „Fortschritt“ im Bewußtsein davon, was Verzweiflung ist. Scheinbar schlägt Kierkegaard die beiden Bedeutungen zusammen: Wenn die Verzweiflung immer deutlicher sich als Trotz erweist, wird zugleich aufgedeckt, was Verzweiflung heißt. Aber dass kein eindeutiger Zusammenhang zwischen den beiden Bedeutungen des Prozesses (dass er in Trotz endet, und dass er aufdeckt, was Verzweiflung ist) besteht, geht aus Kierkegaards eigenem Text hervor. Der entscheidende Unterschied zwischen Verzweiflung über etwas Irdisches oder das Irdische und Verzweiflung am Ewigen oder über sich selbst wird in die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit gelegt. In der Bewegung von der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit im engeren Sinne zu der Verzweiflung über die Schwachheit macht sich der Unterschied bemerkbar. Es ist wichtig, zwischen den beiden Bedeutungen des beschriebenen Prozesses zu unterscheiden.Während gefordert ist, dass der, der verzweifelt, selbst zu der Einsicht gelangt, was Verzweiflung ist, um er selbst zu werden, bedeutet der Schritt weiter zur Verzweiflung des Trotzes, dass man noch intensiver diese Aufgabe verfehlt. Dieser Schritt weiter ist nicht notwendig, um zum Bewußtsein über die Verzweiflung zu gelangen; Kierkegaard hebt vielmehr hervor, dass es in der Verzweiflung über die eigene Schwachheit möglich sei, hin zum Glauben „ab-

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zubiegen.“⁷³ Dass dies nicht geschieht, gibt der Verfehlung des Trotzes seine charakteristische Intensität.

5 Eine negative Phänomenologie? Im Vorhergehenden habe ich oft, aber indirekt auf die Ähnlichkeit zu Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes angespielt. Ich möchte nun abschließend versuchen, die Ähnlichkeit – und den Unterschied zu verdeutlichen. Was Kierkegaard selbst „Gestalten“ der Verzweiflung nennt, sind Gestalten des Bewußtseins. In symptomatischer Weise tritt die Verzweiflung zuweilen als Subjekt auf.⁷⁴ Die Gestalt ist eine Weise, die Welt zu verstehen, zugleich ist sie eine Weise, sich darin selbst zu verstehen. Das telos des Prozesses ist, dass die Verzweiflung zum Bewußtsein ihrer selbst gelangt: dass sie Verzweiflung ist, und was es heißt, zu verzweifeln. Das, was den Prozess ergibt, ist dies, dass die Gestalt sich nicht selbst versteht. Es besteht ein Mißverhältnis zwischen dem, was sie über sich selbst sagt, und dem, was sie selbst zeigt. Dieses Mißverhältnis macht sich vor allem zu Anfang bemerkbar, wo es sich besonders lohnt, Ähnlichkeiten mit Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes zu beachten. In gewisser Weise handelt es sich um einen doppelten Anfang in der Beschreibung der Gestalten der Verzweiflung, erst die unbewußte Verzweiflung, danach die Verzweiflung der reinen Unmittelbarkeit. Schon diese scheinbare Verdoppelung des Anfangs bereitet große Verständnisprobleme. Ich möchte behaupten, dass es in beiden Fällen entscheidend ist zu sehen, dass der Gegenstand der Kierkegaardschen Beschreibung eine Gestalt des Bewußtseins ist, die bereits etwas über sich selbst meint und sagt. Beide Gestalten sind Weisen, sich zu verhalten, die auch darin bestehen, zu reden – von sich selbst. Der Unterschied zwischen den beiden Anfangsfiguren ist der, dass die uneigentliche Verzweiflung sich von Verzweiflung „freispricht,“ während die Verzweiflung der Unmittelbarkeit sich selbst verzweifelt nennt. Da die uneigentliche Verzweiflung behauptet, ohne Verzweiflung zu sein, kann sie nicht mehr die Anfangsfigur des Prozesses sein. Sie stellt statt dessen eine komplexe und gefährliche Möglichkeit dar, die radikal das Ziel des Prozesses anficht, zum Bewußtsein dessen zu gelangen, was Verzweiflung ist. Dass diese radikale Möglichkeit vorangestellt ist, deutet die negative Färbung der Beschreibung an.  SKS 11, 176 / KT, 61.  Siehe z. B. die Überschriften: „Die Verzweiflung, die unwissend ist darüber, dass sie Verzweiflung ist“ (SKS 11, 157/ KT, 39); „Die Verzweiflung, die sich dessen bewußt ist Verzweiflung zu sein“ (SKS 11, 162 / KT, 45).

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Was macht Kierkegaard dann mit der Anfangsfigur, die zurückbleibt, der Verzweiflung der Unmittelbarkeit? Er bekehrt, wie gesagt, „den Unmittelbaren,“ aber er tut dies, indem er die Bedeutung dessen aufzeigt, was der Unmittelbare von sich selbst sagt. Was als Schein aufgedeckt wird, ist die Auffassung des Umittelbaren von sich selbst: Er meint, dass seine Verzweiflung nur von außen komme, indem ihm etwas zustößt, aber er verzweifelt erst, indem er selbst diesem Etwas unendliche Bedeutung beimißt. Er mißversteht sich selbst, wenn er sich verzweifelt nennt, aber dass er es tut und dem Verlust also ein solches Gewicht beimißt, ist Verzweiflung. Im Übergang von Verzweiflung über etwas Irdisches zu Verzweiflung am Ewigen wird das Erste nicht durch das Letzte „abgelöst.“ Die Verzweiflung über etwas Irdisches erweist sich als Verzweiflung am Ewigen. Anders gesagt, Verzweiflung am Ewigen ist, was Verzweiflung über das Irdische bedeutet. Im Prozess selbst zeigt sich, was Verzweiflung „eigentlich“ ist. Das heißt, dass im Prozess „Schein“ aufgedeckt wird. Das, was sich in Schein auflöst, ist freilich nicht die Verzweiflung, sondern die Auffassung des Verzweifelten von sich selbst. Trotzdem ist es die Gestalt selbst, die zeigt, was Verzweiflung ist.Was sie ist, kann man daran ablesen, was der Verzweifelte selbst tut: dem, woran er verzweifelt, eine solche Bedeutung beizumessen, dass er verzweifelt. Seine Verzweiflung ist durchaus wirklich, denn sie mißt in der Tat diesem Etwas eine solche Bedeutung bei. Das, was sich als Schein erweist, ist seine Selbstauffassung: dass Verzweiflung lediglich etwas ist, was ihm widerfährt oder zustößt. Wenn Kierkegaard sagt, dass Verzweiflung nicht von außen kommt, polemisiert er gegen die Selbstauffassung des „Unmittelbaren.“ Dies zeigt, wie entscheidend es ist zu sehen, dass Kierkegaard eine Gestalt des Bewußtseins beschreibt, die bereits spricht – von sich selbst. Der Widerspruch zwischen dem, was sie über sich selbst meint, und dem, was sie in und mit dem tut, was sie von sich selbst sagt (sich von Verzweiflung freispricht oder sich verzweifelt nennt), treibt den Prozess voran. Das telos des Prozesses ist wie erwähnt das Selbstbewußtsein – das Bewußtsein, zu verzweifeln und was es heißt zu verzweifeln, und hierdurch das Bewußtsein, ein Selbst zu sein. Der Prozess beschreibt ein entstehendes Selbstbewußtsein. Es handelt sich insofern um eine Phänomenologie des Geistes. Schließlich werden die verschiedenen Gestalten dadurch verbunden, dass die Einsicht, die in einer Gestalt fehlt, zum Bewußtsein (zur Gestalt) der nachfolgenden wird. Dies gilt in erster Linie für den Übergang von der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit im engeren Sinne zur Verzweiflung über seine Schwachheit. Innerhalb der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit wird das Verhältnis zum Ewigen, das in der Verzweiflung über etwas Irdisches oder das Irdische verborgen ist, in der Verzweiflung am Ewigen bewußt.

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Aber vielleicht gilt dies nur für diesen Übergang? In einem gewissen Sinne zeigt die Verzweiflung des Trotzes, was sich in der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit verbirgt, nämlich eine verdeckte Selbstbehauptung. Das vermittelt vielleicht auch eine Einsicht darin, was Verzweiflung ist, insofern ein Mensch auch sich selbst behauptet, wenn er verzweifelt. Aber es wird eigentlich nichts Neues zu der grundlegenden Einsicht hinzugefügt, die durch den früheren Übergang ermöglicht wurde: dass Verzweifeln heißt, am Ewigen und über sich selbst verzweifeln. Wie oben gezeigt, erhält der Prozess einen gebrochenen Charakter. Dies zeigt an, dass wichtige Unterschiede in der Entstehung des Selbstbewußtseins bestehen, die in der Krankheit zum Tode C.b und in der Phänomenologie des Geistes beschrieben wird. Die Bewegung in der Krankheit zum Tode ist negativ insofern, als sie eine Geschichte der Verzweiflung ist. Zwar handelt es sich um die Geschichte des entstehenden Selbstbewußtseins, aber in der steigenden Bewegung wird die Verzweiflung auch immer intensiver und die Aufgabe wird verfehlt. Zugleich enthält die Bewegung, wie gesagt, unterwegs auch die Möglichkeit, richtig abzubiegen in Richtung auf den Glauben. Die geforderte Einsicht ist bereits mit dem Übergang innerhalb der Verzweiflung der Schwachheit zu der Verzweiflung am Ewigen zuwege gebracht. Die Frage ist dann, inwiefern es notwendig ist, den gesamten Weg durch die Potenzierung der Verzweiflung zu gehen. Der negative und gebrochene Charakter des Prozesses hängt damit zusammen, dass es sich nicht nur um eine Phänomenologie des Bewußtseins handelt. Die Gestalten der Verzweiflung sind nicht nur Bewußtsein, sondern auch Wille. Oder besser: Bewußtsein und Wille sind so miteinander verwoben, dass das Bewußtsein selbst zu einer Frage nach dem Willen wird. Das wurde besonders deutlich bei der uneigentlichen Verzweiflung, die eine komplizierte und verkomplizierende Figur darstellt. Bereits der exponierende „Vortext“ hebt hervor, dass es in der Verzweiflung sowohl um (fehlendes) Bewußtsein als auch um (Wider‐)Willen geht. Hier ist nicht nur davon die Rede, dass man verzweifelt nicht man selbst ist, sondern davon, verzweifelt nicht man selbst sein zu wollen. ⁷⁵ Und wenn man verzweifelt man selbst sein will, ist dies etwas, was man will, aber eben nicht ist. Diese grundlegende Beziehung zwischen Bewußtsein und Wille in der Verzweiflung bewirkt, dass der Prozess über das hinausgeht, was dafür erforderlich ist, um einzusehen, was es heißt, zu verzweifeln. Nachdem sich gezeigt hat, was Verzweiflung ist, intensiviert sich der Prozess negativ in der Verzweiflung des Trotzes. Die Verzweiflung wird nun nicht nur die Verzweiflung am Ewigen, son-

 SKS 11, 131 / KT, 9.

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dern mit Hilfe des Ewigen. Die Einsicht, die erreicht wird, wird verdreht, das Bewußtsein selbst verändert sich. Der spätere Prozess über die Verzweiflung der Schwachheit hinaus, die Verzweiflung am Ewigen ist, vermittelt damit auch eine Einsicht, nämlich in den Willen als Widerwillen. Dies wird dadurch unterstrichen, dass die Bewegung nicht mit der dämonischen Verzweiflung abschließt. Oder richtiger, dass im zweiten Teil (dem „zweiten Abschnitt“) ein Wechsel der Ebene stattfindet, wo die Verzweiflung als ganze als Sünde potenziert wird. Diese Potenzierung ist noch immer eine Steigerung des Bewußtseins, aber es wird zugleich deutlicher, dass sich nicht nur eine Steigerung im Bewußtsein vollzieht, sondern auch im Willen. Oder besser, die Steigerung ist zugleich eine Steigerung im Bewußtsein und im Willen, wie dies vorgreifend in dem kleinen Auftakt am Beginn von C im ersten Teil gesagt wird.⁷⁶ Entscheidend in der Verzweiflung ist der Wille oder WiderWille: man selbst sein zu wollen – bzw. nicht sein zu wollen. Der Prozess, den das Selbst durchlaufen soll, läßt sich in Hegelscher Manier als die Wiedergewinnung des Konkreten beschreiben. Das gibt Kierkegaard selbst an, indem er von „diesem (im Gegensatz zu dem bekleideten Selbst der Unmittelbarkeit) nacktem, abstrakten Selbst“ spricht, „welches des unendlichen Selbst erste Gestalt ist, und das Vorantreibende in dem ganzen Prozess, durch den ein Selbst sein wirkliches Selbst übernimmt mit allen seinen Schwierigkeiten und Vorzügen unendlich auf sich nimmt.“⁷⁷ Das telos ist, konkret zu werden, wie es im kurzen Auftakt in C.a.a heißt, der formelhaft die Bewegung beschreibt, die gelingt.⁷⁸ Konkret werden heißt, das bereits bestimmte, zusammengesetzte Selbst übernehmen. Der Prozess ist insofern eine Überwindung oder Ablegung der abstrakten Form, eine Bewegung hin zum konkreten Selbst als einem wiedergewonnenen Selbst. Aber dieses telos wird in dem Prozess, der in C.b beschrieben wird, gerade nicht erreicht. Was wiederum bedeutet, dass der Prozess einen negativen Charakter hat. Konkret werden ist das telos, das als Möglichkeit und Forderung in den Prozess hineinspielt. Die Spannung zwischen der Forderung und dem negativen Charakter des Prozesses wird dadurch betont, dass die Geistlosigkeit eine stets gegenwärtige negative Möglichkeit ist. Selbst wenn die Einsicht in die Bestimmung des Geistes erreicht ist, kann diese Bestimmung verlorengehen. Deshalb ist die uneigentliche Verzweiflung außerhalb des Prozesses angesiedelt, nicht als ein minimaler Beginn vor dem Beginn der Unmittelbarkeit, sondern als eine radikale

 SKS 11, 146 / KT, 25.  SKS 11, 170 / KT, 54.  SKS 11, 146 – 147 / KT, 25 – 26.

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Möglichkeit, die das telos des Prozesses anficht: zu sich selbst zu kommen. Der Prozess besteht nicht ohne weiteres darin, eine abstrakte Gestalt abzulegen; vielmehr ist Abstraktion eine stets gegenwärtige ethisch-religiös bestimmte Gefahr. Das zeigt vor allem die Geistlosigkeit, die ethisch-religiös als Verlust von Geist bestimmt wird. Hier wird der entscheidende Zusammenhang zwischen Bewußtsein und Wille so wiederholt, dass Bewußtsein zu einer Frage des Willens bzw. Widerwillens wird. Am Schluß möchte ich stichwortartig angeben, worauf die Auslegung, die ich hier vorgestellt habe, indem ich mich auf die Methode und den Prozess in C.b konzentriert habe, abzielt: a. Dass es sich um Gestalten des Bewußtseins handelt, die sich schon zu sich selbst verhalten, sich von Verzweiflung freisprechen, sich verzweifelt nennen usw., bedeutet, dass das Selbstverhältnis schon gegeben ist. Es muss nicht erst zustande gebracht werden. Ein Mensch ist als ein Selbst bereits in ein Verhältnis zu sich selbst gestellt, ehe er das Selbstverhältnis etabliert. Das letztere setzt vielmehr voraus, dass ein Mensch bereits ein Selbst ist. Diese Einsicht in das unumgängliche Selbstverhältnis, die ich der Krankheit zum Tode meine entnehmen zu können, muss auch kritisch gegen die Darstellung Kierkegaards gewendet werden, wenn es z. B. heißt, dass der Unmittelbare nicht ein Selbst ist.⁷⁹ Es geht darum, die normative Bedeutung des Selbst zu klären, die hier hineinspielt. b. Kierkegaard erarbeitet sich einen immer bestimmteren Begriff von Verzweiflung.Verzweifeln ist letztlich, den Mut und die Hoffnung aufzugeben. Nur in diesem Sinne kann die These Kierkegaards verteidigt werden: dass die Verzweiflung „von innen“ kommt, indem Verzweifeln etwas ist, was ein Mensch „tut.“ Nur in diesem Sinne tut ein Mensch, wenn er verzweifelt, etwas mit sich selbst: Er gibt sich selbst auf. Das hindert ihn gerade nicht daran, über etwas zu verzweifeln, das ihn von außen trifft.

6 Eine kleine Nachschrift Im Vorhergehenden habe ich die Interpretation der Krankheit zum Tode zu untermauern versucht, die meiner Diskussion mit Michael Theunissen in dem Artikel: „Der Begriff Verzweiflung“ zugrunde liegt, indem ich mich auf den Abschnitt C.b des ersten Teils konzentriert habe.⁸⁰ Das Vorhergende antwortet also höchstens indirekt auf Theunissens: „Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard.“ Ich

 SKS 11, 167 / KT, 50.  Arne Grøn, „Der Begriff Verzweiflung,“ Kapitel 19 in diesem Buch.

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möchte deshalb als eine kleine Nachschrift eine kurze Antwort geben, die natürlich unzureichend bleiben muss. Michael Theunissens Der Begriff Verzweiflung stellt die These in Frage, mit der die Krankheit zum Tode beginnt und die in der Kierkegaardliteratur überraschend selbstverständlich akzeptiert worden ist, nämlich dass Verzweiflung eine Krankheit im Selbst sei. Unmittelbar gesehen erscheint Kierkegaards These fragwürdig. Wenn ich es dennoch auf mich genommen habe, als „Apologet“ aufzutreten, so deshalb, weil ich meine, dass die These eine Einsicht enthält, die es kritisch zu retten gilt. Ich möchte behaupten, dass es ein fruchtbares, wenn auch problemgeladenes Verhältnis gibt zwischen dieser These, mit der Kierkegaard in dem exponierendem „Vortext“ einsetzt, und dem, was im ersten Teil der Krankheit zum Tode dargelegt wird. Die Verzweiflungsanalyse im ersten Teil deckt ein Selbstverhältnis auf, das nicht darin besteht, dass man seiner selbst mächtig ist, sondern das vielmehr einen zugleich affektiven und handelnden Charakter hat. Auch wenn man versucht, Herr seiner selbst zu sein, leidet man darunter. Dieses leidende Selbstverhältnis spielt in das aktive Selbstverhältnis hinein: Mit dem, was man tut, tut man etwas mit sich selbst. Wenn ich die Rede Kierkegaards, dass die Verzweiflung von innen kommt, dahingehend übersetze, dass man sich selbst verzweifelt macht, habe ich dieses indirekte Selbstverhältnis im Auge: Alle Hoffnung aufzugeben ist etwas, was man mit sich „tut.“ Die Verzweiflung ist in diesem Sinne ein indirektes Selbstverhältnis. Meine Deutung läuft auf die Frage hinaus, ob es nicht eine Grenze dafür gibt, wie weit Kierkegaards ethisch-religiöse Bestimmung der Verzweiflung reicht.⁸¹ Diese Frage ist ernst gemeint. Ich meine zudem, dass die Frage in der ethischreligiösen Auffassung Kierkegaards implizit enthalten ist. Gibt es nicht Situationen, wo man sagen muss, dass „Verzweiflung die allein angemessene Reaktion ist, so dass es im Gegenteil unmenschlich wäre, nicht zu verzweifeln“?⁸² Die Frage ist ebenso entscheidend wie offen, da es die eigene Frage der Verzweiflung ist. Soweit ich sehen kann, braucht Kierkegaard nicht zu leugnen, dass es Situationen gibt, in denen Verzweiflung die menschlich angemessene Reaktion ist. Wenn es in Der Liebe Tun heißt, dass man nicht verzweifeln darf, sondern trauern soll, dann ist die Verzweiflung nicht nur verständlich, sondern menschlich gesehen das nächstliegende.⁸³ Dass man nicht verzweifeln darf, ist kein Moralismus, sondern eine Forderung trotz der Situation, so wie Glaube ein Glaube „trotz allem“ ist. Der Ausgangspunkt in der Analyse der Verzweiflung der Notwendigkeit  Grøn, „Der Begriff Verzweiflung,“ S. 328.  Michael Theunissen, „Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard,“ Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, S. 78.  SKS 9, 49 / LT, 50.

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ist, dass es Situationen gibt, die menschlich gesehen ohne Hoffnung sind. Wenn Kierkegaard davon spricht, dass man nicht verzweifeln darf, so gerade deshalb, weil er Verzweiflung in der vollen Bedeutung von desperatio versteht: die Hoffnung aufgeben. In einem Punkt möchte ich mich gerne etwas ausführlicher verteidigen, nämlich dem vierten Punkt in der Antwort Theunissens an mich. Wenn ich das Beispiel eines Menschen benutze, der darüber verzweifelt, dass seine Welt zusammenbricht,⁸⁴ so handelt es sich nicht um eine petitio principii. Schon aus dem Grund, weil ich das Beispiel in der entgegengesetzten Richtung verwende. Wenn ein Mensch darüber verzweifelt, dass seine Welt zusammenbricht, so meine ich damit eine Verzweiflung, die mit den Worten Theunissens „das Selbstverhältnis transzendiert.“⁸⁵ Bei einer solchen Verzweiflung kann es schwer zu sehen sein, dass es sich um eine Selbstaufgabe und ein Kreisen um sich selbst handelt. Mein Argument kam erst danach: Wenn dieser Mensch in dem Sinne verzweifelt, dass er die Hoffnung aufgibt, tut er noch immer etwas mit sich. Dasselbe Argument würde Theunissens Reformulierung des Beispiels gelten: Wenn der Mensch, der darüber verzweifelt, „dass die Welt im Argen liegt,“ wirklich verzweifelt, gibt er die Hoffnung auf, von der er selbst lebt. Ich bin mir freilich nicht sicher, ob ich Theunissen folgen kann, wenn er das Beispiel reformuliert.Wenn einer über eine Welt verzweifeln können soll, die nicht seine Welt ist, dann entfällt die Einsicht, dass er grundlegend über das verzweifelt, was ihn trifft bzw. ihm widerfährt.Wenn einer darüber verzweifelt, dass seine Welt zusammenbricht, betrifft die Verzweiflung eben nicht ihn selbst im engen Sinne; er wird auch von dem betroffen, was anderen zustößt, die zu der Welt gehören, in der er lebt. In dem Augenblick aber, in dem einer über die Welt verzweifelt, verzweifelt er über seine Welt. In der Verzweiflung wird die Welt zu seiner Welt. Sie geht ihn so an, dass er selbst verzweifelt.⁸⁶

 Grøn, „Der Begriff Verzweiflung,“ S. 328.  Theunissen, „Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard,“ S. 77.  Übersetzt von Eberhard Harbsmeier.

Chapter 21 Phänomenologie der Subjektivität. Überlegungen zu Kierkegaards Abhandlung über die menschliche Freiheit 1 Eingang Kierkegaards Abhandlung über den Begriff Angst – mit dem Untertitel: „Eine schlichte psychologisch-andeutende Überlegung in Richtung auf das dogmatische Problem der Erbsünde“ – ist sein „philosophischste[s]“ Buch,¹ und zwar als Abhandlung über die Freiheit. ² Wenn man die Angst-Analyse in diesem Sinne als Kierkegaards Freiheits-Abhandlung liest, ist allerdings auch in umgekehrter Richtung zu fragen: Warum ist seine Freiheits-Abhandlung eine Abhandlung über den Begriff Angst? Zunächst ist zu bemerken, dass das Buch eine Untersuchung über die Freiheit ist, die die philosophische Frage der Freiheit umformt.Vorausgreifend können wir dies seinen Antworten entnehmen: Erstens ist Der Begriff Angst eine Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, bestimmt aber das Wesen nicht als Substanz, sondern als Sich-(zu-sich)-Verhalten. Zweitens ist die menschliche Freiheit sowohl unumgänglich als auch zweideutig. Sie ist nicht nur die Bestimmung eines Menschen, sondern enthält auch die Möglichkeit, sich selbst zu verlieren. Drittens ist menschliche Unfreiheit eine Frage der Freiheit. Die Angst-Abhandlung besitzt damit ein philosophisches Potential, das nicht leicht einzulösen ist. Wie kann z. B. Unfreiheit eine Frage der Freiheit sein? Unfreiheit bestimmt Kierkegaard als ein Phänomen der Freiheit.³ In der Unfreiheit liegt eine Freiheit, die sich im Phänomen der Unfreiheit zeigt. Wie denn die zugrunde liegende Freiheit sich in der Unfreiheit zeigt, ohne dass damit die Unfreiheit sich auflöst, sondern im Gegenteil erst als Unfreiheit bestimmt wird, ist nicht einfach zu sehen. Die Leser der Angst-Abhandlung müssen ein Doppeltes

 Hermann Deuser, Kierkegaard. Die Philosophie des religiösen Schriftstellers, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1985, S. VII.  Deuser vertritt die These, „das eigentliche Thema im ‚Begriff Angst’ sei die Freiheit“ (Deuser, Kierkegaard. Die Philosophie des religiösen Schriftstellers, S. 133).  „dass die Unfreiheit eine Erscheinung der Freiheit, und mit Naturkategorien nicht zu erklären ist [at Ufriheden er et Frihedens Phänomen, og ikke til at forklare ved Natur-kategorier]“ (SKS 4, 436 / BA, 140). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-027

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tun: einsehen, wie kompliziert das Phänomen der Unfreiheit ist, und zugleich damit die Begriffe Freiheit und Unfreiheit weiter differenzieren. Wenn ein Mensch sich in Unfreiheit verfängt, tut er etwas mit sich. Insofern ist die Unfreiheit selbstverschuldet oder selbst geschaffen. Dass es Unfreiheit gibt, die von außen kommt, wird bei Kierkegaard fast ignoriert. Was er hingegen in das Blickfeld rücken will, ist die selbst geschaffene Unfreiheit, und zwar eine Unfreiheit, in die man nicht nur sich selbst bringt, sondern in der man im Verhältnis zu sich selbst unfrei ist.Wie aber macht man sich selbst unfrei? Nicht in der Weise von etwas, das man tun will. Dennoch wird man durch das eigene Tun unfrei. Man tut etwas mit sich. Das Verhältnis von Aktivität und Passivität erscheint damit auf eine Weise verwickelt, die eine differenzierte Begriffsbestimmung herausfordert. Worum geht es in dieser Fragestellung? Offenbar um menschliche Freiheit als Freiheit. Wenn wir aber versuchen, sie als Freiheit auszulegen, stoßen wir auf die Frage der Subjektivität der Freiheit. Mit den Stichworten Sich-(zu-sich)-Verhalten, Freiheit als unumgänglich und zweideutig, sowie Unfreiheit als Phänomen der Freiheit, geht es um die Subjektivität, die in den Phänomenen der Unfreiheit steckt. Es ist gerade die Angst-Analyse, die sowohl die zweideutigen Phänomene der Unfreiheit wie auch den Begriff Zweideutigkeit als Schlüsselkategorie in den Vordergrund rückt. Die Angst-Analyse kann, so meine These, als eine Phänomenologie der zweideutigen Subjektivität interpretiert werden.

2 „Der Begriff Angst“ Der Begriff Angst ist ein schwieriger Text.Wie sollen wir mit diesem Text umgehen? Welche Fragen sollen wir stellen? Die erste Vorfrage lautet: Warum schreibt Kierkegaard ein Buch über Angst, und zwar über den Begriff Angst? Wenn es ein Buch über menschliche Freiheit, Menschsein als Mensch-werden, ist, warum rückt er dann die Angst in den Brennpunkt? Wie schreibt Kierkegaard über Angst? Indem er über den Begriff Angst schreibt, ist die Frage: Was zeigt die Angst? Dass der Mensch sich ängstigen kann, was bedeutet dies für das Menschsein? Wenn wir dann in die Angst-Analyse einsteigen, wie sollen wir uns orientieren? Zunächst ist festzuhalten, dass die Angst-Analyse auf zwei Ebenen verfährt. Auf der ersten Ebene (vor dem Fall) hat Angst mit der Freiheit als Möglichkeit zu tun. Auf der zweiten Ebene (nach dem Fall) geht es um Angst in Bezug auf Unfreiheit. Der Schnitt liegt zwischen Kapitel 3 und Kapitel 4 des Buches. Wir müssen aber noch weiter differenzieren, und zwar insbesondere auf der ersten Ebene. Ich zitiere aus Kapitel 2: „Angst bedeutet nunmehr…zweierlei. Die Angst, in welcher das Individuum durch den qualitativen Sprung die Sünde setzt,

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und die Angst, welche mit der Sünde hineingekommen ist und hineinkommt, und die insofern auch quantitativ in die Welt kommt, jedes Mal, wenn ein Individuum die Sünde setzt.“⁴ Kapitel 3 resümiert die erste Bestimmung wie folgt: „dass Angst der letzte psychologische Zustand sei, aus welchem die Sünde mit dem qualitativen Sprunge hervorbreche,“ um aber dann von der Angst der Geistlosigkeit zu sprechen.⁵ Angst auf der ersten Ebene ist die Angst, in welcher das Individuum die Sünde „setzt,“ oder die Angst, aus welchem die Sünde „hervorbricht,“ was schon angibt, dass Aktivität mit Passivität verwickelt ist. Angst wird explizit durch Zweideutigkeit gekennzeichnet: „Wenn wir die dialektischen Bestimmungen von Angst betrachten wollen, so zeigt es sich, dass diese eben die dialektische Zweideutigkeit haben. Angst ist eine sympathetische Antipathie und eine antipathetische Sympathie.“⁶ Es ist ein zweideutiges Spiel mit der Möglichkeit der Freiheit. Obwohl es um die Möglichkeit der Freiheit geht, steht das Individuum nicht in sich, frei, vor dieser Möglichkeit, sondern ist selbst dadurch bestimmt. Die Angst der ersten Ebene wird deshalb nach beiden Seiten differenziert: als Angst der Unschuld und als Angst der Geistlosigkeit. Die Differenzierung in beide Richtungen hängt mit der Geschichtlichkeit menschlicher Subjektivität zusammen. Am Anfang von Kapitel 4 scheinen aber die bisherigen Bestimmungen der Angst wegzufallen: Angst vor Nichts, Zweideutigkeit. Indem die Sünde durch den qualitativen Sprung in die Welt gekommen ist, „sollte man glauben, die Angst wäre behoben.“ Denn der qualitative Sprung ist jetzt die Wirklichkeit, und insofern ist die Möglichkeit aufgehoben. Dies sei jedoch nicht so, lässt Kierkegaard sein Pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis sagen. Die Angst kehrt wieder im Verhältnis zu dem Gesetzten und dem Zukünftigen. Sie kehrt aber in einer anderen Form wieder: Nunmehr „ist der Gegenstand der Angst…ein Bestimmtes, ihr Nichts ist wirklich Etwas, da der Unterschied zwischen Gut und Böse im Konkreten gesetzt ist und die Angst daher ihre dialektische Zweideutigkeit verloren hat.“⁷ Wenn aber die Angst durch ihre dialektische Zweideutigkeit definiert und diese nunmehr aufgehoben ist, sollte man glauben, die Angst wäre behoben. Dass dies jedoch nicht so ist, gibt der Angst-Analyse in Kapitel 4 (auf der zweiten Ebene) ihre besondere Bedeutung. Die Zweideutigkeit kehrt wieder, in intensivierter Form, und zwar als zweideutige Subjektivität, indem menschliche Unfreiheit erst hier ins Blickfeld rückt. Um dies einzuholen, müssen wir noch einige weitere Schritte gehen.    

SKS 4, 359 / BA, 53. SKS 4, 396 / BA, 95. SKS 4, 348 / BA, 40. SKS 4, 413 – 414 / BA, 114– 115.

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3 Beobachtung Wie wir als Leser mit der Freiheits-Abhandlung Kierkegaards umgehen sollen, hängt auch von Kierkegaards Methode ab. Was bestimmt den Zugang zu den Phänomenen, die in der Angst-Analyse in das Blickfeld gerückt werden? In einer „Skizze von einem Beobachter,“ die Kierkegaard in seiner FreiheitsAbhandlung wie „ein Wasserzeichen“ hingeworfen hat,⁸ wird „eine allgemeine menschliche Geschmeidigkeit“ hervorgehoben: Der „psychologische Beobachter“ muss geschmeidiger sein „als ein Seiltänzer, um sich den Menschen einschmiegen und ihre Stellungen nachahmen [eftergjøre deres Stillinger] zu können.“⁹ Dass er sich den anderen Menschen einschmiegt und deshalb selbst geschmeidig sein muss, bedeutet, dass er die Stellungen anderer nur nachmachen kann, indem er bei sich selbst jede Stimmung nachbildet, die er an einem andern entdeckt. Beobachtung ist aber eine zweideutige Sache, ähnlich wie eine Gratwanderung. Der Beobachter bringt nicht nur sich selbst ins Spiel, sondern experimentiert mit dem anderen: Er ist „so bewandert im menschlichen Leben und so inquisitorisch scharf blickend, dass er weiß, wo er zu suchen hat, und leicht eine leidliche Individualität entdeckt, die zum Experimente taugt“.¹⁰ Wenn man andere Menschen beobachtet, befindet man sich in einer Distanz, die eine experimentierende Haltung zu ihnen ermöglicht. Man beobachtet aber nicht frei, gleichsam kostenlos, sondern wird dadurch selbst als Beobachter bestimmt. Dies wird in der Freiheits-Abhandlung nicht ausgeführt, jedoch wird eine Ethik des Beobachtens immerhin angedeutet. In einer Passage fast unmittelbar vor der Skizze vom Beobachter macht Vigilius Haufniensis auf den kritischen Unterschied aufmerksam, der in der Sympathie liegt. Es gibt eine feige Sympathie, „die Gott dafür dankt, nicht so einer wie dieser geworden zu sein, ohne dass man begreift, ein solcher Dank sei ein Verrat an Gott und an sich selbst, und ohne dass man bedenkt, wie das Leben allezeit analoge Erscheinungen [Phænomener] in sich trage, denen man vielleicht nicht entgehen werde.“¹¹ Vigilius Haufniensis betont dagegen: Sympathie soll man haben, aber diese Sympathie ist erst wahr, wenn man sich selbst so recht tief eingesteht, was Einem Menschen widerfahren sei, könne allen widerfahren. Dann erst ist man auch sich selbst und andern ein Gewinn. Der Arzt an einer Irrenanstalt, der dumm genug ist um sich für alle Ewigkeit klug zu halten und sein bißchen Verstand wider allen

 SKS 18 / 213 / DSKE 2, 585.  SKS 4, 359 / BA, 54.  SKS 4, 360 / BA, 54.  SKS 4, 358 f. / BA, 53.

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Schaden im Leben gesichert zu wähnen, er ist wohl in gewissem Sinne klüger als die Verrückten, aber zugleich ist er dümmer, und er wird sicherlich auch nicht viele heilen.¹²

Wenn man andere beobachtet, ist die Frage, ob man sich selbst mit einbezieht: Versteht man sich selbst in dem, was man tut? Vigilius Haufniensis weist deshalb später auf jenen griechischen Satz „Erkenne Dich selbst!“ hin, fügt aber hinzu: „Der lateinische Satz unum noris omnes [Mit einem kennst du alle] drückt das Gleiche auf leichtsinnige Art aus und drückt wirklich das Gleiche aus, wenn man unter ,dem einen’ (unum) den Betrachter selber versteht, und dann nicht neugierig nach ,den allen’ (omnes) ausspäht, sondern mit Ernst den Einen festhält, der wirklich Alle ist.“¹³ Der Beobachter steht nicht nur für sich, sondern ist mit dem anderen verbunden, auch wenn er sich nicht für sich selbst mit ihm verbindet. Dies zeigt sich darin, dass die Selbstbeziehung in Beziehung zum anderen auf dem Spiel steht. Die Art und Weise, wie man andere sieht, kann ein Verrat an sich selbst sein, auch wenn man das selbst nicht begreift. Es geht also darum, wie man sieht, wenn man die anderen sieht. Wenn man beobachtet, soll man sich selbst in Acht nehmen.¹⁴ Was bedeutet dies für die Angst-Analyse? Sie macht auf Phänomene aufmerksam, die das Leben in sich trägt, die man aber nicht wirklich sieht.¹⁵ Sie versucht, ihre Bedeutung im Blick auf das Menschsein auszulegen. Wenn die methodische Beobachtung experimentierend verfährt, geht es darum, den Blick für die Phänomene der Freiheit und Unfreiheit zu gewinnen. Sie experimentiert, um zu sehen. Wenn man aber nicht zu sehen versteht, oder nicht sich selbst darin versteht, dass man den anderen sieht, hilft es nichts. So erklärt Vigilius Haufniensis: „Dies näher ausführen mittels experimentierender Beobachtung möchte ich hier nicht, da es aufhält. Das Leben ist mittlerweile reich genug, wenn man sich nur auf das Sehen versteht; man braucht nicht nach Paris oder London zu reisen, – und dies hilft nichts, wenn man nicht zu sehen vermag.“¹⁶ Es geht also um das Sehen: sehen, was man sieht, es noch einmal – aufmerksam – sehen, nachsehen. Worauf soll man dann aufmerksam sein? In der Angst-Analyse kommt es auf Stellungen an, die ein Individuum einnimmt und die sich nicht einfach

 SKS 4, 359 / BA, 53.  SKS 4, 382 / BA, 79.  Was hier mit Beobachtung übersetzt wird, ist der dänische Ausdruck Iagttagelse. Wer beobachtet (iagttager), soll sich selbst in Acht nehmen (skal tage sig selv i agt).  Vgl. z. B.: „Das Leben bietet überdies Erscheinungen [Phænomener] genug dar, bei denen das Individuum in Angst nahezu begehrlich auf die Schuld starrt, und gleichwohl sie fürchtet“ (SKS 4, 405 / BA, 106).  SKS 4, 378 / BA, 75.

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zeigen, sondern sich auch verbergen können. Kurz, es geht um eine Phänomenologie der Stellungen der Freiheit. Sie soll in den Blick fassen, wie menschliche Freiheit sich verkompliziert, da sie nicht einfach Freiheit ist, sondern auch sich selbst verspielen kann.

4 Grenzen der Erklärung Was ich hier Kierkegaards Phänomenologie der Subjektivität nenne, hängt mit kritischen Überlegungen über den methodischen Zugang zusammen. Kierkegaards Freiheits-Abhandlung fragt nach Methoden, und zwar nach Grenzen der Erklärung. Grenze ist hier kein bloß negatives Phänomen, sondern es geht darum, die Grenze der Erklärung zu verstehen, die zeigt, was menschliche Subjektivität bedeutet. In der „Einleitung“ gibt Vigilius Haufniensis eine Skizze von verschiedenen Wissenschaften, indem er fragt, ob sie die Sünde in den Blick bekommen können. Er antwortet dahingehend, dass die Sünde hier streng genommen gar keinen Ort habe – „dies ist aber ihre Bestimmung.“¹⁷ „Eigentlich gehört die Sünde überhaupt nicht in irgend eine Wissenschaft hinein. Sie ist Gegenstand der Predigt, wo der Einzelne als der Einzelne zum Einzelnen spricht.“¹⁸ Es geht um ein Geheimnis, die Aneignung, die das Geheimnis des Gesprächs (Samtalens Hemmelighed) ist. Die Skizze läuft aber auch auf die Antwort hinaus, die Schrift über den Begriff Angst sei der Psychologie zugehörig. Die Psychologie kann die reale Möglichkeit der Sünde behandeln, nicht ihre Wirklichkeit. Sie kann eine Erklärung geben, die eigentlich keine ist. „Die Wissenschaft, die es mit einer Erklärung zu tun hat, ist die Psychologie, welche doch lediglich auf die Erklärung zu erklären kann [forklare hen til Forklaringen], und sich vor allem hüten muss, den Anschein zu erwecken, als erkläre sie, was keine Wissenschaft erklärt, und was allein die Ethik weiterhin erklärt, indem sie es vermöge der Dogmatik voraussetzt.“¹⁹ Der Begriff Sprung gibt die Grenze der Erklärung an. Er wird jedoch in der Kierkegaard-Rezeption als eine blinde Entscheidung mißverstanden. Erstens ist zu klären, in welchem Sinne es um eine Entscheidung geht. Zweitens gibt es etwas zu verstehen: „Wie die Sünde in die Welt gekommen ist, das versteht ein jeder Mensch einzig und allein aus sich selbst; will er es von einem andern lernen, so wird er es eben damit mißverstehen. Die einzige Wissenschaft, die ein bißchen tun

 SKS 4, 322 / BA, 11.  SKS 4, 323 / BA, 13.  SKS 4, 345 / BA, 37.

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kann, ist die Psychologie, und diese gesteht selber zu, dass sie nicht mehr erklärt, und nicht erklären kann und nicht erklären will.“²⁰ Dass es um einen Sprung geht, bedeutet, dass ein jeder Mensch nur bei sich und durch sich selbst versteht, wie die Sünde in die Welt kommt. Wir müssen aber dies „nur“ genau verstehen. Es bedeutet nicht, dass der Einzelne nicht andere Einzelne verstehen kann, sondern im Gegenteil, dass er andere mit diesem Wissen versteht, das er bei sich und durch sich hat. Die Frage nach einer Erklärung betrifft eben das große menschliche Anliegen, „welches man Sünde nennt.“²¹ Es ist das große menschliche Anliegen, indem es die Frage trägt, was es heißt, ein Mensch zu sein. Für die Leser der FreiheitsAbhandlung gilt es also zu verstehen, was die Frage nach einer Erklärung bedeutet, von der aus Kierkegaard schreibt. In ihr geht es darum, ob Subjektivität zu erklären ist. Wenn wir die Wirklichkeit der Sünde erklären könnten, würden wir den Schritt erklären, mit dem der Einzelne der Einzelne wird. Denn die Sünde kommt in die Welt, indem sie „in den Einzelnen als den Einzelnen eintritt.“²² Es gibt eine unauflösbare Differenz der Perspektive: Unschuld ist ein Etwas, sie ist Unwissenheit; wenn wir diese Unwissenheit „von außen her“ betrachten, sie als auf das Wissen hin bestimmen, geht das die Unwissenheit nichts an.²³ Die Unschuld ist keine Unvollkommenheit. Sie wird nur durch Schuld verloren. Das heißt, dass es einen selbst angeht, da es die Frage betrifft, ein Selbst zu sein: als dieses bestimmte Selbst. Man ist selbst durch das bestimmt, was man selbst tut. Man tut es mit sich selbst. Hier fängt das Ethische an. Die Freiheits-Abhandlung Kierkegaards fragt also nach der Grenze der Erklärung von Subjektivität. Was nicht erklärt werden kann, ist aber kein Rest. Es ist keine innere Perspektive, sondern betrifft die Frage, was es heißt, ein menschliches Subjekt zu sein. Dies kann jeder Einzelne bei sich und durch sich selbst verstehen. Er versteht es aber nicht nur für sich, sondern dadurch dass er versucht, menschliche Möglichkeiten eines Selbst zu verstehen. Dazu gehört zum Beispiel auch die Möglichkeit, sich selbst zu vergessen. In seiner Freiheits-Abhandlung betreibt Kierkegaard mit Vigilius Haufniensis nicht nur Psychologie. Er reflektiert auch auf die Grenzen der methodischen Zugänge, vor allem der psychologischen Erklärung. Er nimmt nicht nur experimentierende Beobachtungen vor, sondern rückt das Problem der Beobachtung selbst ins Blickfeld. Die entscheidende Frage ist: Was zeigt sich an der Grenze? Erst indem die Schrift über den Begriff Angst auf diese Frage antwortet, wird sie phi   

SKS 4, 356 / BA, 49. SKS 4, 345 / BA, 37. SKS 4, 355 / BA, 48 – 49. SKS 4, 343 / BA, 35.

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losophisch. Und erst als eine philosophische Schrift wird sie zu einer Abhandlung über die menschliche Freiheit. Was sich an der Grenze zeigt, ist der Charakter menschlicher Subjektivität. Hier wird die Schrift über die Angst eine Abhandlung über das Selbst als Sich-(zu-sich)-Verhalten, und erst damit eine Freiheits-Abhandlung. Kierkegaard bestimmt die Grenze der psychologischen Erklärung derart, dass die Psychologie erklären kann, wie die Sünde entstehen kann, und nicht, dass sie entsteht.²⁴ Die Frage, die an der Grenze aufkommt, ist aber, was es heißt, ein Selbst zu sein. Sie ist eine philosophische Frage; eine philosophische Antwort darauf hat aber auch ihre Grenze. Eine philosophische Reflexion kann die Antwort geben, dass ein Mensch als ein Selbst ein Einzelner ist. Sie erklärt nicht, was es heißt, ein Einzelner zu sein, kann aber darauf hinweisen, dass der Einzelne bei und durch sich weiß, ein Einzelner zu sein, um dann den problematischen, sowohl unumgänglichen als auch zweideutigen Charakter von menschlicher Subjektivität zu bestimmen. Erst hier wird die Schrift über die Angst eine Abhandlung über Menschsein als Menschwerden.

5 Menschsein als Menschwerden Kierkegaards Freiheitsschrift zielt genau darauf ab, den problematischen Charakter menschlicher Subjektivität zu bestimmen. Sie tut dies im Gewände einer Abhandlung über den Begriff Angst. Die leitende Frage ist: Was zeigt die Angst? Was ist ein Mensch, dass er sich überhaupt ängstigen kann? Die formelhafte Antwort lautet: „Dass die Angst sichtbar werde [kommer tilsyne], das ist der Angelpunkt des Ganzen. Der Mensch ist eine Synthesis des Seelischen und des Leiblichen. Aber eine Synthesis ist nicht denkbar, wenn die Zwei nicht in einem Dritten vereinigt werden. Dies Dritte ist der Geist.“²⁵ Angst bzw. Sich-ängstigenKönnen und Menschsein werden direkt miteinander verknüpft: „Wäre der Mensch ein Tier oder ein Engel, so würde er sich nicht ängstigen können. Da er eine Synthesis ist, vermag er sich zu ängstigen.“²⁶ Meistens fragt die Kierkegaard-Rezeption danach, worin die Synthese besteht. In der Angst-Abhandlung gibt es zwei Formulierungen: erstens, „dass der Mensch eine Synthesis von Seele und Leib ist, getragen von Geist;“²⁷ zweitens, dass er

   

SKS 4, 329 / BA, 19. SKS 4, 349 / BA, 41. SKS 4, 454 / BA, 161. SKS 4, 423 / BA, 126.

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zugleich eine Synthese des Zeitlichen und Ewigen ist.²⁸ Die oben zitierte Passage über Angst und Menschsein deutet aber eine zweite Frage an, die wir als die erste stellen sollen: Was heißt es, dass ein Mensch eine Synthese ist? Die Angst zeigt eben, dass ein Mensch eine Synthese ist – und zwar als eine Synthese von Leib und Seele, getragen von Geist, die eine Synthese des Zeitlichen und Ewigen ist. Dass der Mensch eine Synthese ist, bedeutet: Er ist ein zusammengesetztes Wesen, und zwar aus heterogenen Momenten zusammengesetzt. Wenn der Mensch eine Einheit ist, dann eine in sich spannungsvolle Einheit. Die Synthese-Bestimmung versucht, die Einheit des Menschen zu denken, und zwar letzten Endes als eine normativ bestimmte Einheit. Menschsein ist Menschwerden. Dass ein Mensch aus unterschiedlichen Momenten zusammengesetzt ist, die nicht ohne weiteres zueinander passen, stellt die Aufgabe, diese heterogenen Momente zusammenzuhalten. Ein Mensch ist aber mit dieser Aufgabe vor sich selbst gestellt. Die Synthese-Bestimmung soll radikal verstanden werden: Ein Mensch ist sich selbst als Aufgabe gestellt. Er ist nicht einfach zusammengesetzt, sondern mit sich zusammengesetzt oder disproportioniert. Er ist nicht aus zwei Teilen zusammengesetzt: Leib und Seele, sondern er ist eine Synthese, indem er sich zu sich als Leib und zu sich als Seele verhält. Dies ist, was Geist als „Drittes“ bedeutet. Der Geist ist kein drittes Moment, neben Leib und Seele, sondern verbindet die beiden Momente. Ein Mensch ist selbst als Leib und als Seele bestimmt, indem er sich zu sich verhält. Freiheit als Wesensbestimmung ist hier zu orten: Sie bedeutet, dass das Wesen des Menschen keine Substanz ist, sondern Sich-(zusich)-Verhalten. Ein Mensch verhält sich aber zu sich, indem er sich immer schon in einer Stellung zu sich befindet, was im Folgenden als „gestellt sein“ bezeichnet wird. Er schafft sich eben nicht, sondern ist sich selbst gegeben – als Aufgabe. Freiheit ist also unumgänglich, insofern ein Mensch sich selbst aufgegeben ist. Dass er sich als Aufgabe gestellt ist, heißt, dass er schon in Beziehung zu sich gesetzt ist. Ein Mensch ist Selbst-Verhältnis. Er trägt sich selbst. Freiheit als Wesensbestimmung des Menschen bedeutet aber damit auch die Möglichkeit, sich selbst zu verlieren. Die Synthese kann misslingen. Die Identität ist ausgesetzt. Dies bedeutet, dass ein Mensch nicht nur eine Geschichte hat, sondern geschichtlich ist. ²⁹ Mit der Synthese-Bestimmung wird auch die Grenze der Erklärung philosophisch reflektiert. Die Bestimmung des Menschen als Synthese enthält eine philosophische Bestimmung der Subjektivität, die erklärt, warum Subjektivität nicht  SKS 4, 388 / BA, 86.  Zu den hier nur knapp skizzierten Bestimmungen vgl. ausführlicher: Arne Grøn, Angst bei Søren Kierkegaard. Eine Einführung in sein Denken, übers. von Ulrich Lincoln, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1999.

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erklärt werden kann, ohne sie vorauszusetzen. Ein Mensch ist selbst bestimmt, indem er sich selbst als Aufgabe gestellt ist. Er existiert in der Weise, dass er sich verhält – zu sich, zu anderen und zur Welt. In diesen Beziehungen ist er mit sich vor Gott gestellt. Wir sind uns selbst als Aufgabe gestellt, die wir selbst verfehlen können. Diese Möglichkeit zeichnet den Menschen aus. Menschsein ist auf zweideutige Weise Menschwerden.

6 Zweideutige Subjektivität „Das Selbst ist Freiheit,“ erklärt Anti-Climacus in der Krankheit zum Tode. Die menschliche Synthese ist „ein Verhältnis das, obschon abgeleitet, sich zu sich selbst verhält, welches Freiheit ist.“³⁰ Wir können Menschsein nicht ohne Freiheit als Sich-(zu-sich)-Verhalten bestimmen. Menschsein ist Menschwerden. Freiheit in diesem Sinne ist unumgänglich, sie ist aber auch zweideutig. Damit stellt sich die Frage nach der Subjektivität menschlicher Freiheit. Sie besteht nicht in der Souveränität eines selbstmächtigen, sondern in der Zerbrechlichkeit eines selbst bestimmten Subjekts. Zweideutigkeit menschlicher Freiheit ist aber mehrstufig. Zunächst ist die Freiheit, die das Selbst ist, auch die radikale Möglichkeit, sich selbst zu verlieren. Sie ist zweideutige Möglichkeit. Diese Möglichkeit des Selbst wird vor allem in der Krankheit zum Tode thematisiert. In der Angst-Analyse sind zwei Stufen von Zweideutigkeit zu unterscheiden, die den zwei Ebenen der Angst-Analyse entsprechen. Erstens wird die Angst, in der sich die Möglichkeit der Freiheit zeigt, durch Zweideutigkeit gekennzeichnet. Die Sünde kommt in die Welt durch den qualitativen Sprung, aber in und aus Angst. Indem das Individuum in der Angst durch die Angst schuldig wird, ist die Freiheit zweideutig, in der jenes sich selbst bestimmt zeigt. Denn es wird auf zweideutige Weise schuldig. Zweitens wird die Zweideutigkeit in der Angst vor dem Bösen und vor allem in der Angst vor dem Guten als zweideutiges Sich-(zu-sich)-Verhalten intensiviert. Die erste Stufe geht vor allem aus den beiden folgenden Passagen in Der Begriff Angst hervor: „Der qualitative Sprung steht außerhalb aller Zweideutigkeit, aber der, welcher durch Angst hindurch schuldig wird, er ist ja unschuldig; denn er ist es nicht selbst gewesen, sondern die Angst, eine fremde Macht, welche ihn gepackt, eine Macht, die er nicht liebte, nein, vor der er sich ängstigte; – und doch ist er schuldig, denn er versank in der Angst, welche er dennoch liebte indem er

 SKS 11, 145 / KT, 25.

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sie fürchtete.“³¹ „Angst kann man vergleichen mit Schwindel. Der, dessen Auge es widerfährt [kommer til at] in eine gähnende Tiefe niederzuschauen, er wird schwindlig. Aber was ist der Grund? es ist ebensosehr sein Auge wie der Abgrund; denn falls er nicht herniedergestarrt hätte.“³² Beide Passagen drehen sich um zweideutige Subjektivität – als Aktivität und als Passivität. Die erste Passage, unschuldig/schuldig, bestimmt die Zweideutigkeit dialektisch. Man wird schuldig, man ist es nicht selbst gewesen, man wird von der Angst gepackt – und doch ist man es selbst gewesen, denn man tut etwas selbst, man versinkt in der Angst. Die beiden Aspekte greifen ineinander. Man wird überwältigt, man lässt sich überwältigen, man ängstigt sich und gibt nach.³³ In der zweiten Passage wird die zweideutige Dialektik von Aktivität und Passivität verdeutlicht. Wenn man in die Tiefe nieder schaut, wird man schwindlig. Man kommt sich selbst grundlos vor. Was ist der Grund – das Auge oder der Abgrund? Man kommt dazu, in die Tiefe zu sehen, der Abgrund wirkt auf einen. Dass man nieder schaut, ist aber etwas, das man selbst tut, denn man hätte in eine andere Richtung sehen können. Es geht also um die Subjektivität des Sehens. Wenn man sieht, ist man von dem beeinflusst, was man zu sehen bekommt, man wird davon angezogen. Man sieht aber selbst, denn man könnte wegsehen, man könnte anders und anderswo sehen. Um die Verwicklung von Aktivität und Passivität noch zu verdeutlichen: Wenn man sieht, wird man selbst bewegt, und man sieht selbst, indem man sich bewegt. Damit ist die Zweideutigkeit menschlicher Freiheit aber nicht erschöpft. Im Gegenteil wird sie auf der zweiten Ebene der Angst-Analyse intensiver, und zwar als Sich-zu-sich-Verhalten. Dass ein Mensch selbst bestimmt ist, zeigt sich auch darin, dass er in Angst vor dem Guten sich selbst einschließt und „sich selber zu einem Gefangenen macht.“³⁴ Er tut selbst etwas – mit sich: Er macht sich unfrei. Er wird selbst unfrei – durch sich selbst, aber auch im Verhältnis zu sich selbst. Die zweideutige Subjektivität ist mit sich verwickelt. Das Individuum verhält sich auf zweideutige Weise, und zwar in Bezug auf sich selbst, mit zwei Willen.³⁵ Es ist selbst durch die beiden Willen – gegeneinander – bestimmt. Es ist selbst in beiden

 SKS 4, 349 / BA, 41; vgl. auch: „Wer in Angst schuldig wird, er wird so zweideutig schuldig wie nur möglich“ (SKS 4, 366 / BA, 61); „die Zweideutigkeit, in welcher das Individuum beides wird, schuldig wie unschuldig. In der Ohnmacht der Angst sinkt das Individuum zusammen, aber eben darum ist es beides, schuldig wie unschuldig“ (SKS 4, 377 / BA, 73).  SKS 4, 365 / BA, 60.  Diese Zweideutigkeit wird in der Verzweiflungs-Analyse der Krankheit zum Tode zugespitzt: Man wird von Verzweiflung betroffen, man verzweifelt aber selbst.  SKS 4, 425 / BA, 128.  SKS 4, 430 / BA, 133.

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Willen, mit sich uneinig oder zwiespältig, ohne aber desintegriert zu werden.³⁶ Die Frage der Einheit der menschlichen Synthese wird damit zugespitzt.

7 Phänomenologie der Subjektivität Meine Überlegungen haben mehr oder weniger indirekt dafür argumentiert, Kierkegaards Angst-Analyse als eine Phänomenologie der Subjektivität zu interpretieren. Die Angst-Analyse ist nicht nur eine psychologische, sondern auch eine philosophische Abhandlung über die menschliche Freiheit, die auch dadurch radikal verfährt, dass sie auf zwei Fragen antwortet: Wie entsteht Subjektivität? Wie erscheint Subjektivität? Die beiden Fragen gehören zusammen. Eine Antwort, die beide Fragen verbindet, könnte so lauten: Menschliche Subjektivität entsteht, indem ein Mensch zu sich kommt. Diese Antwort weist auf die eigentümliche Struktur der Subjektivität hin: Subjektivität kommt dadurch zur Erscheinung, dass sie sich selbst erscheint. Ich möchte hier dafür argumentieren, dass eine Phänomenologie der Subjektivität diese Antwort weiter qualifizieren muss. Vorher möchte ich aber die Antwort in zwei Schritten entfalten: Zum ersten legt die Angst-Analyse menschliche Subjektivität sowohl radikal als auch bedingt aus, zum zweiten ist die Phänomenologie der Subjektivität genauer zu bestimmen. a. Wie kann gerade die Angst-Analyse eine Phänomenologie der Subjektivität darstellen? Entscheidend ist die doppelte Betonung der Angst-Analyse. Einerseits betont sie, dass menschliche Subjektivität in einem Kontext entsteht. Diese erste Betonung wird in der Rezeption meistens übersehen. Subjektivität hat Bedingungen, vor allem leibliche und geschichtliche. Sie ist „embodied“ und „embedded.“³⁷ Andererseits kann menschliche Subjektivität nicht aus ihren Bedingungen erklärt werden. Sie ist bedingt, kann aber nicht auf ihre Bedingungen zurückgeführt werden. Die erste Betonung, dass ein Mensch selbst leiblich und geschichtlich bestimmt ist, liegt in der Synthese-Bestimmung. Dies wird z. B. in der Analyse der Scham (Blufærdighed) ausgeführt: „In der Scham ist eine Angst, weil der Geist auf der äußersten Spitze der Besonderung in der Synthesis derart bestimmt ist, dass der Geist nicht rein als Leib bestimmt ist, sondern als Leib in geschlechtlicher Besonderung.“³⁸ Der Geist ist als genus bestimmt.³⁹ Eben als Geist ist der Mensch  Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Self and Identity,“ Kapitel 4 in diesem Buch.  Vgl. Arne Grøn, „The Embodied Self: Reformulating the Existential Difference in Kierkegaard,“ Kapitel 6 in diesem Buch.  SKS 4, 372 / BA, 68.

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als Leib bestimmt. Die Synthese-Bestimmung verbindet aber auch Leib und Geschichte: „Erst im Geschlechtlichen [i det Sexuelle] ist die Synthesis gesetzt als Widerspruch, aber zugleich wie jeder Widerspruch als Aufgabe, deren Geschichte im gleichen Augenblick beginnt.“⁴⁰ „Ein jedes Individuum hebt an in einer geschichtlichen Verkettung (Nexus) und die Naturfolgen gelten jetzt wie je.“⁴¹ Die zweite Betonung durchzieht die Freiheits-Abhandlung. Wie Freiheit als Selbstverhalten entsteht, kann nicht aus ihren Bedingungen erklärt werden. Sie entsteht nur als Freiheit. Dass ein Mensch zu sich kommt, ändert seine Bedingungen. Er hat jetzt eine Geschichte mit sich selbst. Dies kann nicht aus einer Perspektive der dritten Person erklärt werden, oder genauer, wir verstehen es nur, indem wir selbst eine Geschichte mit uns haben. Damit verstehen wir, was es heißt, eine bestimmte Geschichte zu haben: dass man selbst bestimmt ist. Dies Verstehen kann jedoch vertieft, oder aber auch vergessen werden. Die Frage ist, wie wir es verstehen, ob wir – letzten Endes – verstehen, was es heißt, ein Selbst zu sein, und ob wir das, was wir selbst tun, auf uns nehmen. Kierkegaards Freiheits-Abhandlung beschreibt, wie Subjektivität als leiblich und geschichtlich bestimmte entsteht. Freiheit als Selbstverhalten wird aber damit nicht erklärt. Wenn wir erklären wollen, wie Subjektivität als Freiheit entsteht, müssen wir auslegen, was es heißt, sich (zu sich) zu verhalten. Die Welt ändert sich, indem man zu sich kommt und sich selbst zum Problem wird. Ein Mensch hängt mit seinen natürlichen und geschichtlichen Bedingungen zusammen, so dass er sich selbst dadurch verstehen muss.Wenn wir aber versuchen, uns selbst – das, was wir selbst tun, sagen und denken – durch unsere natürlichen und geschichtlichen Bedingungen zu erklären, sind wir immer noch auf uns selbst gestellt: Wir geben uns selbst diese Erklärung. Wenn wir versuchen, uns selbst auf Natur oder Geschichte zurückzuführen, ist schon zu fragen, wie dies unser Selbstverständnis ändern wird. Wir kommen nicht um uns selbst herum. Was es heißt, sich zu sich zu verhalten, indem man sich zur Welt verhält, verstehen wir nur dadurch, dass wir uns zu uns verhalten. Wenn Kierkegaard sein Pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis sagen lässt, dass der Geist sich selbst setzt, trifft er diesen Punkt: Selbstverhalten kann nicht aus etwas anderem erklärt werden.⁴² Wie verständlich das, was man tut, auch aus den Umständen heraus scheinen mag – man tut selbst etwas. Dies ist der Punkt der Angst-Analyse als Freiheits-

 SKS 4, 373 / BA, 69.  SKS 4, 354 / BA, 47.  SKS 4, 376 / BA, 73.  „In dem Augenblick, da der Geist sich selbst setzt, setzt er die Synthesis.“ Der entscheidende Zusatz lautet: Um „aber die Synthesis zu setzen, muss er sie zuerst unterscheidend durchdringen, und das Äußerste am Sinnlichen ist eben das Geschlechtliche [det Sexuelle]“ (SKS 4, 354 / BA, 47).

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Abhandlung: Man entdeckt sich selbst als denjenigen, der dies selbst tut. Insofern geht es um Selbstentdeckung und nicht um Selbstsetzen. Man setzt sich selbst, indem man selbst etwas tut. Erstens tut man dies, aber als jemand, der selbst gesetzt und situiert ist, und zweitens erfahrt man sich selbst als denjenigen, der dies selbst tut. Die beiden Betonungen gehören zusammen. Ein Mensch kommt zu sich, indem er sich selbst als aufgegeben erfährt. Er ist sich selbst als Aufgabe gestellt. Er fängt mit sich selbst an, bekommt eine Geschichte mit sich. Dieser Punkt – der Augenblick, in dem und mit dem das Individuum zu sich als sich selbst aufgegeben kommt und seine Geschichte mit sich beginnt – findet aber in einer Geschichte statt. Ein Mensch kommt zu sich als schon leiblich und geschichtlich bestimmter. Damit wird auch angegeben, dass die beiden Perspektiven zusammengehalten werden müssen. Menschliche Subjektivität entsteht als leiblich bestimmte in einer Geschichte, aber als Subjektivität, indem sie eine Geschichte mit sich bekommt. Was erscheint, ist zweideutige Subjektivität: Durch die Angst entdeckt man sich als denjenigen, der schon selbst etwas tut (selbst in den Abgrund sieht), indem man selbst beeinflusst wird. In der Angst kann ein Mensch sich als leiblich und geschichtlich bestimmt ergreifen. Subjektivität ist nur menschliche Subjektivität durch ihre Bedingungen, diese sind aber nur durch Subjektivität menschliche Bedingungen. b. Die Angst-Analyse kann also als eine Phänomenologie der zweideutigen Subjektivität gelten. Wie können wir diese als eine Phänomenologie der Subjektivität bestimmen? Wie wir gesehen haben, geht es in ihr um Phänomene, wie z. B. Mitleid und Scham – und letzten Endes um die Frage: Was zeigt die Angst? Es geht auch um Figuren oder Gestalten, wie z. B. den in sich Verschlossenen. Die AngstAnalyse beschreibt nicht nur Phänomene und Figuren, sondern auch eine Welt – eine Welt des Sehens und der Kommunikation. Wie hängt dies zusammen: Phänomene, Figuren, Welt? Nehmen wir unseren Ausgangspunkt im Folgenden methodischen Hinweis: Was in Der Begriff Angst entwickelt wird, sind „die psychologischen Stellungen der Freiheit zur Sünde.“⁴³ Die Phänomenologie der Subjektivität ist eine Phänomenologie der Stellungen. Versuchen wir, uns dies kurz zu vergegenwärtigen: Mit dem, was ein Mensch tut, bringt er sich und den Anderen in eine bestimmte Stellung. Wenn er etwas einem Anderen gegenüber tut, stellt er sich in ein Verhältnis zu dem Anderen. Dies hat eine doppelsinnige Bedeutung: Erstens, er stellt den Anderen auf eine bestimmte Weise (z. B. wenn er in Hochmut den Anderen so sieht, dass er ihm damit sagt, wie der Andere sich selbst sehen soll, wenn

 SKS 4, 419 – 420 / BA, 121.

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der Andere ihn als überlegen sieht). Er kann aber nur den Anderen auf eine bestimmte Weise stellen, indem der Andere in eine Stellung zu sich gebracht wird (z. B. dass der Andere sich selbst als minderwertig sehen soll). Zweitens, indem er den Anderen auf eine bestimmte Weise stellt, stellt er auch sich selbst – in Beziehung zum Anderen (so stellt der Hochmütige sich selbst als hochmütig an). Mit dem, was er tut, tut ein Mensch etwas mit sich, er stellt sich selbst. Wie er sich stellt, wird nicht einfach damit entschieden, wie er sich selbst stellen will. Die Frage ist nicht nur, was man tut und tun will, sondern auch, was man mit dem tut, was man tut. Entwürfe zu einer Phänomenologie der Stellungen finden wir nicht nur in Der Begriff Angst,⁴⁴ sondern auch in Der Liebe Tun und in Die Krankheit zum Tode. Phänomene wie z. B. Hochmut und Mitleid sind Stellungsweisen. In Hochmut und Mitleid stellt man sich zu sich, indem man sich zum Anderen stellt. Ob man es will oder nicht, steht man in einer Welt der Kommunikation, wenn man sich zu Anderen stellt. Auch In-sich-Verschlossenheit ist Kommunikation. Ein Mensch verhält sich zu sich selbst, indem er sich zu Anderen und zur Welt, die zwischen ihm und den Anderen ist, in ein Verhältnis stellt. Wenn er sich zu Anderen stellt, verhält er sich schon zu sich, ob er es will oder nicht. Er ist zu sich gestellt. Menschliche Subjektivität liegt damit in den Beziehungen: zu sich, zu den Anderen und zur Welt. Die Antwort, Subjektivität entstehe, indem ein Mensch zu sich kommt, muss aber damit auch qualifiziert werden. Denn Subjektivität bedeutet nicht nur, dass man zu sich kommt, sondern ist darin bereits vorausgesetzt. Man kommt zu sich, indem man sich erfährt. Wenn die Anthropologie der Freiheits-Abhandlung so interpretiert wird, dass ein Mensch erst Mensch wird, indem er zu sich kommt, wird menschliche Subjektivität missverstanden. Denn Subjektivität hat die Struktur, dass das Individuum zu sich als sich schon verhaltend kommt. In der Angst als Grundstimmung geht es um eine grundlegende Selbstentdeckung. Die kurzen Beschreibungen der Kindheit in der Angst-Abhandlung sind hier besonders aufschlussreich. Die Welt der Kindheit ist in sich vollkommen und kreist doch um die andere Welt der Erwachsenen. Sie ist nicht nur eine Welt, die später verlassen wird, sondern die Welt, in der ein Mensch zur Welt kommt und auch die andere Welt der Erwachsenen entdeckt. Ein Mensch trägt als Erwachsener die Welt der Kindheit mit sich.  Vgl. z. B.: „Was darüber entscheidet, ob die Erscheinung [Phænomenet] dämonisch ist, ist die Stellung des Individuums zum Offenbarwerden, ob er jenes Faktum mit der Freiheit durchdringen will, es in der Freiheit auf sich nehmen will“ (SKS 4, 429 – 430 / BA, 133). Diese Stellung betrifft nicht (nur) den ausdrücklichen Willen des Individuums, sondern was es in und mit diesem Willen will.

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Obwohl es in der Anthropologie der Freiheits-Abhandlung um das Selbstwerden geht, ist ihre Phänomenologie der Subjektivität nicht teleologisch wie Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. In der Freiheits-Abhandlung Kierkegaards geht es um Menschsein als Menschwerden. Dies bedeutet, dass Menschsein ethisch bestimmt ist.⁴⁵ Mensch wird man nur als Mensch. Man wird nur man selbst, indem man sich auf sich nimmt. Insofern soll man werden, was man schon ist. Nur als Synthese kann ein Mensch die Synthese verfehlen. Sich selbst zu verfehlen ist eine menschliche Möglichkeit. Sie gehört zur menschlichen Freiheit. Das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit ist auch in diesem Sinne zweideutig.⁴⁶

 Ein Kind kann den Unterschied von Gut und Böse erfahren, ohne ihn begreifen zu können; es kann eben damit aber auch den Unterschied verletzbarer erfahren.  Für die sprachliche Überarbeitung danke ich sehr herzlich Dorothea Glöckner.

Chapter 22 Zeit und Transzendenz 1 Transzendenz der Zeit Als das übergreifende Geschehen, von dem frühgriechische Dichtung Zeugnis ablegt, wird in den folgenden Interpretationen zu Pindar und zur archaischen Lyrik ein Wandel in Anspruch genommen, der als eine dynamisch verstandene Transzendenz der Zeit von deren basaler Herrschaft ausgeht und auf eine gewisse Freiheit von Zeitherrschaft zugeht. Transzendenz meint da aber keinen Ausbruch aus Zeit schlechthin und in eine vermeintliche Zeitlosigkeit wie in parmenideisch-platonischer Metaphysik, sondern eine Verwandlung herrschender Zeit in eine andere. Darum ist der Wandel eine Wende, eine Umwendung der Zeit in ihr selbst.¹

Der Anfang des Pindar-Buches von Michael Theunissen stellt in einer knapp umrissenen Bewegung dessen grundlegende Denkfigur dar, die im Untertitel des Buches auftritt: die Transzendenz der Zeit als Wende der Zeit. So komplex und differenziert die im Buch folgenden Interpretationen zu Pindar und zur archaischen Lyrik sind, so zurückhaltend ist die Darstellung der systematischen Perspektiven dieser Interpretationen. Das hängt damit zusammen, dass es um Interpretationen von Dichtung geht.Wenn Dichtung aber „ein philosophieträchtiges Potential“² besitzt, müssen Interpretationen die systematischen Fragestellungen durch die Dichtung reflektiert auslegen. Der Untertitel des Buches – „Menschenlos und Wende der Zeit“ – hebt die übergreifende systematische Perspektive hervor. Die folgenden Überlegungen werden in direktem Zugriff die Fragestellung diskutieren, die sich aus der Denkfigur der Transzendenz der Zeit als Wende der Zeit ergibt – und zwar im Blick auf die Frage nach der conditio humana. Dabei werde ich weder dem Stil noch der fast überwältigenden inhaltlichen Komplexität des Buches gerecht. Außerdem werden meine Überlegungen besonders nach zwei Richtungen über den Kontext des Buches hinausgehen: Zum einen werde ich auf Kierkegaard zurückgreifen, zum anderen ein im Text nur implizit enthaltenes religionsphilosophisches Anliegen behandeln. Mit der Frage nach der Transzendenz der Zeit rückt die Zeit unmittelbar in den Brennpunkt. Denn Transzendenz bedeutet hier eine Verwandlung der Zeit in eine

 Michael Theunissen, Pindar. Menschenlos und Wende der Zeit, München: C.H. Beck 2000, S. 1.  Michael Theunissen, „Philosophie und Philosophiegeschichte. Rückblick eines Lehrers,“ in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Nr. 5, 1998, S. 854. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-028

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andere oder gar eine Umwendung der Zeit in ihr selbst. Es geht also um die Transzendenz der Zeit. Der Wandel ist ein Wandel der Zeit. Dass die Transzendenz der Zeit durch die Transzendenz auf die Zeit hin verstanden wird, wird dadurch bestätigt, dass die Bewegung in unserem Ausgangszitat wie in den darauf folgenden Interpretationen des Buches eine prominente Rolle spielt. Was an dieser Bewegung besonders auffällt, ist ihr Doppelcharakter: Sie ist eine Bewegung über etwas hinaus, zu dem sie eben zurückkehren soll. Die Transzendenzbewegung bedeutet auch Rückkehr und Umkehrung. Das Zusammenspiel von Zeit und Transzendenz in der Figur „Transzendenz der Zeit“ ist spannungsvoll. Der Gedanke, dass die Transzendenz der Zeit eine Wende der Zeit ist, überrascht. Er scheint paradox, weil wir zunächst Transzendenz als Transzendenz von Zeit in dem Sinne verstehen, dass die Bewegung über die Zeit hinaus eben keine Rückbewegung – und also keine Verwandlung der Zeit in ihr selbst – bedeutet. Wenn mit dem Begriff von Transzendenz der Zeit Zeit und Transzendenz wechselseitig bestimmt werden, wird sowohl die Frage nach der Zeit als auch das Problem der Transzendenz akzentuiert. Was Transzendenz bedeutet, wird durch die Transzendenz der Zeit bestimmt – als Wende der Zeit. Die Frage ist demnach, was Transzendenz der Zeit meint. Ich werde von diesem anderen Ende – dem Transzendenzproblem – her anfangen. Wenn wir versuchen, von Transzendenz zu sprechen, fragt sich zuerst: transzendent in bezug worauf? Nicht nur gibt es mehrere Möglichkeiten (zum Beispiel Transzendenz in bezug auf Seiendes, aber nicht auf Welt, oder Transzendenz in bezug auf die Welt, die durch unsere Vorstellungen und Handlungen bestimmt ist, aber nicht auf jene Welt, die im Vertrauen zugänglich ist); zudem ist der Versuch, Transzendenz absolut zu denken, durch eine offene oder vielleicht aporetische Struktur gekennzeichnet: Transzendenz im absoluten Sinne ist von dem losgelöst, was transzendiert wird – und in bezug worauf wir eben von Transzendenz sprechen können. Diese Struktur tritt in der Metaphysik als Transzendenzdenken hervor, das vom Problem der Zeit bestimmt ist.

2 Metaphysik und das Problem der Zeit Dass die Transzendenz der Zeit nicht nur eine Wende der Zeit, sondern auch eine Umkehrung oder Inversion der Transzendenz bedeutet, können wir bereits dem Ausgangszitat entnehmen. Es geht eben nicht um Transzendenz „aus Zeit schlechthin und in eine vermeintliche Zeitlosigkeit wie in parmenideisch-platonischer Metaphysik.“ Der Gedanke der Transzendenz der Zeit arbeitet kritisch mit unseren Vorstellungen von Zeit und Transzendenz. Inwiefern kommt ihm dabei metaphysikkritische Bedeutung zu?

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Metaphysik ist selbst von einer Transzendenzbewegung gekennzeichnet. Wenn sie die Transzendenz, die sie selbst voraussetzt und vertritt, auf den Begriff bringt, fällt vor allem der Versuch auf, Transzendenz als Jenseits der Zeit, als zeitjenseitige Ewigkeit oder als zeitenthobenes Sein zu begreifen. Metaphysik wird zu einer Metachronik.³ Dieses Unterfangen aber bleibt von dem Problem der Zeit bestimmt. Dies zeigt sich darin, dass Ewigkeit als Zeitlosigkeit sich zur Ewigkeit der Zeit verkehrt: Was zeitlos ist, ist immerseiend.⁴ Metaphysik als Theorie einer Welt, die eine zeitliche Verfassung besitzt, verankert diese Welt in einer Ordnung, die „als das Andere dieser Welt ebensowohl das Andere der Zeit ist.“⁵ Wenn aber „das Andere der Zeit“ als eine Welt ohne Zeit verstanden wird, gilt folgendes Argument gegen die Metaphysik als Zweiweltenlehre: Wenn das Unendliche als eine andere Welt vorgestellt wird, wird es selbst als endlich gedacht – als eine andere Welt neben dieser endlichen, zeitlichen Welt. Wenn Transzendenz als eine andere Welt als die endliche, zeitliche Welt, Transzendenz von Zeit als eine Welt ohne Zeit vorgestellt wird, verkehrt sich Transzendenz. Ich möchte daraus zwei Folgerungen ziehen. Erstens liegt in dieser Verkehrung von Ewigkeit (Immersein) und Transzendenz (Welt) eine versteckte Betonung der Zeit: Zeit als Vergänglichkeit, die das Sein bedroht, ist das Problem, auf welches Ewigkeit als Beständigkeit oder Immersein antworten soll. Metaphysik als Transzendenzdenken lebt insofern von dem Problem der Zeit. Der Versuch, den Transzendenzgedanken gegen die Vorstellung von zwei Welten (und das heißt gegen die Verkehrung von Transzendenz) zu gewinnen, kann eben von diesem Problem ausgehen, auf welches Metaphysik als Transzendenzdenken antwortet: Zeit als Veränderung, Vergänglichkeit und Verlust. Zweitens, wenn Transzendenz als zeitjenseitige Welt eben nicht Transzendenz ist, muss ein Begriff von Transzendenz offenbar die Forderung erfüllen, Transzendenz im Verhältnis zur Zeit zu bestimmen. Transzendenz von Zeit muss eine andere Bestimmung von Zeit abgeben. Transzendenz kann als Transzendenz nur von dem aus verstanden werden, was transzendiert wird. Das bedeutet, dass Transzendenz nur von den Erfahrungen aus bestimmt werden kann, die Erfahrungen von Grenzen menschlichen Daseins sind. Transzendenz beleuchtet eben das, im Verhältnis wozu sie Transzendenz ist. Wenn wir Zeit und Transzendenz so zusammenstellen, dass das „und“ betont wird, bekommen wir die innere Bruchlinie der Metaphysik als Transzendenzdenken in den Blick. Der Gedanke der Transzendenz der Zeit erhält seine meta Michael Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit, 2. Auflage, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1992, S. 310.  Ibid., S. 311.  Ibid., S. 310.

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physikkritische Bedeutung dadurch, dass Transzendenz im Gegensatz zum (metaphysischen) Begriff von Transzendenz als zeitloser Welt nunmehr als Wende der Zeit zu verstehen ist. Wenn die Transzendenzbewegung über die Zeit hinaus in eine andere Welt geht, endet sie dort. Da die Metaphysik auf diese Weise ihre Intention, Transzendenz zu denken, verfehlt, ist Transzendenz anders zu denken. Der Versuch, den Transzendenzgedanken wiederzugewinnen, kann – so mein Argument – auf die offene Struktur des metaphysischen Transzendenzdenkens zurückgreifen: Transzendenz bestimmt sich nur in bezug auf das, was eben transzendiert wird. Sie erscheint in bezug darauf losgelöst. Die entscheidende Frage ist dann, in welchem Sinne wir von einer Los-Lösung sprechen können. Diese Frage werde ich im Blick auf die Transzendenz der Zeit verfolgen. Was heißt Transzendenz als Los-Lösung in bezug auf die Zeit? Der hier skizzierte Versuch, den Transzendenzgedanken durch die offene Struktur der Metaphysik als Transzendenzdenken wiederzugewinnen, bedeutet, dass sich metaphysisches Denken auch in anderen Formen als der Zweiweltenlehre zu vollziehen vermag. Ein Transzendenzdenken kann auf das Problem der Zeit zurückgreifen, welches die Metaphysik auch dann voraussetzt, wenn sie Transzendenz von Zeit als Zeitlosigkeit denkt. Insofern könnte eine Reformulierung der Metaphysik hinter die metaphysische Tradition zurückgehen, indem sie die Frage nach Transzendenz und Zeit noch einmal stellt, von der die Metaphysik als ein Transzendenzdenken bewegt ist.

3 Das Problem der Zeit: Dichtung und Religion Michael Theunissen geht hinter die Metaphysik zur vormetaphysischen Lyrik zurück, indem er hinter die Abstraktion geht, die die Parmenideische Metaphysik vornimmt: Parmenides „attained his object, pure being [das reine Seiende] – in which all movement in time, genesis and decline, and thereby all history, is expunged – through a negation of the world which, in the preceding two-hundred year long epoch of lyric poetry that formed the culture, had been described as changing relentlessly and changing us with it, ensnaring us and subjugating us.“⁶ In diesem Rückgang nimmt Theunissen die Frage von Zeit und Transzendenz mit – anstatt den Transzendenzgedanken einer metaphysikkritischen Auflösung

 Michael Theunissen, „Experience of the Divine. Philosophy and Theology in Early Greek Poetry,“ in The Return of God. Theological Perspectives in Contemporary Philosophy, hg. von Niels Grønkjær, Odense: Odense University Press 1998, S. 22.

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preiszugeben. Es geht um die Wiederentdeckung nicht nur der Herrschaft der Zeit, sondern auch der Transzendenz der Zeit. Dass das Problem der Zeit, auf welches die Metaphysik mit dem Transzendenzgedanken antwortet, wieder entdeckt werden soll, wird somit in diesem Rückgang hinter die Metaphysik bestätigt. Bei Theunissen wird das Problem der Zeit durch die Grunderfahrung von Herrschaft der Zeit bestimmt. Es geht um eine Erfahrung von Zeit, die, hinter die metaphysische Abstraktion zurückgehend, erneut ausgelegt werden soll. Die Herrschaft der Zeit wirkt in der Veränderung der Zeit, die uns selbst trifft. Die Transzendenz der Zeit muss so von der basalen Herrschaft der Zeit ausgehen: Wir sind in der Zeit. Wenn die Fragestellung von Zeit und Transzendenz durch die Dichtung reflektiert wird, kommen Erfahrung und Bewegung eine methodische Rolle zu. Die Dichtung arbeitet mit Grunderfahrungen von Zeit und Existenzbewegungen, die ein Subjekt in der Zeit mit sich selbst macht. Sie setzt uns als Zuhörer oder Leser in eine Situation, die sie uns vor Augen führt. Von dieser Situation aus stellt sie Bewegungen dar, in die wir einbezogen sind. Bewegungen, die von einem Menschen gemacht werden und auch mit ihm geschehen. In diesen Bewegungen geht es in gewissem Sinne um Zeit und Transzendenz. In welchem Sinne, bleibt jedoch zu interpretieren. In Dichtung und Religion werden Erfahrungen freigelegt, die zu denken geben. Wie aber ist eine philosophische Deutung der Dichtung möglich? Theunissen zufolge setzt eine philosophische Interpretation voraus, dass die Dichtung selber die conditio humana bedenkt.⁷ Die Dichtung bedenkt aber die menschliche Bedingung nicht wie eine philosophische Reflexion, sondern gibt eben als Dichtung zu denken. Die menschliche Bedingung wird durch die Erfahrungen und Bewegungen reflektiert, die wir in der Dichtung mit uns machen. Durch die Dichtung kann die Grunderfahrung wiederholt werden, dass wir in der Zeit sind. Dazu kommt, dass die Dichtung selber an den Bewegungen, die wir mit uns in der Zeit machen können und die mit uns geschehen, teilnehmen kann. Die Interpretationen des Pindar-Buches kreisen folglich um Bewegungen, und insbesondere um Transzendenzbewegungen bezüglich der Grunderfahrung der Herrschaft der Zeit. Dass die Dichtung an der Transzendenzbewegung teilnehmen kann, geht besonders aus der Interpretation zur zehnten Olympie hervor: Dichtung gibt nicht nur Erfahrungen und Bewegungen wieder, sondern ist ein Mehr-Geben.⁸ Damit ist auch gesagt, dass die philosophischen Interpretationen im PindarBuch von religionsphilosophischen Fragestellungen bestimmt sind. (Das geht

 Theunissen, Pindar, S. 57.  Ibid., S. 625 – 626.

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schon aus dem Sachindex hervor, der unmittelbar einem Index einer religionsphilosophischen Abhandlung gleicht). Themen, die Zeiterfahrungen reflektieren, werden eben im Blick auf die Frage nach der Transzendenz der Zeit gefaßt. Die folgenden Überlegungen werden die Fragestellung von Zeit und Transzendenz aus religionsphilosophischer Sicht weiterführen. Religionsphilosophie verstehe ich als philosophische Reflexion über menschliche Grunderfahrungen, die durch die Religion sowohl ausgedrückt wie interpretiert werden. Sie arbeitet mit einer Perspektivenverdoppelung, da die Religion selber ein Versuch ist, die menschliche Wirklichkeit im ganzen in den Blick zu bekommen. Religionsphilosophie fragt dann danach, was die Optik der Religion für das Verständnis dieser Erfahrungen bedeutet.⁹ Das Problem dieser Optik besteht nicht zuletzt darin, dass Religion menschliche Erfahrungen als Erfahrungen von Transzendenz interpretiert. In dieser Interpretation steckt aber das Problem der Zeit. Was als Transzendenz interpretiert wird, tritt als Antwort auf problembeladene Erfahrungen von Zeit auf. Das Problem der Zeit, welches die Metaphysik als Transzendenzdenken bewegt, wird in der Religion ausgedrückt und interpretiert – und zwar durch Bewegungen, die Zeiterfahrungen im Hinblick auf Transzendenz reflektieren. In der Religion wie in der Dichtung werden wir einbezogen in Erfahrungen und Bewegungen, die nicht nur einfach in einem Bezug stehen zur Zeit, sondern Zeit auch auswerten und vielleicht Zeit freigeben. Wenn religiöse Vorstellungen von Transzendenz in diese Richtung gehen, fordern sie einen differenzierten Begriff von Transzendenz. Mit ihren Transzendenzvorstellungen kann Religion Erfahrungen von Zeit als Veränderung, Vergänglichkeit und Verlust hinsichtlich ihrer Bedeutung befragen, Erfahrungen, die im Hintergrund der Metaphysik liegen. Die nächste Frage ist dann aber, in welchem Verhältnis Transzendenz zu diesen Zeiterfahrungen steht.

4 Inversion der Transzendenz Die Metaphysik, die auf Parmenides zurückgeht, denkt a-temporal: Transzendenz wird als Jenseits der Zeit gefaßt. Im Gegensatz dazu findet Theunissen bei Pindar und der archaischen Lyrik eine dynamisch verstandene Transzendenz der Zeit als Wende der Zeit. Transzendenz bedeutet hier Verwandlung der Zeit: „Das Überstiegene verschwindet nicht,“¹⁰ sondern wird neu bestimmt. Transzendenz ist im

 Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Die Aufgabe der Religionsphilosophie,“ in Kerygma und Dogma, Nr. 2, 2001, S. 111– 125.  Theunissen, Pindar, S. 764.

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prozessualen Sinne zu verstehen als Transzendenzbewegung: ein Überstieg, aber auch eine Rückkehr.¹¹ Transzendenz als diese Doppelbewegung wird in der Überschrift zum abschließenden dritten Teil des zweiten Buches hervorgehoben: „Inversion der Transzendenz.“ Es gibt bei Pindar – laut Theunissen – diese Doppelbewegung: eine Transzendenz des Ephemeren, und aus der Transzendenz des Ephemeren „kehrt Pindar ins Ephemere, aus dem dichterischen Überschwang in die Nüchternheit, aus der Vision eines Jenseits ins Diesseits zurück.“¹² Was hinter der metaphysischen Abstraktion wieder entdeckt wird, ist nicht nur die basale Herrschaft der Zeit, sondern auch Transzendenz in bezug auf diese Herrschaft, aber eine Transzendenzbewegung, die zu der Zeit zurückkehrt, in der wir leben. Als Gegenentwurf zur Transzendenz als Zeitlosigkeit und zur Verdopplung der Welt in zwei Welten (Zeit und zeitlose Transzendenz) steht hier Transzendenz als Wende der Zeit, die einhergeht mit einer Inversion der Transzendenz. Diese Doppelbewegung aber ist mehrfach bestimmt. Sie ist nicht nur Überstieg und Rückkehr, sondern auch Einbruch. In dem Einbruch gibt es etwas uns Übersteigendes. Transzendenz ist nicht nur eine Bewegung, die wir selber vollbringen, sondern Transzendenz ist auch ein Einbruch, der sich an uns im Augenblick ereignet. Wenn wir diesen Gedanken des Augenblickes näher betrachten, fällt zweierlei auf. Erstens geht es hier um Erfahrungen von Unendlichkeit. Es ist ein Einbruch, in dem unsere Vorstellungen gebrochen werden. Einbruch meint ein Übersteigen, aber nicht im Sinne einer Transzendenzbewegung, die von uns ausgeht, sondern im Sinne einer Erfahrung davon, selber überstiegen zu werden. Das Übersteigende oder das Unendliche, das an Einbruchserfahrungen haftet, kann sich in der Inversion von Transzendenz zeigen. Dass ein Leben, das in Schuld verstrickt ist, erneuert wird, ist in diesem Sinne eine Erfahrung von Unendlichkeit. Zweitens geht es aber auch um Endlichkeit im betonten Sinne. Dies möchte ich so begründen: Einbruch setzt eben voraus, dass wir in der Zeit sind. Die Zeit, die gewendet wird, ist diese Zeit: die Zeit, in der wir sind. Entscheidend ist, dass die Transzendenz der Zeit nicht nur Transzendenz von Zeit (über die Zeit hinaus) in die Zeit zurück, sondern auch Transzendenz in der Zeit in dem Sinne ist, dass sie mit uns in der Zeit geschieht. Auch in der Transzendenzbewegung sind wir in der Zeit. Eine Ausnahme davon bildet vielleicht der Augenblick, aber wir sind im Augenblick nur in dem Sinne über die Zeit hinaus, dass etwas Unerwartetes plötzlich in die Zeit hereinbricht.

 Ibid., S. 217– 218.  Ibid., S. 922.

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Die Rede von einer Wende der Zeit läßt die Frage offen: Was ist das für eine Zeit, die verwandelt und gewendet wird? Laut unserem Ausgangszitat geht es um „eine Verwandlung herrschender Zeit in eine andere,“ aber auch um „eine Wende, eine Umwendung der Zeit in ihr selbst.“ Die erste Formulierung deutet an, dass die Transzendenz der Zeit eine Transzendenz von herrschender Zeit in eine andere Zeit ist. Es ist nicht die Rede von der Zeit, sondern von Zeiten. Zeiterfahrungen werden so nicht hypostasiert. Dennoch reden wir von der Zeit, wenn wir versuchen, unsere Zeiterfahrungen auszudrücken. Wir brauchen den Begriff der Zeit auch dann, wenn wir die Erfahrung fassen wollen, dass die Zeit jetzt eine andere ist. Die Zeit, die sich geändert hat, ist die Zeit, in der wir sind. Wir sind von der Veränderung betroffen. Mit Transzendenz der Zeit als Wende der Zeit wird die Grunderfahrung von der Zeit betont, in der wir sind. Die Inversion der Transzendenz ist Rückkehr zu der Zeit, von der wir ausgegangen sind. Die Doppelbewegung ist eine Wiederholung. Die Zeit, die eine andere ist, ist eben die Zeit, in der wir leben. Die Doppelbewegung geschieht mit uns in der Zeit. Diese doppelte Pointe – in den Stichworten Unendlichkeit und Endlichkeit zusammengefaßt – ist jetzt durch die Themen Augenblick und Doppelbewegung näher zu begründen. Es geht mir hier um den Zusammenhang zwischen der Unendlichkeit, die – von dem Augenblick aus durch die Doppelbewegung – die Zeit, in der wir sind, neu bestimmt, und der radikalen Endlichkeit, die mit der Zeit, in der wir sind, betont wird.

5 Un-Endlichkeit: Augenblick und Doppelbewegung In seiner Reformulierung der Fragestellung von Zeit und Transzendenz verwendet Theunissen die beiden Interpretamente: Augenblick und Doppelbewegung. Obwohl er im Pindar-Buch diesbezüglich keine expliziten Hinweise auf Kierkegaard gibt, sind Augenblick und Doppelbewegung eben in ihrer Verbindung Kierkegaardsche Denkfiguren. Dass es bei Kierkegaard um die doppelte Betonung von Transzendenz und Endlichkeit geht, ist ein weiterer Grund dafür, im Folgenden von ihm auszugehen. Die Doppelbewegung ist dem Pindar-Buch eingeschrieben, und zwar durch die entscheidende Denkfigur der Transzendenz der Zeit. Diese Figur hält die beiden Bewegungen: – Überstieg und Rückkehr – zusammen. Die Inversion der Transzendenz macht die beiden Bewegungen zur Doppelbewegung. Bei Kierkegaard tritt die Doppelbewegung vor allem als Doppelbewegung der menschli-

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chen Synthese auf.¹³ Eine Schlüsselstelle in Die Krankheit zum Tode lautet: „Die Entwicklung muss mithin darin bestehen, dass man unendlich von sich selber loskommt in Verunendlichung des Selbst, und dass man unendlich zu sich selber zurückkehrt in der Verendlichung.“¹⁴ Ich möchte hier erstens zeigen, dass es in dieser Doppelbewegung der menschlichen Synthese um Zeit – und Transzendenz – geht, zweitens dass die negative Möglichkeit dieser Synthese zur Doppelbewegung gehört. Bemerken wir zunächst, welche Rolle die Begriffe Endlichkeit und Unendlichkeit für die Bestimmung der Doppelbewegung spielen. Wir können die Doppelbewegung als eine verdoppelte Transzendenzbewegung beschreiben: über die Endlichkeit hinaus um unendlich zur Endlichkeit zurückzukehren. Transzendenz wird hier wiederum prozessual verstanden als Transzendenzbewegung. Gerade die Transzendenzbewegung ist aber der kritische Punkt. Denn wir Menschen machen ohnehin von uns aus Transzendenzbewegungen, zum Beispiel wenn wir uns idealisierenden Vorstellungen hingeben, um unserer Selbstbestimmtheit zu entgehen. Mit solchen Vorstellungen können wir die Wirklichkeit gleichsam überfliegen. Die Kritik der Transzendenzbewegung wendet Kierkegaard auch philosophisch gegen die Metaphysik platonischer Prägung. In der Transzendenzbewegung als Rückführung der Existenz zu der Ewigkeit abstrahiert die Metaphysik von der Endlichkeit. Als Menschen sind wir aber mitten in der Zeit, unterwegs und im Werden. Die „Hintertür“ der Ewigkeit ist verschlossen. Das heißt, dass wir uns zur Ewigkeit nur in Gestalt des Kommenden verhalten können. Die Bestimmung der Doppelbewegung als Transzendenzbewegung setzt also voraus, dass unsere eigenen Transzendenzbewegungen abgebrochen und abgebogen werden. Dies geschieht dadurch, dass wir Einbruchserfahrungen machen. Der Einbruch findet im Augenblick statt, in dem er eine Zäsur in der Zeit, in der wir sind, setzt. Das bedeutet, dass unser Bewußtsein sich ändert, was wir selbst nur im nachhinein – im Laufe der Zeit – verstehen. Dem Augenblick haftet in diesem Sinne eine unendliche Bedeutung an: Im Augenblick wird die Zeit eine andere. Das Leben, das aus unendlich vielen Zeitmomenten besteht, ändert sich auf einmal. Wir sind unterwegs und sehen trotzdem das Leben als ganzes. Hier verbinden sich Doppelbewegung und Augenblick. Der Augenblick geht in die Bewegung ein, die nicht einfach aus Überstieg und Rückkehr besteht. Die Doppelbewegung gelingt nur durch eine einbrechende Transzendenz, die unsere  Vgl. die Bemerkung in Michael Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993, S. 144: „Diese Doppelbewegung hat mich seit meiner Dissertation (1955) immer wieder beschäftigt“ (mit Hinweis auf Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit, S. 345 – 355).  SKS 11, 146 / KT, 26.

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Transzendenzbewegung abbricht und umwendet. Sie vollendet sich nur als Transzendenzbewegung, indem wir zu der Zeit, in der wir sind, zurückgekehrt werden. Die Doppelbewegung ist als vollendete Transzendenzbewegung eben Wiederholung. ¹⁵ Was wiederholt wird, ist das Leben, in dem wir schon stehen. Die Zeit, in der wir sind, wird durch die doppelte Transzendenzbewegung neu bestimmt: „Siehe, alles ist neu!“¹⁶ Eben in diesem Sinne handelt es sich um „eine Umwendung der Zeit in ihr selbst.“ Die Transzendenzbewegung führt über die Zeit hinaus, in der wir sind, um zu ihr zurückzukehren: Es ist dieselbe Zeit, und doch ist alles neu. Das Unendliche – dass alles neu ist – kommt besonders im Paradox der Vergebung zum Ausdruck. Es ist „le bonheur étrange de la réconciliation,“ von dem Emmanuel Levinas spricht in einem Abschnitt über „L’infini du temps“ in Totalité et Infini. ¹⁷ Durch die Doppelbewegung als Wiederholung wird aber auch die Endlichkeit im radikalen Sinne affirmiert. Die Zeit, die eine andere wird, ist die Zeit, in der wir sind. Diese Endlichkeit können wir der Synthesebestimmung entnehmen: In der Bestimmung, dass ein Mensch eine Synthese von Endlichem und Unendlichem ist, kommt Endlichen unmittelbar als das eine Moment der Synthese vor. Näher betrachtet fällt aber auf, dass Endlichkeit zweimal auftritt, denn die Synthese ist als solche Index der menschlichen Endlichkeit. Ein Mensch ist als Synthese endlich.¹⁸ Diese Bedeutung der Endlichkeit kommt in der Schlüsselpassage über Zeit und Ewigkeit in Der Begriff Angst zum Ausdruck: „Sollen hingegen Zeit und Ewigkeit einander berühren, so muss es in der Zeit sein, und nun stehen wir beim Augenblick.“¹⁹ Dieses „in der Zeit“ hat – so mein Argument – eine radikale Bedeutung. Sie zeigt sich darin, dass die Transzendenzbewegung mit uns in der Zeit und mit der Zeit geschieht. Dass wir in der Zeit sind, wird in der Dichtung und Religion durch die Bewegungen reflektiert, die wir mit uns in der Zeit machen. Die Endlichkeit verstehen wir aber nur durch die negative Möglichkeit, die zur Doppelbewegung dazugehört. Die Doppelbewegung als gelungene Transzendenzbewegung, die Wiederholung, kann nur vor dem Hintergrund der Möglich SKS 4, 324 / BA, 14– 15; vgl. Niels N. Eriksen, Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition. A Reconstruction (Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series, vol. 5), Berlin und New York: Walter de Gruyter 2000, insbesondere Kapitel 2, und Dorothea Glöckner, Kierkegaards Begriff der Wiederholung. Eine Studie zu seinem Freiheitsverständnis (Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series, vol. 3), Berlin und New York: Walter de Gruyter 1998.  SKS 4, 324 / BA, 14; mit implizitem Hinweis auf 2 Kor 5, 17.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité, Paris: Le livre de proche 1992, S. 316.  Vgl. Arne Grøn, „Temporality in Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses,“ Kapitel 7 in diesem Buch, und Arne Grøn, „Spirit and Temporality in The Concept of Anxiety,“ Kapitel 5 in diesem Buch.  SKS 4, 390 / BA, 88.

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keit einer mißlungenen Bewegung bestimmt werden. Ich möchte das Argument noch einen Schritt weiter führen: In der Bestimmung der Synthese liegt, dass sie mißlingen kann. Dies setzt aber voraus, dass der Mensch der Zeit ausgesetzt ist. Das bedeutet, dass die Frage nach Zeit und Transzendenz übersetzt werden muss in die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Geschichte und Transzendenz. In dieser Reformulierung ist dann die Negativität entscheidend. In der Doppelbewegung der menschlichen Synthese liegt die Möglichkeit einer mißlungenen Bewegung, und ebendiese Möglichkeit zeugt von Zeit als Geschichte. Dass ein Mensch eine Synthese ist, weist auf die Geschichte hin, die auch davon erzählt, wie die menschliche Synthese mißlingen kann.

6 Transzendenz und Geschichte Mit der Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Transzendenz und Geschichte können wir die Interpretation von Augenblick und Doppelbewegung wiederholen. Dass der Augenblick einen entscheidenden Einbruch in die Zeit bedeutet, in der wir leben, zeigt sich daran, dass er eine Geschichte eröffnet. Erst im nachhinein sehen wir die Bedeutung dessen, was uns geschehen ist. Das Merkwürdige ist, dass unser Leben in einem Augenblick entschieden werden kann. Im entscheidenden Augenblick wird alles wie auf einmal gesammelt. Es ist ein Augenblick neben anderen, hat aber eine übergreifende Bedeutung, die sich darin zeigt, dass die Geschichte sich ändert. Die unendliche Bedeutung dieses Augenblicks besteht darin, dass er, unsere Vorstellungen übersteigend, unseren Maßstab ändert und dass wir dadurch selbst neu bestimmt werden. In der Doppelbewegung geht es um den Zusammenhang der Geschichte, die im Augenblick eröffnet wird. Die negative Möglichkeit, die zur Doppelbewegung dazugehört, wird damit akzentuiert: Wir können in die eigene Geschichte verstrickt sein. Die Gegenwart kann durch Schulderfahrungen die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit sein. Dass die Transzendenz der Zeit dann Transzendenz der Geschichte bedeuten kann, geht aus der Interpretation Theunissens zur zweiten Olympie als einer Ode von der Transzendenz als Befreiung hervor. Pindars Chronos wird von einem spannungsreichen Verhältnis zwischen Zeit und Mensch gekennzeichnet, in dem es um eine Dialektik von Macht und Ohnmacht geht.²⁰ Chronos waltet in der Rechtssphäre, in einer Sphäre von Recht und Unrecht, in der wir uns in Schuld

 Theunissen, Pindar, S. 710.

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verstricken. Chronos vollendet sich als Zeit der Geschichte.²¹ Die geschichtliche Welt ist von dieser Frage von Recht und Unrecht, Schuld und Unschuld, bestimmt. Was bedeutet dies für die Bestimmung von der Transzendenz der Zeit? Es ist eine Transzendenz der Geschichte im doppelten Sinne: ein Überstieg der Sphäre von Recht und Unrecht, eine Transzendenz als Befreiung (wir sind ja in diese Sphäre verstrickt), aber eine Transzendenz, die eben von der Geschichte selbst bestimmt ist, als Antwort und Befreiung. Entscheidend ist, dass es um eine Transzendenz im Verhältnis zu unseren Taten geht. Die geschichtliche Welt, in die das Individuum verstrickt ist, wird von der paradoxen Frage beherrscht, wie Geschehenes ungeschehen gemacht werden kann, oder genauer: wie das, was wir getan haben, ungetan gemacht werden kann. Es ist eine Sphäre der Dialektik von Macht und Ohnmacht: Wir sollen versuchen, die Gegenwart des Vergangenen loszuwerden, und doch können wir das nur dadurch, dass wir los werden. Die Transzendenz der Zeit wird hier als ein Überstieg der ganzen Sphäre wechselseitiger Forderungen verstanden: als die Transzendenz der Liebe. Wir sind von dem Transzendenzproblem ausgegangen. Der Versuch, Transzendenz zu denken, ist durch die Struktur gekennzeichnet, dass Transzendenz nur in bezug auf das von ihr Transzendierte bestimmt werden kann. Die Frage war dann, wie Transzendenz Los-Lösung „im Verhältnis zu“ bedeuten kann. Der hier skizzierte Gedanke einer Transzendenz der Geschichte gibt eine Antwort darauf. Die Doppelbewegung als Wiederholung bedeutet eben eine Los-Lösung von dem, was wiederholt wird. Die Transzendenz der Geschichte ist von der Geschichte her bestimmt. Sie ist Transzendenz im Verhältnis zu dem, was transzendiert wird. Transzendenz der Geschichte ist Los-Lösung in dem Sinne, dass wir von der Geschichte losgelöst und zur Geschichte befreit werden. Transzendenz wird umgekehrt, indem sie Entscheidendes von dem erzählt, was transzendiert wird. Das Pindar-Buch von Michael Theunissen ist ein unzeitgemäßes Buch über Zeit. Nicht nur hält es an der Komplexität des Transzendenzproblems fest, die durch die Geschichte des Transzendenzdenkens aufgearbeitet ist, sondern es geht auch hinter den Ansatzpunkt sowohl der Metaphysik als auch der Metaphysikkritik zu einer – nicht zuletzt von der metaphysischen Tradition – verschütteten Vergangenheit zurück. Tief ist aber der Brunnen der Vergangenheit. Durch die Geschichte können wir auch einen Blick für die conditio humana gewinnen. Als Motto dafür könnte die Passage aus Kierkegaards Unwissenschaftlicher Nachschrift dienen: „aus einem Abstand, der die Ferne der Doppelreflexion ist, solo die Urschrift der individuellen, humanen Existenzverhältnisse, das Alte, Bekannte

 Ibid., S. 700.

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und von den Vätern Überlieferte, noch einmal, womöglich auf eine innerlichere Weise, durchlesen zu wollen.“²²

 SKS 7, 573 / AUN2, 344. Für die sprachliche Revision meines Textes möchte ich Dorothea Glöckner und Hermann Schmid herzlich danken.

Chapter 23 Das Transzendenzproblem bei Kierkegaard und beim späten Schelling 1 Eingang Meine Absicht ist zunächst, den Ort und die Bedeutung des Transzendenzproblems in der Existenzdialektik Kierkegaards zu bestimmen. Obwohl der Transzendenzbegriff ein Kernstück dieser Dialektik ist, tritt er in einer inneren Unbestimmtheit hervor: Was bedeutet hier Transzendenz? Wir können sie erstens als das der menschlichen Existenz Transzendenten, zweitens als eben eine Bewegung dieser Existenz verstehen. Was ist das Verhältnis dieser zwei Bedeutungen? Wie ist die Einheit des Transzendenzbegriffes zu verstehen? Und wenn wir die Transzendenz als eine existentielle Bewegung begreifen wollen, was ist es, das sie überschreitet, und woraufhin (in Richtung worauf) überschreitet sie es? Den im ersten Teil gewonnenen Transzendenzbegriff werde ich im zweiten Teil gegen das Transzendenzproblem in der Spätphilosophie Schellings abzuheben versuchen. Das Transzendenzproblem bezeichnet den zentralen Punkt in der Auseinandersetzung Kierkegaards mit dem deutschen Idealismus. Aber auch das Problem des Idealismus – d. h. das Problem der Selbstvermittlung der Subjektivität im Denken – ist beim späten Schelling zum Transzendenzproblem verschärft.

2 Die einfache Entgegensetzung Als Ausgangspunkt nehme ich die einfache Entgegensetzung von Endlichem und Unendlichem, von Zeitlichem und Ewigem. Diese Entgegensetzung bedeutet, dass „das Ewige und das Geschichtliche eines außerhalb des andern stehen,“ wie es in den Philosophischen Brocken heißt.¹ Und wenn dies der Fall ist, ist das Geschichtliche nur Veranlassung, also zufällig und nichtig.² Demzufolge läßt die Erkenntnis des Ewigen „das Zeitliche und das Geschichtliche als das Gleichgültige ausgeschlossen sein.“³ Die einfache  SKS 4, 262 [Da sämtliche Übersetzungen in folgendem Artikel vom Autor stammen, wird an der Stelle ausschließlich auf die dänische Ausgabe (SKS) hingewiesen – Anmerkung der Redaktion].  SKS 4, 219.  SKS 4, 263 – 264. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-029

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Entgegensetzung bedeutet also ein Auseinanderfallen des Geschichtlichen und des Ewigen. Warum sollen wir nun in dieser einfachen Entgegensetzung anfangen? Weil sie ein Moment in der komplizierenden Entgegensetzung ist, aus der der Begriff der eigentlichen Transzendenz hervorgeht.

3 Vorbegriff der komplizierenden Entgegensetzung Schon die Unterscheidung in Entweder-Oder zwischen innerer und äußerer Geschichte enthält gegenüber der einfachen Entgegensetzung eine Zweideutigkeit oder Komplikation. Die innere, wahre Geschichte ringt mit der Zeit und macht eben dadurch die Bedeutung der Zeit geltend.⁴ Durch diesen Kampf mit der Zeit kann die Ewigkeit in der Zeit bewahrt werden,⁵ weil es eine „Ausarbeitung“ in der Zeit gibt.⁶ Das Geschichtliche und die Zeit (als das Lebensprinzip in der Geschichte verstanden) sind damit besonders herausgehoben, und zwar derart, dass sie in die Innerlichkeit der Existenz versetzt sind. Demzufolge gibt es einen Unterschied im Geschichtlichen. Dieser Vorbegriff einer komplizierenden Entgegensetzung soll nun durch die drei folgenden Themen ausgearbeitet werden: Paradox und Geschichte, Denken und Paradox, die Synthesisstruktur der menschlichen Existenz.

4 Paradox und Geschichte Die unmittelbare Bestimmung der Transzendenz besteht darin, dass sie den Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens, mit der „logischen Immanenz“ bedeutet.⁷ Schon das Ethische bedeutet eine Überschreitung dieser Immanenz;⁸ aber erst durch das absolute Paradox, durch seinen Widerspruch, findet der Bruch eigentlich statt. Dieser Widerspruch ist – wie bekannt – der dialektische Widerspruch, „dass eine ewige Seligkeit auf das Verhältnis zu etwas Geschichtlichem begründet wird,“ wie es in der Nachschrift heißt.⁹ Dieser dialektische Widerspruch ist der

     

SKS 3, 133. SKS 3, 137. SKS 3, 140. SKS 2, 232; SKS 4, 336, 439; SKS 7, 93, 257. SKS 4, 321. SKS 7, 521.

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Bruch mit dem Verstand, mit dem Denken, mit der Immanenz.¹⁰ Mit diesem Widerspruch stehen wir im „Problem selbst“ der Philosophischen Brocken und der Nachschrift. Der dialektische Widerspruch ist der, „dass das Geschichtliche, von dem hier die Rede ist, nicht etwas einfach Geschichtliches ist, sondern von dem gebildet, was nur gegen sein Wesen geschichtlich werden kann, also kraft des Absurden.“ ¹¹ Versuchen wir nun, diese Bestimmung des dialektischen Widerspruchs herauszuheben. Der Widerspruch besteht darin, dass etwas gegen sein Wesen geschichtlich geworden ist. Ich zitiere nochmals die Nachschrift: „Das Paradox liegt hauptsächlich darin, dass Gott, der Ewige, in der Zeit geworden ist als ein einzelner Mensch.“¹² Im Unterschied zum sokratischen Paradox ist hier die ewige Wahrheit in sich selbst paradox, indem sie einen Widerspruch im Wesen „zusammenhält.“ Die Immanenz des Denkens wird durch das absolute Paradox gebrochen, indem das Denken sich in Wesensbestimmungen bewegt, hier aber an einen Widerspruch im Wesen anstößt.¹³ In diesem Widerspruch wird das Geschichtliche dialektisch-geschichtlich. Das absolute Faktum, von dem hier die Rede ist, ist nicht „ein direkt [ligefrem] geschichtliches Faktum, sondern ein Faktum, das sich auf einen Selbstwiderspruch gründet.“¹⁴ Das Geschichtliche wird also in sich selbst kompliziert. Denn der dialektische Widerspruch impliziert einen Unterschied im Geschichtlichen, und zwar den Unterschied zwischen dem einfach oder bloß Geschichtlichen und dem dialektisch oder potenziert Geschichtlichen. Da dieser Unterschied für den Transzendenzbegriff entscheidend ist, versuchen wir ihn festzuhalten. In Frage steht der geschichtliche Ausgangspunkt, der „mehr als geschichtlich“¹⁵ oder – wie es später in den Philosophischen Brocken heißt – „anders als bloß geschichtlich“ interessiert.¹⁶ Das Christentum ist „das einzige geschichtliche Phänomen, welches ungeachtet des Geschichtlichen, ja gerade durch das Geschichtliche, dem Einzelnen Ausgangspunkt für sein ewiges Bewußtsein hat sein wollen, ihn anders als bloß geschichtlich hat interessieren wollen;“¹⁷ es ist etwas Geschichtliches, das „qua geschichtlich gerade durch das Geschichtliche“ ent-

       

SKS 7, 257. SKS 7, 526. SKS 7, 541. SKS 7, 526. SKS 4, 285. SKS 4, 213. SKS 4, 262; vgl. SKS 7, 24. SKS 4, 305.

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scheidende Bedeutung für die ewige Seligkeit haben will.¹⁸ Das Geschichtliche bildet so einen entscheidenden Punkt im Widerspruch des absoluten Paradoxes und hat umgekehrt durch diesen Widerspruch eine paradoxe Struktur. Das Geschichtliche, von dem Climacus spricht, ist durch einen Widerspruch im Wesen, d. h. in komplizierter Weise geschichtlich. Damit wird das Geschichtliche akzentuiert, aber eben in sich selbst: Es kann mehr als bloß geschichtlich sein.¹⁹ Greifen wir nun auf unseren Ausgangspunkt, die einfache Entgegensetzung, zurück. Diese Entgegensetzung setzt das Geschichtliche als bloß geschichtlich und das Ewige als bloß ewig. D. h. sie drückt aus, dass das Ewige seinem Wesen nach außerhalb des Geschichtlichen steht. Aber das absolute Paradox wurde ja eben von dem Widerspruch konstituiert, dass das Ewige gegen sein Wesen geschichtlich wird. Die einfache Entgegensetzung bildet mithin die Unterlage des dialektischen Widerspruchs, dadurch dass sie das Wesen ausdrückt, dem im absoluten Paradox widersprochen wird. Sie wird also in der komplizierenden Entgegensetzung als widersprochen bewahrt. Das einfach Geschichtliche geht in der Bestimmung des potenziert Geschichtlichen ein und gehört dadurch zum dialektischen Widerspruch. Der Unterschied zwischen dem bloß Geschichtlichen und dem potenziert Geschichtlichen ist demzufolge die Differenz des dialektischen Widerspruchs, worin die Immanenz des Denkens gebrochen wird. Dies führt zur These hervor, die im Folgenden zu erläutern ist: Das Geschichtliche ist der Ort der eigentlichen Transzendenz. Es soll gezeigt werden, dass die einheitliche Bestimmung der Transzendenz mit der inneren Differenzierung des Geschichtlichen zusammenhängt. Kehren wir aber zu diesem Zweck vorerst zu der unmittelbaren Bestimmung der Transzendenz als Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens zurück.

5 Denken und Paradox Der Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens durch das Paradox bedeutet offenbar eine Scheidung zwischen Denken und Sein.²⁰ Aber ist damit schon alles gesagt? Welche Bedeutung hat die eben dargestellte Auslegung des dialektischen Widerspruchs für das Verhältnis zwischen Denken und Paradox? Was heißt hier Bruch?

 SKS 7, 31.  SKS 4, 296 – 297.  SKS 7, 118.

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a. Der Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens impliziert eine Verdoppelung; wir können dies die dialektische Pointe nennen. Denn der Bruch soll als solcher gedacht werden, indem er eben durch das Denken als Bruch hervortritt. Das Paradox ist die Leidenschaft des Denkens, den Anstoß zu wollen, wie es in der Metaphysischen Grille heißt;²¹ das höchste Paradox des Denkens ist es, „etwas entdecken zu wollen, das das Denken selbst nicht denken kann.“²² D. h. aber dies als undenkbar durch das Denken festzuhalten, indem das Denken außer sich versetzt ist. In seiner Leidenschaft stößt das Denken gegen das Undenkbare an.²³ Der glückliche Zusammenstoß von Paradox und Verstand geschieht im Verstehen,²⁴ denn es soll verstanden werden, „dass dies das Paradox ist.“²⁵ Es soll verstanden werden, „dass es das Absurde gibt und dass es sich nicht verstehen läßt.“²⁶ Das Paradox wird eben in diesem Verstehen festgehalten. b. Mit dieser Verdoppelung können wir einen Schritt weitergehen. Gegen die einfache Entgegensetzung gibt es im absoluten Paradox eine „Zusammensetzung,“ den Gott-Menschen,²⁷ oder wie es in den Philosophischen Brocken heißt: „das Paradox vereint eben den Widerspruch, ist die Verewigung des Geschichtlichen und die Vergeschichtlichung des Ewigen.“²⁸ Hier ist die komplizierende Entgegensetzung ausgedrückt: Das Paradox ist ein Vereinen im Widerspruch. Das Paradox kommt – mit Climacus’ Worten – dadurch zustande, „dass die ewige wesentliche Wahrheit und das Existieren zusammengesetzt werden. Wenn wir es dann also in der Wahrheit selbst zusammensetzen, so wird die Wahrheit ein Paradox.“²⁹ Diese Zusammensetzung bedeutet die absolute Steigerung des Paradoxes. Der Wesenswiderspruch des Paradoxes fordert aber ein „Zusammenhalten,“ denn er soll eben als ein dialektischer Widerspruch verwirklicht werden. Dieses Zusammenhalten ist jedoch ein Denken. Und der Ort für das Zusammenhalten des Widerspruchs ist das Geschichtliche. Der Widerspruch des Paradoxes wird durch das Denken in der Differenzierung des Geschichtlichen zusammengehalten. Das Paradox ist auch in diesem Sinne das Paradox des Denkens; das Denken ist das Gegenüber des Paradoxes.

        

SKS 4, 242. Ibid. SKS 4, 334. SKS 4, 252– 253. SKS 4, 261. SKS 6, 153; vgl. SKS 7, 246. SKS 12, 92. SKS 4, 263. SKS 7, 191.

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c. Der Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens bedeutet also nicht eine einfache Entgegensetzung zwischen Denken und Sein oder Existenz. Im Gegenteil wird durch den Begriff des Paradoxes auf eine Unterscheidung im Denken gezielt, nämlich die Unterscheidung zwischen abstraktem und konkretem Denken. Die Aufgabe ist es eben, im eigenen Denken existierend zu werden.³⁰ Obwohl die Existenz das Denken vom Sein „spatiiert“ oder absondert, ist sie nicht gedankenlos.³¹ Die Frage ist es, wie die Negativität der Existenz, ihr Widerspruch, im Denken wiedergegeben werden kann.³² Dies geschieht, indem der subjektive Denker denkend diese seine Existenz nachmacht.³³ D. h. er setzt sein Denken in die Unabgeschlossenheit, in die Offenheit, und zwar eine Offenheit der eigenen Existenz gegenüber. Der subjektive Denker gibt denkend wieder, dass er existiert.³⁴ Und er ist als existierend am eigenen Denken wesentlich interessiert.³⁵ Das Entscheidende für uns ist hier, dass die Existenz in diesem wesentlichen Interesse gedacht werden kann. Das konkrete Denken ist dadurch charakterisiert, dass es die eigene Existenz ernst nimmt; es setzt die Aufgabe im Konkreten, d. h. – um vorzugreifen – darin, sich selbst zu werden. Das objektive Denken ist dagegen gleichgültig dem existierenden Subjekt und seinem Denken gegenüber.³⁶ Es abstrahiert davon, dass das Subjekt als existierend zeitlich ist. Das abstrakte Denken sieht „von dem Konkreten, von der Zeitlichkeit, von dem Werden der Existenz“ ab.³⁷ Mit anderen Worten, es denkt nicht geschichtlich.³⁸ Das reine,³⁹ abstrakte Denken sieht von der Not des Existierenden ab, die darin besteht, aus dem Ewigen und dem Zeitlichen zusammengesetzt und als solches in die Existenz versetzt zu sein;⁴⁰ d. h. es vereint nicht den Widerspruch von Ewigem und Zeitlichem. Das absolute Paradox bedeutet also keinen einfachen Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens. Im Gegenteil wird das Verstehen des Paradoxes in einer Umkehrung im Denken selbst verwirklicht. Diese Zweideutigkeit im Denken (abstraktkonkret) ist für das Existenzdenken Kierkegaards entscheidend.           

SKS 7, 73 – 74. SKS 7, 118. SKS 7, 81– 82. SKS 7, 85. SKS 7, 90. SKS 7, 73. Ibid. SKS 7, 274. SKS 3, 127. SKS 7, 118. SKS 7, 274.

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6 Die Synthesisstruktur der menschlichen Existenz Die Auslegung des Verhältnisses zwischen Denken und Paradox hat gezeigt, dass es mitten im Bruch mit der logischen Immanenz eine wesentliche Zusammengehörigkeit von Denken und Paradox gibt. Es geht darum, die Möglichkeit eines Denkens in den Blick zu bringen, das das im Paradox sich Widersprechende vereinigt („zusammenhält“) und eben dadurch festhält. Und wir haben schon gesehen, dass dieses Denken wesentlich ein Existenzdenken ist. Wir müssen nun diesen Übergang ins Existenzdenken ausdrücklich machen. Denn mit der Umkehrung des Denkens auf die Existenz hin ist auch das Transzendenzproblem verschoben. Bereits die Existenz ist in sich selbst ein „Zusammenhalten“ des Auseinanderstrebenden; sie hat die Struktur des Paradoxes. Ferner, das absolute Paradox potenziert gerade das, was die Existenz auszeichnet, nämlich das Zeitliche, das Geschichtliche.⁴¹ Dies geschieht aber dadurch, dass es den Gegensatz zwischen der Existenz und dem Ewigen absolut setzt.⁴² Das absolute Paradox bedeutet damit ein paradoxes Akzentuieren der Existenz. ⁴³ „Das Paradox-Religiöse bestimmt die Distinktion dadurch absolut, dass es das Existieren paradox akzentuiert.“⁴⁴ Die Immanenz wird aber eben durch diese paradoxe Akzentuierung der Existenz gebrochen.⁴⁵ Was bedeutet diese Akzentuierung genauer? Wie geschieht der Bruch mit der Immanenz? Er geschieht im qualitativen Sprung,⁴⁶ der zum menschlichen Existieren gehört. Dieser Sprung ist also eine Transzendenz.⁴⁷ Damit haben wir eine erste Bestimmung der eigentlichen Transzendenz bei Kierkegaard erreicht, nämlich, dass die Transzendenz die Transzendenz der Existenz ist.⁴⁸ Aber diese Bestimmung ist eben nur eine erste und vorläufige. Die Transzendenz muss weiter bestimmt werden, damit die Bedeutung dieser ersten Bestimmung deutlich wird. Worin besteht nun die Transzendenzbewegung der Existenz?

 SKS 7, 275.  SKS 7, 519.  SKS 7, 518.  Ibid.  SKS 7, 483.  SKS 7, 269; SKS 4, 137, 337– 338.  SKS 4, 343, 355.  Johannes Sløk, Die Anthropologie Kierkegaards, Kopenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1954, S. 33: „Die Transzendenz ist eine Bewegung im tieferen Sinne und nur die existentielle Bewegung ist eine solche.“

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Vorerst müssen wir jedoch nach dem Begriff der menschlichen Existenz fragen. Wir stoßen hier auf die anthropologische Grundbestimmung, dass die Existenz jenes Kind ist, „das vom Unendlichen und Endlichen, vom Ewigen und Zeitlichen erzeugt ist, und daher beständig strebend ist;“⁴⁹ demzufolge also die Existenz die Synthesis des Unendlichen und Endlichen ist.⁵⁰ Dieser Synthesischarakter wird nun zu einem dialektischen Widerspruch verschärft; in eins werden der Unterschied unendlich vertieft und die Identität gesetzt.⁵¹ Die Existenz als Synthesis ist also ein Zusammenhalten und Aushalten des Widerspruchs. In diesem akzentuierten Synthesischarakter wird die komplizierende Entgegensetzung vom Endlichen und Unendlichen zusammengefaßt. Was heißt aber Synthesischarakter? Die Synthesis des Subjekts besteht darin, „dass es ein existierender unendlicher Geist ist,“⁵² doch „als existierend ist es zeitlich.“⁵³ Die Synthesis impliziert folglich „den ungeheuren Widerspruch, dass das Ewige wird.“⁵⁴ In dieser gegensätzlichen und damit offenen Synthesis ist die Negativität des existierenden Subjekts begründet.⁵⁵ Dieser negative Charakter gehört aber zur Existenz als Transzendieren, wie es in Climacus’ Bestimmung ausgedrückt ist, die Existenz sei selbst ein Streben.⁵⁶ Im Widerspruchscharakter der Existenz ist ihre Offenheit festgelegt. Was heißt aber diese Offenheit? Es ist – wie schon bemerkt die Offenheit für die Existenz selbst, so dass in dieser Offenheit die Aufgabe gegeben ist: existierend man selbst zu werden; d. h. dass in der Offenheit der Synthesis dem Menschen als Problem gestellt ist, ein endliches, menschliches Subjekt zu sein. Darin ist aber die entscheidende Überschreitung impliziert: Als existierend ist der Mensch endlich, aber kraft des Synthesischarakters der Existenz kann er das bloß Endliche, das bloß Menschliche überschreiten und in dieser Überschreitung das Menschsein zum Problem haben. Die Überschreitung bestimmt sich näher als die Doppelbewegung, die im folgenden Zitat aus der Krankheit zum Tode beschrieben ist: Das Selbst ist die bewußte Synthesis von Unendlichkeit und Endlichkeit, die sich zu sich selbst verhält, deren Aufgabe es ist, sie selbst zu werden, welches nur möglich ist durch das

       

SKS 7, 91. Ibid. SKS 7, 88. SKS 7, 81. SKS 7, 82. SKS 7, 81. Ibid. SKS 7, 90.

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Verhältnis zu Gott. Aber man selbst zu werden ist konkret zu werden. Aber konkret zu werden ist weder endlich zu werden, noch unendlich zu werden, denn das was konkret werden soll ist ja eine Synthesis. Die Entwicklung muß also darin bestehen, unendlich von sich selbst wegzukommen in der Verunendlichung des Selbst, und unendlich zu sich selbst zurückzukehren in der Verendlichung.⁵⁷

Die Doppelbewegung besteht also a. in dem Überschreiten des bloß Endlichen in die Unendlichkeit des Selbst, b. in der Rückkehr zu einer akzentuierten Endlichkeit. Es handelt sich jedoch nur um eine einzige Bewegung: das Überschreiten des bloß Endlichen geschieht, um zu einer potenzierten Endlichkeit zurückzukommen, oder mit anderen Worten, um die Endlichkeit wiederzugewinnen, um sie unendlich zurückzubekommen. Die Bewegung geschieht zwischen dem bloß Endlichen, das dem abstrakt Unendlichen entgegengesetzt ist, und dem akzentuiert Endlichen, das im dialektischen Widerspruch mit dem Unendlichen zusammengesetzt ist. Diese Bewegung gibt die eigentliche Transzendenz an. Denn die Transzendenz bedeutet das Überschreiten des bloß Endlichen; doch woraufhin? Eben auf die Endlichkeit hin, doch nicht länger als bloße Endlichkeit verstanden, sondern als potenzierte, wiederholte Endlichkeit. Mit dieser Interpretation wird es möglich, die Verknüpfung von Transzendenz und Wiederholung bei Kierkegaard näher zu verstehen.⁵⁸ Denn die Transzendenzbewegung führt nicht einfach über das Endliche hinaus und in das Unendliche – „Transzendente“ – hinüber, sie tut so, um zum Endlichen zurückzuführen, um das Endliche zu wiederholen. Die Transzendenz als Wiederholung besteht darin, konkret zu werden: Sie führt zu der Endlichkeit als zusammengesetzter, d. h. als mehr denn bloß endlicher Endlichkeit, zurück. Das Konkrete ist hier also nicht das erste Unmittelbare, sondern im Gegenteil das wiederholte Unmittelbare und dieses zwar als zusammengesetzt verstanden: „konkret zu werden ist weder endlich zu werden, noch unendlich zu werden, denn das was konkret werden soll ist ja eine Synthesis,“ wie es in der Krankheit zum Tode heißt. Diese Transzendenzbewegung ist paradox, denn sie ist ein Überschreiten der Endlichkeit, gehört aber doch zu der endlichen Existenz, ja ist eben die Verwirklichung dieser Existenz. Das Selbst-Verhältnis der Wiederholung wird in der transzendenten Bewegung der Existenz vollzogen. Wie ist aber diese Bewegung –

 SKS 11, 146.  SKS 4, 57; SKS 4, 324, 329.

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die Wiederholung – eine Transzendenz? Unsere Aufgabe ist es, die umfassende, einheitliche Bestimmung von Transzendenz herauszubringen.⁵⁹ Die existentielle Bewegung wird eine Transzendenz, indem sie ein Selbstverhalten durch das Verhalten zum transzendenten Grund der Existenz ist. Die Transzendenzbewegung der Existenz bedeutet, dass das Selbst sich in seinem Selbstverhalten zu einem Andern verhält,⁶⁰ dass es sich in seinem Selbstverhalten „durchsichtig in der Macht gründet, die es gesetzt hat.“⁶¹ Diese Transzendenz der Existenz – im doppelten Sinne – bedeutet die paradoxe Akzentuierung der Existenz. Das Selbstüberschreiten der Existenz ist nur durch das Verhalten zum Andern möglich; dieses Verhalten zu dem der Existenz Transzendenten geschieht aber in der paradoxen Transzendenzbewegung der Existenz, die eine innere Differenzierung der geschichtlichen Existenz bedeutet.  In seinem Artikel „Die Begriffe Immanenz und Transzendenz bei Søren Kierkegaard“ (in Michael Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, hg. von Theunissen und Wilfried Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979) behauptet Gregor Malantschuk, die Auffassung Sløks (vgl. die Hinweisung in Anm. 48) sei eine „Fehlinterpretation“ (S. 493). Wenn man nur an die existentielle Bewegung des Menschen denkt, „wird aber die andere, ungleich wichtigere Seite vergessen, nämlich die Transzendenz außerhalb des Menschen, die transzendente Macht, zu der der Mensch sich verhalten soll: Ohne den Glauben an sie würde alle Rede davon, dass die Bewegung eine Transzendenz sei, ihren Sinn verlieren“ (S. 473). Es ist aber fragwürdig, ob es sich um eine Fehlinterpretation handelt. Denn die Frage der Interpretation ist ja eben, wie die zwei „Seiten“ „zusammengehalten“ werden können: die Transzendenzbewegung der Existenz und das der menschlichen Existenz Transzendente. Die Transzendenz bedeutet unmittelbar den Bruch mit der logischen Immanenz. Dieser Bruch geschieht aber in der Transzendenzbewegung der Existenz. Erst durch die Auslegung dieser Transzendenzbewegung kann die einheitliche Bestimmung der Transzendenz gewonnen werden. Wenn die Transzendenzkonzeption Kierkegaards sich aber darauf reduzieren läßt, die Transzendenz als das der menschlichen Existenz Transzendente ohne die paradoxe Akzentuierung dieser Existenz begreifen zu können, endet sie in einer Position, die sich selbst aufhebt. Vgl. hierzu Paul Ricoeur, „Philosophieren nach Kierkegaard,“ in Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, hg. von Michael Theunissen und Wilfried Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, S. 593. Eine Position, die den Rückfall in die einfache Entgegensetzung von Immanenz (Zeitlichkeit) und Transzendenz (Ewigkeit) bedeutet, eine Entgegensetzung, die der der Transzendenz bei Kierkegaard widerspricht. Vgl. hierzu Michael Theunissen und Wilfried Greve, „Einleitung,“ in Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, hg. von Michael Theunissen und Wilfried Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, S. 37, 69. Denn die Transzendenz bei Kierkegaard ist zunächst die paradoxe Zusammensetzung von Zeit und Ewigkeit, die die logische Immanenz bricht. Diese paradoxe Zusammensetzung bedeutet die paradoxe Akzentuierung der zeitlichen Existenz. Die Transzendenzbewegung ist folglich kein Ablösen von der Endlichkeit, sondern ein Zusammenhalten des Widerspruchs in der Existenz. Der Versuch meiner Interpretation ist es, diesen Transzendenzbegriff in der Existenzdialektik Kierkegaards herauszuarbeiten.  SKS 11, 129.  SKS 11, 130.

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Die unmittelbare Bestimmung der Transzendenz – dass sie den Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens bedeutet – können wir nun durch diesen eigentlichen Begriff der Transzendenz „wiederholen.“ Denn die logische Immanenz bedeutet die abgeschlossene geschichtliche Totalität.⁶² Als Gegenzug zur These dieser Immanenz betont der Begriff der Transzendenz als Geschehen der paradox akzentuierten Existenz die geschichtliche Unabgeschlossenheit. Im Transzendenzbegriff zentriert sich also die Auseinandersetzung Kierkegaards mit dem spekulativen Idealismus Hegels.

7 Transzendenz und Differenz Ich fasse nun die Interpretation der Stellung des Transzendenzbegriffs in der Existenzdialektik Kierkegaards zusammen. Die Transzendenz impliziert eine qualitative Differenz. Die eigentliche Transzendenz bedeutet hier das Überschreiten des bloß Endlichen auf das potenziert Endliche hin durch das Verhalten zu dem der endlichen Existenz Transzendenten. Die qualitative Differenz verstehe ich demzufolge als die Differenz, die in diesem Überschreiten impliziert ist. Die Transzendenz, die die logische Immanenz bricht, geschieht – wie wir gesehen haben – durch den Unterschied zwischen dem bloß Geschichtlichen und dem wahrhaft Geschichtlichen, im „Zwischen“ dieser Differenz des Geschichtlichen. In diesem Sinne ist das Geschichtliche der Ort des Transzendenzproblems in der Existenzdialektik Kierkegaards. Die Transzendenzbewegung ist die Vollzugsweise der Existenz. Im Begriff Angst werden, wie schon erwähnt, die Transzendenz und die Wiederholung verknüpft; in einer Anmerkung hierzu heißt es (unter Hinweis auf Constantin Constantius): „die Immanenz scheitert am „Interesse.“ Erst mit diesem Begriff kommt eigentlich die Wirklichkeit zum Vorschein.“⁶³ Dies bedeutet, dass die Transzendenz mit „dem ganzen Interesse der Subjektivität,“⁶⁴ mit der Leidenschaft, hervorbricht. Die paradoxe Aufgabe des Subjekts, subjektiv zu werden, gehört zur Existenz als Transzendieren. Die Aufgabe ist paradox: das zu werden, was man schon – eben so ohne weiteres – ist.⁶⁵ Die eigentliche Transzendenz bedeutet folglich die Überschreitung der bloßen Subjektivität in Richtung auf die wahrhafte,

 SKS 7, 104– 105, 114: System bedeutet Abgeschlossenheit; vgl. SKS 7, 145 – 146: Die weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung als Totalitätsbetrachtung liegt in der Immanenz („der weltgeschichtlichen Immanenz“).  SKS 4, 329; vgl. SKS 4, 25.  SKS 4, 324.  SKS 7, 123.

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potenzierte Subjektivität hin. Die in dieser Überschreitung implizierte Differenz ist die Differenz der Leidenschaft, die Differenz des Interesses. Die Bewegung führt also zur Subjektivität zurück; das ist der Grund, weshalb Climacus in der Nachschrift sagen kann, die Wiederholung sei im Grunde genommen der Ausdruck der Immanenz;⁶⁶ sie ist eben „eine neue Unmittelbarkeit;“⁶⁷ die Transzendenz bringt die Immanenz zum Ausdruck, doch eben eine akzentuierte, zweite Immanenz, d. h. eine Immanenz auf der Grundlage der Transzendenz. Der Transzendenzbegriff muss also im Zusammenhang mit der konstituierenden Zweideutigkeit im Subjektbegriff Kierkegaards interpretiert werden. Die Aufgabe, man selbst zu werden – und die damit gegebene Differenz in der Subjektivität – wird paradox akzentuiert, indem das Subjekt in Unwahrheit ist. Die hier implizierte, radikale Zweideutigkeit: Wahrheit – Unwahrheit, bedeutet die absolute Akzentuierung der Existenz. Die Aufgabe, existierend man selbst zu werden, ist gegeben, indem es möglich ist zu vergessen, was es heißt: zu existieren.⁶⁸ Letzten Endes ist es gerade diese Vergessenheit, zu der die Existenzdialektik Kierkegaards ein Gegenzug ist. Und die Differenz dieses Gegenzuges ist die der Transzendenz: nämlich der Unterschied dazwischen, bloß – also ohne weiteres – Subjekt zu sein, und es in Wahrheit zu sein.⁶⁹ Der Begriff der Transzendenz drückt also das Anliegen und den Einsatz der Existenzdialektik Kierkegaards aus. Er gibt den dialektischen Punkt in der Existenz an: „das zu werden, was man so ohne weiteres ist.“⁷⁰

8 Denken, Transzendenz und Geschichte beim späten Schelling und bei Kierkegaard Die Bedeutung dieses Transzendenzbegriffes soll nun durch die Abhebung gegen das Transzendenzproblem in der Spätphilosophie Schellings verdeutlicht werden.⁷¹ Die Fruchtbarkeit einer Gegenüberstellung von Kierkegaard und dem späten Schelling beruht auf ihrer systematischen Zusammengehörigkeit, die sich

 SKS 7, 239.  Ibid.  SKS 7, 116; SKS 12, 132– 133, 137– 138.  SKS 7, 123 f.  Ibid.  Die Spätphilosophie soll hier im strengen Sinne verstanden werden, nämlich als die Philosophie, welche von der Unterscheidung von negativer und positiver Philosophie getragen wird. Zum Folgenden vgl. die grundlegenden Untersuchungen von Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings, Pfullingen: Neske 1975.

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eben im gemeinsamen Transzendenzproblem äußert. Gerade durch diese systematische Nähe tritt aber die Zweideutigkeit – die Gemeinsamkeit und der Gegensatz – der Auseinandersetzung Kierkegaards mit dem deutschen Idealismus hervor. Der Sinn der Abhebung ist es, diese Zweideutigkeit auszulegen.

9 Kritik der logischen Immanenz Sowohl bei Kierkegaard als auch beim späten Schelling wird der Transzendenzbegriff in der Kritik der logischen Immanenz bei Hegel konzipiert. Was heißt aber logische Immanenz? Das wird durch das Grundanliegen Schellings deutlich und zwar in derselben Richtung als die oben „wiederholte“ Bestimmung der Transzendenz bei Kierkegaard: Transzendenz ist Bruch mit der Immanenz als abgeschlossener Totalität. Immanenz heißt also in der Hegel-Kritik Abgeschlossenheit. Nun aber zur Verdeutlichung dieser Bestimmung bei Schelling: Schellings Zweiteilung der Philosophie in eine negative und eine positive wird in der Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel gewonnen.⁷² Warum diese Zweiteilung? Die Frage dieser Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel ist es, ob das Denken sich in sich selbst vollenden kann, ob es sich abschließen kann. Die negative Philosophie ist eben der konsequente Versuch der Vernunft, sich selbst abzuschließen. Die Vernunft sondert das Zufällige aus, um zum Wesen zu gelangen;⁷³ die reine Vernunftwissenschaft impliziert daher ein negatives Verfahren, und damit ist der Begriff der negativen Philosophie gegeben.⁷⁴ Diese rationale, negative⁷⁵ Philosophie hat „ihre Wahrheit in der immanenten Nothwendigkeit ihres Fortschrittes,“ wie es in der Einleitung in die Philosophie der Offenbarung heißt.⁷⁶ Gerade indem die Vernunft konsequent versucht, sich zu Wesenswissenschaft zu reinigen und das Absolute zu begreifen, stößt sie aber an das Andere ihrer selbst an, nämlich an den vorausliegenden Anfang und damit an das, was sie nicht in sich selbst hat. Sie erfährt die Transzendenz des Absoluten, d. h. seine Undenkbarkeit, aber die reine Vernunftwissenschaft sollte ja ihren Sinn gerade in der immanenten Entwicklung haben.

 Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings, S. 102– 108.  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, in Schellings Werke, Bd. XIII, hg. von Manfred Schröter, München: Beck 1927 ff., S. 67.  Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, S. 68, 70.  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie I, in Schellings Werke, Bd. XI, hg. von Manfred Schröter, München: Beck 1927 ff., S. 562.  Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, S. 128.

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Sowohl bei Kierkegaard als auch beim späten Schelling wird also die Transzendenz als Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens bestimmt. Auch bei Kierkegaard bezieht sich ja das Transzendenzproblem auf die Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen dem Denken und dem Undenkbaren.⁷⁷ Diese Frage wird durch Schellings Begriff der negativen Philosophie verdeutlicht: Die Immanenz des Denkens bedeutet – wie schon erwähnt – das Abschließen des Denkens in sich selbst. Oder genauer, das immanente Denken besagt die Aufhebung der Transzendenz in eben die Immanenz dieser aufhebenden Bewegung. Die Immanenz des Denkens kann aber nicht vollständig werden. Im Gegenteil endet die reine Vernunftwissenschaft in einer Negation der Vernunft, in der Scheidung von Immanenz und Transzendenz, von Vernunft und Gott.⁷⁸ Das Ergebnis der negativen Philosophie ist es somit, „dass das wahrhaft Seyende erst das ist, was außer der Idee, nicht die Idee ist, sondern mehr ist als die Idee.“⁷⁹

10 Die dialektische Pointe Wir können die gemeinsame Aussonderung der Transzendenz von der Immanenz als die erste Schicht in der systematischen Zusammengehörigkeit von Kierkegaard und Schelling bezeichnen. Aber auch das, was ich im ersten Teil die dialektische Pointe genannt habe, dass nämlich der Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens eine Verdopplung impliziert, macht Schelling deutlich. Denn die Negation der Vernunft wird durch die Vernunft selbst vollzogen. Indem die Vernunft ihr absolutes Außer-sich setzt, ist sie ja „in diesem Setzen außer sich gesetzt, absolut ekstatisch;“⁸⁰ d. h. aber, dass die Negation die Transzendenzbewegung der Vernunft ist. Es ist also die Vernunft selbst, die sich in das Andere ihrer selbst überschreitet. Die Transzendenz – d. h. die Undenkbarkeit – bricht eben in der Bewegung der Vernunft hervor. Es ist die Vernunft, die die Transzendenz geltend macht – und zwar der Vernunft selber gegenüber. Die Grenze ist daher im doppelten Sinne die Grenze der Vernunft. Der Bruch mit der Immanenz des Denkens – die Transzendenz – muss eben als solcher gedacht werden. Das heißt aber, dass mitten im Bruch mit der logischen Immanenz eine Tätigkeit des Denkens stattfindet. Diese Pointe – die bei Kierkegaard nur implizit enthalten ist – wird bei

 Vgl. Philosophische Brocken: Das höchste Paradox des Denkens ist es, „etwas entdecken zu wollen, das das Denken selbst nicht denken kann“ (SKS 4, 243), „das Unbekannte“ (SKS 4, 245) als Grenze (SKS 4, 249), „das absolut Verschiedene“ (SKS 4, 249).  Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie I, S. 569: „Gott außer der Vernunft.“  Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie I, S. 566.  Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, S. 163.

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Schelling im ausdrücklichen Übergang zur positiven Philosophie herausgearbeitet. Die Transzendenz ist nicht ein abstrakter Bruch mit dem Denken, sie fordert im Gegenteil ein Denken. Doch sie fordert eben ein anderes Denken; oder genauer, die Aufgabe, das Andere als solches zu denken, fordert eine Umkehrung des Denkens. ⁸¹ Sowohl bei Kierkegaard als auch bei Schelling drückt sich die dialektische Pointe in einer Umkehrung des Denkens aus: bei Schelling in der Umwandlung der negativen philosophie in die positive; bei Kierkegaard in der Umkehrung des abstrakten Denkens ins konkrete; d. h. dass die Differenz im Denken selbst, in seiner Verdopplung, wohnt. Im Unterschied zu Kierkegaard arbeitet Schelling aber diese Dialektik systematisch heraus.

11 Die Transzendenzbewegung Die Zweiteilung der Philosophie bedeutet das Scheitern der reinen Vernunftwissenschaft, indem die Vernunft sich nicht in sich selbst vollenden kann. Aber die beiden Philosophien – die negative und die positive – gehören trotzdem zusammen, sie sind – so erklärt Schelling – eine Philosophie.⁸² Wie aber? a. Die negative Philosophie führt in die positive hinüber, indem eben die Reinigung der Vernunft zur rationalen Philosophie die Notwendigkeit einer anderen Philosophie vorzeichnet. b. Die positive Philosophie geht von der Transzendenz, also vom Ergebnis der negativen Philosophie, aus und setzt damit diese erste Philosophie voraus; und ferner: die negative, rationale Philosophie wird in der positiven vollendet, indem diese die zweite, „wiederholte“ Ausübung der Vernunft ist.⁸³ Dieses dialektische Verhältnis zwischen negativer und positiver Philosophie macht die Spannung zwischen Immanenz und Transzendenz sichtbar. Indem die Bewegung der negativen Philosophie immanent sein sollte, stößt sie an die Transzendenz an. Und die positive Philosophie geht von der reinen Transzendenz aus, zielt aber eben darauf hin, sie in die Immanenz zu verwandeln.⁸⁴ Die dialektische Pointe wird also bei Schelling in einer Doppelbewegung herausgearbeitet, die folgendermaßen dargestellt werden kann: a. Die Immanenz wird in die Transzendenz überschritten; dieser Vorgang ist eine aussondernde Negation, d. h. eine Negation der Vernunft in der Aussonderung des Absoluten als undenkbar. b. Diese Überschreitung geschieht aber, ge Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie I, S. 566: Die positive Philosophie bedeutet eine Umkehrung.  Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, S. 152.  Ibid. S. 153.  Ibid, S. 170.

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rade, um die Transzendenz durch die Ausübung der Vernunft in die Immanenz zu verwandeln und damit die Immanenz wiederzugewinnen.⁸⁵ Diese Doppelbewegung – a. Überschreitung als Aussonderung und b. Rückkehr als Vollzug der Überschreitung – ist eine einzige Bewegung, und zwar die Transzendenzbewegung der Vernunft. Das Einheitliche der Bewegung ist darin enthalten, dass das Ziel der Überschreitung die Rückkehr ist. Die Transzendenzbewegung ist mithin eine Wiederholung. Wir sehen, dass die Struktur der Transzendenzbewegung bei Kierkegaard und bei Schelling dieselbe ist. Ihre Gemeinsamkeit zeigt sich jedoch auch im Inhalt der Transzendenzbewegung: Die Subjektivität soll in ihrer Offenheit – als zweite Immanenz – wiedergewonnen werden. In beiden Fällen wird durch die Transzendenzbewegung die Endlichkeit enthüllt, bei Schelling zunächst die Endlichkeit der Vernunft, bei Kierkegaard zunächst die Endlichkeit der Existenz. Die Transzendenz wird nicht durch die Aneignung aufgehoben; die Aufgabe ist es im Gegenteil, die Transzendenz im Verstehen festzuhalten. Dementsprechend wird die Offenbarung als eine Dialektik von Offenbarung und Verbergung, d. h. von Immanenz und Transzendenz, begriffen.⁸⁶

12 Geschichte und Transzendenz Wir kehren damit zum Zusammenhang von Transzendenz und Geschichte zurück. Angesichts der Verknüpfung von Vernunft und Geschichte bei Hegel wird die Kritik der logischen Immanenz zu einer Kritik der Geschichtskonzeption Hegels. Das Transzendenzproblem wird sowohl bei Kierkegaard als auch bei Schelling durch die Frage nach Transzendenz und Geschichte expliziert. Die positive Philosophie, die mit der Transzendenz anfängt, ist – so erklärt Schelling – geschichtliche Philosophie.⁸⁷ Und wie bei Kierkegaard impliziert die Frage nach der Transzendenz die Unterscheidung des bloß Geschichtlichen vom wahrhaft Geschichtlichen. Es ist die Unterscheidung zwischen einem „nur gemeingeschichtlichen Ereignis,“⁸⁸ das eine „bloß menschliche oder gemeingeschichtliche Be-

 Hierzu Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings, S. 68 – 69.  Michael Theunissen, „Die Dialektik der Offenbarung. Zur Auseinandersetzung Schellings und Kierkegaards mit der Religionsphilosophie Hegels,“ Philosophisches Jahrbuch 72, Nr. 1, 1964, S. 134– 160.  Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie I, S. 571.  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie II, in Schellings Werke, Bd. XIV, hg. von Manfred Schröter, München: Beck 1927 ff., S. 29.

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deutung“⁸⁹ hat, und einer „höheren“ Geschichte, also die Unterscheidung zwischen der „bloß äußeren“ Geschichte und der „wahren,“ „inneren“ Geschichte.⁹⁰ „Der Inhalt der Offenbarung ist nichts anderes als eine höhere Geschichte,“ die in der Philosophie der Offenbarung erklärt werden soll.⁹¹ Der Zielpunkt der Kritik der logischen Immanenz ist sowohl bei Kierkegaard als auch bei Schelling die These von der geschichtlichen Abgeschlossenheit. Die Auseinandersetzung Kierkegaards und Schellings mit der Geschichtskonzeption Hegels geht aber auf die Weise vor sich, dass sie die Differenzierung des Geschichtlichen, die schon bei Hegel selbst stattgefundet hat, vertiefen. Zusammenfassend: Sowohl bei Kierkegaard als auch bei Schelling wird die unmittelbare, einfache Entgegensetzung von Immanenz und Transzendenz überschritten. Die Transzendenz wird in einer dialektischen Entgegensetzung bestimmt; dementsprechend ist die Transzendenzbewegung eine Doppelbewegung, die die Endlichkeit – die geschichtliche Offenheit – enthüllt. Gerade in der hier skizzierten Zusammengehörigkeit tritt aber der entscheidende Unterschied des Transzendenzbegriffes bei Kierkegaard und bei Schelling hervor. Im Gegensatz zu Kierkegaard arbeitet Schelling das dialektische Verhältnis zwischen abstraktem Denken (d. h. negativer Philosophie) als erster Wissenschaft und konkretem Denken (d. h. positiver Philosophie) als zweiter Wissenschaft aus. Die Transzendenzbewegung ist bei Schelling eben die der Vernunft. Gegen diesen Hintergrund zeigt sich deutlich die Verschiebung des Transzendenzproblems, die Kierkegaard vornimmt: Der Schwerpunkt liegt bei ihm im Synthesischarakter der Existenz. Die Synthesis ist eine paradoxe Zusammensetzung, die in der radikalen Zweideutigkeit: die Subjektivität als Wahrheit – die Subjektivität als Unwahrheit, akzentuiert wird. Diese Verschiebung bei Kierkegaard bedeutet, dass sich der Unterschied zwischen dem bloß Geschichtlichen und dem potenziert Geschichtlichen im Wesenswidersprach des Paradoxes verschärft und zum Geschehen der paradox akzentuierten Existenz zurückgeführt. Der konstituierende Zusammenhang zwischen der Transzendenz der Existenz und der Differenz im Geschichtlichen wird bei Kierkegaard besonders herausgehoben. Die innere Geschichte zeichnet die Existenz aus, deren Vollzugsweise die Transzendenzbewegung ist. Das Geschehen der Existenz bedeutet somit eine Potenzierung des Geschichtlichen. Zum Schluß möchte ich die folgende Perspektive des Transzendenzproblems andeuten, die das Thema: Transzendenz und geschichtliche Totalität betrifft.

 Ibid., S. 35.  Ibid., S. 219 – 220.  Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung II, S. 30.

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Indem die Transzendenzbewegung der Existenz, wie skizziert, betont wird, laufen wir Gefahr, die Frage nach dem geschichtlichen Ganzen – nach der Geschichte als Zusammenhang – abzuwerten. Diese Gefahr ist in der Unterscheidung zwischen der Weltgeschichte und der heiligen Geschichte in der Einübung offenbar. AntiClimacus fängt mit der Bestimmung an, die Weltgeschichte sei die Geschichte direkt verstanden.⁹² Danach heißt es aber, die heilige Geschichte stehe allein für sich, außerhalb der Geschichte, d. h. der Weltgeschichte.⁹³ Demzufolge wird die Weltgeschichte als Zusammenhang gegenüber der heiligen Geschichte zu einer bloß äußeren Geschichte. Durch die Unterscheidung zwischen heiliger Geschichte und Weltgeschichte verliert die Differenzierung des Geschichtlichen ihre dialektische Komplexität. Damit wird aber auch die Spannung der Transzendenzbewegung abgeschwächt, denn diese Bewegung spannt sich ja eben in der Differenz des Geschichtlichen aus. Indem aber die Transzendenzbewegung der Existenz in sich selbst eine Erstreckung – und damit einen Unterschied und einen Zusammenhang – fordert, ist die scheinbare Alternative, in der wir nach Hegel und Kierkegaard stehen, überholt: nämlich entweder die Geschichtlichkeit der Existenz so hervorzuheben, dass wir die Frage nach dem geschichtlichen Ganzen abwerten, oder die Geschichte als objektives Geschehen so zu betonen, dass wir von der Geschichtlichkeit absehen, die zur Transzendenz der Existenz gehört. Indem diese scheinbare Alternative durch den Transzendenzbegriff selbst überholt ist, sind wir vor die Aufgabe gestellt, die Frage nach dem geschichtlichen Ganzen festzuhalten, ohne den Transzendenzcharakter der Existenz zu nivellieren.

 SKS 12, 38, 40, 44– 45.  SKS 12, 76.

Part Three: Ethics

Chapter 24 Ethics of Vision 1 Introduction Works of Love presents its reader with an “embarras de richesse.”¹ The book is rich in themes and perspectives and such riches ought properly to challenge, but in fact they turn interpretation into a difficult, if not an embarrassing enterprise. This circumstance might go some way to explaining the peculiar or ambiguous position, which the book has occupied in Kierkegaard reception. Although generally acknowledged to be one of Kierkegaard’s major works, Works of Love has not figured prominently in Kierkegaard reception in the 20th century, which seemed to favor other parts of the corpus rather, irrespective of whether the interpretation was philosophically, theologically or aesthetically informed. Even if we look specifically for ethics in Kierkegaard, the focus has been directed elsewhere – on the position of B, the ethicist, in Either-Or. The reader’s embarrassment owes too to the book’s rhetoric, its mode of address or its “form” (as referred to in the subtitle). Indeed, the recognition that the book consists of discourses is crucial to its proper understanding. The discourse aims to do something to its reader, changing his or her perspective or vision. While the first point mentioned – its thematic luxuriance – seems to invite the reader to enter into the act of reflection engaged by the book, the second point – its rhetoric – seems to bring the reader’s reflection to an end. For only one conclusion presents itself as appropriate: that the reader change him- or herself. These two points, however, go hand in hand. As the subtitle reads, Works of Love is “some Christian deliberations in the form of discourses.” That they are deliberations – in the form of discourses – implies that the discourses are precisely discourses for deliberation or reflection. A human being only changes her or his view by coming to think in a different way. This demand on thinking inherent in the discourses is easily overlooked in interpreting Works of Love. How then should we place Works of Love within Kierkegaard’s oeuvre? It is indeed a key work whose interpretation has implications for that of Kierkegaard’s other works. In order to capture its import for the corpus as well as its own intrinsic merits, which challenge ethical reflection today, I have advanced two conjoined theses: that Works of Love represents Kierkegaard’s “second” eth Johannes Sløk, Kierkegaard – humanismens tænker, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag 1978, p. 136. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-030

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ics, and that this ethics is an ethics of vision. ² The first thesis implies that Works of Love responds to the problem left open by the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety: What would ethics look like (if ethics is possible at all) after the breakdown of ethics traced in the movement from Fear and Trembling to the Concept of Anxiety? In the following, however, I shall focus on the second point, that concerning the interpretation of Works of Love as an ethics of vision, with the aim of answering the systematic question: What is an ethics of vision? What is the ethical significance of vision or the act of seeing?

2 Seeing and not Seeing The first discourse in Works of Love is an opening discourse in the sense that it opens the field of discourse. As pointed out in the book’s preface, the discourses are not about love, but about works of love. This means that they move within a field marked by a tension between visible and invisible. This field of in-visibility is indicated by the heading of the opening discourse: “Love’s Hidden Life and Its Recognizability by Its Fruits.” Love must find expression in works of love, it must be recognized by its fruits, and yet no work or action is a work of love simpliciter, which means that love is not simply to be seen, its life is hidden. This is anticipated by the distinction between Kjerlighedsgjerninger and en Kjerlighedens Gjerning ³ made in the prayer following the preface: “There are indeed only same works that human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love [Kjerlighedsgjerninger], but in heaven no work can be pleasing unless it is a work of love [en Kjerlighedens Gjerning].”⁴ The 1ocution Kjerlighedsgerninger implies that prior to engaging in action we are able to make a list of specific kinds of actions so that to perform an action belonging to one of the types listed would be to perform a work of love. But every action should be a work of love. The distinction between Kjerlighedsgjerninger (specific kinds of actions) and en Kjerligh-

 I have argued for this double interpretation in a number of articles: Arne Grøn, “Kærlighedens gerninger og anerkendelsens dialektik,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, vol. 54, 1991, pp. 261– 270; Arne Grøn, “Liebe und Anerkennung,” Kerygma und Dogma, vol. 40, 1994, pp. 101– 114; Arne Grøn, “The Dialectic of Recognition in Works of Love,” Chapter 26 in this volume; Arne Grøn, “Kierkegaards ‚zweite‘ Ethik,” Chapter 33 in this volume.  The distinction is difficult to translate adequately into English. Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, the title of the book, is rendered in the same way as Kjerlighedsgjerninger, but Kjerlighedens Gjerninger belongs to the other side o f the distinction: Kjerlighedens Gjerninger means that all works (Gjerninger) should be works of love (en Kjerlighedens Gjerning).  SKS 9, 12 / WL, 4.

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edens Gjerning (each and every action should be a work of love) supplies the context for the crucial issue addressed by the discourses: How the work is done. This concern is reflected in the first discourse when it repeats the distinction articulated in the prayer: “There is no work, not one single one, not even the best, about which we unconditionally dare to say: The one who does this unconditionally demonstrates love by it. It depends on how the work is done.”⁵ So on the one hand love must manifest itself in works of love, and on the other this visibility or recognizability in the particular case remains an open question: Is this a work of love? The discourse thus urges the reader to reflect upon both what appears to be a manifestation of love and the requirement that it really be so. But the point put forward in the opening discourse is even more forceful. It is made by the discourse performing a reversal of perspective: If we only ask whether love can be seen or recognized, we are looking in the wrong direction. The critical point is that love itself is a matter of seeing. Therefore, love can only be recognized by itself recognizing or seeing love in the other. This inversion – love’s recognizability through its own recognition, or identification, of love in the other – is articulated at the end of the opening discourse, and it is repeated and unfolded in the opening discourse of the second series of discourses in the book: “Love Builds Up.” Love is to presuppose and thus to see love in the other. This inversion of perspective – from love as something we can look for and maybe recognize, to love itself as a matter of seeing and recognizing love – represents in itself an ethical turn. This is anticipated by a question, tellingly phrased, that appears on the very first page of the opening discourse. It is thrown out casually, almost en passant, but when we re-read it through the lens of the subsequent discourses it turns out to be some sort of knot to be solved by the reader: “Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of the one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see?”⁶ Love is indeed a matter of seeing, but inherent in seeing is a possibility of radical significance: seeing without seeing, or seeing and yet not seeing. If the field of discourses about works of love can be described as a field of in-visibility, the question now is how we see when we see.

 SKS 9, 21 / WL, 13.  SKS 9, 13 / WL, 4.

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3 Change of Love – Love’s Change The opening discourse is followed by three connected discourses that are variations on the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The first of these discourses (II. A) stresses the commandment qua duty: “You Shall Love.” As the discourse itself observes, this immediately confronts us with a problem affecting our understanding of what love means: How can love be a duty? No direct answer is given in the discourses, but drawing on the book in its entirety, we can reconstruct an answer in two stages. First, the discourse proceeds in a negative mode, focusing on the problem of love. Intrinsic to love is the question: Can it last? The problem is the passage of time – time as a burden and as a dangerous power. But the problem of time comes from within, too, in that over time love can change – into something other than love. It can change in itself through becoming hatred or jealousy, and it can change from itself through becoming habit and thereby losing its passion. This change of love, however, is a change taking place in vision, namely in the way we see the other. If we see ourselves as the one who loves, we might see the change in love as mirroring a change in the other: We no longer recognize the beloved in the other. But this implies that something in our own mode of seeing the other has changed. The problem of time affecting love thus shifts the emphasis to the question: how we see the other. The problematic change of view is reflected in a passage in a later discourse on duty, namely “The Duty to Love the People We see”: However much and in whatever way a person is changed, he still is not changed in such a way that he becomes invisible. If this – the impossible – is not the case, then of course we do see him, and the duty is to love the person one sees. Ordinarily we think that if a person has essentially changed for the worse, he is then so changed that we are exempt from loving him. What a confusion of language: to be exempt from loving, as if it were a compulsory matter, a burden one wished to cast off! But Christianity asks: Can you because of this change no longer see him? The answer to that must be: Certainly I can see him; I see that he is no longer worth loving. But if you see this, then you do not really see him (which you certainly cannot deny you are doing in another sense), you see only the unworthiness and the imperfection and thereby admit that when you loved him you did not see him in another sense but merely saw his excellence and perfections, which you loved.⁷

This passage offers an illuminating example of the movement of deliberation or meditation performed by the discourse. In Works of Love, the discourse operates by guiding, moving and challenging the vision of the reader. It is a movement

 SKS 9, 172– 173 / WL, 172– 173.

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turning on vision and thereby a movement of reflection. The movement of reflection in the passage cited turns on emphasis. It takes place by shifting the emphasis in relation to what is seen: If you see this, you do not see him. So the question is: What do we see when we see? In conversation, we may ask one another: What do you see in her or him? The passage just quoted however turns this question around: If we are looking for perfections in the other, we may by so doing be placing ourselves in a position where we only see his or her imperfections. What we see in the other (e. g. unworthiness) implies seeing the other as (e. g. as unworthy and imperfect). Second, the accentuation of love as a duty (you shall love) is a response to the first point, the problem of love. The duty of love does not operate in vacuum, but impinges on and seizes our vision by changing our perception of the other. This has implications for what we see in the other (what we are to see in the other is the neighbor) and how we see the other (we are to see the other as the neighbor). The duty (you shall love) thus implies a new vision (seeing the other as the neighbor), but this is not merely a vision imposed upon us from outside, it is our own way of seeing that is changed. And this change wrought by duty takes place through a process of questioning, reflecting and reversing our vision. Conceiving of love as a duty only makes sense in terms of a response to the problematic change of love on our part. When we merely see the imperfections in the other, we have already done something to what we see. Seeing e. g. only unworthiness in the other means seeing the other simply as unworthy. The duty to love implies a change in love (from preferential love to neighbor love), but this is also love’s changing us in the sense that it changes our vision. Emphasizing love as a duty thus only makes sense if duty means, in effect, the working of a transformation in seeing. “You shall love” implies “you shall see the other as the neighbor” with the further implication: “you shall see the other as the neighbor.”⁸ But how does this transformation of vision work? If we see the other as e. g. merely unworthy we deny that the other is different from what we see him as, but what we deny in “seeing the other as …” we have in fact already seen: We see the other as merely unworthy. We are able to see the other as the neighbor precisely because we have already seen the other in different modes. In seeing the other as merely unworthy (of our love), we are configuring the other: we make him into the merely unworthy. Thus in seeing we relate to what we see, we do something to what we see through our mode of seeing.

 See the movement or shift in emphasis running through the three connected discourses: “You Shall Love” (II. A), “You Shall Love the Neighbor” (II. B), “You Shall Love the Neighbor” (II. C).

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This is indicated when the discourse speaks of our preventing ourselves from seeing: “Would it also be as difficult to get to see the neighbor – if one does not prevent oneself from seeing him – since Christianity has made it eternally impossible to mistake him?”⁹ How does one, then, prevent oneself from seeing? By ignoring or by looking in the other direction. Thus in seeing one can actually prevent oneself from seeing. This leads us to one of the underlying themes of the book, which is signaled at the outset by the introduction of the inversion of perspective, namely that of self-deception, in the sense that one defrauds oneself of love.¹⁰ The discourse represents a countermove in that it directs our attention to what we will not see. In this sense, the neighbor is the one we ignore or seek to avoid by looking in the other direction.

4 Seeing in – Seeing as The discourse thus moves by contradicting, reversing and guiding the vision of its reader. It moves the eyes of the reader by shifting emphasis and in so doing confronts the reader with his or her own mode of looking: What do you see when you see? What do you see in the other? How do you see the other person you see? Seeing in turns out to be seeing as. This movement of “seeing in” and “seeing as” comes to the fore in the following deliberation on Luke 14:12 – 13: O my listener, does it seem to you that what has been set forth here is merely quibbling [Ordstrid] about the use of the word “banquet”? Or do you not perceive that the dispute [Strid] is about loving the neighbor? The one who feeds the poor – but still has not been victorious over his mind in such a way that he calls this meal a banquet – sees the poor and the lowly only as the poor and the lowly [han seer i den Fattige og den Ringe kun den Fattige og den Ringe]. The one who gives the banquet sees the neighbor in the poor and the lowly – however ludicrous this may seem in the eyes of the world.¹¹

The lines just quoted should be read in the light of an earlier passage in the same discourse (“You Shall Love the Neighbor”):

 SKS 9, 56 / WL, 51.  “To defraud oneself of [bedrage for] love [Kjerlighed] is the most terrible, is an eternal loss, for which there is no compensation either in time or in eternity” (SKS 9, 14 / WL, 5 – 6); see also: “the deception by which people defraud themselves out of actually starting to love.” Their misfortune is a form of guilt: “not to find any object of love, whereby they further prevent themselves from finding it” (SKS 9, 162 / WL, 161).  SKS 9, 88 – 89 / WL, 83.

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The times are past when only the powerful and the prominent were human beings-and the others were bond servants and slaves. This is due to Christianity, but from this it does not follow that prominence or power can no longer become a snare for a person so that he becomes enamored of this dissimilarity [forseer sig paa denne Forskjellighed], damages his soul [tager Skade paa sin Sjel], and forgets what it is to love the neighbor. If this happens now, it certainly must happen in a more hidden and secret way, but basically it remains the same. Whether someone savoring his arrogance [Hovmod] and his pride openly gives other people to understand that they do not exist for him and, for the nourishment of his arrogance, wants them to feel it as he demands expressions of slavish submission from them, or whether he slyly and secretly expresses that they do not exist for him simply by avoiding any contact with them… – these are basically one and the same.¹²

Let us have a closer look at this passage. It starts off from the relationship between master and slave, but then takes a turn in that it directs the reader’s attention to more hidden, indirect and subtle ways of depriving another person of significance. This is brought out by two critical expressions in the text. First, how does one give other people to understand that they do not exist for oneself? By the way one looks at them: telling how they should look upon themselves in seeing oneself. One makes them see oneself as superior. The implication, however, is that the self-conception of the arrogant is dependent on others’ seeing themselves as inferior. The dialectic of self-relation and relation to others is reflected in the second expression: forseer sig paa denne Forskjelighed. “At forsee sig paa” means to see wrongly: to see in such a way that involves one fastening one’s eye on some one thing and thereby not seeing something else which one should have seen. The implication is that one avoids seeing the latter by gazing at the former. What one looks fixedly at is the dissimilarity between oneself and the other, thereby not seeing the equality or the kinship with the other human being.¹³ This is not merely to be mistaken, but to do wrong (at forsee sig paa implies the commission of a fault, forseelse). This is brought out by a second point, which is of critical importance for the turn performed in the passage: When guilty of misperception in fastening one’s eye on the dissimilarity, one damages one’s soul. This means that one’s relation to oneself is at stake in one’s relation to others – in the way one relates to others. Which leads us once again back to the inversion of perspective, which first appeared in the opening discourse, namely self-deception taking place in our relation to others. The passage exemplifies the negative possibility introduced in the opening discourse: seeing and yet not seeing. Arrogance, for example, only functions by ignoring and thus not seeing the other human being, but for all that, ignoring  SKS 9, 80 / WL, 74.  That is, the kinship of all human beings (SKS 9, 75 – 76 / WL, 69).

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remains a mode of seeing. At forsee sig paa – seeing wrongly by fastening one’s eye upon – is seeing and yet not seeing: one fastens one’s eye upon the dissimilarities between oneself and the other, thereby blinding oneself to the equality or kinship with the other. Seeing implies paying attention to or ascribing significance to the other one seen, but in this lies the negative possibility of not-seeing as a way of depriving the other of significance. But this only works by way of seeing: one “gives the other to understand” by way of ignoring, looking in another direction or fastening one’s eye. The dialectical point being that in all this one sees – and thereby ascribes significance to – the other as another person to be deprived of significance: One gives the other to understand. This dialectical point is sharpened in focusing upon what happens to the one depriving the other of significance: the act of seeing not only gives significance to the one seen, but also to oneself, seeing. The negative possibility of radical significance is to damage one’s soul or to lose oneself – in seeing the other wrongly.

5 Seeing the People We See Given the possibility of seeing and yet not seeing, the double issue of “seeing in” (what one sees in the other human being) and “seeing as” (how one sees the other) can be rephrased in terms of whether we really see the one we see. Seeing in this emphatic sense was indicated in a passage cited above: “But if you see this, then you do not really see him (which you certainly cannot deny you are doing in another sense).”¹⁴ The emphatic or normative sense of (really) seeing thus presupposes seeing in the parenthetical “another sense.” This emerges from the dual occurrence of the verb in “seeing the others we see.” It is a paraphrase of the heading of Discourse IV in the first part of the book from which the passage (re)quoted was taken: “Our Duty to Love the People We See.” A reading of this discourse, however, reveals that the emphatic or normative sense of seeing is a complex one. The discourse does not simply exploit the emphatic or normative sense of seeing, but explores further the negative possibility of not seeing the other. And what is even more remarkable, it does so by focusing on the problem of idealization: Idealizing love is just another way of avoiding seeing the other. “With regard to loving, the most dangerous of all escapes is wanting to love only the unseen or that which one has not seen. This escape is so high-flying that it flies over actuality completely; it is so intoxicating that it easily tempts and easily imagines itself to

 SKS 9, 172 / WL, 171.

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be the highest and most perfect kind of love.”¹⁵ According to the discourse, the normative goal is the reverse of the idealization of love: it is that of gaining actuality, namely by “finding and remaining in the world of actuality as the task assigned to one.”¹⁶ Consequently, seeing in the emphatic sense – really seeing – seems to be a matter of seeing the other in her or his actuality. But in what sense is this normative? As the discourse tells us there is indeed a task or demand awaiting us: actuality is something to be achieved. This connection between normativity arid actuality suggests, however, that the normative itself is complicated. It is not a matter of measuring according to an ideal of love but, on the contrary, a matter of seeing what cannot be measured. This is brought out in the following discourse, which is the last one in the first part or series of discourses. That it is “our duty to remain in love’s debt” (as the heading reads) means that a “book-keeping arrangement” is inconceivable, because “love’s element is infinitude, inexhaustibility, immeasurability.”¹⁷

6 What is More – to Be Seen But how do we see what cannot be measured? The discourse on our duty to love the people we see emphasizes what we see, the visible figure of the other human being, as against what is unseen. Immeasurability does not simply mean invisibility – on the contrary it relates to what we see or rather to how we see: it is to determine our vision. One way of specifying what immeasurability signifies is to say that in what we see – the visible human figure – we are to see the other human being. This does not mean, however, that we see a common humanity behind the other we see. Indeed, “really seeing” implies seeing the other human being in her or his actuality. Consequently – it seems we are to see the other as she or he really is, complete with all imperfections. And yet, we have been told that seeing the other human being means seeing that the other person is more than whatever im-perfections are there to be seen. This “more” – that we are to see when we see the other human being comes to expression in the bare qualification: the other human being. The tension between visibility and invisibility, which was sketched in the opening discourse, is thus reformulated in terms of a double demand: for both distinctiveness (seeing this individual) and for immeasurability (seeing the individual as another human being).

 SKS 9, 162 / WL, 161.  Ibid.  SKS 9, 180 / WL, 180; see also SKS 9, 178 / WL, 178..

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So the question is: How do we see what cannot be measured? An answer is offered in the sequence of discourses with which the second part of the book opens. As already noted, the first discourse repeats the inversion of perspective performed in the opening discourse: Love builds up by presupposing and thus recognizing love in the other. In the following discourses the manner in which love builds up is unfolded: by having faith or trust in the other person (II), by hoping for the other (III) and by not seeking its own, but instead helping the other “to become himself, free, independent, his own master” (IV).¹⁸ The discourse on love’s faith contrasts trust and mistrust as two ways of seeing the other: While mistrust judges the other on the basis of what she or he has already manifested, i. e., from what mistrust takes as having been seen, trust, by contrast, opens a field of possibility: The “more” is to be seen is a matter of becoming – ultimately of the other becoming him- or herself. The point, however, is even more complex: Love’s trust is not merely a trust placed in the future, but is placed in the actual other person, which means that in the eyes of trust the other is already her- or himself. Accordingly, the other is not to be measured, not even by reference to future possibilities.

7 Seeing and Hiding Really seeing seems to mean seeing the other as he or she really is, with all imperfections and faults. But if we only see im-perfections we are fastening our eyes and thus seeing wrongly. The alternative is not just to see something more than the imperfections in the sense that we also see a more positive side. When love sees the other human being in her or his actuality, this does indeed entail seeing imperfections too, but seeing them in a peculiar mode of notseeing: seeing them in such a way that they are ignored. In Discourse V in the second part of Works of Love “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” this not-seeing is intensified. Seeing in the emphatic sense also implies seeing in the mode of hiding-the-other. Really seeing does not merely mean seeing the other as she or he really is. In one sense, it implies suspending any judgment as to what the other really is. And what is more: the alternative to fastening one’s eye on im-perfections is not only to suspend our judgement, but to see in the mode of hiding. The discourse on love’s hiding culminates in a short passage on forgiveness, which merits quotation in full:

 SKS 9, 272 / WL, 274.

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[F]orgiveness takes the forgiven sin away is. This is a wonderful thought, therefore also faith’s thought, because faith always relates itself to what is not seen. I believe that what is seen has come into existence from what is not seen; I see the world, but what is not seen I do not see; that I believe. Similarly, in forgiveness – and sin – there is also a relation of faith of which we are rarely aware. What, then, is the unseen here? The unseen [det Usynlige] is that forgiveness takes away that which does indeed exist; the unseen is that what is seen is nevertheless not seen, for if it is seen, it obviously is unseen that it is not seen. The one who loves sees the sin he forgives, but he believes that forgiveness takes it away. This cannot be seen, whereas the sin can indeed be seen; on the other hand, if the sin did not exist to be seen, it could not be forgiven either. Just as one by faith believes the unseen into what is seen, so the one who loves by forgiveness believes away what is seen. Both are faith. Blessed is the believer, he believes what he cannot see; blessed is the one who loves, he believes away that which he indeed can see!¹⁹

This passage not only marks the culmination of the deliberation on love’s hiding, but in a remarkable manner it also transposes the question of in-visibility with which Works of Love opens. Love’s hidden life as encountered in the opening discourse is now transformed into love’s hiding – namely its hiding the faults of the other. This reaffirms the inversion of perspective heralded at the beginning of the book – turning the issue whether love can be seen and recognized into the issue of love itself seeing and recognizing love. The passage points out what seeing in the mode of hiding means: The one forgiving sees what she or he forgives, but sees it in such a way that forgiveness takes the sin away. The one who loves and forgives believes and sees away that which is seen. Here we have the positive counterpoint to the negative possibility put forward on the first page of the first discourse: seeing and yet not seeing. Forgiveness is seeing and yet not seeing: “the unseen [det Usynlige] is that what is seen is nevertheless not seen.” It is not seen because it is seen away. The negative possibility of seeing and yet not seeing is thus reversed: Forgiveness does – indeed see, it sees that which is – to be forgiven, but it sees it in the mode of hiding. So forgiveness is seeing and yet not seeing, i. e., hiding in the sense of seeing away. In focusing on this active sense of seeing – seeing away that which is seen – the passage testifies to a crucial point in the ethics of vision, namely that seeing is doing. But in what sense?

 SKS 9, 282 / WL, 294.

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8 Seeing and Doing The discourses of Works of Love are deliberations not about love, but about works of love. Therefore seeing is not doing in the sense of seeing instead of doing or acting. That would be seeing qua spectator or observer. In contradistinction to this, an ethics of vision directs our attention to how we see when we act. As noted at the outset, the crucial issue for the discourses is: how the work is done. This question – how we do what we do – might appear to be a second or supplementary one presupposing an answer to the question: what we ought to do. But the second question (how?) affects the answer to the first question (what?). What we shall do we can do in ways that change its ethical qualification. This is the implication in Discourse VII in the book’s second series, “Mercifulness, a Work of Love Even If It Can Give Nothing and Is Able to Do Nothing.” This discourse draws a distinction between beneficence and mercifulness. Acts of beneficence – the giving to the one in need – can be done without mercifulness, it may even humiliate the recipient. The discourse’s paradoxical heading (to the effect that on the one hand mercifulness is a work of love, on the other hand the one doing this work can give nothing) should be read in the light of this negative possibility: doing the right kind of action and yet doing wrong. The discourse on mercifulness actually executes a reversal of the perspective of action or giving – seeing the one who is assigned a subordinate role (i. e., who is seen as merely a recipient, as merely being the one in need) as being him- or herself in a reciprocal position, able to show the mercifulness, which also the one giving is in need of. As the discourse tersely puts it: “Mercifulness is how it is given.”²⁰ The second question (how?) concerns the act of giving in that it focuses on how we act or give. But this is a matter of how we see when we act or give, i. e., how we see the other, the one we are doing – giving – something to. Seeing is doing in the sense that it is seeing in doing or acting. It is vision implied in, or embedded in, actions. But seeing is also doing in a more radical sense. We do something in seeing: By the way in which we see we are doing something to the other seen. “But one can, by the way in which one sees, make another person’s form [Skikkelse] vacillating or unreal.”²¹ We are doing something even when we think that we are only seeing and not doing anything. We are then acting as spectators and observers. Seeing is not merely seeing, it is observing, evaluating, comparing, judging, etc.

 SKS 9, 323 / WL, 327.  SKS 9, 165 / WL, 164– 165.

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9 Ethics of Vision? The aim of the preceding meditations on (some of) the discourses Works of Love has been to clarify the ethical significance of vision or the act of seeing. Why should we link the question of ethics to that of vision? A direct answer might be sought by reference to the moral appeal coming from what we see. And this goes not only for what we directly see and witness, but also for that to which we have indirect visual access: images of people suffering can be very disturbing. However, this fact suggests that a direct answer leaves out what is problematic. For images also offers the opportunity of viewing at a distance. In one sense, distancing is required in order to see the actual situation of the ether. In another sense, viewing at a distance can lead to our remaining unaffected by what we see. But the critical point is that this is still a matter of how we see. In seeing, we relate to what we see. Seeing means paying attention to, attributing significance to, and so also includes the option of depriving what we see of significance. This implies that the problem rests with seeing. To disregard, to ignore or to look down upon e. g. are modes of seeing. The possibility of seeing and yet not seeing is inherent in vision. My suggestion is that precisely this complication – constituted by the negative possibility – is of crucial importance for an ethics of vision. It is only against the background of the negative option – seeing in the mode of not seeing – that we can speak of seeing in the emphatic or normative sense: “Really seeing” means seeing where we might instead have been seeing without seeing. The negative possibility implies that something is at stake in seeing – ultimately the self-understanding of the one doing the seeing. The normative significance of vision has to do with its inherent complexity.²²

 Special thanks to Susan Dew for carefully checking my English.

Chapter 25 Ethics of In-Visibility 1 Making (In)Visible We live in a culture of visibility. The world we more or less share is not only mediated through images of the world. Rather, a shift in how we deal with visibility seems to have taken place. To put it briefly, visibility has become a matter of making visible; and what is to be made visible is not so much what has been ignored or overlooked, e. g. past wrongs or minorities, but ourselves.¹ To be visible has become a condition for communication. If we want to count, we must make ourselves visible to others, in whose eyes we want to count. Making oneself visible appears as a condition for being someone. Image, then, is not a matter of identity; rather, identity becomes a matter of image. We must be ready to present ourselves, and that requires us to have ourselves at hand – in order to make an image of ourselves. The picture I have just sketched may be questioned for at least two reasons. First, human sociality always implies some culture of visibility. No matter what, sociality is a matter of seeing and being seen. This can be turned into a search for recognition, led by the implicit question: who counts in whose eyes? Nevertheless, the culture of visibility in which we now take part, whether we want to or not, may lead us to think that in social affairs, the visible is that which makes itself visible to us. If human relationships are about communication, are we not beings who communicate and thus make ourselves visible? Turning visibility into a matter of making ourselves visible, however, changes the conditions of both communication and the art of seeing. Second, we do not simply live in a culture of visibility. Although we take part in this culture, we are not just part of it. We may even question the “we” I invoked in the very first sentence. Visibility is at stake between us – to the point that the question is whether there actually is a “we.” Our ways of seeing may not only be called into question by others. We may even come to question whether we live in a shared world. This depends on whether we share views – not so much in the sense of opinions, but rather as ways of seeing the world. Both objections lead to the point I want to make in opening the question of in-visibility. Turning visibility into a matter of making ourselves visible presup See Arne Grøn,”Synligt og usynligt,” in Vinduer til Guds Rige. Seksten forelæsninger om kirken, ed. by Hans R. Iversen, Frederiksberg: Anis 1995, pp. 135– 154. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-031

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poses visibility as not yet determined by us. But as a precondition visibility is so obvious that we can take it for granted and see it as being at our disposal. We may think that in making ourselves visible we become visible. We become visible, however, not simply as the ones we seek to make visible, but also as ourselves seeking to make us visible. Making ourselves visible, we are still to be seen by others. Visibility is not absorbed, as it were, in our making visible. Rather, it is an open question between ourselves and others. What is visible may then appear to be a matter of power: the power of making visible, on the one hand, and the power that inheres in seeing, on the other. When we seek to make ourselves visible, we have others in view, to whom we appeal. We may seek to “make ourselves seen.” Whether we succeed depends upon others seeing us. Making oneself visible is an appeal to be seen. Is visibility then not a matter of making visible and seeing? If we take seeing and making visible to correspond to each other, we may think ourselves into a common world where “we” are seeing. But the other we see stands out, as it were, from such a “we.” She is not there, visible, in order to make herself visible to us or in order to see us making ourselves visible to her.² Rather, if there is a “we” in the interplay of seeing and being seen, it is at stake between “us.” This even implies asymmetry. It will take most of this essay to explain what I have in mind. Let me first return to the opening passage. A culture of visibility creates its own blindness. First and foremost, it is difficult to get into view what it means to see the other. If identity is turned into something to be claimed or re-claimed, the identity of the other is pre-viewed or pre-defined in terms of us seeing her. In particular, when seeking to make ourselves visible to the other, we tend to make an image of her. We may come to see her as the other who is there to see us. Seeing the other, then is about us being seen by her. In seeking to make ourselves visible to the other, we may make her invisible to us – without noticing. Nevertheless, is identity not a matter of mutual recognition? We cannot give an account of ourselves without taking others into account – others who belong to our life. However, taking the identity of the other to be a matter of us recognizing her is not the same as letting our own identity depend on us being recognized by others. More than that, both the first “taking” and the second “letting” are questionable. The other may be affected by what we do to her, and this may run deep, affecting how she sees herself; but that does not allow us to take her identity to be a matter of us recognizing her. Rather, she is already taking herself in ways we do not see. On the other hand, if we think that we can only be our-

 It goes without saying that I could have used “he” as well. “She” is purely conventional.

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selves when we are recognized by others, it is as if we were ourselves others too. When our identities become in this sense social, sociality changes. Turning ourselves into social beings, we see the other as one of the others. Her alterity is absorbed into a social “we.” Recognizing the other, however, implies acknowledging that we may fail to see her. If we take her identity to be a matter of us recognizing her, we do not recognize her. Although she is exposed to our gaze, she is also beyond it. Maybe she is beyond precisely in being visible to us? If we take ourselves to be what we are in the eyes of others, we easily make ourselves blind to what we do to the other. Again, this is not only a problem in a current culture of visibility. Rather, it belongs to the human condition that one escapes oneself in seeing others. Still, if visibility in human affairs is turned into a matter of making others see oneself, seeing others becomes a matter of making oneself seen. In short, a culture of visibility that turns visibility into a matter of making ourselves visible tends to make us blind to our own seeing. This does not just happen to us. Rather, we do something in seeing the other – if only to prefigure her as visible to us, her visibility being defined in terms of our seeing her. Remarkably, we do this in seeing her. Where does this lead us? Visibility is not just a matter of making visible. In seeking to make (ourselves) visible (to others), we can make (the other) invisible (to us). What we see bears witness to us, and this indicates that we become visible in seeing, despite ourselves. Thus, visibility is more than what we make out of it. It is a matter of seeing, but also of turning seeing into a question posed to us. How does invisibility enter the picture? Maybe the point is that it does not come into view. Is visibility not all there is? If the visible and the invisible are taken to be two domains, the invisible seems to be added to the visible, as something next to or behind the visible, thereby reproducing the visible world. But if visibility is a condition that escapes us in seeing, the invisible is already in play. Is this not what a culture of visibility, even when it takes the form of a culture of recognition, loses sense and sight of? The idea I want to examine under the heading of the in-visible is that the invisible already in play in visibility turns the visible into a question – a question in which our own ways of seeing can be called into question: what do we – not – see in what we see? That is, the invisible concerns us in seeing: how we see what we see. If the visible is not simply there but is, rather, a matter of us seeing, the weight seems to be placed on the one seeing. The seer appears at a distance from what is seen. In The Visible and the Invisble, Merleau-Ponty seeks, as a countermove to the division between the seer and the seen, to capture the visi-

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bility of the one seeing, describing the world as “universal flesh.”³ If we take vision seriously, we will come to a notion of the intertwining of the visible and the seer: “Visibility” as “flesh,” as an “‘element’ of Being.”⁴ When we see others seeing us, the “lacuna where our eyes, our back, lie is filled.” We are, through the other’s eyes, “for ourselves fully visible.”⁵ My argument moves in a different direction. It seeks to capture both the becoming visible of the one seeing and the distance between the one seeing and the seen. The question of whether we ignore or acknowledge that we ourselves become visible in seeing is ethical in nature. Although we share this condition of becoming visible, there is an ethical asymmetry between the one and the other – in seeing each other.

2 Ethics of Vision Let us take our point of departure from the following quote from the end of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: It is written, “Why do you see the splinter in your brother’s eye but do not see the log that is in your own?” A pious man has piously interpreted these words as follows: The log in your own eye is neither more nor less than seeing and condemning the splinter in your brother’s eye. But the most rigorous like for like would of course be that seeing the splinter in someone else’s eye becomes a splinter in one’s own eye. But Christianity is even more rigorous: this splinter, or seeing it judgingly, is a log. And even if you do not see the log, and even if no human being sees it, God sees it. Therefore a splinter is a log!⁶

What does it mean that seeing the splinter in the other’s eye is a log in one’s own? We do not just observe that this is the case. Rather, saying that it is so changes something. It is a claim that should make us see. Why? Because there is blindness to our own seeing the other – a blindness that comes to the fore in the difficulty of understanding what it means to see the splinter in the other’s eye. “Saying” here relates to “it is written.” Reading or listening to the words of Matthew 7:3, we may be both puzzled and caught by the image. We can imagine what it would be like to have a splinter in one’s eye, but the image of a log in the  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort and trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1968, p. 137.  Ibid., p. 139.  Ibid., p. 143.  SKS 9, 375 – 376 / WL, 382.

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eye is grotesque. It runs counter to what we expect and imagine. We probably have a sense of what it is about, without fully realizing what it means. Reading or listening to what is said in the quote, we may come to see what it is about: seeing the splinter in the brother’s eye is the log in one’s own eye. This may strike us as a sudden and deep insight: “Yes, this is what it means!” But that still leaves us with the task of explaining the implications to ourselves. The claim – that seeing the splinter in the other’s eye is a log in one’s own – can only redirect us in seeing, that is: by confronting us with the fact that we are already seeing. We are reflected in seeing, not just reflecting upon seeing. As the one seeing, we are questioned. Indirectly, the text leaves us, the readers and listeners, with the question: “…and how do you see?” The claim resituates us in a field of vision, reminding us that in seeing, we are not situated in a free position. But this is what we tend to ignore. For in seeing, our attention goes outwards. Thereby, we can be blind to what we ourselves do in seeing the other. Do we make ourselves blind? If so, we make ourselves blind to our own seeing in seeing. These reflections point to an ethics of vision.⁷ What I mean by “ethics of vision” is not an ethical position. Rather, we are dealing with the question of what the ethical is, or even where it begins. The insight is that in seeing, we are already situated in a field of vision that is ethically imbued. An ethics of vision addresses the question of the ethical significance of seeing: what is at stake in seeing the other? Let me add a second quote: “He saw me. Nobody has ever seen me as much as William did. He could almost see more than there is.”⁸ This is from an interview with Else Lidegaard, a Danish journalist, looking back and trying to explain her relation to William Heinesen, the author from the Faroe Islands. Her words indicate the significance inherent in seeing. In seeing, we can pay significance to another as the other. But in reading and listening we may also come to ask: what does it mean to see another in this sense, making it possible for the other to say “He saw me”? Let us call this sense of seeing the other emphatic. It contrasts other ways of seeing in which we see each other without being able to say that we really see the other. The quote also suggests an answer: “Nobody has ever seen me as much as William did. He could almost see more than there is.” Is seeing the other a matter of seeing more? If it is, how would seeing more be a matter of seeing the other? The argument I shall seek to unfold is that the  Arne Grøn, “Ethics of Vision,” Chapter 24 in this volume.  Marianne Krogh Andersen, “Sjælevenner,” Weekendavisen, October 14, 2011; in Danish: “Jeg blev større af at være sammen med William…Han så mig. Ingen har set mig så meget som William. Han kunne næsten se mere, end der er.”

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ethical significance of seeing the other concerns the link between two forms of “already”: realizing what it means that one is the one – already – seeing the other, and seeing that the other is – already – other than the other we see. The first “already” is about singularity, the second about alterity. My argument is, further, that an ethics of vision along should be understood as an ethics of invisibility. If seeing the other is a matter of seeing more, it seems to be a matter of time in a straightforward sense. In principle, we could then place ourselves in an observing position, waiting to see the other “in full.” But what if seeing “more” is about how we should see the other now? In that case, time comes into the in-visible in a refracted way. Where does the ethical begin? If the significance inherent in seeing is something we give to what we see, it seems that ethics begins with the subject of seeing attributing significance to what is seen: to the other. But in giving significance to the other, do we see her? If the ethical begins with us as the subject of seeing, how is it possible for us to see in ways that are ethically wrong? Put differently, if ethics begins with seeing, what is the ethics of seeing? The critical point is that the ethical can only begin with us if we are called into question – as the subject of seeing. However, in understanding ourselves as the subjects of seeing, we easily come to take ourselves as the subjects of meaning. What we see means something to us, and this seems to lead us back to our giving significance to what we see. On this understanding, the ethical begins with our “ethical view,” i. e., with our assessments. But if the ethical begins with us letting the ethical begin, how do we account for the ethical character of seeing? Our giving significance to what we see is itself a matter of ethical concern. This means that ethics begins with our seeing in a deeper sense – one that pertains to the subjectivity of seeing. If we were first to decide how to see what we see, how would we then account for the fact that we are situated in seeing? Ethics begins with us seeing, before we let it begin with us attributing significance to what we see. In seeing, we are ourselves affected by what we see. We are not absorbed, as it were, in the significance we give to the other. Rather, we only give significance to what we see because it means something to us. Ethics begins with us in that we are ourselves to begin, answering for what we are to do, but the ethical demand captures us in the affectivity of seeing. If the ethical concerns us seeing the other, how does it begin with us as subjects? My suggestion is twofold. First, the ethical begins with us in that we can fail to see the other. This is implied in the emphatic sense of seeing the other (that makes it possible for her to say: “He saw me”). In seeing the other, we can ignore her and even make her invisible. Second, the ethical does not

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begin with us defining or establishing ourselves. Rather, we begin having already begun.⁹ Making the other invisible need not be a separate act distinct from what we otherwise do. The fact that we can see the other and yet not see her is a possibility that accompanies us in often surprising ways. In performing an act of benevolence, for example, how do we see the other? If we point to ourselves doing the act, the other is defined as the recipient of our act. In seeing the other, we may seek to make ourselves seen: showing ourselves to be benevolent. Seeing the other in this way, are we actually doing her good? This question indicates that the relation to the other is ethical even before we define it as such. It also shows that we are there, before the other, to be seen – also in seeking to make ourselves seen. Our visibility escapes us. It is “between ourselves,” opening the question of whether there actually is a “we.”

3 Phenomenology and Ethics of In-Visibility From the beginning – the prelude on “Making (In)Visible” – I have moved between a phenomenology and an ethics of in-visibility.¹⁰ Is ethics the limit of phenomenology? If phenomenology is concerned with observing phenomena, then the answer is yes. But phenomenology and ethics are both reflections on what cannot be absorbed into reflection. Phenomenological reflection may even call our ways of seeing into question, indicating our blindness in seeing. Yet ethics does not come after phenomenology. The ethical question begins with the fact that we are able to see and yet not see. This is not a fact that calls for an observational position; but, rather, it indicates the question of visibility to the one seeing. Phenomenologically, visibility is a condition that escapes us no matter how much we seek to turn it into our making. If we seek to reduce the visible world between us to a matter of making visible, we nevertheless take our point of departure in this world. The question, then, is: what is the “-able” in visible? It cannot simply be taken back to our own making visible.

 Arne Grøn, “Time and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. by Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 435 – 455.  Arne Grøn, “Phenomenology of In-visibility,” in (In)visibility: Reflections upon Visibility and Transcendence in Theology, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. by Anna Vind, Iben Damgaard, Kirsten B. Nielsen, and Sven R. Havsteen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2020, pp. 13 – 32.

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If we cannot account for the visible in terms of us seeing and giving significance to what we see, how should we understand the visible? Obviously, the visible is defined through what we actually see or have seen. Yet, it is not only what we remember to have seen (memoria) and what we now see (contuitus), but also what there is – still – to be seen, but yet not seen. More than this, the visible is also what – already now – could be seen if we saw differently. This indicates that the invisible is not just beyond the visible but, rather, that it turns the visible into a question of seeing. If we follow Augustine’s notions in Book 11 of the Confessions,¹¹ is that which is still to be seen a matter of expectatio? In a critical sense, it is not. What is to come (à venir) remains to be seen (à voire). This underlines the idea that vision and time are intertwined in the question of the visible. The visible cannot be explained in terms of acts of seeing but, rather, puts a demand on the subject of seeing: to see that which is – still – to be seen, and to see it “in time,” both in the time to come and in the right moment. Time and vision are intertwined not only in the time coming, that is inscribed in seeing (coming to see what is still to be seen), but also in the visible as what – already now – could be seen or even could have been seen. The visible as that which is “there to be seen” in a deeper sense points back to our own seeing. In seeing, we pay significance to what we see; we do not leave it “as it is.” But in giving significance, do we see what is there to be seen? Even when we pay attention to the other, we may not see her. We may identify her with the significance we give to her. A phenomenology of visibility leads us to the problem of vision. Not only does it require a notion of the unseen or the not yet seen; we also encounter ourselves making (in)visible what is visible. But maybe there is something¹² that does not show itself in the visible: What is it that phenomenology is to “let be seen”? What is it that is to be called “phenomenon” in a distinctive sense? What is it that by its very essence becomes the necessary theme when we indicate something explicitly? Manifestly it is something that does not show itself initially for the most part, something that is concealed [verbogen] in contrast to what initially and for the most part does show itself. But, at the same time, it is some-

 Augustine, Confessions, Vol. 2, Book 8 – 13, ed. and trans. by Carolyn J.-B. Hammond, Cambridge: Havard University Press 2016 (Loeb Classical Library), pp. 242– 245; see Kurt Flasch, Was ist Zeit? Augustinus von Hippo. Das XI. Buch der Confessiones. Historisch-philosophische Studie. Text – Übersetzung – Kommentar, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1993.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, p. 33 / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1972, p. 35.

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thing that essentially belongs to what initially and for the most part shows itself, indeed in such a way that it constitutes its meaning and ground.¹³

This is a key passage in Heidegger’s hermeneutical turn of phenomenology. The quote from Sein und Zeit §7C continues: “But what remains concealed in an exceptional sense, or what falls back and is covered up [Verdeckung] again, or shows itself only in a “disguised” [“verstellt”] way, is not this or that being but rather, as we have shown in our foregoing observations, the being of Beings [Sein des Seienden].”¹⁴ With the key motif of the oblivion of being, there is in Heidegger an appeal to see differently. Yet it is difficult for him to unfold the implicit motif of transforming vision. That would require an account of the subjectivity of seeing, which is missing in Heidegger. What is the relation between Being that tends to hide itself in beings and the oblivion of being? We are forgetting and covering up, and yet we are not only struck by the oblivion of Being. In Heidegger, it is as if the oblivion of being – and even Being’s hiding itself – is inscribed into being the beings we are. But what we do – forgetting – cannot be taken back into Being’s hiding. Although we tend to overlook in seeing, when we actually fail to see we are to respond. “If we saw differently,” or even ‘If we had seen differently’ can call into question us seeing (for) ourselves. Could we say that what is visible shows itself because visibility hides itself in the visible? There is a critical difference between Being and visibility, in that visibility points to the subject of vision; it questions us in seeing what is there to be seen. Therefore, we should consider two intertwined moves. First, a phenomenology of in-visibility, asking: how does the visible (that which is visible) show itself? In order to see what shows itself, we must take something unseen into account. We never come to the point where what is visible is simply there to be seen.¹⁵ This means, in turn, that the invisible is not there next to the visible. Rather, there is invisibility to the visible. Second, in seeing, we respond to what is there to be seen. We are to see for ourselves, being called into question; we are made responsible. This is the move taken in an ethics of in-visibility. If the

 Ibid., p. 33 / p. 35.  Ibid.  There is infinity to the horizon of vision: it is open in opening: “In phenomenology there is never a constitution of horizons, but horizons of constitution” (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass, New York: Routledge 2002, p. 150); see also Arne Grøn, “Beyond? Horizon, Immanence, and Transcendence,” in Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers, Södertörn Philosophical Studies 8, ed. by Jonna Bornemark and Hans Ruin, Huddinge: Södertörn University 2010, pp. 223 – 241.

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visible also is what we – already now – could see if we saw differently, the second move is opened in the very question of in-visibility. But this does not mean that ethics comes after phenomenology. Rather, ethics captures us in the indicated double “already”: we are to realize what it means that we are the one – already – seeing the other, and we are to see that the other is – already – other than the other we see. The intertwinement of time and vision bears on this double “already.” Being situated in seeing also implies the experience of having already failed to see the other. This accentuates the demand on the one seeing the other: we are – still – to see her. What is “there to be seen” is up to us, not in the sense of us defining what is there to be seen, but as a question to us that is also implied in “if we saw differently.” But we cannot just see differently. Even if we so choose, it remains to be seen whether we in fact come to see as we choose. Remarkably, this is because we are ourselves implied in seeing. The difficulty in transforming our vision is that it takes us: we only come to see differently – in seeing differently. In what sense, then, is seeing something we do? In seeing, we do something, as the one seeing, but seeing is not a doing as a separate act, as, for example, taking a walk. Rather, it is something we do in what we are doing. When we go for a walk, we also take the walk with our eyes. In travelling, we are seeing, listening, smelling, feeling, or touching. Yet seeing may also be a specific act. Thus, we may “have” or “take” a look. We may move our eyes or change position in order to see something, but we only do so in seeing. We redirect ourselves, look more closely or in a different direction, and we do so in seeing, as the one already seeing and being affected. Acts of seeing (looking for something or seeking to tell the other something just by looking) have a different character from acts of performing a movement. We are situated in seeing so that we do not first have to place ourselves and to intend what we see. When we intend to see and direct our attention, we re-direct ourselves in seeing. Yet seeing is also movement – we move our eyes in sensing what is there to be seen. We move in being moved. In seeing, we respond to being affected. The ethical implications of seeing concern how we see the other in what we do. An ethics of vision encounters a twofold difficulty: seeing the other, and seeing the invisible. First, we do not just see the other. If we see her, she is not simply the other, but the other we see. Second, we do not see the invisible. Visible and invisible are not two domains, as if the invisible were a sort of second visibility. Rather, invisibility is already in play in visibility – visibility as a condition that escapes us in seeing. What we see is visible, but we do not see “the” visible. How then is the invisible beyond? It is not simply beyond seeing; it turns seeing into a question. That is, the invisible concerns the visible as a question of seeing: what do we – not – see in the visible? It is in this sense in-visible. What does this

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mean for seeing the other? The question of the in-visibility of the other is: do we see her as the other? This is a matter of what it means to see her – invisible in her visibility. Let me unfold this suggestion in variations on vision and in-visibility.

4 Ethics of In-Visibility: Variations Seeing the Other? Seeing the other as the other is a difficult, if not aporetic, notion. If we think we know what it means, do we then see the other? Note the ambiguity involved: if we think that this is what we do, namely see the other, and if we take the other to be the other we see, is it the other that we see? This question indicates the existential meaning of seeing the other. It concerns what we do in seeing her. The consciousness with which we see the other goes into our seeing her. In an intensified sense, the other “as the other” is a formal indication. It only offers an indication that depends on how we ourselves fulfill or embody it. It is about coming to see the other differently. Does the notion of the other as neighbor offer an indication that can direct us?¹⁶ In Kierkegaard, the notion is linked to love as a duty. This is a strange move. It seems to run counter to what is implied in loving someone. First, “what we love and what we fail to love is not up to us.”¹⁷ Rather, we find ourselves loving or “in” love. Second, if an act of love comes in order to fulfill a duty, it is not love. There is, however, a tension between these two claims. The second indicates that love is personal in the sense that it is a matter of how we are “in” love. Love is not just something in which we find ourselves. It demands us because it concerns us in how we relate to the other, in seeing her. What, then, is the point in turning love into a duty? The answer, I think, is to be found in the difficulty of seeing the other as the other. The duty is directed to us seeing the other; it is a demand placed upon us to see differently: to see the other as neighbor. But how is it possible to see differently from how we see? We embody the way we see the world and the other, and we cannot simply see differently. Yet, we are not simply locked up in our ways of seeing. We may be, but if we are, we have come to see differently. Nevertheless, do we not identify the other we see, thereby turning her into the other we see? However, if we identify the other with the other we see, we

 Arne Grøn, “Un-sichtbar. Den Nächsten sehen,” Chapter 35 in this volume.  Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004, p. 46.

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do something: we assure ourselves that she is as we see her. The very act of identifying opens the reversed question: is she (the other) the other we see? It is easy to overlook this question (which is also in this sense open: it is up to us to ask ourselves). It may even be the question we avoid asking when identifying the other. Here we need to distinguish between two senses of identifying: identifying in order to see what we see (indicating that it is still open what we see) and identifying as determining what we see. Again, this difference in identifying may vanish before our eyes. Seeing the other, we are under influence. We may even be affected by our seeing the other: it is the other we see. Therefore, we may slide into identifying the other to be seen with the other as we see (or even have seen) her. We ignore the leap we ourselves make in moving to identifying in the second sense. The leap between the two senses concerns time (the other is not simply there, “in time,” and we are ourselves displaced in time), but it may also disappear in time. Yet the difference between identifying in the first and in the second sense remains open in the very act of seeing the other – at least as the difference that is ignored. Identifying the other as the other we see presupposes that she is already the other: to be seen. Even when we claim that the other is as we see her, she is still the other we identify as the other we see. Seeing here opens the question that our claim answers – to the point of denying that there is a question. This is a question of the visibility of the other – do we let the other be visible beyond our seeing her? Turning love into a duty may seize us in what we are doing in seeing the other. It requires us to change in seeing, not just to change our view, as one might change one’s opinion, and not just to change in the sense of deciding to do so. The demand to “change (in) seeing” is a demand to change oneself. We are ourselves in how we see. The duty to love one’s neighbor requires us – to see the other as our neighbor. “We” are the addressees of the ethical demand. Is seeing the other as neighbor seeing beyond what one sees?

Seeing Beyond – Seeing The other is not simply there, before our eyes, to be observed and identified. Ethics begins by calling this position into question: having the other before our eyes. The other is there, visible, but the visibility of the other turns seeing her into a demand placed on us. This is an ethical reversal of perspective that differs from a perspectival exchange in which we seek to appropriate the perspectives of one another. The ethical reversal has to do with asymmetry (as already indicated). The implication is that one is to see differently in order to see the other as

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one’s neighbor. The question is not where to find my neighbor but whether I show myself to be the neighbor of my neighbor. Seen in this light it makes sense to turn love into a duty. The duty lets the one seeing and acting appear in the accusative, as the one having already acted and therefore as the one to re-act and see once again. In this sense, it redirects one’s vision. What then does it mean to see the other as the neighbor? The other is not simply the other – to be defined as the other. Rather, seeing the other as the other implies seeing that she is other than the other I see. That is, she is beyond my seeing. But this should change the way I see her. Seeing the other as the other demands that we see differently, but how is it possible to see differently from how we see? We embody our ways of seeing – as the ones seeing. Yet, identifying the other we see with the other we see indicates an open question: is it the other we see? More than this, seeing the other as the other is not only a problematic notion. It also formally indicates the paradoxical possibility: seeing that the other is other than we see. It is the possibility of seeing her beyond our seeing. This is not a position in which we can establish ourselves, claiming that this is how we see the other. Neither is it an ideal that we can strive to accomplish. Rather, it is to see with a sense of limits: limits to what one is to see of the other, limits to what one has seen of the other. In that sense, there is always more to be seen. But this means that the other has still to show who she is. In other words, seeing the other as neighbor breaks off identification. It is to see her as invisible in her visibility.¹⁸ This way of understanding, of “seeing the other as neighbor” goes against Levinas’ critique of seeing and comprehending. Levinas points to a response that answers “to a non-thematizable provocation,” “before any understanding”¹⁹ But is there no understanding in this response? The accusative – being addressed and questioned in the proximity of the neighbor – “derives from no nominative.”²⁰ We find ourselves in the accusative – we do not lead ourselves from the nominative into the accusative. Yet, in the accusative we are in the nominative. We are the ones to respond, as those already seeing and yet not seeing the other.

 Grøn, “Un-sichtbar.”  Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1998, p. 12.  Ibid., p. 11.

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Face In-Visible Is the face of the other a phenomenon?²¹ What is the question in this question? Without noticing we may think ourselves into a position in which we are to decide what kind of entity we deal with. Taking the face of the other as a phenomenon, we tend to see it as corresponding to our intending it as a face. But we are part of the phenomenon in so far as seeing the face of the other requires that we face the other. The other may not see us, and in that sense we are not face-toface. Yet we only understand what it means to see the face of the other when we realize that she is beyond us also in the sense that she can face us. What is in a face? Apparently, this is a matter of what the other lets us see and of what we see in the face of the other. Again, this seems to place us in the position of deciding what is there, before our eyes, to be seen. However, the face of the other is not there, just to be seen. But neither is it just not to be seen. Rather, the invisibility of the other – that the face of the other is not to be seen – puts a demand on us seeing her. What is in a face is also a matter of what we do not see in the face of the other. And this again is twofold. First, in the sense that there is something to be seen, which we do not see – we may not only overlook what she shows us but may even ignore her. That is, it is possible to see the face of the other in such a way that we do not see her. We may even see her so as to make her invisible. But there is more to the “seeing and yet not seeing” and this has to do with the visibility and invisibility of the other. We may see the face of the other attentively, looking for some signs that tell us what she thinks. This way of looking may slide into observing the face of the other. Yet, if we focus on traits of the face of the other, we do not see her. She is beyond what we see, and not in the sense of hiding behind (this suggests that we could see her behind herself). Rather, she is beyond in her own visibility. What does this mean in terms of an ethics of in-visibility? We do not first see what we see and then add an evaluation that brings ethics into play. The ethical begins in seeing the other. We are to see the other so as not to see (observe) her face. We are to understand in what sense the face of the other is not to be seen. She is there – still to be seen, beyond us seeing her. The other is in-visible: she is invisible in her visibility.

 See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969, pp. 187– 189, 197– 198, 206 – 209; Levinas, Otherwise than Being, pp. 88 – 90.

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The ethics of vision is not a position; it concerns the ethical. The ethical begins with us seeing. To be more precise, it begins with the possibility of our seeing and yet not seeing. Seeing the other in her in-visibility turns this motif of “seeing and yet not seeing” around. We shall see the other in such a way that we, for ourselves, realize that she is beyond what we see. She is not simply there to be seen – but still to be seen. The face speaks, Levinas claims.²² There is a rupture in visibility, introducing the time of the other. She is there, before us, to be seen, but comes from a past we cannot integrate into our history and moves towards a future that keeps our history open. The voice of the other belongs to her face, but the face also speaks silently. It may speak beyond the faces we can put up.

Nakedness Nakedness points to the look. Being naked or nude, one is exposed to the look of others. This appears to be a simple relation. But there are critical differences at play here. Thus, to lose face differs from the nakedness of the face. The face of the other becoming naked shows the other to be affected by what happens to her, beyond the face of communication, without reflecting the look of others. This has to do with the face speaking – in nakedness. The face already speaks before we put faces on ourselves. There is a peculiar temporality to the nakedness of the face. First and foremost, the face becomes naked and does so suddenly. It is not something shown. There is no time for taking a position or manifesting an attitude. The sudden nakedness is the other suffering and in this suffering, the other comes to the fore as subject, beyond the subject that establishes herself. It is the other who has to carry the weight of her history, or even the weight of herself. Yet, can the nakedness of the face not be an expression? The other may show herself to be affected by what has happened to her, for example in crying. Does the nakedness of the face show itself in tears? Crying is both to bear what feels unbearable and can be an appeal to others seeing one’s situation. Could we then say that the other may show herself naked in tears? The sudden nakedness of the face that breaks through (in) the face – does this indicate the plasticity of the face? It is not about a person having more faces or about the face having more layers. That would leave our look intact. Rather, the face becoming naked involves our look in a more disturbing way.

 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 66, 198.

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If it were about the face having more layers, we, in seeing the face of the other, could, in principle, move through these layers. But seeing the face of the other becoming naked, we ourselves “fall through” our look, as it were. We become naked ourselves in seeing, as the one seeing the other. The look is turned upon itself. We are reflected on ourselves in seeing. The other need not look back – rather, she is there, in herself, beyond in her visibility.

Shame and Shamelessness Shame reflects visibility. Following Sartre, we may define the experience of shame – finding oneself ashamed – as the experience of being seen by the other.²³ However, what I discover is myself being seen. I do not just come to see myself as the other sees me. I am not simply recognizing myself in the eyes of the other. If I take myself to be what the other sees, this is something I do. I show myself to be the one seen by the other. This is my singularity already at stake in seeing others seeing me. Being fixed by the gaze of the other, I can come to realize that I am this singular individual, embodied and exposed to her gaze. Already this brief outline suggests the decisive move to be taken. If shame is the experience of being thrown back onto oneself, finding oneself seen, as an intensified form of finding oneself (Befindlichkeit), being “riveted” to oneself (as Levinas puts it), it is not just about coming to see oneself as one is seen by others. There is more to the experience: I come forward as the one being seen by others. Subjected to the look of others, the subject of shame appears. In the experience of shame, one can come to “sense oneself” – in sensing oneself exposed to the look of others. The critical move that further complicates the picture is the possibility of being ashamed on behalf of others, by substitution, as it were. This has to do with the possibility of others showing themselves shameless. The opening scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear is enigmatic. How is Lear’s gesture to be understood, when asking his daughters: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (Act One, Scene 1). If the gesture is about shame, it testifies to the power of the look: Lear avoids the visibility implied in being loved by others, which would require him to let them see him, in his weakness.²⁴ He wants  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes, London: Routledge 2003, pp. 276 – 326.  Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 267– 353.

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to determine how they should see him. If this is the case, his youngest daughter Cordelia’s open, almost defiant avoidance is also about shame, but reversing Lear’s: Cordelia’s shame exists on behalf of her father – who defigures himself. She loves him beyond the look that would focus on his weakness, the look that he anticipates. Her shame harbors the motif of protecting his dignity – against himself. This indicates that the relation of shame and vision complicates both. The possibility of being ashamed shows the power of vision: being exposed to the gaze of others, a look that need not be a specific act of seeing but is, rather, implied in their acts. However, the subject of shame is not simply subjected to the look of others. Shame is also the response of the subject being subjected. In shame, she may not just show herself to be exposed to, but also protect herself against, or even offer some sort of resistance to, the look of others. As the one subjected, suffering, she is more than the way she is seen. Furthermore, shame is also a way of seeing others, to the point of feeling shame on their behalf, as Cordelia does. The subject of shame is subjected to shame: it is there, it can persist. Shame is hardly a position we take. But this does not preclude that, in shame, we take a position in relation to others and to ourselves. Feeling ashamed, we relate to others and to ourselves. Let us repeat the critical move and consider the following quote: The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about midday on 27 January 1945…They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive…They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime, the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.²⁵

This is a quote from the beginning of Primo Levi’s book The Truce, published in Italian in 1963. The passages I have quoted were written in 1947. In The Drowned

 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf, London: Abacus 1987, pp. 187– 188.

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and the Saved, published shortly before his death in 1987, Levi returns to this opening, quoting the last section (“They did not greet us”).²⁶ In the chapter entitled “Shame,” Levi speaks of another shame, the shame of the world: And there is another, vaster shame, the shame of the world. It was memorably pronounced by John Donne, and quoted innumerable times, pertinently or not, that ‘no man is an island’ and that every bell tolls for everyone. And yet there are those who faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it and not feel touched by it: this is what the majority of Germans did during the twelve Hitlerian years, deluding themselves that not seeing was a way of not knowing, and that not knowing relieved them of their share of complicity or connivance. But we were denied the screen of willed ignorance, T.S. Eliot’s “partial shelter”: we were not able not to see.²⁷

Can the “shame of the world” be the shame that such a crime should have been “irrevocably introduced into the world of things that exist”? It is illuminating here to introduce the notion of shamelessness. When we call an act shameless this may be a way of expressing moral condemnation; but this is a derived manner of speaking. Feeling shame in no way implies that one has performed a shameless act. Shame as moral sense implies that one should have acted differently (to the way that one actually did). This is the opposite of having acted shamelessly. Shamelessness means that the agent should have felt shame but – in order to perform the act – did not. Shame of the world – shame of what is introduced into the world – can be on behalf of others who do not feel shame. This is a shame responding to their shamelessness. It is a moral sense of the boundaries of the self that are not only overstepped but denied. What does this shame of shamelessness show? Shame concerns vision, not just in the obvious sense of being exposed to the look of others. Already as a response to the look of others shame may harbor a sense of limits – the limits of what should be seen. It may do so as a defense of one’s own dignity involved in being vulnerable. This sense of limits is intensified in the shame of shamelessness. Shame here concerns vision from within. It need not come from oneself being exposed to the look of others but is, rather, a sense of what is at stake ethically in seeing the other. The limits of vision are ethical: they can be transgressed, as to both interiority and exteriority. At stake are both conscience and dignity.

 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal, London: Abacus 1989, p. 54.  Ibid., p. 65.

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Conscience and Dignity Shame reflects visibility, not only one’s own but also the other’s. There are various, if not different, possibilities in shame, from sensing oneself being exposed to others, to harboring a sense of dignity – one’s own as well as the other’s. Remarkably, vision can be turned upon itself. In feeling ashamed, one can be reflected in seeing the other (not only resisting the other’s look but also looking after the dignity of the other). Again, this is not reflection upon seeing but is, rather, being oneself reflected in seeing – not only in being seen by others but also in seeing others. Shame thus reflects visibility in ways that open up questions of the ethics of in-visibility. The moral sense of shame is a sense of limits to visibility – as a sensibility to possible violations. The humanity of human beings is at stake in how they see themselves – each other – in what they do. The power inherent in seeing is also the power to humiliate the other – even beyond recognition. How is this possible? Depriving the other of dignity requires something: to see the other without dignity. Does this still hold the other as implicit addressee: that she should see herself without dignity? If it seeks to deprive the other of the status of being someone to be seen, how is it possible to see the other as not to be seen? Is this to see without the conscience implied in shame? Let us follow a bit further the twofold question of conscience and dignity as a question of the ethics of in-visibility. In his essays At the Mind’s Limits, Jean Améry ponders on the victim’s condition.²⁸ His “Nachdenken” reclaims the dignity of which the victim is deprived. To continue the argument above: subjected to “his” condition, responding in suffering, the victim shows himself as a subject. He already sees for himself, which makes it possible for him to insist that he is more than what a look at the victim as a victim realizes. A struggle about what is visible takes place, not only in seeing but also “between the looks.” Dignities – one’s own, the other’s – are intertwined, as conscience and dignity are. At least two remarkable human possibilities are at work here. First, conscience implies one’s ability to be ashamed – not in being exposed to the look of others, but to what one does. Second, the possibility of being ashamed of the shamelessness of others concerns conscience – not as something given but as a question between ourselves. Although conscience singularizes, we share the question of conscience.

 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980.

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How is dignity at stake in these two possibilities? The first indicates that dignity depends on what one does: one’s sense of dignity is not only a matter of being recognized by others; in a critical sense it does not come from outside but concerns what one is able to do. Human beings can lose dignity through what they do themselves. This is where the ethical begins: in coming to understand that one can fail. If what we are is also a matter of what we can do, our own-most possibilities are not only possibilities into which we can project ourselves (as in Heidegger), but also what we show ourselves to be able to do. To fail ethically is not something we project – and yet it is something we “can.” We do not just happen to fail ethically. When we do, we fail. This insight is also at work in the second question of conscience as shared. Conscience and dignity are invisible – but their invisibility concerns the question of visibility: what do we (not) see in that which is to be seen? Seeing is a matter of conscience. Shame not only reflects being seen but also oneself (and others) seeing. Conscience is not to be reduced to a guilty conscience but reflects what one has done in what one can do. To reformulate the link between the Socratic ignorance and the voice of daimonion: not being in a position to know what the ultimate or absolute is, we must remind ourselves of what we are able to do – we can fail ourselves. Following this line of argument, dignity concerns us in what we do: we cannot reduce ourselves to what affects us. Yet human dignity also goes beyond agency: it is the dignity of the subject suffering. Does the first not play into the second? The one suffering suffers as a subject, not least as the subject unable to act. And in suffering we show ourselves to be more than what we are made into: we suffer. Does this mean that in suffering there is a form of resistance or protest? If visibility is a matter of power, are not both conscience and dignity as “invisibles” without power? Apparently, it is possible to ignore one’s own conscience, and the resistance of the nakedness of the face does not figure of much. If there is resistance in suffering it seems to be easily overlooked. Seeing the dignity of the other suffering depends on the one seeing’s having conscience, and do we not decide on our own whether we have conscience or not? Where would that leave us? Seeking to ignore or silence conscience is not the same as deciding to be with or without conscience. If dignity comes down to our recognizing the dignity of the other, if dignity is something we give to each other in recognizing, what we recognize is not the dignity of the other – we would only recognize the other as we see her. This indicates that we should reconsider what is implied in normativity, continuing our variations on ethics of in-visibility by focusing on what comes into play in the in-visible.

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5 In-Visible: Ethics, Time and Vision Time and History In-Visible Time is invisible – not beyond or next to, but in the visible. Yet, we do not see time in the visible. What we see is marked by time, becoming and perishing, but we do not have time before us in the visible. Rather, what we see we see “in time,” even when we are too late and should have seen in time. Seeing takes time. The visible and the one seeing are both in time. The “in” (“in time”) should not be taken as suggesting that time is a kind of space in which we move. Rather, it concerns how we are situated moving in space, living in and through the visible. In brief, we are “in” time in that time comes into the in-visible. Above I have linked the question of in-visibility to time: the visible is defined through what we have seen, through what is to come, but also through what we could have seen, had we seen differently. What is there to be seen is itself a matter of time: in what we see there is more to be seen. The other we see is not simply there, before our eyes. She is “in” time, withdrawn from us. She comes from a past beyond us and is to show herself in the time to come. We only see the other with a sense of limit to our seeing her. This is not only negative. Rather, the limit to seeing the other opens up the question of seeing her. To see the other demands that we wait for her to show herself. She is there to be seen in that there is more to be seen. But the other is there not only to respond to us. She is there before me (in the double sense of the word). The relation to time is intrinsic to ethics. It also appears to be straightforward. Ethics concerns the future: it is about what we shall do. Remarkably, however, the ethical not only has to do with time that comes to us. It also concerns us in how we are (not) “in” time. In dealing with the time to come, we may be too late, but we may also have already failed. Yet is this “have already” not just a matter of the past? Given that we, as concerned beings, are future-directed, it is striking how the past plays into ways in which humans interact with each other. Often it is difficult to let the past be past. How to deal with the past may concern the conditions upon which a human co-existence is possible. This is particularly the case in the aftermath of mass atrocities. Although ethics concerns what Jean Améry, in his essay on resentment, calls the genuine human dimension: the future, the past becomes an ethical issue when dealing with past wrongs.²⁹

 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 68.

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However, in what sense is the past a matter of ethics? It may be argued that dealing with the past is an indirect way of dealing with the future. But if this route is taken it is difficult to understand the moral weight of the past. The issues of forgiveness and reconciliation are not just a matter of restoring peace or making even. Rather, at stake in dealing with past wrongs is also our moral sensibility. We have already seen this in reflecting on the phenomena of shame that bring human dignity into play. Consequently, we do not face the alternative of linking ethics to either the future or the past.³⁰ The ethical character of the past is not added to ethics as future-directed. We only understand what it means to say that the ethical concerns the time to come if we realize that the past already questions our moral sensibility. What is even more important, there is a temporal asymmetry in the ethical response to the problem of time: the future opened in forgiveness does not absorb or even correspond to the past as past wrongs. Remembering concerns the dignity of others beyond us in time. The other before us is also beyond us. The ethical is not only condensed in “shall” – its weight is also brought out in “should have.” This move – from “shall” to “should have” – indicates the demand that the ethical has on us. It has to do with the in-visible. The invisible is not simply that which we cannot see but also what we should have seen. We may even have made it invisible to ourselves. Adressing the intricate relation between ethics, time and vision, we move towards history. Time is invisible but history appears to be visible: it takes place, if not before our eyes then recorded in narratives or images, and it leaves traces. Yet, history is time that has disappeared, and history is still open in time coming to us. How, then, is history invisible? The face of the other bears a history that is invisible to us in seeing her. It dis-appears in appearing: the other is withdrawn from us as subjected to her own history. Even though we are appealed to, we cannot “read” the history of the other in her face. This is not because the face lacks significance – rather, the face of the other may bear too much. What we see is the other bearing her history. She does not just “show” her history. Rather, it takes an effort for her even to seek to articulate the history to which she bears witness. The traces of the face are not just traces of history: the history of the other is not “there” to be seen. The nakedness of the face bears witness to the history to which the other is subjected. Although we may see her face, we do not have her history before us. The face of the other is not part of her history but is naked beyond the

 See Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2002, p. 35.

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history to which it bears witness – witnessing the other as subject subjected to this history. History also leaves its traces between us – traces that are difficult to read. More often than not, we ignore them as we move on. If we are led by some idea of progress in history we may think that we have history both before us and at our back. Although this is our idea we may also become its prisoners, making us blind to history. History comes in the plural. “Writing” history, in deeds and words, leaves other histories outside of “history.” We may make an effort to bring histories into narrative, telling of what should be remembered. This is an act of “making visible,” taking history with us in seeing the world. Remembering does not bring history back. Even in its traces, history is there as lost. Should we then remember it as lost? Maybe, but this only makes sense if history means something to us. It bears witness to ways of living a human existence different from ours, possibilities which are not our own – and yet they should concern us. If we follow Heidegger and define our own existence as existing in possibilities, we tend to define these possibilities as “our own.” What comes into view, then, are possibilities as (to be) projected. However, human possibilities also accompany us in history, without us projecting them. Having the past behind us, projecting us into the future, it is difficult to see that the past is also the past of lost futures.³¹ Why should that concern us now? The critical point here is that history is a human concern beyond what we can make out of it. What it is to be human is a question that we are to answer, in how we understand the life we live. Yet it is not just a matter of how we see it. We share it with others in the past. This should not be stylized as a “perennial” question. Rather, across unsurpassable differences in time, there is a contemporaneity in questioning and in being questioned that has to do with the character of the question: it is a question to be asked and answered only in being, ourselves, called into question. In what sense is human history a matter of what it means to be human? We may place ourselves in a position in which we can see history as a “space” of various interpretations of what it is to be human, making history appear as a sort of resource for us. Being human, however, is a matter of history in a more critical sense. Human history also offers the possibility of losing the sense of the human as shared. History comes in the plural also in the ways in which human histories can be lost. How should this concern us? It has to do with what it means to remember. Remembering is up to us not just in the sense

 See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, London: Pimlico 1999.

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that we decide what is important to us. It takes an effort to remember what should be remembered. This is an act of “keeping visible,” of not letting the question of what should be remembered fall into oblivion. At stake here are our ways of deciding what is important to us. This is also what the term “human” can indicate. What is important to us as humans is a matter of remembering too. As we may seek to remember, we can also make histories invisible. This is a human possibility accompanying human history. Even in its traces, history is there as lost. It comes in the plural, not only in narratives but also as histories of suffering that have left no traces in the form of names. History is in this sense invisible – as histories that are lost (and not even visible as lost), forgotten, or without names. The histories we can trace may indicate lost histories we cannot trace. But also in this sense history calls for ethical imagination. We may try to “see” history before us, the history from which we ourselves come and which is yet a history of lost histories. The sense of a history beyond imagination requires – imagination. Is the nakedness of a face not beyond history? Is history not a matter of power, the power of making ourselves visible so that we may hope for a sort of human “eternity”? The history to be witnessed in a face appears only to disappear in history. Is the face not in this sense in-visible: powerless? The face is easily overlooked or disregarded. In its nakedness, it belongs to the category of what could be called “das Unansehnliche” (to use a German word, “det uanselige” in Danish): the inapparent or unimpressive, that which does not figure of much. It is not invisible, but is there to be seen, and yet it does not take much effort to ignore. Nevertheless, a face may haunt us. What is in a face? What is the unimpressive? If it is that which leaves us unimpressed, it is not simply invisible. We may be left with a question we do not ask ourselves. The color of a face may hide such a question.³² Can art seek to make the invisible in the sense of the unimpressive, the inapparent, visible? Is it possible to show that which does not make itself visible? Should we speak of an aesthetics of the in-visible? Art dealing with vision concerns time. Seeing takes time, and seeing has a history to it in which seeing itself is at stake. As a countermove to history, the art of seeing still concerns history. Is it possible to find a link here between ethics, phenomenology, and aesthetics of in-visibility? This question is too big for one essay, so let me give only one suggestion. Maybe the link is to be found between repetition (in seeing) and remembering (reminding us of ourselves, seeking to remember the question

 See Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man, New York: Random House 1952.

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of what it is to be human). Repetition here means seeing once more, as a countermove to the possibility that accompanies us: seeing and yet not seeing. Time and history in-visible play into vision and ethics. Let me address the two questions re-opened here: the question of seeing (in seeing the other), and the issue of normativity.

Seeing and Understanding In seeing the other, we are both situated and situating ourselves. Even when we intend only to observe her, we take a position – that of observing. The ethical begins with us seeing before we let it begin with our evaluations. This is indicated in redoubling questions such as: In seeing the other, do we see her? Do we see her as the other? In a critical sense, seeing the other as the other is not something we can do. It is not a separate act or even a goal to be accomplished. Rather, it is an open question to us in what we do to the other. What if we claim that this is what we do: see the other as the other? The very situation would change. We would place the other in a position in which she were to see herself as the other we see. Claiming to see the other as the other, do we – in this very act – see her as the other? We may not ask this question ourselves; we can even avoid asking it. Yet, we do not have to look for the question. Rather, we can only ask it as a question that imposes itself upon us. This shows that seeing the other as the other is a formal indication that is still open to being embodied in actually seeing the other. Ethically, the answer does not meet the question that remains open. The one answering is still questioned. It makes sense to ask ourselves: do we see the other as the other? But if we answer that this is what we do – we do something else. We change the very situation: we do not see the other as the other still to be seen. We turn her into the other we see or even have seen. But is that not what we do in seeing her: turning the other into the other we see? Does the problem lie in seeing as such? It seems to go without saying that we see the other as we see her. We cannot do otherwise. Does that mean that seeing reduces the other to the same: the other we see to – the other we see? Are we in this sense enclosed upon ourselves in seeing? If we are, this is not something we just happen to be. Rather, we are ourselves enclosed. It has to do with us, both in what we do and in how we are affected. We do not just make ourselves enclosed but become enclosed in what we do. Yet, is it not possible to be self-enclosed in our ways of seeing? How we see may be determined by what we are looking for, and this may go deep in var-

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ious ways – it may demand patience from us, and our ideas of what we are looking for may change, but we may also make some short cuts and just seek our own. What we see must then fit into what we are looking for.³³ Does this mean that we, as the subjects of seeing, stage our own seeing in order to find what we are looking for? Is this already the case when we seek to grasp what we see? On this notion of seeing as mastery, it is difficult to understand what it means to say that seeing is sensation. What is in question here is the subjectivity of seeing. In seeing, we are ourselves moved by what we see. We are only the subjects of seeing in being ourselves subjected to seeing. As the ones seeing, we are affected by what we see. We are not subjects performing or enacting seeing; we are subjected in that we are to bear ourselves in seeing. If we were simply enclosed upon ourselves in seeing, it would not make sense to ask ourselves: what do we see in what we see? The fact that it is possible for us to ignore the other we see would no longer be the fact of a possibility accompanying us but just a fact. We would no longer need to be disturbed by what we are able to do. How do we deal with the “can” implied in the visible as what can be seen? In seeing, we move in possibilities. These are not only at our disposal or possibilities we can project. They may also bear witness to us in more disquieting ways. Thus, we may be able see the other with a consciousness of seeing her (for example, claiming to see her as the other or as the neighbor), which makes us blind to her. Speaking of an ethics of vision, I am not advocating seeing over, e. g., listening or touching, but insisting on the problems and possibilities inherent in seeing. We cannot account for the complex question of seeing without taking into account the interplay of seeing, listening and touching. Remarkably, senses have a metaphorical status in terms of the world of experience. What we see is a matter of “seeing,” making it possible for us to ask ourselves: what do you see in what you see? If we are not “touched” by what we see, having a sense of what it is like to be thus situated, we do not “see” it. Senses interplay in a metaphorical “seeing” of the world. Thus, a glance can caress what is seen – as if it were touching the face or the figure it sees. A look can seek to “catch” the

 See the following passage in Kierkegaard’s discourse “Love Does Not Seek Its Own” in Works of Love: “If the rigid and domineering person cannot ever create, he wants at least to transform – that is, he seeks his own so that wherever he points he can say: See, it is my image, it is my idea, it is my will” (SKS 9, 269 / WL, 270).

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other in order to save him – maybe from himself.³⁴ Sensing (perceiving) “contains” more than we see when observing the senses. It takes a world with it. How do we “see” this world? Our ways of “seeing” may be questioned in actually seeing. We may seek to confirm ourselves in how we see the world, but this presupposes that we are not just enclosed upon ourselves in seeing. Yet we cannot just change the way we see. Transforming one’s way of seeing is not just to change view. It is to come to see differently. This indicates that seeing in a metaphorical sense (“seeing” the world) draws on the affectivity of seeing as sensing (perceiving). Understanding is not sensation and vice versa, and yet we cannot account for one without the other: understanding is rooted in seeing as sensation, and seeing is about coming to understand what we see. This intricate relation of seeing and understanding is ignored when the problem of seeing the other as the other is located in seeing as such. Seeing is then analyzed in terms of intentionality. “Seeing or knowing, and taking in hand, are tied together in the structure of intentionality,” Levinas claims.³⁵ But in what sense is there intentionality in seeing? In seeing, we are directed to what we see: we see. Is this something that we do: direct ourselves? It may be the case when we look for something, but this requires that our attention has already been attracted. In a reflective analysis, however, it is as if we were the subjects of seeing directing our attention. Intentionality is then “read back” into the structure of seeing. But intentionality is itself an interplay of activity and passivity. We are ourselves called forth in seeing; we can be overwhelmed, to the point of being traumatized, by what we come to see. As beings that seek to understand, we can be affected by what we see. The affectivity of seeing – our being affected in seeing – cannot be accounted for in terms of intentionality. We may project ourselves in seeing, but seeing is not projecting oneself. We may seek to come to “see” in actually seeing. Seeing in this metaphorical sense is understanding that plays into seeing as sensation. In what sense, then, is seeing grasping? In seeing we are affected and as affected we may seek to come to grips with what we see. We do not first have to decide this. Rather, there is spontaneity in seeking to understand when being af-

 See, for example, the following passage from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: “And how did Christ look at Peter? Was this look repelling, was it like a look of dismissal? Ah, no, it was as when a mother sees the child in danger through its own carelessness, and now, since she cannot manage to grasp the child, she catches it with her admittedly reproachful but also saving look” (SKS 9, 170 / WL, 170).  Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. by Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1987, p. 99.

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fected. Seeking to understand, we may be overwhelmed in that we cannot grasp what we see. We are affected before understanding, and yet we are affected as beings who seek to understand what affects us. In this sense, understanding already begins in being affected, which does not mean that we understand what affects us. Being affected cannot be reduced to understanding, but opens up understanding as seeking to understand. Addressing the inherently problematic nature of seeing, an ethics of vision also aims to offer an answer to critiques that point to the perils of vision (two paradigmatic but quite diverse examples in the background of what I write in this chapter are Luther and Levinas). In seeing the other, we may enclose ourselves upon ourselves, without willing or noticing – or maybe even willing without noticing. If, however, we take the fact that we can do so as a fact, the possibility (“can”) would change. Enclosing ourselves is neither something we simply do nor a possibility with which we can operate. Privileging listening over seeing would still draw on seeing. As a dimension of interiority, listening is turned against a social world of visibility in which we may reduce ourselves, including the other, to what we see and master. But this possibility testifies to what is at stake in seeing. If seeing as such were reducing the other to the same, this fact would no longer have the ethical weight of possibility (we “can”). Why is seeing dangerous? In seeing we are exposed – we are under influence and can be diverted or seduced, but we are so in what we think and do. This indicates that seeing is dangerous in a deeper sense. Being affected in seeing, we are also exposed to ourselves. Thus, we can make images of what we see, even of ourselves, and in so doing we can enclose ourselves. This is not something that just happens to us; it is, rather, something we do to ourselves. It bears witness to us: we seek our own. And yet, remarkably, in enclosing ourselves upon ourselves we do not master ourselves. Rather, we become victims of ourselves, having made ourselves unfree. This self-created unfreedom is indicated in the phrase: “to be enclosed upon ourselves.” It is both “self-enclosed” and “self-enclosing.” Still, even though seeing does not, as such, reduce the other to the same (or divert us from interiority), it may harbor a tendency to self-enclosure. The ambiguity implied in the concept of tendency, however, is crucial. Self-enclosure is not an option we choose. It comes from us – through what we do and yet as if from behind. We cannot establish ways of seeing that would prevent us from self-enclosing. On the other hand, the possibility of enclosing ourselves presupposes something other than self-enclosing: that we are affected by what comes to us in seeing (the other). It also shows that we, in seeing, are affected by what we do ourselves (conscience). The affectivity in seeing and the ethical weight of seeing are intertwined. If we were not ourselves affected, we would not be exposed

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to ourselves. At stake in seeing the other is both interiority (we do something to ourselves) and exteriority (seeing the other beyond us). We enclose us upon ourselves in seeing others. Why an ethics of vision? My answer is: precisely because of the problematic nature of seeing. The perils in seeing bear witness to the ethical in which we are ourselves in question. In seeing, we are under influence, but as the ones seeing who can fail in responding. We are affected before understanding that which affects us, and yet we are not just affected. How we are affected is a matter of understanding – not in the sense that we are affected as we understand but, rather, in that understanding is itself at stake in being affected. We may understand in ways in which we seek to resist that which affects us, to the point of denying that we are affected. Seeking to avoid being affected, however, presupposes that we in fact are. In being affected, we are exposed to ourselves in responding. We are already caught in seeing, as something we do in what we are doing. All this indicates the ambiguity of subjectivity implied in seeing. As the subjects of seeing we are subjected: affected in seeing, doing something to ourselves, for example in seeking to ignore what we see.

Normativity Reconsidered Ethics begins with us in that it concerns us: we are to respond, to take an ethical stance, to choose. Yet, we are only to do so being already the ones concerned. The ethical has begun with us before we let it begin by evaluating what to do. When we place ourselves in a position in which we are to consider what to do, we are not first to project ourselves into seeing – we are already situated in seeing. The ethical begins with us having already begun – not only in the past, but now. When we consider what to do, we take time to reflect. It is part of ethical reflection to stop and give ourselves time to think and see again. However, reflection may produce a “reflection,” which makes it seem as if we began in reflecting. But reflection draws on what comes before. We are placed in what I have called the accusative of seeing. However, the weight of being in the accusative falls on us in the nominative: as the one to respond. We do not first make ourselves into subjects but, rather, come to experience ourselves in being subjects. We are to respond for ourselves, and responsibility implies that we are willing to evaluate ourselves. The weight of evaluating, however, does not come from the act itself, but from what we are to take upon ourselves. In seeing, we are ourselves exposed not only to what we see but also to what we do. We do not first decide how to see the other and then see her. Rather, we do something ourselves in how we see what we experience.

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We are not only vulnerable (in being able to be affected), but fragile (in what we are able to do). In reconsidering normativity, we should focus on this “can”: what we are capable of doing. The negative possibility inherent in seeing – seeing and yet not seeing – does not form a sphere of its own, added to seeing the other in the emphatic sense mentioned above. Rather, seeing the other requires us to see again, reminding ourselves of what we are able to do. The ethical is not to be seen (or read) in what we see; nor does it begin with us evaluating. Rather, it concerns us in the possibility of our failing. We can see the other without seeing her. But the power inherent in seeing – giving significance to – does not mean that the status of the other depends on whether we recognize her. On the contrary, recognizing the other is a matter of seeing that she is beyond us seeing her: she is other than the other we see. However, if the other is exposed to us seeing her, in what sense is she also beyond what we can do to her? She is not just part of a social world in which “we” are seeing and being seen. This comes to the fore in the question that may strike us when we ourselves are questioned: how is the other to see herself in and through what we do to her? When we, in performing an act of benevolence, point to ourselves doing this act, the other is placed in a position where she is to see herself as the recipient of our act. But this implies that she, in being exposed to us, is also withdrawn from us. She is to see for herself. Even when we seek to make her see us, we have her “in view” as the other herself, seeing us. We may come to see this ourselves, being struck by what we have ignored. Ethically, our vision is then reversed in how we are to see the other seeing herself. We are not “doing” this reversal. Rather, the reversal goes into what we should recognize: that the other, although being dependent on what we do to her, is beyond us. Obviously, the other is not just out of reach when she is exposed to us. Human beings may make an effort to show that others are not beyond, but subjected to their power, to the point of making them invisible. Still, the very act of making others invisible testifies to the possibility accompanying us: to see the other beyond us. The ethical plays into the in-visible, in the intertwining of time and vision. The other is there, to be seen, but she is only visible in that there is more to be seen. We have to wait for her to show herself, and seeing her takes time. However, there is more to be seen already now. We are to see again, in order to see what we see, reminding us that we can fail in seeing the other. If we are struck by having been blind, we come to see differently. Yet seeing differently is difficult. It requires us, as the subjects of seeing, to see “against ourselves,” as it were. Seeing the other is a matter of seeing “more” in the critical sense that we should see her beyond our seeing.

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Normativity does not first come into play when we introduce standards into what we see. Rather, it already concerns us in our experiences of vulnerability and fragility.³⁶ The ethical moves us beyond social visibility and places us between interiority (singularity) and exteriority (alterity).³⁷ It singularizes us as the ones to respond. In seeing, we can come to question ourselves without others calling us into question. This is the interiority of conscience. It concerns the exteriority of the other. In this ethical asymmetry that situates us between fragility and vulnerability, interiority and exteriority, sociality is at stake – and it is so “between ourselves.” Communication between us does not form a continuous social world. Rather, there are ‘gaps’ between us in which we come to see for ourselves. This has to do with the fact that seeing cannot be captured by seeing. Others cannot see as I do, and others can see (me) in ways that I cannot (which is why communication is essential). We see and live in and through this asymmetry. Seeing (for ourselves) is not absorbed into, but opens up communication (between us). If we see, knowing ourselves to be seen, seeing changes. Surveillance tends to destroy communication.

6 The In-Visible What is the invisible? It seems difficult to avoid thinking that it is something behind the visible, a second visible, as it were. We may speak of “seeing” the invisible in a metaphorical sense but, as argued, seeing metaphorically is not a second seeing, as if we had two ways of seeing, sensation and understanding. We do not “see” the invisible, nor do we comprehend the visible, as if it were there before our eyes. Both conceptions are misleading. By contrast, I have argued for a notion of the in-visible. Both the interiority of conscience and the exteriority of the other concern the in-visible. The other is invisible in her visibility, and the invisible questions us in seeing what can be seen. The visible is a matter of time invisible: it is not only defined in terms of what we have seen, what we see now, and what we shall see in the future,

 See Arne Grøn, “Self and Identity,” Chapter 4 in this volume; Arne Grøn, “The Limit of Ethics – The Ethics of the Limit,” in The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocitity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Thomas Brudholm and Thomas Cushman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, pp. 38 – 59.  See Arne Grøn, “Subjectivity, Interiority and Exteriority: Kierkegaard and Levinas,” Chapter 30 in this volume; Arne Grøn, “Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,” in Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, ed. by Arne Grøn and Claudia Welz, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010, pp. 13 – 30.

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but also as that which we could have seen, had we seen differently, and as that which we could see now, if we took the time to see once again. The visible as that which can be seen is still to be seen. Seeing the other as the other is not something we can do as a distinct act of seeing. Rather, “the other as the other” turns us against ourselves in seeing the other. Likewise, the invisible is not something we can see, but questions us in what we “can” see. The two phrases – “seeing the other as the other” and “seeing the invisible” – belong together. Seeing the other as the other is a matter of seeing that she is in-visible: we only realize that she is beyond us in seeing her. It is how we should see her: seeing her beyond us seeing her. We are turned against ourselves, and this is the ethical. It is up to us to see the other as the other, but if we do not take this as a demand, it appears as almost nothing. Responding to the ethical demand, we are to let ourselves be questioned in our ways of seeing; but this does not mean that the ethical is of our making. The ethical is not in this sense a point of view that we may choose. In seeing, we are more or less affected and moved by what we see. This is not something we first decide to be. Rather, we respond in being affected. However, there is a twofold tendency here: we may become absorbed in what we see (our attention goes outwards), and in this movement we may also be turned upon ourselves. We may even convince ourselves that what we see is as we see it. We may become caught in ourselves through our ways of responding. What we experience means something to us. It may even affect how we relate to our world. Making an experience in this sense means that we are ourselves changed (as Hegel indicates in the introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit).³⁸ In experiencing, we may set ourselves off from ourselves that were implied in previous experiences. A child being moved and moving from kindergarten to school comes to “see” herself differently. She is no longer the child she used to be. We are ourselves implied in the experiences we “make.” We are the subjects of experience only in being subjected to the experience that is ours. However, what we experience may overwhelm us so that the distance needed to relate, distancing ourselves from what happens to us, seems to disappear. Responding, we may seek to regain the distance in order to orient ourselves. This may take the form of seeking to place ourselves in a position from which we can observe what we see. We withdraw ourselves in seeing, but this presupposes that we are affected.

 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by Arnold V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, p. 55.

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Understanding requires distancing, but the “mood” of distancing may differ. Understanding the other demands a distance from us in which she can show herself. Distancing is here a matter of how we see her. But if we take the other as one to be observed, we place ourselves in a different position to that of seeking to understand her. Yet is understanding not about grasping what we understand? Seeking to grasp, one’s grasp may be changed. The passivity implied – being affected in seeking to understand – has to do with the temporality of seeing. Being the subject of seeing does not mean that we are enclosed in “our” seeing. Our vision does not “contain” ourselves. Taking what is other “into” ourselves does not just reduce it to the same, but rather makes us unable to catch up with ourselves. Although we are the ones seeing, we do not coincide with ourselves in seeing. Seeing does not form a continuum to which the visible corresponds, but is rather refracted in time. Remarkably, we can “fall through” our own seeing and may even come to see that we have made ourselves blind. Is expecting the visible to answer our questions already a form of ignoring? Temporality is not added to, but already at work in visibility. We can only account for what it is to see if we take conditions into account, visibility and time, that cannot come into view, but which escape us in seeing. Both conditions – visibility and time – are invisible. What we see is visible, but we do not see “the” visible. The visible world, rather, opens up seeing. Time is invisible as seeing takes time – now. We only see the other if we wait for her to speak for herself, but this does not mean that we only see her provisionally now. Rather, seeing her now requires us to understand that she comes with a time of her own. We may give ourselves time to see, but only being ourselves given “in” time, having already begun and even failed: having seen and yet not seen the other “before” us (in the twofold sense, in vision and in time). What about ourselves? Having already begun we are nevertheless too late. We cannot catch up with ourselves, and yet we are to respond for ourselves. We should not “see” ourselves as if we were others to ourselves. Rather, we should see (for) ourselves, and that requires us to “take us” in beginning ourselves, having already begun. Beginning here requires repetition: to see again, reminding us that we can fail and even make what is visible invisible. Contrary to reducing the other to the same, as if we only saw what we see, as if we had already seen what is there to be seen, repetition is the attempt to see anew, reminding us that there is more to be seen – in seeing what we see. What is, then, the invisible, ethically speaking? Not only should we distinguish the invisible from what is (still) unseen – we should also make a distinction between two senses of the invisible. First, the invisible is what we have made invisible to us. It hides in what we let be visible. How is this ethical? The invisible is what we should have seen in what we see, but have made our-

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selves blind to. Second, the invisible is what we should recognize as invisible in what we can see. And in this second sense, the invisible is not somehow available to us, but concerns the visible as a question put to us. In seeing, we do not exhaust what is to be seen. That there is still more to be seen should determine how we see now. The face of the other is there, to be seen, and yet invisible. In this sense, the face is not metaphorical – it is the face of this other before us, invisible. Conscience is invisible in that it concerns us and no other, and yet it shows itself as a question to us in how we see what is to be seen. Visibility and time as conditions that escape us in seeing put a demand on us seeing. The demand is not of our own making. The other is there to be seen, before and yet beyond us. It is up to us to see her as the other. However, if we think that it is up to us to decide whether the other is to be seen, we do not come to see her.

Chapter 26 The Dialectic of Recognition in Works of Love 1 Introduction In a previous essay, I made the double claim that, first, vision plays a crucial role in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love by virtue of its normative or ethical significance and that, second, it is possible to discern a remodeled dialectic of recognition in this ethics of vision.¹ I made the double claim that first vision plays a crucial role in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love by virtue of its normative or ethical significance and that second it is possible to discern a remodeled dialectic of recognition in this ethics of vision. In other articles, I have tried to substantiate and work out especially the first claim by way of a detailed interpretation of Works of Love as Kierkegaard’s “second” ethics.² What I would like to do here is briefly to outline what I have called a remodeled dialectic of recognition. In the remarkable passage on the criterion of the self in the second part of Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus uses the example of a master who is a self directly before slaves: “A cattleman who (if this were possible) is a self directly before his cattle is a very low self, and, similarly, a master who is a self directly before his slaves is actually no self – for in both cases a criterion [Maalestok] is lacking.”³ What is in focus here is not the relation between master and slave as such, but the question: what it means to be a self. To be a master is an example: a way of being a self. It is, however, not an example taken at random. By using the master as an example, Anti-Climacus is able to focus on the problem of the criterion of the self. A master is only master by having the criterion by which he measures himself against slaves. He sees himself before slaves who see him as a master. Anti-Climacus’ comment is that the master actually lacks a criterion (Maalestok) for the self. That by which he measures himself he does not himself see as a self. The conclusion drawn by Anti-Climacus is that the master is really not a self. As in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the relation of master and slave is viewed as a dialectic of self-consciousness, a dialectic, which is negative in the sense that the relation fails to bring about genuine self-consciousness.

 Arne Grøn, “Kærlighedens gerninger og anerkendelsens dialektik,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, vol. 54, 1991, pp. 261– 270.  Arne Grøn, “Kierkegaards ‚zweite‘ Ethik,” Chapter 33 in this volume; Arne Grøn, “Ethics of Vision,” Chapter 24 in this volume.  SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-032

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This short example used in the second part of Sickness unto Death appears only to be an isolated reference to the dialectic of master and slave. The problem of recognition, however, is not marginal, but rather is a crucial one in Kierkegaard, even though he does not speak much of recognition. What he does speak of is vision: seeing and ways of seeing. This is especially the case in Works of Love.

2 Vision and the Problem of Recognition Before turning to Works of Love I will briefly argue for the point I just made: in order to understand what the dialectic of recognition is about, we must discern the problem of recognition, and this is a problem of vision or ways of seeing. It is perhaps not evident in Hegel that the dialectic of recognition is a dialectic of vision, but some evidence can be found in Sartre’s transformation of the dialectic of recognition in the section on “The Look” in Being and Nothingness. ⁴ But let me sketch my argument in view of Works of Love. To recognize someone is not just to see, but to affirm what you see. It is to see in the emphatic sense of paying attention to or giving significance to. Recognition is seeing the other human being as an other self: affirming the other to be an other self. Here lies, however, the problem of recognition: it is possible to see this other in ways not affirming the other as an other self. These ways of seeing are exactly what comes in the foreground in Works of Love. Kierkegaard’s method in Works of Love is negative in the sense that in order to say what love is, he must speak about what love is not. He makes a detour by way of describing negative phenomena. Just to mention one example, the Discourse II in the second part or “series” on love having faith or trust in the other, “Love Believes All Things,” becomes a discourse on mistrust. Right from the first page in Works of Love our theme comes into play: seeing and yet not seeing, or seeing without seeing. Kierkegaard asks: “Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of the one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see?”⁵ The manner in which one does not see can consist in ways of seeing. Examples are ignoring or overlooking, but also judging or condemning.

 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes, London: Routledge 2003, pp. 276 – 326.  SKS 9, 13 / WL, 5.

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The problem of recognition is given with this negative possibility: seeing without seeing. What, then, is meant by the dialectic of recognition? Dialectic has to do with the movements taking place between the one seeing – maybe without seeing – and the other to be seen, this other also seeing in return. Dialectic means more specifically that the way in which one sees oneself depends on the way in which one sees others seeing oneself. One views oneself in relation to others by whom one is seen. And one does so not least of all by measuring oneself against others. This implies negative phenomena as for example mistrust or envy. Dialectic in the Hegelian tradition has to do also with negative movements, as for example the dialectic of master and slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but in Kierkegaard the dialectic of recognition is in a more acute sense a negative dialectic. Now, let me turn to Works of Love. Many examples indicating a dialectic of recognition in the sense I have delineated – a dialectic of recognition implied or embedded in a dialectic of vision – could be given. I have chosen three.

3 Arrogance and Envy First I will quote a passage from Discourse II C in the first series of Works of Love, a passage, which also appears to refer to the dialectic of master and slave: The times are past when only the powerful and the prominent were human beings – and the others were bond servants and slaves. This is due to Christianity, but from this it does not follow that prominence [Fornemhed] or power can no longer become a snare for a person so that he becomes enamored of this dissimilarity [forseer sig paa denne Forskjellighed], damages his soul [tager Skade paa sin Sjel], and forgets what it is to love the neighbor. If this happens now, it certainly must happen in a more hidden and secret way, but basically it remains the same. Whether someone savoring his arrogance [Hovmod] and his pride openly gives other people to understand that they do not exist for him and, for the nourishment of his arrogance, wants them to feel it as he demands expressions of slavish submission from them, or whether he slyly and secretly expresses that they do not exist for him simply by avoiding any contact with them…these are basically one and the same.⁶

Kierkegaard here only refers to the relation between master and slave in order to get started. The discourse makes a turn: it directs the reader’s attention to more hidden or subtle ways of depriving another person of significance. Kierkegaard

 SKS 9, 80 / WL, 74.

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uses a remarkable expression: “forseer sig paa.” “At forse sig” means to do wrong (at begå en forseelse), but the literal meaning is informative: “at for-se” means to see wrongly, namely to see in such a way that one fixes one’s eye on something, thereby not seeing something else which one should have seen. Kierkegaard indicates that one avoids seeing this something else by fixing one’s eye, for-seeing. What one looks fixedly upon is the dissimilarity between oneself and the other, not seeing the basic equality, “the kinship of all human beings [Slægtskabet mellem Menneske og Menneske].”⁷ The passage I have quoted is even more remarkable. It demonstrates the dialectic between relation to the other and self-relation. Kierkegaard expresses this tersely: to do wrong by seeing wrongly (at forse sig på) means to damage one’s soul (at tage skade på sin sjæl). To see the other person wrongly is a snare for oneself. One ensnares or enslaves oneself in seeing the other person wrongly. This is demonstrated by the phenomenon of arrogance or pride: one gives other people to understand that they do not exist for oneself. The point in doing so is to tell other people how they should see themselves in seeing oneself, to make them see oneself as superior. Arrogance as a self-conception depends on others seeing themselves as inferior to the arrogant. As arrogance is a way of seeing, so is envy. The relation to others here seems to be viewed from opposite perspectives: from above (arrogance) or from below (envy). Kierkegaard, however, describes envy as a figure parallel to arrogance,⁸ making the same point: In envying others, one ensnares oneself. Arrogance and envy are two ways of seeing the other wrongly, thereby damaging one’s soul.⁹ That self-relation and relation to others are interdependent is demonstrated in a positive manner by the next example.

4 Distinctiveness This second example is taken from Discourse IV “Love Does Not Seek Its Own” in the second series of Works of Love. In this brief exposition, I will focus on the concept of “Eiendommelighed,” which Howard and Edna Hong translate by “distinctiveness.” When Kierkegaard in Works of Love emphasizes the basic human equality, he also stresses individuality or distinctiveness. – I quote: “Love does

 SKS 9, 76 / WL, 69.  SKS 9, 85 – 87 / WL, 80 – 82.  SKS 9, 76 / WL, 70.

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not seek its own. The truly loving one does not love his own distinctiveness but, in contrast, loves every human being according to his distinctiveness; but ‘his distinctivness’ is what for him is his own [det for ham Egne]; that is, the loving one does not seek his own; quite the opposite, he loves what is the other’s own”.¹⁰ The point of the passage is that love sees and affirms what is the other’s own. In contrast, the domineering person “lacks flexibility, lacks the pliability to comprehend others; he demands his own from everyone, wants everyone to be transformed in his image, to be trimmed according to his pattern for human beings”.¹¹ “The domineering person” is the rendering of “den Herskesyge,” the one who wants to be the master. “Den Herskesyge” will not see or affirm the distinctiveness of the other. His way of seeing the other is to demand his own, seeking his own image. Distinctiveness is thus primarily the distinctiveness of the other: that which distinguishes the other from oneself. It is in this sense that one should not love one’s own distinctiveness. But one’s own distinctiveness is in some sense also something other to be affirmed or accepted. A human being receives distinctiveness. That gives a clue to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the duty of self-love in Discourse II A in the first series of Works of Love. What it means to love oneself in the right way is learnt in loving the neighbor. It implies accepting oneself as an other than oneself, conceived of in seeking one’s own. Kierkegaard therefore links the difficulty of affirming the distinctiveness of the other together with the difficulty of accepting one’s own distinctiveness. The small-minded person has never had the courage for this God-pleasing venture of humility and pride: before God to be oneself – the emphasis is on “before God,” since this is the source and origin of all distinctiveness. The one who has ventured this has distinctiveness; he has come to know what God has already given him, and in the same sense he believes completely in everyone’s distinctiveness. To have distinctiveness is to believe in the distinctiveness of everyone else, because distinctiveness is not mine but is God’s gift by which he gives being to me, and he indeed gives to all, gives being to all.¹²

To have distinctiveness, to be oneself, is to believe in the distinctiveness of everyone else. In what follows we find the famous phrase that the greatest beneficence is in love to help someone “to become himself, free, independent, his own master [sin Egen], to help him stand alone”.¹³ In this, we have recognition in a strong sense:    

SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 9, 9, 9,

268 / WL, 269. 269 / WL, 270. 270 / WL, 271. 272 / WL, 274.

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affirming the distinctiveness of the other, affirming that the other is independent, standing alone – in relation to oneself.

5 Forgiveness and Reconciliation My third example is taken from two discourses later in the second series of Works of Love, Discourse V “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” and Discourse VIII “The Victory of the Conciliatory Spirit in Love, Which Wins the One Overcome.” In the first discourse, I will only focus on the short, but crucial passage on forgiveness (tilgivelse). In forgiving, the negative possibility of seeing and yet not seeing is reversed: “The unseen is that forgiveness takes away that which does indeed exist; the unseen is that what is seen is nevertheless not seen…The one who loves sees the sin he forgives, but he believes that forgiveness takes it away.”¹⁴ Especially in the second series of Works of Love, each discourse sketches or presupposes a situation. The reader must be aware of this situation in order to understand the discourse. In the second series, there takes place an intensification. For example from the Second Discourse “Love Believes All Things – and Yet Is Never Deceived” to the Fifth Discourse “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins.” In fact, this Fifth Discourse resumes the two preceding discourses on faith (II) and hope (III) – in order to make a new step by being precisely a discourse on forgiveness. The situation described in the Second Discourse “Love Believes All Things” is a question of being or not being deceived. The one who loves (“den Kjerlige”) can in fact know that he or she has been deceived: “In other words, in one sense the one who loves is well aware [Vide kan nemlig i en vis Forstand den Kjerlige meget godt] if someone deceives him, but by refusing to believe it, or by believing all things, he keeps himself in love and in this way is not deceived.”¹⁵ A close reading of the discourse might even lead us to question Kierkegaard’s dictum that knowledge is indifferent.¹⁶ The one who loves also believes in spite of what she or he knows about the other person. She or he might even maintain this faith in the other in spite of what the other person thinks of himself. This character of faith – that it is faith in spite of – suggests that there is a knowledge, which is not ethically indifferent, but on the contrary makes the con-

 SKS 9, 292 / WL, 294– 295.  SKS 9, 240 / WL, 239.  SKS 9, 230 / WL, 228.

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clusion obvious that the other is one who deceives. It is exactly this move – from knowing what the other has done to judging about what the other is – that the person who loves does not make. Now, in the Fifth Discourse “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” the situation, which is presupposed is more direct or unequivocal than in the second. The one who loves sees the sin he or she forgives. In order to forgive, the one who loves must have a knowledge of what the other has done. It is not a question of possible interpretations.¹⁷ The paradoxical character of forgiving is that the one who loves in fact sees the sin, but that which is seen is nevertheless not seen. In order to understand this intensification, which takes place in the second series of discourses in Works of Love more fully, let me most briefly sketch the composition of this second part. The first discourse “Love Builds Up” is an exposition, opening the second series of discourses. In fact, the unspoken or presupposed heading for the discourses following after is “Love Builds Up.” Each discourse describes how love builds up: by believing all things, by hoping all things, by not seeking its own and by hiding a multitude of sins, forgiveness being the most intensified way of hiding: taking away that which does exist, or not seeing that which is seen. Forgiveness is thus an example of how love builds up. To put it briefly, it builds up by re-building the relation or the reciprocity of the relation. This line of thought is prolonged in the Eighth Discourse “The Victory of the Conciliatory Spirit in Love, Which Wins the One Overcome.” In this discourse Kierkegaard comments on the concept of forgiving. I only quote one passage: Who is it, then, who is in need of forgiveness, the one who did wrong or the one who suffered the wrong? Certainly it is the one who did wrong who needs forgiveness, but the loving one who suffered the wrong needs to forgive or needs agreement, reconciliation, words that, unlike the word “forgiveness,” which reminds us of right and wrong, do not make such a distinction but lovingly make a mental note that both are in need.¹⁸

Already in the passage on forgiveness Kierkegaard appeals to the experience of the reader or the one considering whether to forgive or not: “Yet if you yourself have ever needed forgiveness, then you know what forgiveness is capable of –

 That the situation presupposed is in this sense unequivocal is also the case in, for example, Discourse IV in the first series: Peter has denied Jesus. The question of seeing comes thereafter. The turning point of the discourse is to see that “the one denying is in danger” (SKS 9, 170 / WL, 170).  SKS 9, 331 / WL, 336.

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why, then, do you speak so naively¹⁹ and so unlovingly about forgiveness?”²⁰ What Kierkegaard here appeals to is the reader’s experience of being on the other side as the one to be forgiven. This experience or this understanding is required when the reader is on this side, seeing or rather looking upon the other side.

6 Reciprocity? The reader who is familiar with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit will be reminded of the passage on forgiveness “evil and its forgiveness [das Böse und seine Verzeihung]” at the end of the chapter on Spirit, leading up to the chapter on religion.²¹ In this passage, Hegel repeats the dialectic of recognition as a movement between the one admitting to having done wrong and the one forgiving. Forgiveness is unilateral in the sense that there is one who forgives and one who is forgiven. What Hegel traces is, however, a mutual movement. That is in line with the argument in what could be called the logic of recognition, namely, the opening passage of Chapter IV A of the Phenomenology of Spirit preceding the dialectic of recognition.²² In this logic of recognition, Hegel argues that recognition is “indivisibly the action of the one as well as of the other [ebensowohl das Tun des Einen als des Andern].”²³ Now, this seems to be what Kierkegaard cannot say. What he emphasizes is that works of love is unilateral, “the action of the one [Tun des Einen].” As a duty or a command, love singles out or isolates the individual. Does this mean that there is no reciprocity in Works of Love?

 The Danish word is “uerfarent,” which means: as if you have not yourself experienced what it is to be forgiven.  SKS 9, 292 / WL, 295.  Chapter VI Cc in Hoffmeister’s edition: Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by Alexander V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977 / Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg: Meiner 1952, pp. 468 – 472.  Although the section IV A of Phenomenology of Spirit “Independence and Dependence: Lordship and Bondage [Selbständigkeit und Unselbständigkeit des Selbstbewußtseins; Herrschaft und Knechtschaft]” is one of the most influential and commented passages in modern philosophy, the literature on Hegel tends to overlook that it contains two different approaches. The section consists of two parts: a logic of recognition (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 111– 113 / Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 141– 143) and the dialectic of master and slave as a dialectic of recognition (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 113 – 119 / Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 143 – 150).  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 112 / Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 142.

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My essay “Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun?” deals with this question.²⁴ Here I will only repeat a few distinctions: First, we must distinguish between two concepts of reciprocity: a. Reciprocity as having something in return (gensidighed som gengæld). This negative sense of reciprocity plays a dominant role in Works of Love. What is meant by reciprocity in this negative sense? The point is that one only gives in order to be payed back or to have something in return. What one does is conditioned by the expectation of having something in return. When it is love that one is supposed to give, one’s love is conditioned. One makes the exchange of love. As a person “pays out money in order to purchase some convenience,” he can also make “a love deal; he barters his love.”²⁵ b. One can, however, also give in the hope of a response or the hope of reciprocity. In this second sense, one does not give in order to have in return. One gives anyway. This positive understanding of reciprocity can be developed further. The reciprocity, which is at stake here, is the reciprocity of the relation between oneself and the other. The relation is reciprocal in the sense that it is already a relation on both sides. This reciprocity can be broken, but also restored or re-built. The hope for reciprocity concerns this reciprocity of the relation between oneself and the other. If we look at the second part or series of Works of Love, it is difficult to understand the movements described in these discourses without a positive concept of reciprocity along these lines. The discourses aim at a reciprocity to be maintained or restored. This can be seen from the following very brief summary or catchwords: to love is “to presuppose love in others.”²⁶ One cannot hope for oneself without hoping for others.²⁷ To have distinctiveness is to believe in the distinctiveness of others.²⁸ The greatest beneficence is to help the other stand alone, and in that sense affirming the other side of the relation.²⁹ In order to understand what forgiveness is capable of, one should see oneself on the other side as the one also to be forgiven.³⁰ Forgiveness is even replaced by reconciliation

 Chapter 34 in this volume.  SKS 9, 238 / WL, 237; in Danish: “Man gjør Kjerlighedens Omsætning; man giver sin Kjerlighed hen, for at bytte.”  SKS 9, 225 / WL, 223.  SKS 9, 258 – 259 / WL, 259 – 260.  SKS 9, 270 / WL, 271.  SKS 9, 272 / WL, 274.  SKS 9, 292 / WL, 295.

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in that both sides are in need.³¹ To do a work of love is to presuppose love on the other side in the sense that the other could do this as well. Reciprocity means that the perspectives can be reversed.³² This positive understanding of reciprocity does not invalidate the ethical asymmetry. A distinction must be made between two questions: the first one is whether the obligation to do the works of love is a matter of reciprocity. In this sense, there is no ethical reciprocity in Works of Love. But when this first question has been settled, there is a second question: what do the works of love mean? What do they aim at? And here we need a positive concept of reciprocity.

7 Dialectic of Recognition In conclusion, when one looks for a dialectic of recognition in Works of Love something happens with this dialectic. It is not just a matter of reading a dialectic of recognition into Kierkegaard’s text; on the contrary, this dialectic is being remodeled. Let me just repeat two points: a. The dialectic is in Kierkegaard first and foremost a negative one. The dialectic of seeing others seeing oneself is viewed through phenomena such as arrogance and envy, that is: ways of relating oneself to the other in which one ensnares oneself – damages one’s soul – in seeing the other wrongly. This leads to my second point. b. The dialectic of recognition is embedded in an ethics of vision. By the way in which one sees the other, one does something to the other. It is possible to make the figure (skikkelse) of the other unreal. I quote from Discourse IV “Our Duty to Love the People We See” in the first series: “There are people of whom it may be said that they have not attained form [vundet Skikkelse], that their actuality has not become integrated, because in their innermost beings they are at odds with themselves about what they are and what they will to be. But one can, by the way in which one sees, make another person’s form [Skikkelse] vacillating or unreal.”³³ The negative phenomena described in Works of Love belong to an ethics of vision. They are negative in an ethical sense. The possibility of seeing without seeing or seeing wrongly indicates the ethical significance of vision. The dialectic   Do 

SKS 9, 331 / WL, 336. See Discourse VII “Mercifulness, a Work of Love, Even If It Can Give Nothing and Is Able to Nothing.” SKS 9, 165 / WL, 164– 165.

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of recognition, which is mainly negative, is thus remodeled by being embedded in an ethics of vision: It is both a dialectic of vision and an ethics of recognition.

8 The Social World as a World of Vision A dialectic of recognition offers a clue to understanding sociality. In Kierkegaard, however, we do not find an explicit theory of sociality. What we do find has an indirect character. Kierkegaard does not focus on, but presupposes the social world. This indirect character has to do with the dialectic of recognition being remodeled in the twofold sense: as a negative dialectic embedded in an ethics of vision. When Works of Love focuses on the ethical significance of vision, the setting is a social world. I have argued that it is important to be aware of the situation described or presupposed in each discourse in Works of Love. In describing or presupposing these situations, Kierkegaard depicts a social world as a world of vision. This is a world of seeing and being seen. Kierkegaard describes this world mainly negatively: as a world in which we evaluate and judge each other. In seeing wrongly by fixing one’s eye, one also fixes the figure (skikkelse) of the other person so that he only is what we see him as. The problem of vision is an ethical one. The ethical asymmetry emphasized in Works of Love, however, not only presupposes a social world, it also challenges our world of vision.

Chapter 27 Dialectics of Recognition: Selfhood and Alterity 1 Dialectics – of Recognition Dialectics is a key issue in the Hegelian legacy in modern philosophy. If we want to reconsider this legacy, the dialectics of recognition offers more than just an example. It turns dialectics itself into a question. This is a thesis to be developed and argued for, but let me begin by briefly indicating the context for my discussion. Dialectics concerns relations of identity and difference. It originates in the interplay of different perspectives in a dialogue, in particular the interplay between questions and different positions taken to what is in question. Philosophically, dialectics reflects on this communicative situation and asks how it is possible for us to orient ourselves in a world of changing differences, and thus to articulate that something is different or the same. Not only is the situation itself dialectical, our thinking moves in differences of perspectives and positions in order to articulate relations of identity and difference. When dialectics seeks to account for the situation in which it originates, that is, the interplay of different perspectives, the question of identity and difference is intensified as a dialectics of selfhood and alterity. But this turns identity and difference into critical issues that affects and questions dialectics itself. Is dialectics, as an account of relations of identity and difference, a dialectics of identity? If it is, is alterity integrated into the dialectics of selfhood? Does dialectics turn alterity into a moment of self-realization? Such questions reflect a Levinasian critique of dialectics. But how can we articulate radical, irreducible difference without a notion of identity being at stake? In this essay, I will review the dialectics of recognition along this line of questioning. The dialectics of recognition deals with relations of different perspectives as a question of selfhood and alterity. If we turn to Hegel, the dialectics of recognition becomes a question of selfhood and alterity in particular in the context of a phenomenology of spirit, but this makes our critical question even more pertinent: does a dialectics of recognition, especially as a turning-point in the phenomenology of spirit, lead to a totalizing dialectics of identity that establishes an identity encompassing self-identity and alterity of the other? My interpretation of Hegel will be limited in scope. I will only consider in some detail Chapter IV A of Phenomenology of Spirit, “Independence and de-

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pendence of self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage.”¹ If we want to consider the dialectics of recognition after Hegel, several candidates would be obvious. Sartre would be one of them, while Kierkegaard would not. To bring Kierkegaard, and moreover Works of Love, into this discussion is not an obvious approach to the Hegelian legacy. In fact, dialectics is a Kierkegaardian theme, as a dialectics of existence, but not it would seem as a dialectics of recognition. The problem of recognition, however, is of critical importance in Works of Love. To discuss it in this context may help us to explicate the problem of recognition as a matter of ways of seeing, or, in other words, to unfold the dialectics of recognition as a dialectics of vision. This enterprise involves an unorthodox reading of Works of Love for which I have argued in other studies.² In this essay, I will focus on a sequence of related questions. First, what is a dialectics of recognition? Second, what is the role of vision in a dialectics of recognition? Third, how does one account for the normative dimension of recognition when recognition is taken as a matter of dialectics? Fourth, can we reformulate a dialectics of selfhood and alterity in terms of the problem of subjectivity?

2 Phenomenology of Spirit – Dialectics of Perspectives In Hegel, dialectics deals not only with identity and difference, but with relations of identity and difference. Moreover, dialectics deals also with the relations of different perspectives implied in talking about a world of identity and difference. This way of staging and transforming dialectics takes place in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Phenomenology of spirit can be taken as a phenomenology of perspectives in the following two senses: (a) It is a phenomenology of fundamentally different ways of relating: to an object, to oneself, and to others (implying others relating to oneself). In seeing how these different ways of relating come to appear, we come to see how they are interrelated. Self-relating is implied in relating to an object, relating to others is implied in relating to oneself. Thus, the phenomenology of spirit is about the relation of these different ways of relating. According to this reading, spirit concerns the relation of the different ways of relating: consciousness (of an object),  Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg: Meiner 1988 / Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by Alexander V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977; in German: “Selbständigkeit und Unselbständigkeit des Selbstbewußtseins; Herrschaft und Knechtschaft.”  See, for example, Arne Grøn, “Kierkegaard’s ‚zweite‘ Ethik,” Chapter 33 in this volume.

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self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. The turning-point in the phenomenology of spirit is that these ways of relating are not just different ways of relating oneself to the world, but become a matter of different perspectives: others seeing oneself and the world differently. This turn takes place in the dialectics of recognition. Only this turn makes it possible to speak of a phenomenology of spirit.³ Differences in perspectives thus enter the phenomenology of relations: not only is relating to others implied in relating to oneself, relating to others implies others relating to oneself. Furthermore, it can be argued that this is not just implied in, but transcends, my relating to others. (b) Phenomenology of spirit thus takes the form of a phenomenology of perspectives. But what do we, the readers of the Phenomenology of Spirit, come to see? If we take the notion of spirit as our lead, the answer would be that we come to see how different perspectives of the world are related to each other in differing from each other. Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit is dialectical, firstly in the sense of overcoming the appearance of consciousness being on one side and the object being on the other side, thereby overcoming the isolation of beings, secondly in the intensified sense of establishing spirit as “unity in its duplication.”⁴ The question then follows: does a phenomenology of spirit exceed a phenomenology of different perspectives of the world in that it shows how these perspectives presuppose each other in being different? Is the phenomenology of spirit in this sense a dialectics of perspective: overcoming the perspectival character of consciousness? If it is, it would be a phenomenology of spirit in focusing on what takes place between different perspectives (they are interrelated in differing), and it would be a phenomenology of spirit encompassing differences in perspective. Let us look more closely into the dialectics of recognition, as the turning-point in a phenomenology of spirit (making phenomenology of consciousness into a phenomenology of spirit).

3 Dialectics of Recognition – Logic of Recognition In focusing on the “turning-point,” I can limit myself to the section (Chapter IV A) on independence and dependence of self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomen-

 See the following key passage: “With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit…It is in self-consciousness, in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds ist turning-point [Hiermit ist schon der Begriff des Geistes für uns vorhanden…Das Bewußtsein hat erst in dem Selbstbewußtsein, als dem Begriffe des Geistes, seinen Wendungspunkt]” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 110 / Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 108).  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 110 / Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 109.

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ology of Spirit. I shall not attempt to follow its movements in detail. It is often identified with the dialectics of master and slave, but if we take a closer look at Hegel’s text it is clear, I think, that it has a double beginning.⁵ It does not only contain a dialectics of recognition, in the form of the dialectics of master and slave. It also defines the “pure concept of recognition [Dieser reine Begriff des Anerkennens].”⁶ The dialectics of recognition only comes in as a second beginning. First, the pure movement of recognition is presented: “Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both.”⁷ In short, this means that the two parties “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”⁸ Recognition is a movement, but a redoubled one in that recognition demands reciprocity. So much for the first beginning: the pure concept of recognition, or the pure movement of recognition. This first part concerns what recognition is, according to its concept, and provides the answer: recognition is reciprocal. The second beginning is now announced as follows: ‘We have now to see how the process of this pure Notion of recognition, of the duplicating of self-consciousness in its oneness, appears to self-consciousness “We have now to see how the process of this pure Notion of recognition, of the duplicating of self-consciousness in its oneness, appears to self-consciousness.”⁹ Hegel thus distinguishes between the (pure) concept of recognition (recognition is a reciprocal movement taking place between two parties relating to each other) and the process, which is “its’ process” (“sein Prozess”), the process of the notion of recognition. It shows what is implied in the concept, but it does so in a negative manner. In the logic of recognition, it was said that the unilateral act, or project, is useless: “Action by the one side only would be useless because what is to hap-

 I have argued for this interpretation in Arne Grøn, “Anerkendelsens dialektik og begreb,” in Filosofiske essays af Arne Grøn. Eksistentiel Hermeneutik, Vol. 1, ed. by Bjarke M. S. Hansen, Mads Peter Karlsen, René Rosfort, Frederiksberg: Eksistensen Akademisk 2019, pp. 63 – 78.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 110 / Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 109.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 112; in German: “Die Bewegung ist also schlechthin die gedoppelte beider Selbstbewußtsein. Jedes sieht das andre dasselbe tun, was es tut; jedes tut selbst, was es an das andre fodert; und tut darum, was es tut, auch nur insofern, als das andre dasselbe tut; das einseitige Tun wäre unnütz; weil, was geschehen soll, nur durch beide zu Stande kommen kann” (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 110).  Ibid.; in German: “anerkennen sich, als gegenseitig sich anerkennend” (ibid.).  Ibid.; in German: “Dieser reine Begriff des Anerkennens, der Verdopplung des Selbstbewußtseins in seiner Einheit, ist nun zu betrachten, wie sein Prozess für das Selbstbewußtsein erscheint” (ibid.).

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pen can only be brought about by both.”¹⁰ However, the dialectics of recognition in the form of master and slave begins with the project of unilateral recognition: The point of departure is that “one being only recognized, the other only recognizing.”¹¹ The master is recognized without recognizing, the slave recognizing without being recognized. This point of departure of the second beginning, the dialectics of recognition, thus brackets or even negates the point of the first beginning, the logic of recognition: that recognition is reciprocal. The project implied in the second beginning is one-sided in two senses: it is the project of the master, and it is the project of being recognized without recognizing. But the process of this project is a process taking place between the two parties, master and slave. This is what makes it a dialectics of recognition. The exposition of this process, the dialectics of master and slave, can be viewed as a sustained argument in three main steps. It shows why the project of being recognized without recognizing must fail. Put most briefly, the argument can be reformulated as follows. First, the relation of dependence and independence between master and slave is reversed. In leading his life as a master of life, the master depends on the slave working up objects, giving them form, his form. Thus, the life of the master becomes a life provided for by the slave. The master has the other self-consciousness, the slave, mediating his (the master’s) own relations to a world of objects. Second, the master is only master before the slave: he can only come to see himself as master through the slave seeing him as master. He has his self-consciousness in the other. And third, the project of unilateral recognition – to be recognized by the other without recognizing him – fails for intrinsic reasons. The master seeks recognition, but he himself destroys the very condition for being recognized. This is the crucial argument: to be recognized by someone that I do not myself recognize is not recognition. It does not, for me, have the value of myself being recognized. I have myself deprived the other of the infinite significance of being a person that is the condition if the recognition offered by the other is to have value for me as a person. The dialectics of recognition thus takes place at more than one level: as the reversal of dependence and independence, as seeing oneself through the others seeing oneself, and as the relation to the other as a matter of how one sees the other. We should add that it is also a matter of recognizing oneself as being already involved in the relation as the one seeing the other. In this sense, the dialectics of recognition concerns the presupposition made in the relation to the other. I  Ibid.; in German: “das einseitige Tun ware unnützt, weil, was geschehen soll, nur durch beide zu Stande kommen kann” (ibid.).  Ibid., p. 113; in German: “das eine nur Anerkanntes, [das] andre nur Anerkennendes ist” (ibid.).

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can only be recognized by someone that I myself recognize. Recognition is mutual. One could argue that the master still gets some sort of recognition. After all, he is the master. Unilateral recognition might to some extent prove to be effective, but it is not actual or fulfilled: it depends on the other who is being deprived of significance, and thereby leaves the desire of the master for recognition unsatisfied. The criterion implied is that one can only be recognized as independent in a relation in which one can acknowledge being oneself dependent on the other. Thus, the dialectics of recognition is a dialectics of dependence and independence, with the implication that the relation to the other is reversed, as the other’s relation to oneself. It is a dialectics of perspectives. This means that recognition is in a twofold sense about being a self: being recognized is to be recognized as a self, independent (“selbständig,” “für sich”), but this can only be achieved in relation to others that one recognizes as selves, that is, as independent, relating on their part to oneself. Being a self, independent, thus depends on others recognizing one as independent, but – we should add – in recognizing others, one is already a self relating to others (this last point will be of critical importance later). This means that we should distinguish between two forms of the dialectics of recognition. First, there is a negative dialectics, as illustrated by the dialectics of master and slave. Second, recognition, as reciprocal, only succeeds in a paradoxical dialectics of in-dependence. What is of critical importance, however, is that this dialectics of in-dependence does not absorb the negative character of a dialectics of recognition. This indicates that we should make a further distinction between different forms of negativity. The negative character of a dialectics of recognition is not exhausted by the dialectics of master and slave. The latter is a negative dialectics of recognition in the double sense that the point of departure is negative: the project of being recognized without recognizing, and that the process is negative: the project fails, and fails from within. Through the experience of the negative process the point of the first approach, the logic of recognition, is confirmed: recognition only succeeds as reciprocal. Thus, the negative dialectics of recognition shows what the logic of recognition says. But this does not mean that negative dialectics is instrumental. The two distinctions I have made here should be taken together. First, dialectics of recognition can be taken in a positive sense, as a dialectics of the logic of recognition. Reciprocal recognition is a positive dialectics of dependence and independence: being recognized as a self implies recognizing the other self. In the positive sense, dialectics of recognition concerns the interdependence of self-relation and relation to the other self that is relating to oneself. Second, the dialectics of recognition still has a negative character to it: it is about experiencing alterity. Only then can the dialectics

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of in-dependence be possible. The experience of alterity is what reciprocity is about. This, however, anticipates the further argument to be developed in the following section.

4 Dialectics of Recognition We are now in a position to answer, in a preliminary manner, our first, opening, question: in what sense is the dialectics of recognition dialectics? As we have seen, the dialectics of recognition in the form of the dialectics of master and slave is negative, in contrast to the logic of recognition. Through the negative experience – that the project of one-sided recognition fails – we come to see what recognition is, according to its concept: reciprocal. But this is an experience of reciprocity. In relating, one experiences that there is another side to the relation in which one takes part. In the perspective being reversed for oneself, the other shows herself to be an other self, capable of reversing the relation. Thus, the dialectics of recognition does not just illustrate the point already made in the logic of recognition: that recognition is reciprocal. It is also about coming to see what reciprocity means in terms of experiencing alterity. Recognition is a matter of reciprocity, but reciprocity is a matter of recognizing alterity. In this perspective, we, the readers of the Phenomenology of Spirit, also face the question what the dialectics of recognition means. How should we interpret it as dialectics? Dialectics defined in terms of relations of identity and difference is intensified as a dialectics of recognition: it is about relations between parties relating to each other. Relations take place between parties taking part in the relations, that is: in and through their relating to each other. In this intensified mode, dialectics concerns the relation between self-relation and relation to others, between oneself relating to others and others relating to oneself, and, consequently, between two forms of doubling: first, the doubling of oneself relating to the other and the other relating to oneself, and second, between relating to oneself and to the other. Dialectics concerns the interdependence in this relation between oneself and the other. On both sides, self-relation and relation to others are intertwined. But this poses the question: if spirit means “unity in its duplication,” does this only apply to the self (be that oneself or the other self), or is there a unity in the doubling of self and the other? If the latter is the case, dialectics of identity is totalizing. However, it need not be. What I would argue for is that a dialectics of recognition can accentuate a critical difference in perspective. It is the difference between oneself relating to others and others relating to oneself, and even more critically the difference in perspective implied in the notion of alterity. Let me explain.

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The dialectics of recognition not only exemplifies dialectics, in terms of relations of identity and difference, but turns dialectics itself into a question: is it a dialectics of identity? In a sense it is. Identity is, as identity of a self, dialectical. We are ourselves, not in ourselves, but in ourselves relating to others. But is alterity also dialectical? It seems so. It is not only alterity of the other. One also becomes an other to oneself in relating to others. There is, however, a critical difference in perspective here. I can and should understand myself as a self in relating to the other, but that is not the way I should see the other. Of course, the other is also a self in relating, on his or her part, to others, including me. But her alterity, in being an other, means that she is in herself. That is how I should see her. In this sense, her alterity is for me, as an ethical demand: I should see her as other, i. e., in herself, outside of my relation to her. Thus, the difference in perspective is ethical. I cannot take others in the sense that I should take myself. This ethical asymmetry shows up in the middle of a dialectics of recognition that accentuates reciprocity. How is this possible? It has to do with the dialectics of recognition. In order to bring out the link between the difference in perspective implied in the notion of alterity and the character of dialectics, let me first point to a remarkable, but easily ignored feature of Hegel’s phenomenological dialectics. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, there is a dialectics of consciousness at work. Consciousness shows itself to be more than it takes itself to be. It comes to experience itself in experiencing the object differently. What makes the movement of consciousness dialectical is that consciousness escapes and encounters itself. It does not simply plan to take a move, which it then carries out. It is itself moved in relating to the object that turns out to be different from what consciousness first thought. Consciousness itself turns out to be other than it first took itself to be. Only slowly does it come to consciousness. Hegel’s phenomenological dialectics is about this detour in coming to know oneself. The detour has to do with consciousness experiencing the object, the other, the world, and in this consciousness itself, to be different from what it thought. This dialectics of consciousness is intensified in the dialectics of recognition. The other shows herself to be different in reversing my relation to the object, to the other herself, to the world. Consciousness itself is altered. It is not just consciousness, but one among others. We can come to see ourselves as others to the other. As consciousness, we not only escape ourselves in relating to object, others, the world. We become distanced from our own perspective on objects, others, the world, and thereby from ourselves. In Hegel, however, the dialectics of consciousness seems to be absorbed by the phenomenology of spirit. Absolute spirit comes to appear in reconciling consciousness in conflict: consciousness as acting and consciousness as judging.

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Here, at the end of the chapter on spirit, the dialectics of recognition ends in reconciliation as a reciprocal recognition that is absolute spirit.¹² Thus, differences in perspectives, as conflicting, are overcome by each consciousness recognizing the other in giving up what is one-sided in its own relating to the other. But this is only possible in coming to see oneself as bearer of an encompassing consciousness, that is, in seeing oneself as a vehicle of spirit. Thus, spirit realizes itself in and through finite subjects relating to each other. The dialectics of consciousness then seems to be put into the service of a phenomenology of spirit encompassing differences in perspectives between self and other. Against this background, how should we reformulate a dialectics of recognition? I would suggest two moves. The first is to continue our line of thought and further unfold the difference in perspectives that is implied in the notion of alterity. What makes the dialectics of recognition into a dialectics is the experience of alterity: we encounter the other escaping our grasp, seeing the world differently, and seeing us in ways that we cannot see ourselves. As a self, the other is in herself, although she relates to us. In relating, she shows herself to be in herself. This means that there is no “unity in its duplication” between self and the other. Interpreted along the line of a dialectics of consciousness, the dialectics of recognition cannot be integrative. But we should focus even more on the subjectivity involved in differences of perspective. In the other reversing my perspective, I become distanced from myself, and yet it is crucial that I am seeing the other seeing me. Although I can become an other to myself, I am not other in the same sense as others are (to me). I am to take myself in ways that I cannot take others: as myself. The critical difference in perspective implies that internal alterity (being another to oneself) is radically different from the alterity of the other. The second move is to review the negativity implied in a dialectics of recognition. It does not simply amount to what recognition is not: one-sided. What recognition is (reciprocal) is learned through negative experiences (of reciprocity). But the negative character is even more intrinsically related to the issue of recognition. In relations between self and other, recognition is at issue, but what is recognition about? What is at stake? Recognition is a matter of dialectics in the sense that self and other relate to each other. In the relation between self and other, the problem is how they relate, that is: how they see themselves and each other. If recognition is to be reciprocal, each should see the other as another self, independent (“für sich”). This indicates the normative dimension

 “[A] reciprocal recognition which is absolute Spirit [ein gegenseitiges Anerkennen, welches der absolute Geist ist]” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 408 / Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 361).

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of recognition already touched upon. The normative dimension, however, is only to be accounted for when we take the implied negative possibility into account. There are various ways of not recognizing the other (and also of not recognizing oneself). We learn what recognition means in response to negative possibilities inherent in seeing one another, that is: negative possibilities that tell something about us, what we are as subjects. The dialectics of recognition thus opens up the issue of normativity and negativity, and the issue of subjectivity. We are facing the three guiding questions following our opening question on dialectics, i. e., vision, normativity, and subjectivity. As already indicated, it is difficult to bring out in Hegel’s dialectics of recognition the normative dimension of recognition and the implied subjectivity. When negativity is put into the service of a dialectics of spirit that is to overcome the isolated perspectives of consciousness, the normative dimension of recognition seems to dissolve into dialectics. Still, the dialectics of recognition within Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit displays a crucial feature of dialectics in terms of selfhood and alterity. What makes it into a dialectics of recognition? The turning-point is that we encounter the other seeing the world and us differently. Not only does the object stand against us. The other stands against us in the sense that the perspective can be reversed – for us. This seems to be what Sartre emphasized in his analysis of the gaze.

5 The Gaze of the Other The “turning-point” in the dialectics of recognition, that which turns it into a dialectics, is the encounter of the other escaping and reversing my perspective. It is the experience of reciprocity: that there is another side to the relation to the other, namely the other relating to me. Seeing the other is turned around in the other seeing me. My perspective can be reversed – for me. If we reinterpret the dialectics of recognition in terms of the experience of the other escaping my perspective by herself seeing the world to which I belong, and seeing me seeing her, how does this experience take place? I come to see the other escaping my seeing her. I come to see that she, for herself and by herself, sees me and the world between us. But how does this happen? Sartre’s answer, in re-interpreting Hegel’s dialectics of recognition, is to insist on the almost traumatic experience of being seen by the other. I am, for myself through the other, turned into an object.¹³

 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. by

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For Sartre, the point of departure is once again a phenomenology of perspective: objects present themselves in my perspective. In this perspective, others are objects. But I come to see that they are objects of a special kind, objects around which objects present themselves. In my perspective, I discover other perspectives. My world is stolen, Sartre says. But I only come to realize this in being myself turned into an object. The other brings one’s exteriority before oneself. One becomes another for oneself through the other. In Sartre’s account of the look or the gaze of the other, it is difficult to discern the relation of negativity and normativity implied in the problem of recognition: seeing the other as other. In what follows, I will outline a reading of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in terms of a dialectics of vision that focuses on the difference inherent in seeing the other as other.

6 Dialectics of Vision In a passage on the criterion of the self in the second part of The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard has Anti-Climacus use the example of a master who is a self directly before slaves: “A cattleman who (if this were possible) is a self directly before his cattle is a very low self, and, similarly, a master who is a self directly before his slaves is actually no self – for in both cases a criterion is lacking.”¹⁴ What is in focus here is not the relation between master and slave as such, but the question: what it means to be a self. To be a master is an example: it is a way of being a self. It is, however, not an example taken at random. By using the master as an example, Anti-Climacus is able to focus on the problem of the criterion of the self. A master is only a master by having the criterion by which he measures himself against slaves. He sees himself before slaves who see him as a master. The comment made by Anti-Climacus is important: the master actually lacks a criterion for the self. That by which he measures himself he does not himself see as a self. The conclusion drawn by Anti-Climacus is that the master is actually no self. As in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the relation of master and slave is viewed as a dialectics of self-consciousness, a dialectics that is negative in the sense that the relation fails to bring about genuine self-consciousness.

Hazel E. Barnes, London: Routledge 2003, pp. 276 – 326 / Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologique phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard 1943, pp. 310 – 364.  SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.

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This short example used in the second part of The Sickness unto Death appears only to be an isolated reference to the dialectics of recognition. The problem of recognition, however, is not a marginal, but rather a crucial one in Kierkegaard, even though he does not directly speak of recognition. What he does speak of, however, is vision: seeing and being seen. This is especially the case in Works of Love. And what is particularly important in our context is that, in Works of Love, vision plays a crucial role by virtue of its normative significance. The ethics in Works of Love can be interpreted as an ethics of vision.¹⁵ However, the role played by vision is an ambiguous one. The normative significance of vision is to be seen from its negative possibilities. Thus, to the ethics of vision belongs a dialectics of vision. And in this dialectics of vision one can discern a remodelled or even intensified dialectics of recognition. Let me just give two examples, a negative and a positive one. The negative one is to show how the problem of recognition is accentuated through the dialectics of vision. It is a passage taken from discourse II C in the first part of Works of Love – a passage, which also appears to refer to the dialectics of master and slave: The times are past when only the powerful and the prominent were human beings – and the others were bond servants and slaves. This is due to Christianity, but from this it does not follow that prominence [Fornemhed] or power can no longer become a snare for a person so that he becomes enamored of this dissimilarity [forseer sig paa denne Forskjellighed], damages his soul [tager Skade paa sin Sjel], and forgets what it is to love the neighbor. It this happens now, it certainly must happen in a more hidden and secret way, but basically it remains the same. Whether someone savoring his arrogance [Hovmod] and his pride openly gives other people to understand that they do not exist for him and, for the nourishment of his arrogance, wants them to feel it as he demands expressions of slavish submission from them, or whether he slyly and secretly expresses that they do not exist for him simply by avoiding any contact with them…– these are basically one and the same.¹⁶

As in the passage in The Sickness unto Death, the relation between master and slave is important, but not in focus. The way it is displaced, however, is telling. The discourse only refers to the relation between master and slave as a point of departure. It then makes a turn in that it re-directs the reader’s attention to more hidden or subtle ways of depriving another person of significance, that is: of not recognizing the other. These ways are ways of seeing. What is here (mis)translated as “becomes enamored of this dissimilarity” reads in Danish: “forseer sig paa

 See Arne Grøn, “Ethics of Vision,” Chapter 24 in this volume.  SKS 9, 80 / WL, 74.

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denne Forskjellighed.” “At forse sig” means to do wrong (in Danish: at begå en forseelse), but the literal meaning is informative: “at for-se sig pa” is to see wrongly, namely to see in such a way that one fixes one’s eyes on something, thereby not seeing something else, which one should have seen. The discourse indicates that one avoids seeing this something else by fixing one’s eyes, for-seeing. In this case, what one looks fixedly upon is the dissimilarity between oneself and the other, thereby not seeing the basic equality, “the kinship of all human beings [Slægtskabet mellem Menneske og Menneske].”¹⁷ The passage is even more remarkable if we define dialectics of recognition as a dialectics of self-relation and relation to others. The passage demonstrates and intensifies the dialectics between relation to the other and self-relation. Kierkegaard expresses this tersely, in explicating what is implied in seeing the other wrongly: to do wrong by seeing wrongly (at forse sig på) means to damage one’s soul (at tage skade på sin sjæl). To see the other person wrongly is a snare for oneself. One ensnares or enslaves oneself in seeing the other person wrongly. This is demonstrated by interpreting the phenomenon of arrogance or pride. In arrogance, one “gives other people to understand” that they do not exist for oneself. The point in doing so is to tell others how they should see themselves in seeing oneself, to make them see oneself as superior. Arrogance is an attitude towards others, and, in this, it is also a way of seeing oneself, but this self-understanding depends on others seeing themselves as inferior to the arrogant one. If they do not see themselves in this way, arrogance does not work. In arrogance, one ignores others, but this is precisely a way of seeing others, and it is so in a rather complicated manner: it is a way of telling others how to see themselves, and the persons to see in this way are the others themselves. In seeing in arrogance, in ignoring, one gives others to understand. As arrogance is a way of seeing, so is envy. The relation to others here seems to be viewed from opposite perspectives: from above (arrogance) or from below (envy). Kierkegaard, however, describes envy as a figure parallel to arrogance,¹⁸ making the same point: in envying others one ensnares oneself. Arrogance and envy are two ways of seeing the other wrongly, thereby damaging one’s soul.¹⁹ To conclude, in the dialectics of vision the problem of recognition is understood in an intensified mode, accentuating the negative possibilities inherent in vision, possibilities that pertain to the issue of identity and alterity in self-rela-

 SKS 9, 76 / WL, 69.  SKS 9, 85 – 86 / WL, 80 – 81.  SKS 9, 76 – 77 / WL, 70.

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tion in relation to the other self. The dialectics of vision is not only a way of exemplifying the dialectics of recognition, but a more radical way of understanding this dialectics. To this negative example let me add a second one where the interdependence of self-relation and relation to others is demonstrated in a positive manner.

7 The Other’s Own This second example is taken from Discourse IV “Love Does Not Seek Its Own” in the second part of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. A central motive in Works of Love is human equality, that is, the equality between humans as humans. In this discourse, Kierkegaard accentuates individuality or distinctiveness (Eiendommelighed) in emphasizing the basic human equality: “Love does not seek its own. The truly loving one does not love his own distinctiveness but, in contrast, loves every human being according to his distinctiveness; but ‘his distinctiveness’ is what for him is his own [det for ham Egne]; that is, the loving one does not seek his own; quite the opposite, he loves what is the other’s own.”²⁰ In our context, the point of the passage is that love, as neighbor love, sees and affirms what is the other’s own. Love recognizes the other in the sense of affirming what it sees, the other, but it does so in a movement beyond or against our ways of seeing and identifying the other: the other is seen and affirmed as distinctive from us, in her own. In contrast, the domineering person “lacks flexibility, lacks the pliability to comprehend others; he demands his own from everyone, wants everyone to be transformed in his image, to be trimmed according to his pattern for human beings.”²¹ “The domineering person” is the rendering of “den Herskesyge,” the one who wants to be the master. “Den Herskesyge” will not see or affirm the distinctiveness of the other. His way of seeing the other is to demand his own, seeking his own image. Thus, distinctiveness is first and foremost the distinctiveness of the other: that which distinguishes the other from oneself. In this sense, one should not love one’s own distinctiveness. Still, one’s own distinctiveness is also to be affirmed or accepted. A human being receives her or his distinctiveness. This gives a clue to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the duty of self-love (in discourse II A in the first part of Works of Love). What it means to love oneself in the right way is learned in loving the neighbor. It implies accepting oneself as an other, that is, as other than the

 SKS 9, 268 / WL, 269.  SKS 9, 269 / WL, 270.

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one that one conceives of in seeking one’s own. Consequently, Kierkegaard links the difficulty of affirming the distinctiveness of the other together with the difficulty of accepting one’s own distinctiveness: The small-minded person has never had the courage for this God-pleasing venture of humility and pride: before God to be oneself – the emphasis is on “before God,” since this is the source and origin of all distinctiveness. The one who has ventured this has distinctiveness: he has come to know what God has already given him, and in the same sense he believes completely in everyone’s distinctiveness. To have distinctiveness is to believe in the distinctiveness of everyone else, because distinctiveness is not mine but is God’s gift by which he gives being to me, and he indeed gives to all, gives being to all.²²

The point of this second passage is that to have distinctiveness, to be oneself, is to believe in the distinctiveness of everyone else. Here we find the double emphasis on the interdependence of self-relation and relation to the other (I do not have distinctiveness on my own) and on the distinctiveness of the individual. This is an intensified form of the dialectics between independence and dependence, which we first met in the dialectics of recognition. Thus, the problem of recognition is accentuated in what I have called an ethics of vision. This implies a dialectics of vision both in a negative and a positive sense: it focuses on the power inherent in vision of identifying the other, thereby not seeing the other in her distinctiveness, and it focuses on the possibility of seeing the other in a movement beyond our own ways of seeing. Distinctiveness as independence is accentuated ethically as the independence of the other. According to Works of Love, the greatest beneficence is in love to help someone “to become himself, free, independent, his own master [sin Egen], to help him stand alone.”²³ Thus, in neighbor love, the issue of independence recurs, but as the independence of the other. We then seem to have the asymmetry reversed, compared to the dialectics of recognition in Hegel. I should be the one recognizing the independence of the other, without asking for reciprocity or for the perspective being reversed. An ethics of vision harbors a dialectics of vision also in the sense that it emphasizes the interdependence of self-relation and relation to the other, but it does so in ethically emphasizing both the independence of the other and self-relation as self-acknowledgement. Also in this sense, the dialectics of recognition is intensified. A dialectics of vision does not just explicate the interdependence of self-relation and relation to the other. It unfolds the interdependence in em-

 SKS 9, 270 / WL, 272.  SKS 9, 272 / WL, 274.

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phasizing both the independence of the other and one’s own singularity. Thus, identity and alterity is accentuated in an ethics of vision: identity being interpreted as distinctiveness, alterity being accentuated against ways of seeing in identifying the other and ourselves. Let me continue the more systematic reformulation in three steps, first on the complication of selfhood and alterity, second on dialectics of recognition, and third on dialectics and ethics.

8 Selfhood and Alterity Revisited The dialectics of recognition is often understood in terms of a theory of selfhood, which claims that we become selves in being recognized. Dialectics of recognition, however, itself requires that we are selves: in relating to others relating to us. What is at stake in recognition therefore is selfhood in a normative sense, that is, a sense in which we, as selves, can fail. Selfhood in the normative sense does not consist in taking over ways others see us, but in appropriating what we are, as selves. We are the ones seeing others seeing us. Consequently, we are the ones to recognize the other. Selfhood depends on this active sense of recognition: not just on being recognized, but oneself recognizing the other, seeing the other as other. Thus, the normative sense of selfhood turns out to be a matter of recognizing alterity. This is in itself a crucial insight. The further critical point, however, is that this does not turn recognition of the other into a way of achieving selfhood. If we recognize the alterity of others in order to realize our own potentiality as selves, it is not alterity that we recognize, nor selfhood we achieve. This means that the relation of selfhood and alterity is complicated in a way that affects the very sense of dialectics, defined in terms of relations of identity and difference. The dialectics of recognition does not simply transpose the issue of identity and difference into the issue of selfhood and alterity (so that selfhood would amount to self-identity and alterity to the difference of the other). By this, I do not only mean that selfhood itself becomes a matter of alterity: seeing oneself as another (internal alterity) and recognizing the alterity of the other (external alterity). The point is that in a critical sense it is not possible simply to recognize the alterity of the other. To recognize the alterity of the other is to see that there are limits to one’s own seeing. In this sense, our ways of seeing become twisted. Alterity is not just the difference of the other, but the other’s identity. She is in herself, not just different from oneself, or different to oneself. But how is the identity of the other then alterity? Is alterity her identity seen from oneself? In the sense that we should see the other as other, yes. But would

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alterity then not still point back to selfhood? Yes, but it does so in a double move: we are to see the other as other, and in this sense to affirm or to recognize her alterity, but this implies seeing that she is in herself, apart from us, beyond her relation to us. This alterity shows up precisely in her relations to us. There is transcendence in the relation to the other. Our relation to the other contains something it cannot encompass: the other (not) relating to us, beyond our relation to her. In our search for a critical reformulation, this is the point of a dialectics of recognition: that we encounter the other escaping us in herself seeing us and the world in between, and that recognition is at stake in our relating to the other. Alterity is not something that we just see and recognize, but that which we are challenged to recognize in ourselves coming to see differently, in seeing the other being beyond our seeing her. What does this amount to? In reformulating a dialectics of recognition, we will have to revisit the issue of selfhood and alterity. It is not possible to emphasize alterity (as not to be integrated) without a strong notion of selfhood. Selfhood is not just what is to come about in and through a dialectics of recognition, but is implied in seeing the other as to be recognized and in recognizing her. What then is the other to be recognized as? The answer seems to go in two directions: as a self, and as the other. However, what is to be recognized is the other (being) in herself, beyond our relating to her. But this is what we should come to see. As a self she escapes us, in herself seeing the world, in herself (not) relating to us. Alterity is an other identity: the other being herself. This is no shared identity. We can come to share understanding, in coming to understand ourselves differently. To recognize alterity implies the possibility of having one’s own way of seeing transformed. This, however, is implied in a strong notion of selfhood.

9 Recognition of Dialectics Revisited Thus, a dialectics of selfhood and alterity does not follow, but rather complicates the model of dialectics defined in terms of relations of identity and difference. It accentuates relation as the relation between parties relating to each other, thereby making their relation into a relation, taking it as a relation. But as a relation between selves relating to each other, the relation itself is a matter of perspective. It is a relation of critical differences in perspective. Although we can and do take part in each other’s lives, each has a life to live on her or his own. What I have argued for is that reformulating the dialectics of recognition must do justice to two, equally radical, insights: a. Alterity of the other implies that her identity is beyond my grasp (exteriority). b. Selfhood means that I am

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myself as no other. If I am to myself an other, it is in a sense in which no other is (inferiority). Both insights complicate the notion of self as relational. We are not ourselves in ourselves, but in relating to others, and in relating to others we become others to ourselves, but this internal alterity differs radically from the alterity of the other. Oneself as another implies: as no other.²⁴ How is it possible to reformulate the dialectics of recognition from these two insights into alterity and selfhood? First and foremost, alterity of the other accentuates selfhood of the self. This dialectics of alterity and selfhood is not about identifying oneself with the other, or of coming to see oneself in the other (as in Hegel). Instead, selfhood means that I am the one to recognize the other, that is, to see the other as other, in herself, beyond me. Alterity of the other is for me. In this sense I am myself and no other. Likewise, I can and should see the other as another in a sense in which the other cannot and should not. The other is not an other to herself in the sense of alterity that I face. Why should these insights into alterity and selfhood be formulated in terms of recognition? Apparently, recognition means coming to see oneself in the other, re-cognizing the other as a self. This is at least what comes into the foreground in Hegel. However, in our reformulation, recognition is about re-cognizing limits to one’s own seeing the other. It concerns the other beyond recognition in the sense of identification, but this demands recognition in the sense of recognizing the other in herself, that is: beyond what I see. I have argued that the dialectics of recognition is about the other escaping one’s grasp, and that this is what is to be recognized. What I should recognize is the alterity of the other in the almost paradoxical sense that she is in herself,

 Thus, the reformulation of the dialectics of selfhood and alterity I have suggested is not only a rejoinder to Levinas, but also to Ricoeur. Contrary to Levinas, I have argued that the alterity of the other is a matter of seeing the other, and in that sense a matter of selfhood. Levinas defines alterity as exteriority against seeing and understanding, implying that seeing and understanding encompass and reduce the other to the same. Therefore, the face of the other is not a phenomenon, but speaks (see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969, p. 66 / Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité, Paris: Le Livre de Poche 1991, p. 61). Contrary to Ricoeur, I will argue that the dialectics of selfhood and alterity cannot be accounted for in terms of the two intersecting movements: the gnoseological movement from the self and the ethical from the other (Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. by Kathleen Blarney, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1992, pp. 397– 391 / Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris: Seuil 1990, pp. 335 – 339). It is a dialectics of two equally radical insights into alterity and selfhood. To recognize the alterity of the other means to see that she is in herself, beyond the relation, but this requires selfhood: being the one to see that the other is exterior to me, beyond my grasp. Oneself as another thus implies: as no other.

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beyond the relation to me, be that my relation to her or her relation to me. This is what I should see. Thus, alterity demands selfhood that becomes a matter of oneself recognizing the alterity of the other. Let us take this reformulated dialectics of recognition one step further, unfolding the implication of what has just been said. Recognition is about the other beyond recognition. This demands recognition. And this is the dialectics of recognition reformulated. This “beyond what I see” indicates that I will have to wait for the other to give her answer and for the other to ask questions that I was not waiting for. This waiting for the other is part of the dialectics of recognition. How is it dialectics of recognition? In the double sense that, first, dialectics is about the experience of alterity and the alterity of the other is what is to be recognized, and, second, it is an open question whether we actually recognize the other as other: in herself. Recognizing this open character is part of the recognition of the other. Dialectics is in this sense also a matter of the other showing herself. The dialectics of recognition thereby points to an ethics of vision. This way of reinterpreting the dialectics of recognition seeks to do justice to the connection of negativity and normativity that I have indicated above. Dialectics is about experiencing alterity, but this turns out to be a matter of recognizing the other as other. The negative character of the dialectics of recognition shows recognition to be an open question: is it actually recognition? This in turn points back to subjectivity, the possibility of failing to recognize the other. In sum, the dialectics of recognition is about alterity and selfhood in the strong sense indicated: the other escaping my grasp (the other in herself) and the self as not to be escaped (oneself as no other). The alterity of the other demands selfhood, and selfhood is about oneself recognizing the other being beyond one’s relation to her. In this accentuated dialectics of alterity and selfhood, recognition is what is at stake. This re-opens the issue of dialectics and ethics that was too quickly closed in Hegel and in most of the Hegelian legacy.

10 Dialectics and Ethics If we continue this line of reformulation, the dialectics of recognition opens up and requires an ethics of recognition. It is not as such an ethics of recognition. The point lies in the relation between dialectics and ethics.

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Recognition is not simply a matter of dialectics, but is also an ethical demand.²⁵ It does not just come about in a process of relating, but requires each of the two parties to give up his or her one-sided way of holding to the relation. This normative surplus is to be seen in the negative possibility that the process fails to bring about recognition. Thus, it can be argued that normativity enters the dialectical process, being implied in the ways the two parties relate to each other. Otherwise, it would not be a dialectics of recognition. In that sense, the ethical demand is part of the process of parties relating to each other in a struggle for recognition. How should we understand recognition as an ethical demand? It is a demand for reciprocity, but reciprocity itself implies the demand of oneself recognizing, not just of being recognized. In a second turn, recognition can be made into a demand to the other, but only on the condition of reciprocity. An ethics of recognition, however, does not simply amount to an ethics of reciprocity. It also implies asymmetry in the sense that recognizing the alterity of the other means to affirm an identity that does not depend on, but rather withdraws itself from, us. It is in this sense alterity: withdrawn, beyond, but for us. Thus reformulated, recognition is about us seeing the other being in herself, beyond her relation to us. There is a critical limit to our seeing the other, and this is what we should see or recognize. Through this critical limit, vision and subjectivity are accentuated. Let me conclude by taking the issue of normativity, vision, and subjectivity a bit further. I have argued for a reinterpretation of the dialectics of recognition that makes the relation of dialectics and ethics more intrinsic than traditionally conceived in the Hegelian legacy. As we have seen, the negative dialectics of recognition has a normative force to it, showing how one-sided recognition fails from within. As a dialectics, it points to the encounter of the other escaping our seeing the other. Moreover, in the dialectics of recognition something is at stake: recognition itself. But what is at stake in recognition? In answering, let me briefly return to the issue of negativity and normativity. The problem of recognition pertains to the negative possibilities inherent in ways of seeing oneself and the other self. Recognition is about seeing and being seen. There is, however, a critical difference in both seeing and being seen. Recognition is about this difference. To recognize someone is not just to see, but to affirm what you see. In this sense, recognition is about seeing. It is to see in the

 In Hegel, the ethical appears to be absorbed in the dialectics in two connected ways: first, in focusing on what takes place between the selves relating to each other and second, in an encompassing or totalizing movement.

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emphatic sense of paying attention to or giving significance to what you see. To recognize is to see the other as other, that is, to affirm the other to be an other self, in herself. Here, however, lies the problem of recognition. It is possible to see the other in ways not affirming the other as other. The difference inheres in seeing. The manner in which one does not see can consist precisely in ways of seeing. For example, to ignore or to overlook is not simply not to see, but on the contrary, ways of seeing. We can see others in such a way that we do not see them (and, to make the case even more complicated, this can be a way of telling them how to see themselves, as already mentioned). Taken along this line, the dialectics of recognition is a dialectics of vision: seeing others seeing oneself. The critical point is that one can relate to others in ways in which one ensnares oneself in seeing the other wrongly. Both possibilities, first the possibility of seeing without seeing, and second the possibility of ensnaring oneself in seeing the other wrongly, indicate the ethical significance of vision. What we should have is both a dialectics of vision and an ethics of recognition. The link between dialectics and ethics would be that the dialectics of recognition implies that recognition is at stake in the relation between the two parties.²⁶

 Thanks to Bartholomew Ryan for English language corrections and suggestions.

Chapter 28 Repetition and the Concept of Repetition 1 “A confusing form, fraught with antitheses” This is no doubt an odd book, as the author also intended it to be. To my knowledge, he is indeed the first to have a lively understanding of “repetition” and to have allowed the pregnancy [Prægnants] of the concept to be seen in the explanation of the relation of the ethnical and the Christian, by directing attention to the invisible point and to the discrimen rerum [turning point] where one science breaks against another until a new science comes to light. But what he has discovered he has concealed again by arraying the concept in the jest of an analogous conception.¹

This is how Kierkegaard has Vigilius Haufniensis, in The Concept of Anxiety, describe Repetition by Constantin Constantius. In this passage, Vigilius Haufniensis confirms what the reader of Repetition quickly senses: that it is a confusing book. There seems to be a discrepancy between, on the one hand, the decisive significance, which repetition assumes in Kierkegaard’s writings and, on the other hand, this work, which not only gives repetition its name, but also discovers it. It is quite clear that Constantin Constantius’ himself understands repetition as a new category. He makes programmatic declarations such as the following: “Repetition is the new category that is to be discovered.”² “Recollection is the ethnical view of life, repetition the modern.”³ But this happens in a strangely quirky fashion. In fact, in other respects the book shows what true repetition is not. Constantin Constantius attempt at repetition serves only to place true repetition in relief. And at the end, when the young man believes that he has repeated himself or taken himself again, it is in fact not repetition in the decisive sense of the term. What the book sets forth as repetition is not in fact repetition.⁴ Vigilius Haufniensis claims that the confusion and discrepancy in the book Repetition is intentional: “But what he has discovered he has concealed again by arraying the concept in the jest of an analogous conception.” This is repeated by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous canon, there is not only interplay between the author and the work

 SKS 4, 324 / CA, 17– 18; translation modified.  SKS 4, 25 / R, 148; translation modified.  SKS 4, 25 / R, 148.  In Danish, the text reads “taget sig selv igen,” which means “repeated himself” and also has the literal meaning of “taken himself again.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-034

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within each individual work, but also among the works and their various authors. In the middle of the Postscript (which in its very title relates itself to the works in conclusory fashion), there is a commentary on Kierkegaard’s works, which are being brought to a conclusion. This is contained in a section entitled “A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature.”⁵ With respect to Repetition, it is stated: “And Constantin Constantius wrote, as he calls it, ‘an odd book’.”⁶ Vigilius Haufniensis’ description has now become that of Constantin Constantius.⁷ But Johannes Climacus adopts a similar line to that of Vigilius Haufniensis: immediately preceding this passage he states that “a confusing contrastive form [en forvirrende Modsætnings-form]”⁸ is employed in Repetition, because that which is to be said is of decisive significance, but it must be said without lecturing. On the one hand, it is necessary to coin the concept of repetition in order to maintain that “the immanence of the ethical despair has been broken” and that “the leap has been posited.”⁹ On the other hand, this must not be the subject of a straightforward lecture, but must be said indirectly through a jest. Referring to the title page, Johannes Climacus states that Repetition contains a psychological experiment – the subtitle reads: “A Venture in Experimenting Psychology.”¹⁰ This can be understood in various ways: Constantin Constantius undertakes an experiment regarding the existence of repetition; he travels to Berlin and ascertains that it does not exist. In a certain way, he also undertakes an experiment with the young man. Repetition is not an experiment, however, but a trial. In what follows, I will give a more detailed description, in three steps, of the meaning of the category of repetition. First, I will point out that Constantin Constantius himself uses repetition as a concept of epoch-making significance. Next, I will show that as a religious category repetition is related both to what Climacus calls “ethical despair,” and to what Vigilius Haufniensis calls a “second ethics.”¹¹ Thirdly, I will show that the discovery of repetition as a new category is a (re)discovery of what Kierkegaard calls the category of spirit. In conclusion, I will revisit the question of form: Is repetition as a category inconsistent with Repetition as a book?

 SKS 7, 228 – 273 / CUP1, 251– 300.  SKS 7, 239 / CUP1, 263; translation modified.  In the Papers, however, Constantin Constantius does call Repetition “an odd little book” (SKS 15, 85).  Ibid.  SKS 7, 238 / CUP1, 262.  SKS 7, 239 / CUP1, 263.  SKS 4, 329 / CA, 21.

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2 The Significance of Repetition The Modern View On the first page of Repetition, Constantin Constantius declares that for quite a period of time he has “at least on occasion” concerned himself with “with the question of repetition – whether or not it is possible, what importance it has.”¹² Right from the outset, one can become confused when Constantin Constantius speaks, without explanation, of “a repetition” as well as of “the repetition.” Because, what is it that is to be repeated? Constantin Constantius gives what appears to be a straightforward answer in the next sentence where he discusses “whether something gains or loses in being repeated.”¹³ That which is to be repeated can apparently be anything whatever, as long as a suitable experiment can be arranged. And even though Constantin Constantius has considered the problem of repetition – “at least on occasion” – for a long time, it “suddenly” occurs to him that “You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there once before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has.”¹⁴ As if it were a sudden whim, Constantin Constantius continues by sketching, in a rather quirky fashion, the significance of repetition – not just any repetition, but repetition as a category. And repetition as a category must first be discovered. It is noteworthy that Constantin Constantius attributes epoch-making importance to this discovery of the significance of repetition. It forms the boundary between what Constantin Constantius calls the Greek or “ethnical” and the “modern.” While still on the first page of Repetition, Constantin Constantius states: “Say what you will about it [the question ‘of whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has’], it will play a very important role in modern philosophy, for repetition is a crucial expression for what ‘recollection’ was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition.”¹⁵ This must be understood, however, as meaning that repetition will become the category for modern philosophy just as recollection was the category for Greek thought – and that precisely herein lies the decisive difference between Greek and modern thought. Further on he writes: “When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one    

SKS 4, 9 / R, 131. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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says: actuality, which has been, now comes into being.”¹⁶ Both categories give coherence to a life, which would otherwise dissolve into “empty, meaningless noise.”¹⁷ But they do so in decisively different ways. Constantin Constantius puts it succinctly: “Recollection is the ethnical view of life, repetition the modern.”¹⁸ There is, however, yet another dividing line, namely that between recent times, or recent philosophy, and modernity. When the young man is brought to a stop by the problem of repetition, he turns neither to Greek nor to recent philosophy, but to Job. While the Greek chooses recollection, recent philosophy makes no movement. Or rather, to the extent that it makes a movement “it is always within immanence.”¹⁹ Just as Greek thought moved within the immanence of eternity, recent philosophy takes everything back into mediation or into suspension.²⁰ I will return to this point shortly. For now, the important thing is that repetition is the modern view of life, but not in the sense that it has already been discovered. On the contrary, “repetition is the new category which is to be discovered,” and this will be a clear contrast to recent philosophy’s talk of mediation.²¹ What Constantin Constantius calls modernity is thus that which is to come. What is the meaning of this dividing line? The pagan view is characterized by recollection. This means that the truth is found by going back. Back, that is, to eternity, which forms the basis of all reality. In other words, this is the immanence of eternity. Repetition also has the apparent meaning of going back, because that which is to be repeated existed before. But for Kierkegaard repetition is something which is to happen. The forward movement takes on decisive significance. As early as the first page of Repetition, Constantin Constantius says that both recollection and repetition are the same movement, but “in opposite directions”: backwards and forwards.²² In simplified form, we can say that recollection returns to that which was, and in so doing does not really repeat it in the present. Mediation is a form of repetition, which does not really make any difference. On the other hand, repetition in the strict sense makes a real difference. This is what we should read into the formulation: the whole of exis-

      

SKS 4, 25 / R, 149; translation modified. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 4, 57 / R, 186. The Danish term is “Ophævelsen” (related to the German “Aufhebung”). SKS 4, 25 / R, 148; translation modified. SKS 4, 9 / R, 131.

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tence, which has been, now comes into being. ²³ The emphasis is upon this becoming. This is of decisive importance, because the movement backwards, “the back door of recollection,” is closed (as Climacus says in the Postscript).²⁴ There is only the movement forward.²⁵ The future is granted decisive significance, but in a paradoxical fashion – by means of repetition. What I have said above points forward toward Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript. Repetition contains a sketch of the antithesis with which the Philosophical Fragments begins and which receives further treatment in the Postscript: the antithesis between the Socratic and the Christian. As has been mentioned, according to Constantin Constantius, the discovery of repetition as a category is of epoch-making significance. Modernity, of which he speaks, points back to Christianity – but to the Christianity, whose significance must first be (re)discovered.

Repetition as Transcendence As has already been mentioned, repetition is a word with many meanings. In an immediate sense, it points backward, because that which is repeated has already been. Repetition is that the same thing happens again. But Kierkegaard emphasizes that repetition is a becoming. Repetition is something, which is to happen. But to the extent that repetition is something one aspires to it seems to connote uniformity: nothing new must happen. One protects oneself by doing the same thing over and over again. This is what the bourgeois philistine does. In his use of the concept of repetition, Kierkegaard means the opposite of this. Courage is required for repetition, and this is so because repetition is not something, which comes naturally, but involves a fundamental transformation. More specifically, it consists in repeating something, which has been lost. Let us see in more detail how this is so. Repetition is discovered as a separate category when it takes on this added significance. It is a requirement, something which is to happen, and as a requirement it lies within what Kierkegaard calls the ethical. Constantin Constantius puts forth the slogan that “repetition is the watchword [Løsnet] in every ethical

 SKS 4, 25 / R, 149.  SKS 7, 191 / CUP1, 208.  For example: “The modern view, on the other hand, must indeed be the expression of freedom in the movement forward, and in this lies repetition” (Pap. IV B 111 p. 273; see also SKS 15, 82 / R, 318).

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view.”²⁶ The ethical is characterized by a person’s wish to remain in continuity with himself. This is expressed in the requirement to choose oneself, and this contains a repetition: to will oneself again. This leads us back to Either/Or, where the ethicist “B” several times describes the dialectics of choice. “What I choose, I do not posit, for if it were not posited I could not choose it, and yet if I did not posit it by choosing it then I would not choose it.”²⁷ When “B” speaks of the choice, he means the individual’s choice of himself: “This self has not existed before, because it came into existence through the choice, and yet it has existed, for it was indeed ‘himself’.”²⁸ This dialectics of choice recurs as the dialectics of repetition.²⁹ “The dialectics of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been – otherwise it could not be repeated – but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”³⁰ This also makes it clear that repetition is the new, or that it renews. Repetition transforms, and this places requirements on what may be counted as repetition. Ethically viewed, repetition is when one takes over or assumes one’s self. It is the watchword of every ethical view because it is the obligation of the self. Repetition, however, does not merely repeat what is said in Either/Or. It displays not merely an aesthetic despair, but a despair over the ethical. While Constantin Constantius suggests an aesthetic solution to the young man’s problem, the young man himself seeks an ethical solution – and despairs precisely by doing so. Constantin Constantius himself indicates what the answer to this despair would be: repetition by virtue of the absurd.³¹ With this, we have come to repetition as a religious category. If repetition is to assume its full pregnancy, it must contain a decisive transformation. For why attempt to repeat or “take things again?” It must be because that which one wishes to repeat has been lost. One tries to regain it. In the pregnant sense, repetition assumes a decisive loss. If “the back door of recollection” is closed, it is because the truth has been lost in a decisive fashion – by means of something one oneself has done. In Philosophical Fragments, this is what Johannes Climacus suggests we should understand by the term “sin.” In its pregnant sense, repetition presupposes the concept of sin.

 SKS 4, 25 – 26 / R, 149.  SKS 3, 205 / EO2, 213.  SKS 3, 206 – 207 / EO2, 215.  See Wilfried Greve, Kierkegaards maieutische Ethik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1990, pp. 147– 148.  SKS 4, 25 / R, 149.  SKS 4, 55 / R, 185.

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It is true that this does not come through clearly in Repetition. The book evinces only a despair over the ethical, and gives the outlines of an answer: repetition as transcendence. But the possibility – or rather, the presupposition – which is implicit in the pregnant sense of the concept of repetition is precisely this book’s point of contact with The Concept of Anxiety. And here I can repeat the quotation I started with: science conflicts with science. The footnote, which I cite, is found in the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety, in which science is opposed to science: psychology and dogmatics, ethics and dogmatics. “Ethics and dogmatics struggle over reconciliation in a fateful confinium [border area].”³² Vigilius Haufniensis notes that “the science in which sin might find its role most nearly is probably ethics.”³³ But sin only belongs to ethics to the extent that it is upon the concept of sin that ethics breaks down. Dogmatics, on the other hand, presupposes the reality of sin. And here ethics returns, the second ethics. This new ethics presupposes dogmatics and with this, the reality of sin. Vigilius Haufniensis now repeats the antithesis between the Greek and the modern, which Constantin Constantius sketched in Repetition. He differentiates between the first and the second philosophy: the first denotes “that totality of science which we might call ‘ethnical,’ whose essence is immanence and is expressed in Greek thought by ‘recollection;’ while the second philosophy “whose essence is transcendence or repetition.”³⁴ In Repetition, it had been stated that repetition “repetition is and remains a transcendence.”³⁵ This must be understood against the background of despair over the ethical. As I said in connection with the Postscript: in emphasizing repetition as a new category, the intention is to assert that the immanence of ethical despair has been broken and the leap has been posited. Repetition as a category thus signifies a liberation or a release from the power of the ethical to bind or to judge.³⁶ Repetition is not so much to regain something by one’s own strength as it is to receive again something, which has been lost to oneself. But what has been lost is in fact one’s self. Sin means that one is imprisoned by oneself, that one cannot break free because one is bound by oneself. Repetition thus

 SKS 4, 319 / CA, 12; translation modified.  SKS 4, 323 / CA, 16; translation modified.  SKS 4, 328 – 239 / CA, 21.  SKS 4, 47 / R, 186.  See once again Vigilius Haufniensis: “If repetition is not posited, ethics becomes a binding power. No doubt it is for this reason that the author states that repetition is the watchword in every ethical view” (SKS 4, 324 / CA, 18).

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comes to mean reconciliation.³⁷ And this repetition begins in faith. Therefore it is stated in slogan-like terms that “repetition is conditio sine qua non for every issue of dogmatics.”³⁸ “If repetition is not posited, dogmatics cannot exist at all,” Vigilius Haufniensis adds.³⁹ Here the connection between Fear and Trembling and Repetition is very clear. Repetition in its deepest sense is the double movement of faith. As mentioned, Constantin Constantius makes use of the key phrase from Fear and Trembling when he speaks of repetition as a movement by virtue of the absurd. But there is an important difference. The category of repetition is related to the ethical, to despair over the ethical. The ethical requirement is repetition: to will oneself, specifically to will continuity with oneself in what one does. But when one loses oneself in doing what one does, a simple ethical repetition is impossible. Repetition therefore becomes a religious category. Unlike Fear and Trembling, there is no mention of a suspension of the ethical, but of its transformation. As a new category, repetition points forward to the second ethics.

Repetition as Freedom Thus far I have pointed out connections between Repetition and the pseudonymous works with which it is surrounded: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Repetition is a work complete in itself to a lesser extent than the other books. If one takes one’s cue from the title, Repetition – which, incidentally, is also repeated as the heading for the second part of the book – the purpose of the work is to formulate the concept of repetition. And in fact Repetition does discover a category, which is of decisive significance for the rest of Kierkegaard’s works. But in order to understand repetition as a category we must include other works than Repetition itself. Kierkegaard also comments upon Repetition in his Papers, and especially in the drafts of his “Open Letter to Herr Professor Heiberg, Knight of the Dannebrog from Constantin Constantius.”⁴⁰ Heiberg had “corrected” Constantin Constantius in an article in which he had asserted that repetition belonged to the world of natural phenomena. This “correction” now provokes Constantin Constantius to

   

Reconciliation is “the most profound expression of repetition” (SKS 15, 78 / R, 313). SKS 4, 26 / R, 149. SKS 4, 324 / CA, 18. SKS 15, 61– 88 / R, 283 – 324.

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come forward and state directly his main thesis, which he had wished to conceal in Repetition. One of Constantin Constatinus’ key words makes another appearance in the sketch by Vigilius Haufniensis from which I quoted at the beginning of the essay, namely the word “pregnancy” (“Prægnants”). There is “only one repetition in the pregnant sense,” and “it is the repetition of the individuality itself, raised to a new power,” Constantin Constantius says.⁴¹ To invent repetition as a category is to decide what constitutes repetition in the pregnant sense. What, then, is necessary to repetition in the pregnant sense? What is it that makes it possible for us to speak of the repetition? The underlying argument seems to be as follows: a repetition is later than that which it repeats. In the realm of spirit, this difference in time is a difference in meaning. The repetition happens in another place and with another consciousness. The repetition transforms what is repeated precisely by repeating it. The “true” repetition, therefore, cannot be an external or a simple repetition, because it itself adds something. And one tries to repeat something because in one or another sense it has been lost for one. As mentioned, Constantin Constantius’ “pregnant example” is “the repetition of the individuality itself.” It is the individual who repeats, and also the individual who is repeated. To use Constantin Constantius’ words, it means to “take itself back again [tage sig selv tilbage (gjentage sig)].”⁴² And this is so because one has lost oneself. As we have already seen, repetition comes to mean reconciliation. In Constantin Constantius’ words, reconciliation is “repetition sensu eminentiori [in the highest sense].”⁴³ This is in fact a repetition, which transforms. Even if it is the same life, which is “taken again” (repeated) or regained, repetition makes a decisive difference: See everything is new.⁴⁴ Repetition, in the pregnant sense, is to become oneself. And this is what Kierkegaard understands by freedom. In the draft of his reply to Heiberg, Constantin Constantius repeatedly emphasizes the connection between repetition and freedom. There is only one repetition in the pregnant sense, and it is “the repetition of the individuality itself, raised to a new power.” This is repetition sensu eminentiori, and, Constantin Constantius adds, it is “freedom’s deepest interest.”⁴⁵ This must be understood in a double fashion. Repetition is the “task for freedom” – that is, for the individual as a self – but repetition simultaneously is freedom. It can be seen that the question in Repetition is not about “the repeti    

Pap. IV B 111, p. 270. SKS 15, 66 / R, 302; see footnote 4 above. Pap. IV B 118, 1, p. 301. See The Concept of Anxiety (SKS 4, 324 / CA, 18). Pap. IV B 111, p. 270.

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tion of something external but of the repetition of his [that is, the young man’s].”⁴⁶ Repetition in the pregnant sense is to be seen “as the task for freedom and as freedom.”⁴⁷ Repetition “means freedom itself.”⁴⁸ In the Papers, Constantin Constantius says that the concept of repetition has a history in “the sphere of individual freedom,” “freedom passes through several stages in order to attain itself.”⁴⁹ He differentiates between three stages: a) at the first stage, freedom is qualified as desire; b) at the second stage freedom is qualified as shrewdness; c) at the third freedom is qualified in relation to itself. Here it comes to itself. “Freedom itself is now repetition.”⁵⁰ It is – in a passage I have already cited – to take oneself back (to repeat oneself).⁵¹ This definition of the concept of repetition is a (re)discovery of the concept of spirit. The individual becomes himself by coming to himself, or by coming back to himself in the movement forward – by regaining himself. And spirit means precisely to come to oneself in regaining oneself. In his draft, Constantin Constantius does not say this directly, but in the Papers he repeatedly returns to the significance of repetition in the realm of the spirit. And in Repetition, the young man concludes by saying that in a human life “only repetition of the spirit is possible.”⁵² It is, however, only in The Concept of Anxiety and subsequent works that spirit is explicitly connected to the regaining of freedom and to reconciliation. In the drafts of his reply to Heiberg, Constantin Constantius does not conceal his discovery. On the contrary, he insists upon it almost as though he has been wronged. He explains Repetition by developing its principal idea. But the Constantin Constantius whom we read in the Papers is no longer the Constantin Constantius who had connections with the young man. It is Constantin Constantius who takes possession of his book and asserts himself as its author. In the letter to his “dear reader,” which concludes Repetition, Constantin Constantius states that he has allowed the young man to come into being.⁵³ Now, in the Papers, not only the young man, but also the experiment – and thus the “odd” book – are retracted. The confusion is ended, and the book becomes something other than what it was, just as Constantin Constantius has become another author. The fact

       

SKS 15, 69 / R, 304. SKS 15, 77 / R, 312. Pap. IV B 120, p. 308. SKS 15, 66 / R, 301. SKS 15, 66 / R, 302. Ibid. SKS 4, 88 / R, 221. SKS 4, 94 / R, 228.

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that the pseudonym writes himself out of a job was a bit too much. In any case, the drafts of the reply to Heiberg remained drafts. Instead, Constantin Constantius attempts to do what he had already done at the conclusion of Repetition: to write to his “dear reader.” This also ends up as a draft.

3 Melancholia and Observation Vigilius Haufniensis said that what Constantin Constantius has discovered, “he has concealed again by arraying the concept in the jest of an analogous conception.”⁵⁴ But just a couple of pages into Repetition, Constantin Constantius declares: “Repetition – that is actuality and the earnestness of existence.”⁵⁵ Does the confusing and antithetical form do anything other than confuse and create distance from what is said about repetition as a category? In the retrospective glance in the Papers, Constantin Constantius says that he has caused repetition to come into existence “by illuminating it in the contrast of jest and despair.”⁵⁶ If Repetition is not only to state, but also to demonstrate, what repetition is, it does so negatively, in the form of an antithesis, the antithesis of despair. But does it do so? In the Postscript, Johannes Climacus asserts that Repetition is definitely a case of doubly reflected communication. Because the communication takes place in the form of an experiment, it “creates for itself an opposition.”⁵⁷ But does Repetition contain the tension between communication and form, which is necessary to doubly reflected communication? Does Repetition as a work cohere with repetition as a category? First of all, it is worth noting the fact that Constantin Constantius himself talks about “the book,” Repetition, and in so doing speaks directly to the book’s reader. After having read the final letters from the young man the reader must turn the book sidewise to read the dedication: “To the Worthy Mr. X, The Real Reader of This Book.” The reader is literally drawn into the book, but more or less only to be sent out of it again. The text addresses itself directly to its reader and provides a description of who this reader is.

 SKS 4, 324 / CA, 18.  SKS 4, 11 / R, 133.  SKS 15, 79 / R, 314. Earlier in the Papers, Constantin Constantius stated that he would “wanted to let the concept come into being in the individuality and the situation, working itself forward through all sorts of misunderstandings” (SKS 15, 68 / R, 302).  SKS 7, 239 / CUP1, 263.

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I will not discuss in any more detail this interplay between the text and the reader.⁵⁸ Instead, I will examine the circumstance that Constantin Constantius and the young man produce portraits of one another. The key terms in these mutual portraits are melancholia and observation, respectively. Constantin Constantius attempts to describe how the young man’s love has gone wrong. He speaks of the young man’s “mistake.”⁵⁹ “His depression entrapped him more and more.”⁶⁰ Constantin Constantius links depression with recollection in a manner that implies their antithesis to repetition. The young man’s mistake was that “he stood at the end instead of at the beginning.”⁶¹ “Right away, within a few days,” he was capable “to recollect his love,” and thus he was “essentially through with the entire relationship.”⁶² In the middle of the relationship, the young man feels a melancholy longing.⁶³ Constantin Constantius subsequently notes that the young man, in his relationship to Constantin Constantius himself, “is in a state of continual self-contradiction. He wants me to be his confidant, and yet he does not want it – indeed, it causes him anxiety.”⁶⁴ The young man also speaks of his anxiety.⁶⁵ For his part, he describes Constantin Constantius as an observer who has “a demonic power.”⁶⁶ Constantin Constantius views himself as an observer. The young man repeats this view while assigning another meaning to it. He portrays Constantin Constantius as a detached observer who subjects every passion “under the cold regimentation of reflection.”⁶⁷ In an entry in his papers from 1846, Kierkegaard notes that in Repetition “feeling and irony are kept separate from one another, each in its representative: the young man and Constantin.”⁶⁸ When, as quoted above, Constantin Constantius spoke of an “antithesis of despair,” who is it, then, who despairs? The young man describes himself as despairing and “in self-contradiction.”⁶⁹ But in the Pa-

 See Joakim Garff, “‘My Dear Reader!’ Kierkegaard Read with Restrained Affection,” Studia Theologica, vol. 2, 1991, pp. 127– 130.  SKS 4, 14 / R, 137.  SKS 4, 16 / R, 138.  SKS 4, 14 / R, 137.  SKS 4, 14 / R, 136.  SKS 4, 14 / R, 137.  SKS 4, 51 / R, 180; translation modified.  Both in the case of Constantin and in that of the young man anxiety is to be understood as an ambivalent form of existence; see The Concept of Anxiety (SKS 4, 347– 351 / CA, 41– 46).  SKS 4, 59 / R, 189.  Ibid.  Pap. VII-1 B 83.  SKS 4, 68 / R, 200.

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pers, Constantin Constantius observes that “I despair of the possibility [of repetition] and step aside for the young man, who by means of his religious primitivity is going to discover repetition.”⁷⁰ And later: “I, however, in despair have relinquished my theory of repetition.”⁷¹ The young man despairs when his life comes to a halt at the problem of repetition. It is thus the young man who is also to discover repetition. But at the same time it is Constantin Constantius who reports on this discovery as a detached observer. These two modes of existence – shrewd observation and melancholia – are two ways in which repetition does not succeed. The mark of melancholia is that one holds oneself in reserve. One will not wholly will that which one wills.⁷² There is also a clearly discernible reserve in the making of shrewd observations, in which one places oneself outside of that which one observes. Constantin Constantius’ “despair” is that he is incapable of discovering repetition by himself. Thus, Repetition as a work gives a negative delineation of repetition as a category. But in its description of negative phenomena – melancholia and detachment, despair and anxiety – it is also the case that Repetition points beyond itself. The analyses of the negative are developed in works, which appeared after Repetition, primarily in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death. ⁷³

   

SKS 15, 69 / R, 304. SKS 15, 82 / R, 317– 318. Melancholia is “the sin of not willing deeply and inwardly” (SKS 3, 183 / EO2, 189). Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse.

Chapter 29 The Ethical Demand: Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas 1 Ethics and the Ethical What is “the ethical” in “the ethical demand”? If the ethical is seen as the ethical demand, the weight is implicitly on the addressee. In being subjected to the demand the ethical subject is required to take a position. This is a complex relation not easily understood. In what follows two questions will be in focus: How should we understand the position of the subject in the ethical demand? How does the subjectivity implied go into an account of the normativity of the ethical demand? First a note on “the ethical.” In Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Løgstrup ethics may seem to be more about understanding what the ethical means than actually presenting an ethics. Their aim appears to be to bring into view how ethics concerns, and is rooted in, human existence. This is particularly clear in Levinas. His approach leaves us with the question: If ethics is first philosophy, in what sense is it in fact an ethics? In Kierkegaard, the ethicist’s position in Either/Or is explicitly about “the ethical.”¹ Apparently, his claim is that ethics begins with taking a position: the ethical is about choosing oneself. But the demand of choosing oneself is a response to the possibility which B, the ethicist, encounters in A, the aestheticist: that of losing the sense of the ethical. This line of interpretation brings the ethicist closer to subsequent reflections on the ethical in Kierkegaard’s writings. According to the Postscript ² (but also, for example, in the epilogue to Fear and Trembling),³ the ethical concerns what it is to be a human. Does the ethical begin with our taking a position, or is taking a position ethical due to that to which it responds? In accounting for the ethical, Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Løgstrup all seem to move beyond “taking a position.” That even seems to apply to Kierkegaard’s ethicist. When Kierkegaard identifies the ethical with choosing oneself, this self-choice is already determined ethically: it is to assume oneself in what one is doing. In choosing oneself, we respond to the fright-

 For example: “What stands out in my either-or is the ethical” (SKS 3, 172 / EO1, 176; translation modified).  For example: “The ethical accentuates existing” (SKS 7, 302 / CUP1, 331).  SKS 4, 208 – 210 / FT, 121– 123. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-035

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ening possibility of ethical indifference, which, the ethicist claims, makes us strangers to the life we live. Yet the ethical is also about taking a position. It requires us to step forward. In responding to the ethical demand we are to respond for ourselves. Taking a position cannot be reduced to that which calls us to take a position. But neither can the position of the subject in the ethical demand be reduced to the act of taking a position. We are subjects subjected to the demand. The suggestion I would like to probe here is that the ethical concerns us in our relating to others and to a world in between. The ethical demand seizes or takes hold of us in these relations. The ethical is not added to knowing how the world is, but concerns us knowing how the world is (Kierkegaard) or being situated in relations of knowing (Levinas). In knowing, we are situated, relating to others (I take this to be implied in Levinas’ claim of ethics as first philosophy).⁴ This does not mean that ethics competes with knowing. It cannot stand in, as it were, for knowing the world. How, then, is the ethical basic to human existence? The answer to be outlined in what follows is that it is a matter of being the creatures we are, humans, not so much in an Aristotelian sense, but rather in a sense in which being human is refracted. This more Kantian approach can be put as follows: ethically, we are determined beyond and maybe against ourselves. The ethical concerns us as beings that are to situate ourselves in the world, but we can do so only as already situated, having already failed. Although we, in knowing the world, distance ourselves from the world, we are still situated in a history, which is ethically imbued.

2 Duty, Demand, Appeal The note on “the ethical” is meant to indicate not only a shared direction in the way ethics is thought in Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Løgstrup, but also what is at issue here: how to understand the nature of ethical normativity. “The ethical” in ethics comes to the fore in three key concepts: duty (Kierkegaard), demand (Løgstrup), and appeal in the sense of call (Levinas).

 See Peter Dews’ reflections on knowing and infinity in Levinas (Peter Dew, “The Configuration of the Ethical Demand in Løgstrup and Levinas,” in What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life, ed. by Hans Fink and Robert Stern, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2017, pp. 102– 129).

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Do these various ways of phrasing the ethical differ? When Kierkegaard speaks of the duty of the commandment “You shall,”⁵ he gives an answer to the question: what is the character of the ethical demand? The point in accentuating the duty in the demand is that the duty breaks off and redirects our vision. It is a countermove against us: we tend to let time go – in fact, we have already wasted some time before beginning to fulfill the ethical demand. That is what makes the demand unfulfillable.⁶ The duty singles out the one who is to fulfill the duty: “You shall.” I am for myself turned into a “you”: addressed, almost accused (for having already failed). However, Kierkegaard’s way of accentuating the demand as a duty also seems to minimize the appeal or call coming from the other in need: “What can extort [afnøde: urge, compel] from one a work of love can be extremely varied and thus cannot be enumerated. The child cries, the pauper begs, the widow pesters, deference constrains, misery compels, etc. But any love in work that is extorted in this way is not free.”⁷ What is the point here? Appeal or exhortation depends on occasion, but why should that be problematic? If we need the other to make an appeal to us, in order to see her, we place ourselves in a position in which we can ignore what we ourselves are already doing to her. Seeing the other is not just a matter of the other making us see her. Rather, the appeal seizes us in our ways of already seeing her. We should not first act on an appeal but be able to see the neighbor before being appealed to. This is implied in emphasizing the ethical as the duty in the demand. When Levinas accentuates the ethical as the appeal or the call, he actually makes a point similar to one made by Kierkegaard in stressing the duty. The call cuts us off from reflecting on the appeal. But why should we be cut off in reflecting? It is not a matter of acting without understanding the situation of the other. Rather, the problem lies with us. In reflecting we can place ourselves in a distant position, to the point of asking whether there is any appeal or call (as if we were to decide whether there is an appeal or not), or to the point of asking, who is my neighbor. But pointing to the appeal, claiming that we are appealed to or called upon before reflecting on the call, indicates that the ethical implies a countermove. This is what the notion of duty can capture. In line with the above argument about duty and seeing, the question would be: what if there is no call or appeal coming from the other – both in the sense of the other not making an  SKS 9, 25 – 27 / WL, 17– 19.  Not only in Løgstrup, but also in Kierkegaard we find the claim that the ethical demand is unfulfillable. This is what the move from first to second ethics is about. It is also why Kierkegaard accentuates the duty in the demand.  SKS 9, 345 / WL, 351.

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appeal to us and in the sense of the other not being situated in ways that attract our attention? Levinas’ answer would be that we are already under the appeal of the face. This is neither a matter of the other uttering an appeal to us, nor of the other being first situated in a condition that attracts our attention. The face of the other is naked (or nude) before we find our conditions for paying attention fulfilled. As the title suggests, in The Ethical Demand (Den etiske fordring), Løgstrup takes the ethical in terms of the demand. He conceives the ethical demand more as an appeal or call than as a duty. Still, the weight lies in being the one who is under the appeal. In Løgstrup, too, the ethical demand is not to be identified with claims or demands uttered by the other. This is emphasized by the role played by the notion of the single individual (den enkelte) in explicating the character of the ethical demand. Especially here the influence from Kierkegaard is prominent, although not admitted. As an example, let me quote a long passage from The Ethical Demand, which I’ll draw upon in the following: In other words, the demand implicit in every encounter between persons is not vocal but is and remains silent. The individual [den enkelte] to whom the demand is directed must him or herself in each concrete relationship decide what the content of the demand is. This is not to say that a person [den enkelte] can arbitrarily and capriciously determine the content of the demand. But the fact is that there is a demand. And since the demand is implied by the very fact that a person [den enkelte] belongs to the world in which the other person has his or her life, and therefore holds something of that person’s life in his or her hands, it is therefore a demand to take care of that person’s life. But nothing is thereby said about how this caring is to be done. The other person him or herself cannot say anything about this, even though he or she is the one directly concerned, since, as we said before, it might very well involve something diametrically opposed to his or her own expectations and wishes. It is of the essence of the demand that with such insight, imagination and understanding as he or she possesses a person [den enkelte] must figure out for him or herself what the demand requires.⁸

For now, we only need the emphasis on the single individual (den enkelte). What is accentuated is the subject position. As the addressees of the ethical demand, we are turned into the single individual, that is, towards and against ourselves. We must come to terms with the demand, beyond what we – the one who responds to the demand – would prefer. If we understand duty as a countermove,

 Knud E. Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, trans. by Theodor I. Jensen and Gary Puckering, rev. and ed. with an introduction by Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1997, p. 22 / Knud E. Løgstrup, Den etiske fordring, Aarhus: Klim 2010, p. 32.

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turning the ethical subject into the addressee of the demand, there is also a duty to the demand in Løgstrup. Later, with Løgstrup’s concept of sovereign expressions of life – conceptualized in Controverting Kierkegaard (Opgør med Kierkegaard) from 1968 – it becomes difficult to account for the ethical in terms of the subject position implied in ethical normativity, and for ethical normativity too.⁹ I have elsewhere argued that the concept of sovereign expressions of life is ambiguous, meaning either the act or only the impulse to act.¹⁰ In this essay, however, I’ll restrict myself to The Ethical Demand. ¹¹ The three ways of accentuating the ethical – duty, demand, and appeal (in the sense of call) – share the same direction. They place the weight of the ethical on the one being assigned: the one to do the duty, the one addressed with the demand, one being appealed to or called upon. Would that mean that the normativity of the ethical demand must be accounted for in terms of the subjectivity of the one being addressed?

3 Ethics Singularizes Remarkably, Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas also share the claim that the ethical “singularizes.” In Kierkegaard, the claim is in particular, and persistently, made in the Postscript. In Levinas, the following passage makes the point explicit: “Ethics as consciousness of a responsibility toward others…far from losing you in generality, singularizes you, poses you as a unique individual, as I.”¹² The quote is from “A Propos of ‘Kierkegaard vivant.’” Oddly enough, Levinas makes this claim in critique of Kierkegaard – a critique, which is based on a (problematic) reading of Fear and Trembling (the phrase concerning ethics as “losing you in generality” indicates Levinas’ critical point).

 Central parts of Controverting Kierkegaard have been published in Knud E. Løgstrup, Beyond the Ethical Demand, ed. with an introduction by Kees van Kooten Niekerk and trans. by Susan Dew and Heidi Flegal, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2007.  See Arne Grøn, “Livsytring, person, situation: Løgstrup og subjektiviteten,” in Løgstrups mange ansigter, ed. by David Bugge, Pia R. Böwadt, and Peter A. Sørensen, Copenhagen: Anis 2005, pp. 27– 42.  Thus, I leave out Løgstrup’s later critique of morality as involving duty. See Robert Stern, “‘Duty and Virtue are Moral Introversions’: On Løgstrup’s Critique of Morality,” in What is Ethically Demanded, ed. by Hans Fink and Robert Stern, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2017, pp. 300 – 324.  Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. by Michael B. Smith, London: Athlone Press 1996, pp. 76 – 77.

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In Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand, the claim comes to the fore in a section on the radical character of the demand. Why is the ethical demand radical? Løgstrup asks, and answers: “Because the person [den enkelte] confronted by the unspoken demand must him or herself determine how he or she is to take care of the other person’s life.”¹³ This implies that the demand is radical in that it isolates the addressee as the single individual (den enkelte). In line with the long passage quoted above, Løgstrup states: The radical character of the demand means that it is up to the individual himself [den enkelte selv] to determine what will best serve the other person. And since, as we have said, this could prove to be the very opposite of what the other person asks for and desires, the demand has the effect of making the person to whom the demand is directed a singular person [den enkelte i udtrykkelig forstand]. Ethically speaking the demand isolates him.¹⁴

In order to better understand what is implied in this claim – the ethical demand is radical, it isolates the single individual as this single individual – we should look at a distinction made in the beginning of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love between “works of love [Kjerlighedsgerninger]” and “a work of love [en Kjerlighedens Gjerning]”: “There are indeed only some works that human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love [Kjerlighedsgerninger], but in heaven no work can be pleasing unless it is a work of love [en Kjerlighedens Gjerning].”¹⁵ The locution Kjerlighedsgerninger suggests that prior to engaging in action we are able to make a list of specific kinds of actions so that to perform an action belonging to one of the types listed would be to perform a work of love. But every action should be a work of love. This radical demand concerns how the work is done: “There is no work, not one single one, not even the best, about which we unconditionally dare to say: The one who does this unconditionally demonstrates love by it. It depends on how the work is done.”¹⁶ Kierkegaard’s Works of Love can be read as a second ethics in the sense that it focuses on the ethics implied in the question of how we should do what we ought to do. The implicit claim is that we can do what is professed to be works of love in ways that change the ethical meaning of our doing. Thus, acts of benevolence which make themselves visible as acts of benevolence tend to be without charity. This critical insight goes into Løgstrup’s reformulation of the ethical demand.

   

Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, p. 44 / Løgstrup, Den etiske fordring, p. 56. Ibid., p. 45 / p. 57. SKS 9, 12 / WL, 4. SKS 9, 21 / WL, 13.

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The radical ethical demand accentuates the position of the subject. The demand requires the addressee to take a position as the one being addressed. If ethics is not only about what we ought to do, but implies a second question, how we do what we ought to do, we are to account not only for what we have chosen to do, but also for the choices implied in how we have done what we have chosen to do. The normativity of the demand does not amount to the subject taking a normative stance. Rather, it places the subject in the position to respond, to act as a subject, finding out what the demand implies. It even requires the subject to change her position – as the one to respond. Instead of looking “into” the world to find an answer to the question of what the ethical demand means, we, as subjects of the demand, should realize that the ethical is a matter of how we see when looking “into” the world. Although the normative binding opens up subjectivity in the sense that the single individual being addressed by the demand is to find out for herself what the demand implies, Løgstrup tends to reduce the subject position to the alternative: either we lose ourselves in selfless actions or our selfhood gets in the way between the other and our action. But if we move in this alternative, we cannot account for what it is to be the one addressed. That would include the position of facing the alternative: either acting selflessly or letting ourselves get in the way between the other and our action. The implied subject position is not captured by the alternative itself. If we would argue that we lose ourselves as subjects in the ethical situation, in what sense is this something we do: lose ourselves as subjects? We are still to account for what we do to the other when acting selflessly – which leaves us with the open question whether our action is in fact selfless. By contrast, in Levinas, as in Kierkegaard, the addressee becomes a subject in being called upon to respond. Both determine subjectivity as responsibility. Taking subjectivity into the account of ethical normativity does not mean that normativity comes from the subject. On the contrary, the subject is subject as addressed. There is autonomy, but only to respond in being called upon. We may argue that subjectivity is also inscribed in ethical normativity in the following sense. When we try to formulate or establish what the demand says, there is a second question: “And how is that the ethical demand?” Or: “How do we respond to this as a demand?” We have to voice and formulate the demand, but the demand exceeds our formulations of the demand. We can question what it means that the demand is… (as we formulate it). And we can be questioned in acting on formulations of the demand. Thus, ethical normativity implies that the one asking (what does the ethical demand mean?) can herself be questioned. Again, this has to do with the position of the subject. It is not

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only a position taken but also a position of being addressed. The addressee of the ethical demand is called to respond and can be questioned in responding.

4 For the Sake of the Other – “Before” the Other The ethical demand singularizes. Being addressed, each of us is this single individual, to use Kierkegaard’s term. This implies that one cannot respond for the other. Yet the ethical demand is not about being addressed. It concerns oneself in that it redirects oneself towards the other. The ethical demand is, Løgstrup claims, that everything which the single individual says and does shall be said and done “for the sake of him or her whose life is in his hand.”¹⁷ Could we say that, being situated “before” or in front of the other, we are placed under the ethical demand? Does this provide an answer to the question: where does the normative force to the duty, demand, or appeal come from? Both in Kierkegaard (Works of Love) and in Levinas (Totality and Infinity),¹⁸ the weight of the ethical lies in being placed “before” the other. This is explicit in Levinas’ notion of the face of the other, which implies “face-to-face,” being situated in front of the other. Is Kierkegaard’s insistence on the neighbor a way of speaking of the face of the other in Levinas’ sense? Maybe indirectly, in so far as the other as my neighbor is the other given to me before I take the other to be my neighbor. But the question goes both ways. When Levinas insists on the face of the other, is this a way of speaking of the neighbor? What is implied in the notion of the neighbor is both proximity (which Levinas reclaims in Otherwise than Being)¹⁹ and distance (which he already emphasizes in Totality and Infinity). Being situated in front of the other, I do not come close to the other so as to grasp or understand her. On the contrary, it implies that the other is beyond my grasp. Insofar as the ethical demand is a demand to see the other, it begins with the other. Although it concerns me as the one seeing, it does not come from me. But this does not mean that the demand comes from the other in the sense that it is voiced by the other, or at least, it need not be. That the demand is not – or at least need not be – the demand of the other is emphasized in Løgstrup and Kierkegaard (and less in Levinas). Kierkegaard would share Løgstrup’s claim in the long quote above that the ethical demand requires the single individual to re Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, p. 44 / Løgstrup, Den etiske fordring, p. 56.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969.  Emmanuel Levinas Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1998.

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spond on her own. Being situated ethically “before” the other (both in the sense of “in front of” and “on our own,” before the other might tell us what this means), we face the question of the ethical demand. We are to find out what the demand means. However, it is important to distinguish between being situated in front of (before) the other and being situated in relation to the other. The latter implies that one can place oneself in the relation between oneself and the other. In contrast, the ethical weight in being situated “before” the other comes to the fore in a reversal of perspective that is not an exchange of perspectives: oneself becoming the neighbor’s neighbor (Kierkegaard)²⁰ or questioned (Levinas). Does this mean that the alterity of the other is the source of ethical normativity? The alterity of the other questions me, but does it also command me? If the face commands me, is it the other commanding me? If we would claim that, the appeal coming from the face of the other would simply be the appeal made by the other. This would run counter to the infinity implied in the face of the other. What does it mean that the commandment to love your neighbor is divine, according to Kierkegaard? It is given, or “it is written,” but what does that imply? The critical point is that it is not something we humans “invent;” rather, the commandment turns our “conceptions and ideas upside down” and requires us to change our vision – in order to see the other.²¹ This does not exclude autonomy in the sense that we, as the addressees of the commandment, have to respond for ourselves and to determine on our own what the commandment requires us to do. How does the reference to God then come into the picture? God as “the middle term” means to see the other as neighbor.²² In relating to God, one is directed towards the other. This comes to the fore especially in a discourse in Works of Love entitled “Our Duty to Love the People We See.”²³ Let me just quote one passage: “The matter is quite simple. A person should begin with loving the unseen, God, because then he himself will learn what it is to love. But that he actually loves the unseen will be known by his loving the brother he sees.”²⁴ Thus, according to Kierkegaard too, it is in relation to the neighbor that the relation to God is decided or determined, to quote Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand. ²⁵ However, Løgstrup appears to move one step further. The ethical de-

 SKS 9, 29 – 30 / WL, 22.  SKS 9, 31– 33 / WL, 24– 25.  SKS 9, 111 / WL, 107.  This discourse shows how misleading Løgstrup’s critique of Works of Love is (e. g., “Polemical Epilogue” in Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand).  SKS 9, 161 / WL, 160.  Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, p. 4 / Løgstrup, Den etiske fordring, p. 12.

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mand is not only located in, but also inherent to, the relation to the neighbor. But why is there a normative force in the fact that the other is given over to me? What is “the fact” that Løgstrup invokes? Why is it linked to trust? In trusting, one is vulnerable. But the other is also given over to me when distrusting me, as Løgstrup himself notes.²⁶ The fact which is the source of the silent demand is the interdependency.²⁷ In what we are doing, we interfere into how the other is situated. We belong to the world of the other. If it is to be ethical, interdependency is asymmetrical in the sense that it is first and foremost to be thought of from the perspective of the other who is affected by what we do. What then does it mean that the demand inheres in the encounter between persons, as is said in the long quote from The Ethical Demand above? In a Levinasian perspective, claiming that the ethical demand is inherent in the relation would be too ontological an approach or too much a matter of knowing. Speaking of the fact of interdependency as source of the demand seems to presuppose a subject placed at a distance, which is then suspended when we, the subject, recognize that we are part of the world of the other. But must we not place ourselves outside of the ethical relation in order to see its significance? Maybe, but the question would still be whether we can account for what it is to be the addressee of the demand if we understand the ethical in terms of the relation between oneself and the other. Levinas’ point would be that, in the ethical relation, we are ourselves situated “before” the other. This is where we begin. Being situated “before” the other is not the same as the other being given over to me in trust. Clearly, “the face” implies that the other is exposed or given over to me, but it also situates me. It places me in the accusative, as the addressee of the demand and as the one being questioned by the alterity of the other. Placing us in the accusative is how the ethical demand seizes or takes hold of us in relations to others and the world more or less shared.

5 Subjectivity of the Accusative Where does this leave us with the question of normativity and subjectivity? The ethical demand opens up subjectivity. It requires us to determine ourselves – in seeing the other, in finding out what we should do “for the sake of the other.” As subjects, determining ourselves, we are already ethically determined. But why must we then remind ourselves that we are subjected to the demand? Reminding

 Ibid., p. 45 / pp. 56 – 57.  Ibid., p. 8 / p. 17.

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ourselves should turn us against ourselves. It is not simply reminding ourselves of what is important in determining ourselves – it is also a countermove against us being blind to what we are ourselves doing. Although we know that we are the subject of our own actions, we can, as it were, disconnect ourselves from our actions. The claim that human subjectivity is ethically situated – that the ethical singularizes – harbors a critical insight. Realizing that we are the addressees of the demand implies that we are already in the accusative, as Levinas puts it.²⁸ Being in the accusative is to be ethically situated, before situating oneself. Yet, it is to be situated as the one having to respond. We are placed in the accusative – as subjects. This must be read both ways. We are not first in the nominative and then may transport ourselves into the accusative. Yet we find ourselves in the accusative only as subjects who could – and would – take ourselves to be in the nominative. Finding ourselves in the accusative, we are contradicted in our ways of taking ourselves in the nominative. Being situated in the accusative means both that we can be accused (before accepting this) and that we are the addressees of the appeal or the ethical demand (before accepting that this is so). Being accused and being addressed, we are turned towards ourselves but in being at the same time turned towards others. When Levinas claims that subjectivity “is” responsibility, the point is, I think, that responsibility as taking oneself to be responsible is not what makes us responsible. It is the other way round. Taking oneself to be responsible is possible because we already are responsible in the sense of being situated “before” the other so as to be called to respond for ourselves. Yet, we are not simply in the accusative. Rather, ethics is also about coming to realize what the ethical means. This move is more explicit in Kierkegaard than in Levinas (and Løgstrup). Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety can be read as an account of coming to self-consciousness in finding oneself in the accusative. The self-disclosure in anxiety is about discovering oneself as the one to be accounted for in finding oneself guilty. When ethics singularizes, singularity itself is normatively determined. It is about becoming this single individual. The normativity implied, however, points back to the one who one already is. In the accusative, being the addressee, one is thrown back upon oneself, facing the task of assuming oneself. “Becoming” the single individual does not mean becoming another than one already is. The direction of “becoming” is turned around. It is to “become” who one is, this individual, in taking oneself upon oneself. Respon For example: “In responsibility for another subjectivity is only this unlimited passivity of an accusative which does not issue out of a declension it would have undergone starting with the nominative…Everything is from the start in the accusative” (Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 112).

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sibility then is not just to be in the accusative but to respond in the accusative. “Becoming” this single individual for oneself changes something. One comes to see differently, in responding to the demand. The Kierkegaardian formula “this single individual as this single individual” is telling. It both indicates that singularity is normatively determined (it is about realizing oneself to be this single individual) and points back to the fact of being already this single individual. Singularity in the normative sense means to answer for oneself as this single individual. What is brought out more clearly in Levinas than in Kierkegaard is the implication that we answer for ourselves “before” the other. While Kierkegaard accentuates that I am ethically situated as the one to respond, to the point of being turned into a “you” (“You shall”), Levinas emphasizes that I am to respond as the one called upon in face of the other. While Levinas accentuates that the subject begins in the accusative, Kierkegaard says more about finding oneself in the accusative – and has more to say about the normativity implied in realizing oneself to be this singular individual called upon. Yet the question still is whether they unfold the subjectivity of being in the accusative.

6 Subjectivity and the Nature of Normativity What is at issue when we discuss the ethical demand in Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas? Taking our point of departure in their various accounts, what is the challenge we face when we seek to answer the question: what is the ethical in the ethical demand? I have argued that we should focus on the subject position implied in ethical normativity. In concluding, let me rephrase my argument. All three – Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas – accentuate the binding character of the ethical. Yet, although the ethical binds us – this is what makes it ethical – it does not simply do so. If it did, there would be no ethical demand. In an important sense, then, ethical binding is up to us. We are to respond and to bind ourselves, and to decide what should bind us. It even makes sense to ask whether we let ourselves be bound by the ethical demand. The challenge then is to account for the nature of normativity both in the sense of a binding that precedes our binding and in the sense that we can not only fail to fulfill the demand but also let ourselves be unbound by the demand. The question about the nature of normativity may go together with the question about the source of normativity. An answer to both questions could be that normativity comes from the fact that we humans can bind and commit ourselves, so that normativity becomes a matter of what matters to us. The counterargument would be: if normativity is seen as a matter of what matters to us, and if

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this is taken in the sense of interests and priorities, it does not really bind us, as we can let ourselves off, and it is therefore not ethical. In a critical sense, ethical normativity cannot be reduced to the subjectivity implied. Rather, it implies some sort of transcendence of subjectivity. Ethically, we are determined beyond, and maybe against, ourselves. Still, if ethical normativity points to us who are to respond, it seems to go to the core of what we are. We are ourselves – also in answering for ourselves. Being the one to answer for oneself is part of what it means to be oneself. Normativity belongs to us, to being what we are: humans. It is not something added. How could it be if we are to respond for ourselves? Yet it also appears to be something we add or bring into the picture. The world is as it is, we are as we are, and having recognized that, we introduce into the world ideas about how the world and we should be. Normativity then is something we add to knowing what is the case. But if it were just like that, it would be subjective as a matter of evaluation, choice, and interpretation. To a large extent, this conception forms our current culture. And it may seem quite obvious that normativity is about us evaluating. But that would again point back to us. We are, it appears, beings that evaluate. Normativity would still belong to us – as the beings we are. If we were to claim that normativity is merely subjective, we would still be left with the problem of accounting for subjectivity. Is subjectivity not what we are, our nature? We can only come to think that it is not if we take subjectivity to mean that we as subjects go beyond nature, but this presupposes that nature is what we take to be nature: nature as we observe it, before us. In contrast, if nature means the specificity of something (in German: Eigenart), we need the notion of subjectivity in order to understand human nature.²⁹ And accounting for human nature then implies accounting for the nature of normativity. When Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Løgstrup emphasize that the ethical binds us, they argue, implicitly or explicitly, against the claim that subjectivity is the source of normativity. This is implied in their ways of conceiving the ethical in terms of duty, appeal, and demand. We do not first have to place ourselves under the ethical demand. Rather, we discover ourselves being committed.³⁰

 See also Arne Grøn, “Homo subiectus. Zur zweideutigen Subjektivität des Menschen,” in Seinkönnen: Der Mensch zwischen Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, pp. 19 – 33.  Neither does it help to move from subjectivity to intersubjectivity as the source of ethical normativity. See the argument by Hans Fink: “The perspective of the ethical demand is radically altrocentric yet incompatible with a dialogical or second-personal perspective” (Hans Fink, “Løgstrup’s Point: The Complementarity between the Ethical Demand and All Other Moral De-

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This, however, leaves us with the task of accounting for the subject position implied in ethical normativity. Especially two points are of critical importance here: (1) the intricacy of passivity and activity, and (2) the negative possibility implied in normativity. a. How do activity and passivity come into play in the ethical demand? Obviously, the demand is directed to us as agents. It calls us “out of” passivity, but it does so in binding us. We are to see ourselves as subjected to the demand. This passivity of being placed in the position to respond is not simply absorbed in, but rather determines and qualifies, the activity of responding in taking a position. We respond to the demand in binding or committing ourselves. The demand requires us to determine ourselves. But determining ourselves implies that we let ourselves be determined. The passivity implied in self-determination has to do with normativity. The normative force of the demand does not come from the fact that we can commit ourselves. On the contrary, committing ourselves involves us in a deeper, temporal sense: we bind or commit ourselves only if we let ourselves be committed, and we “do” that only if we “are,” in the time to come, committed by what we have committed ourselves to. This also indicates the passivity implied in responsibility. Committing ourselves, we are committed by ourselves: we are to respond for what we do. Could we not understand being committed as the outcome of committing oneself? Do we not make ourselves committed? Is subjectivity – self-determination – not in this sense the source of normativity? Yet, how would we be situated if we could take ourselves to be the source of our being committed? If we take ourselves to be committed because we commit ourselves, our commitment would change. It would be a matter of whether we choose to be committed and what we choose to be committed by. But do we choose to be committed? In a sense, yes, but only indirectly: we can choose to be committed only by committing ourselves. It makes sense to speak of choosing to be committed only because being committed is implied in committing ourselves. Being committed is not a specific act we can perform. Rather, it is a matter of how we commit ourselves: are we committed in committing ourselves? This means that subjectivity is not the source of normativity precisely because normativity concerns the subject. The ethical demand redirects the subject. Assigned as this single individual, one is both turned towards and against oneself in being directed towards the other. Normativity only “belongs to us” in that we are addressed and can be drawn, and draw ourselves, into question. But this

mands,” in What is Ethically Demanded, ed. by Hans Fink and Robert Stern, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2017, p. 55).

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also implies that the passivity of being placed in the position of the accusative concerns us as subjects. In sum, an account of the ethical in the ethical demand must also give an account of subjectivity as intertwinement of activity and passivity. Normativity concerns us as agents but it does so in binding us, that is, placing us in the position to respond. The passivity of being placed in this position also qualifies our response. Committing ourselves is a matter of letting ourselves be committed, but this “letting be” is a matter of what we do: how do we carry our commitments? Committing ourselves (activity) thus implies being committed (passivity): it is a matter of how we commit ourselves – with the possibility of actually not doing so. Thus, in seeking to understand the subjectivity implied in the nature of normativity, the challenge is to hold together being the subject of the demand (normativity being up to us) and being subjected to the demand (normativity in the sense of normative binding on us). b. Obviously, normativity implies that it is possible not to fulfill the demand. Despite our efforts we may fail. Being subjected to the demand, we may even seek to ignore it. However, the various negative possibilities (not fulfilling, failing, ignoring) seem to leave the ethical demand as it is. What I would suggest is to consider our possibility of not binding us as intrinsic to the normative character of the ethical demand. The nature of normativity is its binding character, but the binding implied in normativity opens up the question whether we in fact bind ourselves. The “in fact” question has to do with what it is to respond to the demand. It involves the temporal perspective in being bound (committed) in binding us. It remains to be seen, in the time to come, whether we in fact bind ourselves. Likewise, the experience of failing to do what we ourselves recognize we should is crucial in coming to understand what it is to be what we are: beings that can be called to respond and be called into question, even questioning ourselves. Responsibility implies that we are to carry the weight of failing. Realizing what it is to fail is part of understanding what it means to be situated as both subjected to and the subject of the ethical demand. The normative binding is up to us not in the sense that we are first to decide that we are bound by the ethical demand; on the contrary, it is up to us because we can fail. As the addressees of the demand, we are not simply committed but can fail to do what we have committed ourselves to, and can even seek to avoid being committed. The deep question then is what it means to be already committed before committing ourselves when we can not only fail to respond to the demand, but even ignore our being committed.

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This intensified negative possibility reminds us of the danger which the ethicist confronts in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: that of losing the sense of the ethical. This could lead us to think that the ethical begins with us, choosing to be ethical. But we can choose ourselves only indirectly, through what we do. The demand of choosing oneself presupposes that we are already subjected to an ethical demand. We may, however, have some other good reasons for thinking that normativity begins with us, taking an ethical stance. First, we are to find out for ourselves what we should do. We are “demanded” not only by the ethical demand but also by authorities claiming to give voice to the demand. Resisting such claims, finding out for ourselves what the demand is, we may come to think that the demand begins with us. In a sense, it does. We are to respond for ourselves. Yet it does not begin with us in the sense that we “construct” the demand. On the contrary, finding out for ourselves what the demand is presupposes again that there is an ethical demand. What is meant here by “is”? I take it to mean that we are placed in the position of being subjected, as subjects, to the demand. It is in this position – the accusative – that we are to take our position. Second, as Sartre insisted, to be responsible is to bear the weight of what we do, not having authorities to carry the weight for us. Also in that sense, normativity begins with us. But again, this does not turn us into the source of our own commitments. Rather, the weight to carry in responding for ourselves indicates that we are bound by ourselves before choosing to be so. Therefore, choosing oneself is, also in the ethicist’s account, a matter of assuming responsibility for oneself. How, then, does negativity come into the picture in accounting for the ethical in the ethical demand? Situating ourselves, taking a position, we are already situated: we always come too late (Levinas) and have already wasted some time (Kierkegaard). And according to Løgstrup we even come too late in being aware of the demand as a demand. Ethical normativity implies that one should remind oneself of one’s position – the situation in which one is to take a position. It is not a position already justified. Taking it as a justified position would make us blind to what we have already done and are doing. This “already” is easily absorbed into a second “already”: we are already addressed by the ethical demand before placing ourselves under the demand. But this second “already” does not remove the first one. We are called to respond precisely as those who can fail – and know what it means to fail.

Chapter 30 Subjectivity, Interiority, and Exteriority: Kierkegaard and Levinas 1 In Defense of Subjectivity? How are we to understand subjectivity in terms of interiority and exteriority? This is the question I would like to address in this essay. Let me briefly explain what I have in mind. It seems to go without saying that interiority is subjective in a sense in which exteriority is not. In fact, there is a long tradition of defining subjectivity in terms of interiority. Philosophies in the 20th century, however, often appear to take this definition as a negative backdrop for claiming that subjectivity is “out there” in the world. But how is subjectivity “out there” subjectivity? When we take the definition of subjectivity as negative backdrop (or contrast), we easily come to define subjectivity as relational, thereby not asking the critical question: as relational, how is it subjectivity? If the idea is that it does not make sense to speak of the inner and the outer if they are not intertwined, in what sense then should we still speak of the inner and the outer (in order to speak of their intertwinement)? These questions indicate that we should be cautious in dealing with the notions of interiority and exteriority. Perhaps the point lies in the very complication in dealing with them. If that is the case, the question I began asking should be reformulated. Interiority and exteriority are not just aspects of subjectivity. Rather, subjectivity is itself a matter of interiority and exteriority. That is, instead of defining subjectivity in terms of interiority and exteriority, we should ask: what is subjectivity implied in interiority and exteriority? To put it most briefly, subjectivity is subjectivity in interiority and exteriority. The context for my discussion will be Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas. The former seems to emphasize interiority, the latter exteriority. Realizing how complex the issue is in their respective works can help us to come to a better understanding of subjectivity. Thus, my concern here is not, for example, whether Levinas’ critique of Kierkegaard is misleading or not. I think it is quite obvious that it is. Still, his critique might have to do with the complexity of the issue in question. My point of departure is that both thinkers set out to defend subjectivity. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript is one long sustained defense of subjectivity, and Levinas’ Totality and Infinity “does present itself as a defense

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of subjectivity.”¹ Both works also show the difficulty in defending subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Postscript points to the problematic character of subjectivity. Levinas’ Totality and Infinity apprehends subjectivity “as founded in the idea of infinity.”² In Otherwise than Being, the otherness has to do with seeing in subjectivity (“in the substantiality of the subject”) the substitution for the other.³ This implies a “despite oneself.”⁴ Two questions immediately impose themselves upon us. First, why is it necessary to defend subjectivity? The second question follows: defending subjectivity against what? Both questions obviously concern subjectivity (as in need of defense), but they also point to subjectivity as being at issue. Misunderstanding and even de-figuring subjectivity is a possibility of subjectivity. This means that the enemy is within. Understanding subjectivity also implies: subjectivity as understanding or misunderstanding subjectivity. There is a further implication in defending subjectivity, which should be made explicit from the start. Kierkegaard’s defense of subjectivity is often misread as implying some sort of subjectivism or acosmism. In contrast, my claim is that subjectivity is a problematic notion, even for Kierkegaard: subjectivity implies having subjectivity – being a subject – as a problem. Whether or not Kierkegaard should be called a social thinker depends on clarifying what it means to focus on the social. As humans we are interdependent. We are so to the extent that the question is whether we ever come to be “the singular” (den Enkelte), answering for ourselves. Taken in this normative sense, the singular individual is not Kierkegaard’s starting point. The notion of becoming the singular presupposes that we already see ourselves through others seeing us. We take ourselves to be what we are in the eyes of others. Pointing to the category of the singular then is not to argue against the social dimension being intrinsic to human existence. On the contrary, it is to point to the character of this dimension and to problems of human sociality. If we focus on how we are interdependent, we encounter subjectivity in that we are already involved in understanding others and ourselves. We only come to see ourselves through others, but if we take ourselves to be what we are in seeing ourselves through others, we are nevertheless the ones see-

 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969, p. 26 / Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité, Paris: Le Livre de Poche 1991, p. 11.  Ibid.  Emmanuel Levinas Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1998, pp. xlvii-xlviii / Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, Paris: Le Livre de Poche 1990, p. 10.  Ibid., pp. 51– 53 / pp. 86 – 89.

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ing others seeing us. Thus, we can suddenly come to realize that others do not see us as we thought they did. This offers us the possibility of coming to realize that we already are seeing others seeing us. In what sense then can Kierkegaard be taken as a social thinker? Let me give an example. In reading Works of Love, we – the readers – are placed in a social world of humans where we (humans) see and are being seen. This is a world in which we can, and easily do, without further ado, take differences as occasions to judge others (or each other). Thus, human existence is inherently social, but the social dimension is also a matter of being human. In interpreting Works of Love, I have argued for an ethics of vision.⁵ An ethics of vision has to do with the in-visible, with limits of vision (otherwise there would be no ethics of vision), and in the ethics of vision, the issue of interiority and exteriority comes into play. But let me begin by re-opening the issue of interiority, taking my point of departure in Kierkegaard. This re-opening will have implications for the whole discussion.

2 Subjectivity as Interiority As indicated, an alternative between subjectivity and intersubjectivity would not make sense because subjectivity is already at play in inter-subjectivity. Likewise, defining subjectivity as interiority would imply a notion of exteriority. This is reflected in the context of our discussion. Interiority and exteriority are not to be distributed to Kierkegaard and Levinas respectively. In Kierkegaard, defining subjectivity in terms of interiority already turns subjectivity into an open question. Subjectivity becomes a matter of relating to the other. I am not going to interpret Kierkegaard in detail, but will take a more systematic approach. Thus, I will address two connected questions that are not made explicit in Kierkegaard. First, what role does the question of truth play in his apparent definition of subjectivity as interiority, and second, what happens when subjectivity is taken as interiority? What is interiority? If we focus on interiority, it seems to escape our grasp. In itself, it appears enigmatic. If interiority means that we turn inside as it were, interiority depends on what we are turning away from. It is interiority in contrast, in relating to the world. This already suggests that interiority is interiority in relating to the world. Let us take this as a lead, together with the idea of interiority as a movement, and now turn to Kierkegaard’s ways of dealing with interiority.

 Arne Grøn, “Ethics of Vision,” Chapter 24 in this volume.

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Let us first consider what appears to be a definition of subjectivity in terms of interiority. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard has Johannes Climacus stating that subjectivity is the truth.⁶ How should we interpret this claim? On a closer reading, it does not offer a straightforward definition. If subjectivity is the truth, how are we to understand it as subjectivity? Claiming that subjectivity is the truth puts demands on subjectivity. It is itself turned into a matter of truth. If truth is to count as truth for us it must determine us in our ways of relating to the world, to others, and to ourselves. “Truth for us” does not turn truth into a matter of our choice. Rather, when Johannes Climacus states that subjectivity is the truth, subjectivity is in question. The subject is given to itself and it is given to itself as a task. Subjectivity becomes a matter of appropriation, but the very task of appropriating oneself implies that we are not in possession of ourselves. Although subjectivity is to determine oneself, we are not free to decide who we are. If we were, we would still encounter ourselves as the ones deciding who we are. Subjectivity is already implied in the question of truth: we are asking the question, but the question we are asking calls ourselves into question. If subjectivity were not in question, it would not be interiority. As interiority, subjectivity becomes a matter of subjectivity: appropriation. Therefore the apparent definition of subjectivity as the truth turns out to define subjectivity in problematic terms of interiority and appropriation. What does this mean for understanding subjectivity? First, subjectivity only means to determine ourselves if we are given to ourselves. Subjectivity is implied in how we are given to ourselves. We are to answer for ourselves, that is, for what we are doing. Our actions not only affect others, but also ourselves. We are what we do, and yet we can distance ourselves from our own doings. Thus, we are given to ourselves so as to make what we do into our own (appropriation). This is a matter of interiority: taking what we have done and what we are doing upon ourselves. We can ignore ourselves in acting and thinking, although we are acting and thinking. This turns subjectivity into a question of interiority and appropriation. Second, the further implication is that interiority is about the subject: acting, suffering and understanding, or rather, understanding oneself in acting and suffering. It is interiority of self-understanding. It is however self-understanding in self-determination: it is to answer for oneself in making up one’s mind. This im-

 SKS 7, 187– 189 / CUP1, 204– 206; for a detailed interpretation and discussion of this passage, see Arne Grøn, “Phänomenologie der Subjektivität. Überlegungen zu Kierkegaards Abhandlung über die menschliche Freiheit,” Chapter 21 in this volume.

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plies coming to know one’s own mind. In acting, we are not simply executing our will, but are ourselves involved in acting so that we also must learn what we are up to in what we are doing. Interiority thus becomes appropriation in the sense of answering for ourselves in coming to understand ourselves in suffering, willing, and acting. To sum up these first two points, subjectivity defined in terms of interiority and appropriation is subjectivity being in question. Third, this way of defining subjectivity in terms of interiority has what may appear to be a surprising consequence. Interiority is interiority in relation to others in the sense that it is interiority in understanding ourselves in acting towards others. I think that this can be argued from Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety. ⁷ Furthermore, it is interiority in understanding others in that we only come to understand others when we take ourselves into account – as the ones understanding others. This can be argued both from the Postscript (interpreting the chapter on actual subjectivity, ethical subjectivity)⁸ and from Works of Love. In understanding others, we ourselves are at play. We are doing something to the other. We are placing the other in a position towards us. This means that interiority is not an inner realm. If it were, it would be an inner realm for oneself. It would be something we took as an inner realm. If we in fact do take interiority as an inner realm, the question would be what we are thereby doing. We might for example be ignoring what we are doing in understanding and acting. That does not exclude the observation that interiority can be taken as an inner retreat, but it is so in relating to others: we take retreat. Fourth, we must distinguish between different perspectives of interiority. It is not only one’s own, but also the interiority of the other. Our own interiority is a matter of understanding ourselves in what we are doing in relation to others. It is movement, and it is so in two senses. First, interiority is the way I take myself in relating to others, in understanding and acting (interiority of understanding). Second, there is a movement in interiority. This can be brought out if we return to our context of discussion. To his sentence “Subjectivity is the truth” Johannes Climacus in the Postscript adds a second one: “Subjectivity is the untruth.” What is remarkable is not only this sentence being added, but how this is done. Climacus introduces his second sentence asking: is there a more inward, more interior,

 The section on “Freedom Lost Pneumatically” (SKS 4, 437– 453 / CA, 137– 154) deals with interiority (inwardness) and truth in a negative approach (how freedom is lost, and what it shows about being human). We should read the section together with the section on interiority and (un) truth in the Postscript. For now, we only need to make a note of how interiority is linked to action and understanding: Interiority (inwardness) “can be attained only by and in action” (SKS 4, 439 / CA, 138), and “inwardness is an understanding” (SKS 4, 442 / CA, 142).  SKS 7, 274– 328 / CUP1, 301– 360.

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expression for subjectivity as the truth? He answers: yes, if this sentence – i. e., subjectivity is the truth – begins in this way: “Subjectivity is the untruth.”⁹ Thus, the second sentence does not replace the first one. Rather, it intensifies the claim of interiority made in the first. Interiority is not only a movement. There is a movement in or into interiority. This means that interiority is not to turn inside or take an inner retreat, but to be thrown back upon oneself. In interiority, we are facing ourselves. As already pointed out in Philosophical Fragments, being in untruth means to be outside oneself in the sense that one does not have the truth within oneself. This is, according to Climacus, an intensification of subjectivity as interiority. The movement goes deeper inwards, but it does so in our being displaced or de-centered. The intensification thus implies exteriority in a double sense. First, interiority is, as indicated, interiority in relating to others. In this sense, it is already, in itself, a matter of exteriority. Interiority is not an inner realm. Rather, it is a space in which we move in relating to others, in understanding ourselves in acting towards others. Second, interiority is a movement, it is even a movement “inwards” or into interiority, and precisely this movement means that we are placed outside ourselves. In this intensified mode, interiority is related to exteriority in the sense of radical alterity: as the exteriority of another beyond our grasp, another that we cannot take into our horizon or integrate into our worldview. In Climacus, the paradoxical movement into interiority reflects God’s radical otherness that is revealed to humans in God’s paradoxical move towards humans. This double intensification through exteriority points to interiority as self-relation.

3 Interiority as Self-Relation If interiority means turning inside, it implies relating to the world. Interiority is not simply an inner realm, but can be taken as such. If we take interiority as an inner realm, we are ourselves outside. We can move “inside” as it were, and we can place ourselves “inside” ourselves. That is, interiority is redoubled. What does this show about interiority? First, interiority is already at play when we deal with interiority in terms of turning inside or taking it as an inner realm. The question is: how does the idea of interiority function? What does it mean to us? This is already a matter of understanding and thus interiority. Second, in-

 SKS 7, 189 / CUP1, 207.

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teriority is self-relational. It is interiority in understanding ourselves in relating to others and the world. In this, we can come to realize what we are ourselves doing in relating to others. We encounter ourselves and are thrown back upon ourselves. But we are only thrown back upon ourselves as selves. We are already related to ourselves in relating to others and the world. Interiority is about being self-related in relating. If interiority is taken as an inner realm, it seems to imply that within ourselves we are at home. We are ourselves, that is: we are in possession of ourselves. Interiority in Kierkegaard, however, is reversed. It is indeed a matter of who we are, but this implies that we are ourselves questioned. Are we as we take ourselves to be? Interiority harbors the question of truth, in which we are ourselves in question. “In interiority,” we are not in possession of ourselves, but are to appropriate ourselves in the sense of taking over what we are in what we are doing. What is to be appropriated, I would claim, is both the fact that we are the ones doing what we are doing and the ways in which we are ambiguous in our doings. This intensifies the insight that interiority is interiority in understanding and action. We are given to ourselves also in what Kierkegaard in Sickness unto Death diagnoses as forms of despair, that is: in not being ourselves. Self-relation is not established through self-reflection. Rather, self-reflection in coming to terms with ourselves presupposes that we are being related to ourselves. We are subjects in being subjected to ourselves in what we are doing. What we do not only affects others, we are ourselves being affected. Self-relation is not something we first have to establish in turning to ourselves or turning inside. In doing so, we are already being related to ourselves. This is to be seen in phenomena, which are negative in an almost enigmatic manner. If we, e. g., become victims of our own ambitions, we did not set out to make ourselves captives of what we set out to achieve. Neither is it simply an unintended consequence of what we are doing. Rather, we can only change our situation in taking upon ourselves the ways in which we have been taking ourselves (letting ourselves become victims of our own ambitions). Appropriating ourselves therefore must take the form of acknowledging ourselves. According to Kierkegaard, it is even a duty to love oneself. To learn to love oneself in the right way implies that we are given to ourselves as persons to be received.¹⁰ This could be taken in line with the remark made by Levinas that in Kierkegaard’s thought, subjectivity is an inner tension, “a tensing on oneself [une ten-

 SKS 9, 30 / WL, 22.

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sion sur soi].”¹¹ The subject has a secret. The implication seems to be that the subject is turned inwards. We are, however, not just turned inwards, but are ourselves involved in this movement. It is possible to be turned inwards in the sense of becoming self-enclosed, but this has to do with how one relates to oneself in relating to the world. One encloses oneself, yet one becomes self-enclosed. Selfenclosure is a form of self-relating. This however implies a crucial difference between interiority and self-enclosure that is often overlooked.¹² The tension in subjectivity referred to by Levinas is ambiguous. The sense of ambiguities in being human I would take as an argument in favor of Kierkegaard’s approach to subjectivity in terms of interiority.

4 Appropriation and Alterity How could we then reformulate Levinas’ criticism of Kierkegaard? The critical point is whether defining subjectivity as interiority and interiority as appropriation amounts to reducing the exteriority of the other. Is alterity to be appropriated? First, what is to be appropriated is not the other, but oneself: as acting, thinking, feeling and willing. Appropriation is self-appropriation in relating to others. But why are we to appropriate ourselves in the first instance? Because we as humans can ignore ourselves in acting, thinking, feeling and willing, even though we are the ones acting, thinking, feeling and willing. Furthermore, in what we are doing we can lose ourselves in the sense that we become our own captives (for example, in making ourselves into victims). In both cases, we are “out of ourselves.” Otherwise, we would not have to appropriate ourselves. Self-ignoring and self-estrangement, however, presuppose a sense of being “outside oneself” that is intrinsic to selfhood. As selves, we are outside ourselves in relating to others. We have ourselves in relation to others. In Kierkegaardian terms, a self is a self in relating to another, before whom we understand ourselves.¹³ That is why we can take ourselves to be what we think we are in the eyes of others. Thus, we must distinguish between two senses of being “outside oneself.” A self is relational, that is, we are selves in relating to others and to a world more or  Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. by Michael B. Smith, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996, p. 67 / Emmanuel Levinas, Noms Propre, Paris: Le Livre de Poche 1987, pp. 78 – 79.  For example by Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1990.  SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79.

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less shared with others. In relating, we are in relation to others and to a world in between. This being “outside oneself” that is intrinsic to selfhood does not amount to self-estrangement. Rather, in self-estrangement we are “outside ourselves” in such a way that we are in a “misrelation” to ourselves (to use a Kierkegaardian term).¹⁴ The primary form of misrelation is not to acknowledge oneself in what one is doing. What I have called two forms of being “outside oneself’” can be compared to Hegel’s notion of “Entäußerung.” This has a double meaning that points back to Luther. First, “Entäußerung” means to come “out of” oneself in relating to others and the world. Relating is “to relate oneself to.” To put it in more Kierkegaardian terms, a self is in relating outside herself and, in this relation, self-related. We are in relation to what we relate to, depending on how we relate. Second, in coming “out of” oneself we can become estranged to ourselves. We can lose ourselves. Still, we should distinguish between “Entäußerung” and self-estrangement. If self-appropriation is a response to self-estrangement, this self-estrangement in turn presupposes that we are selves in relating to others. Subjectivity is “out there” as subjectivity, in relating oneself to, with the possibility of losing oneself in what one is doing. If appropriation does not amount to integrating alterity, how does it relate to the exteriority of the other? First, the self is itself transformed in the process of appropriation. Even if we were to speak of appropriation as integration, it is not integration into some sort of established interiority of the self. Interiority would itself be at play in integrating what is other to the self. Second, interiority presupposes the exteriority (or rather externality) of the self in relating to the other who is exterior to the self. Instead of alterity being appropriated, alterity shows up within selfhood. Third, it is crucial to distinguish this internal alterity (oneself as another) from the alterity of the other. Let us call the first form externality of the self (being “outside oneself”) and the second exteriority of the other (the other being outside oneself in the sense of beyond one’s grasp). Appropriation takes the form of a double movement in Kierkegaard. The “secret” of this movement is to come to oneself in and through coming outside oneself. It is to lose oneself in order to regain or to become oneself through relating to others. Does this mean that the double movement of coming outside oneself and of appropriating oneself integrates alterity, in the sense that alterity is that through which I come to see myself? I take this to be a critical point in Levinas’ reclaiming of exteriority: the other is exterior in the sense that she is not to be integrated in self-understanding. Exteriority is precisely not a matter of self-un-

 SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.

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derstanding, not even of understanding the other, but only of understanding that the alterity of the other is not relative to me. Such a criticism of the dialectics of alterity and appropriation seems to target both Hegel and Kierkegaard. What could a Kierkegaardian answer be? I think it can take the following direction. Appropriation does not imply integrating the alterity of the other. Rather, as self-appropriation, it can acknowledge the exteriority of the other. Whether it in fact does, has to do with the character of self-appropriation. We might even ask whether self-appropriation is about integrating oneself. As indicated, what is to be appropriated is one’s own ambiguity. Therefore self-appropriation primarily means acknowledging oneself. Appropriation is not integrating alterity, but answering for oneself in relating to others. Interiority is interiority in relating to others. We should add that in this notion of self-appropriation as self-acknowledgement there is a sense of what it is to be human at play. To be human implies both answering for oneself in seeking to account for what one has done or is doing, and recognizing human ambiguity. To be human also involves having this being human as problem – it is not simply to carry out what is human. Self-acknowledgement means acknowledging ourselves as humans, and in this there is a sense of a “common watermark”: that we are equal in having the problem of being human.¹⁵ How should we connect these two claims: acknowledging the exteriority of the other and acknowledging the sense of a “common watermark” in being human? My suggestion is to look once more at the notion of interiority and ask whether the exteriority of the other implies the other’s interiority.

5 Interiority of the Other Thus far, interiority implies the following asymmetry: it is interiority in relating to others, but this means that it is self-appropriation in answering for oneself. Appropriation means acknowledging oneself in what one has done and is doing. Although this involves a sense of human ambiguity, it is about acknowledging one’s own ambiguities. Interiority is about relating to others, and yet we cannot, as it were, relieve ourselves of ourselves in bringing others into the picture. To this first asymmetry corresponds a second. To one’s own exteriority or rather externality, which is precisely not exteriority of the other, corresponds the interiority of the other. I should not see myself in the way in which I should

 SKS 9, 94 / WL, 89.

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see the other (as beyond my grasp). I am not another in the sense in which the other is. How then should we understand the interiority of the other? The point is not just that interiority and exteriority are intertwined. They are so only in calling for a double asymmetry, as just indicated. What does this mean for our understanding of interiority and exteriority? In a sense, we learn what interiority means from relating to others. In the other we encounter interiority: the other is “in herself,” beyond our grasp, herself relating to us. The relation to her does not amount to our relating to her. Nor does it consist in her relating to us also being added. Rather, in our relating to her we encounter her not only as relating to us, but also as withdrawn from us. She is in herself. Interiority of the other is interiority “in itself.” In this context of the exteriority of the other, it makes sense to speak of interiority as an inner realm. In contrast, our own interiority is not an inner realm to us, but a matter of what we are in what we are doing and therefore a matter of taking ourselves – upon ourselves. The other beyond my grasp is the other’s interiority, but this is not the way I should take myself. I am not another as the other is. The sense in which one is “outside” oneself implies: one is to appropriate oneself. This is precisely not the sense in which the other is exterior to oneself. This means that coming to see what interiority means as the other’s interiority (she is in herself beyond our grasp) is itself a matter of interiority (in the sense of self-understanding and selfacknowledgement). It is a matter of how we see. We come to see differently – in seeing the other. Let us take as our lead this observation that interiority differs according to perspective. We can make the point even more strongly. Interiority is itself a matter of perspective and indeed of critical differences in perspective. In a sense, interiority takes place between self-appropriation (self-acknowledgement) and recognizing the interiority of the other. As indicated, it is possible to make sense of interiority as an inner realm in a different perspective from ours: as the interiority of the other, but this is a matter of seeing the other – beyond our grasp. In this sense, interiority does imply being withdrawn from others, but here we are “others.” The other escapes us in our seeing her. Understanding this is a matter of interiority. It is in this double sense that we come to understand what interiority means when we face interiority as the interiority of the other: the other is in her own, out of reach, although we can affect her in her self-understanding. How is this interiority of the other a matter of interiority as our self-understanding? First, it is about understanding what we are doing to the other, already in seeing her. Second, it is about coming to see what it is to be human. Not only is the other given to us, we are also given to ourselves. Yet, we can only receive ourselves (as given

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to us) in acknowledging us. This is the interiority in being given to oneself. We learn what this means in relating to others. Recognizing others (as “in themselves”) is different from acknowledging ourselves (answering for ourselves). In this intensified mode, understanding others is also a matter of self-understanding. The other’s interiority shows us that we are not exterior to ourselves in this sense. We cannot take our interiority as something we should recognize as we recognize the other in her interiority, precisely because our interiority is a matter of self-acknowledgement. Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication is about the exteriority of the other and the interiority of self-understanding. Moreover, the other is exterior as other interiority: as self-relating, in and on her own. However, she is not just in herself, but can in herself be affected by what we do. As other interiority, she is to stand by herself. On my part, this commands interiority in terms of self-understanding in what I am doing. I have to do something to myself. I have to limit myself in order to let the other have space for herself. An ethics of vision would thus be an ethics of restraint. Taken along this line of argument, Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication concerns the interiority of the other, not as something to be integrated in self-understanding, but as demanding us to understand ourselves in seeing the other as withdrawn from us. Yet, Kierkegaard also takes this line of argument to imply that we cannot point to the other addressing us. What is demanded from us is spontaneity in the sense that we are to begin on our own, not waiting for and not being dependent on the other to address us.

6 Interiority in Exteriority At the same time, however, Kierkegaard accentuates the sense of being human (universality) together with the asymmetry implied in seeing the other’s own (her interiority). Let me show this by briefly interpreting the discourse in Works of Love on love not seeking its own. The way love does not seek its own is to seek the other’s own. This is to seek that which would help the other to live the life she is to live: her own. In seeking the other’s own we encounter her interiority: her relation to the life she is to live as her own. In this, in her interiority, she is exterior to us. In order to capture the identity in question here, Kierkegaard talks about distinctiveness (Eiendommelighed): “Love does not seek its own. The truly loving one does not love his own distinctiveness but, in contrast, loves every human being according to his distinctiveness; but ‘his distinctiveness’ is what for him is his own [det for ham Egne]; that is, the loving one does not seek his own;

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quite the opposite, he loves what is the other’s own.”¹⁶ Love sees and affirms what is the other’s own. It recognizes the other in the sense of affirming what it sees: the other. But it does so in a movement beyond or against our ways of seeing and identifying the other: she is seen and affirmed as distinctive from us, in her own, not relative to us. In contrast, the domineering person (den Herskesyge) will not see or affirm the distinctiveness of the other. His way of seeing the other is to demand his own, seeking his own image. Thus, distinctiveness is first and foremost the distinctiveness of the other, that which distinguishes the other from oneself. In this sense, one should not love one’s own distinctiveness. Still, one’s own distinctiveness is also to be affirmed or accepted. A human being receives her or his distinctiveness. This gives a clue to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the duty of self-love. What it means to love oneself in the right way is learnt in loving one’s neighbor. It implies accepting oneself as distinctive from what one wants oneself to be in seeking one’s own. Consequently, Kierkegaard links the difficulty of affirming the distinctiveness of the other together with the difficulty of accepting one’s own distinctiveness: “To have distinctiveness is to believe in the distinctiveness of everyone else.”¹⁷ Thus, the notion of distinctiveness gives a twist to the question of identity. What we are is a matter of what we take ourselves to be, and this has to do with what we take others to be – yet in both cases, there is more to identity than identification (as taking to be). Distinctiveness as identity is a notion of one’s own identity being at stake in relating to others (interiority as self-understanding), but also a notion of the exteriority of the other (her interiority). It is a notion of interiority in exteriority. Talking about the sense of being human, “the common watermark,” requires this double perspective and asymmetry. The discourse on distinctiveness is a discourse on human equality, which is a key motive in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: the equality between humans as humans.

7 Exteriority to Subjectivity We have moved from the question of interiority to that of exteriority, only to rediscover interiority in exteriority. As the first question harbored the second, so exteriority turns out to be a question of interiority. This, however, should not

 SKS 9, 268 / WL, 269.  SKS 9, 270 / WL, 271.

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be taken as if the second question could be translated back into the first. Rather the point is that exteriority intensifies the question of interiority. As mentioned in the beginning, if we focus on interiority, we discover that it implies exteriority (it is interiority in contrast). Likewise, exteriority implies subjectivity. In both cases, however, this is only an opening observation. It opens the questions to be asked: what is exteriority in implying subjectivity? Is it exteriority in relation to subjectivity? Or is the point rather that exteriority is not part of a relation but, on the contrary, limits or even breaks the relation? As exterior to me, the other is not part of my relation to her. This, however, changes my relation to her. I am the one to see, not only that she is not part of my relation to her, but that even if she relates to me, she is exterior to me. Exteriority is exteriority to subjectivity in the sense that it questions us and calls for our response. Thus, “exteriority to” seems to imply both ir-relation and relation. In Levinas, exteriority cannot be part of a dialectics of interiority and exteriority. Exteriority implies transcendence. The infinite is not within, but questions our horizon. The infinite is beyond, not in the sense that we can delimit ourselves, or grasp the limits in relation to which the infinite is beyond. Exteriority is exteriority to subjectivity in the sense that the infinite is in thought as that which thought cannot comprehend. But if we, as Levinas does, emphasize exteriority in contrast to comprehension, we are likely to overlook the subjectivity that is involved: the infinite overflowing thought points to thinking. We are designated as those not comprehending the infinite. We are to understand that the infinite is exterior to us in understanding. Although exteriority is exteriority to subjectivity (in the sense of ir-relation), it is not simply outside of subjectivity. Rather, exteriority makes subjectivity appear as that which makes it possible to speak of exteriority to. In Levinas, exteriority as alterity even calls forth subjectivity as interiority. In itself, subjectivity is called upon. Alterity enters into interiority, as the voice of the other within me. If exteriority was simply exteriority to (outside) subjectivity, this would imply that subjectivity was in itself, unaffected by alterity. If that were the case we would not be able to account for the fact of being affected. The argument put forward by Levinas in Otherwise than Being points to exteriority as not only intensifying interiority (as in Kierkegaard), but as calling forth subjectivity: as affected, commanded and appealed to. The question, however, is whether Levinas can account for the subjectivity implied. Subjectivity is not simply being called forth, commanded and appealed to, but called forth as subjectivity. It might be argued that this is what Levinas seeks to account for in defining subjectivity as responsibility. But here also lies the problem.

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Subjectivity is responsibility and this responsibility “rids the I of its imperialism and egotism,” Levinas writes.¹⁸ This, however, indicates that subjectivity is not responsibility without qualification. It is also subjectivity to be emptied. Yet, Levinas seems to claim that subjectivity dissolves into responsibility. The ethical is emptying the subject, but the subject called to response, the subject responding, is the subject to be emptied. It can respond because it can be called into question. It can be called into question because it can fail to respond. In this sense, subjectivity is not simply responsibility. If it were, it could not respond. However, the sphere of human ambiguities, resonating in our responses, seems to be cut off in Levinas. The ambiguity of human subjectivity is the sphere of interiority as self-acknowledgement. If subjectivity (that can fail to respond and that can resist its being responsible) is left out, responsibility is without subjectivity. If the ethical is read back into the structure of subjectivity, if subjectivity is defined as responsibility, the problematic character of subjectivity is ignored. But the problematic character of subjectivity is the sphere of ethics. Ethics moves in questions, which can call us in question. How are we to understand ourselves in acting towards others? If comprehension is defined as integrating alterity, as in Levinas, how are we to account for this sphere of questions and self-questioning? Levinas seems to reduce, rather than defend, subjectivity. On the one hand, he defines subjectivity as responsibility. On the other, he sees subjectivity as egoism (which is to be emptied of itself). But subjectivity takes place in between, in a sphere of ambiguities in which the character of our lives is at stake. In relation to others, in terms of us doing something to others, it is crucial to discriminate and to understand what we are doing, with the question of ambiguity in mind. The subjectivity implied in talking about “despite oneself” cannot be accounted for if subjectivity is divided into subjectivity as responsibility on the one hand and subjectivity as egoism on the other. As argued above, it is of critical importance to distinguish between the sense in which the other is exterior to me (exteriority) and the sense in which I am “out there” in the world (externality). Exteriority is not exteriority in the world, but alterity breaking into my world. In this sense, exterior to subjectivity implies being exterior to the world I take as mine. Yet, the world is also “in between.” I am “out there” in the world in which the other breaks into. Would we be able to account for ethics without a notion of the world in which the other breaks into? This leads back to the question of ethics and subjectivity. I am also ethically “out there,” questioned in questioning.

 Levinas, Proper Names, p. 73 / Levinas, Noms propres, p. 86.

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8 Despite Ourselves: Ethics and Subjectivity Levinas’ criticism of Kierkegaard deals with ethics and subjectivity. According to Levinas, Kierkegaard seems to ignore the fact that the ethical as “consciousness of a responsibility toward others” singularizes, because he wants to ‘transcend ethics’ in going beyond the ethical stage.¹⁹ Moreover, Levinas argues, “it is not I who resist the system, as Kierkegaard thought; it is the other.”²⁰ Levinas reads Kierkegaard through Fear and Trembling, but even in this context the ethical is not just a stage that we can and should go beyond. First, we need to distinguish between a discussion of the limits of ethics, which concerns ethics, and the claim of moving to a stage beyond ethics. Second, in the margin of Fear and Trembling, in the “Epilogue,” there is a different notion of the ethical at work, the ethical pointing to what is human as a question of the beginning, which no one can go beyond: that oneself is beginning. This line of thought is further developed in the Postscript: the ethical concerns what it is to be human, that is, an existing being. Kierkegaard sees subjectivity as ethically determined. Finally, according to Works of Love, I am to see the other in her interiority, beyond my grasp, reversing my perspective. In Kierkegaard, we encounter both ethical asymmetry and separation, and subjectivity defined in terms of responsibility, but we do so in the context of subjectivity being in question. In both Kierkegaard and Levinas, the ethical singularizes the subject. It implies asymmetry. In relating to others, we are ethically separated from the others we relate to. This can be seen as the “irreducible subjectivity” reclaimed by Levinas.²¹ As I indicated in the beginning, the question is not: what is the relation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or subjectivity and sociality? Rather, subjectivity itself is subjectivity in interiority and exteriority. In relating to others, we are left with ourselves (interiority). Although we are ethically separated from others, the other is not simply on the other side – she is exterior to me, she is in herself, beyond my grasp. In relating to the other, we encounter interiority in exteriority. In separation, interiority and exteriority go together. Would this open the possibility for a notion of the human, “the common watermark”? In the Postscript we find the following suggestion: “[T]he ethical is the eternal drawing of breath and in the midst of solitude the reconciling fellowship

 Ibid., pp. 76 – 77 / p. 90.  Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 40 / Levinas, Totalité et Infini, p. 30.  Levinas, Proper Names, p. 73 / Levinas, Noms propres, p. 85.

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with every human being.”²² Ethical interiority (the ethical singularizing each of us) is a reconciling community – in exteriority. The questions I have raised and discussed concern subjectivity in interiority and exteriority, pointing to the issue of ethics and subjectivity. Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication drives ethical separation and asymmetry to a point where we cannot point to the other addressing us. In contrast, Levinas accentuates that the other addresses me to the point where we cannot unfold the subjectivity being implied in this. This affects the notion of ethics. When Levinas turns ethics into first philosophy, is it ethics we find in Levinas? Ethics is the sphere where we are situated with ourselves, questioned as to what we have done, what we are doing and what to do. We are questioned in questioning. In the sphere of ethics, we are called to respond and we face ourselves with the question of human ambiguity in mind. How do we account for the double emphasis: the other addressing me? In the beginning, I asked two questions: why defend subjectivity, and against whom is subjectivity to be defended? In concluding, I would like to ask the implied third question: defending subjectivity, what does that show about subjectivity? Maybe we should look for the answer in asking once more what subjectivity is in interiority and exteriority. The fact that subjectivity is to be defended against subjectivity points to the problematic character of subjectivity. The subject called to respond can fail to respond and even turn indifferent. The ethical calls us because we can fail. These possibilities inherent in subjectivity are not just the negative backdrop against which the ethical appears. They show the difficulty humans have in being human, and this is where ethics begins without going beyond.

 SKS 7, 141 / CUP1, 152; in Danish: “[D]et Ethiske er det evige Aandedrag og midt i Eensomheden det forsonende Fælledsskab med ethvert Menneske.”

Chapter 31 Time and History “The heaviest burden laid upon a person (because he himself laid the burden of sin upon himself) is in a certain sense time – indeed do we not say that it can be deathly long!”¹ “[T]he history of spirit (and it is precisely the secret of spirit that it has history)”²

1 Prelude Time and history do not figure prominently in the literature on Kierkegaard. They are not seen as key concepts in the same way as, for example, existence, selfhood, the ethical, or Christianity. One may even ask whether time and history are direct themes at all in his writings. Kierkegaard does write about time and history, and in some passages he outlines an account of what time is, but this seems only to serve as a background to other topics. History appears to figure mainly in a sort of negative mode: ethics is to be understood in contrast to “world history”; Christianity is to be not only distinguished, but also separated from “its” history; faith is about becoming contemporaneous, overcoming the time of history. Thus, Kierkegaard’s writings appear not only to downplay or to ignore the significance of history; as readers, we are also encouraged to think “against” history. But thinking against history implicitly places a weight upon time and history. It indicates that time constitutes a danger. This suggests that time and history concern humans in what they are: existing beings relating to themselves in leading a life. If so, the task set by time and history goes into the key issues: what it means to be a human being, and what it is to become a Christian. The aim of this chapter is to show that the implications of Kierkegaard’s key concepts can only be unfolded through the questions of time and history. The claim is that time and history are of critical importance for understanding what is at issue in Kierkegaard’s key concepts as, for example, selfhood, existence, the ethical, faith, and love. My approach will be to move through these concepts in order to show how time and history come into play, and to distinguish between different notions of time and history. Kierkegaard accentuates the moment (Øieblikket) in which a de-

 SKS 9, 136 / WL, 133.  SKS 4, 370 / CA, 66. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-037

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cision – even when it is a decision “against” history – takes place. But what is decided in the moment if not the existence that is ‘in becoming’, between birth and death, carrying the burden of time? This suggests that we should take our point of departure in ways of experiencing time. In Kierkegaard’s texts, there is a rich layer of descriptions of phenomena, which are human ways of being exposed to and relating to time and history. This layer is basic in the sense that it shows what is implied in the key notions to be discussed later.

2 Experiencing Time, Taking Time It is primarily in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses that human ways of experiencing time are described. Edification can only be understood in response to the problems which time presents for human beings. “The person who is expecting something is occupied with the future,” the first of the upbuilding discourses from 1843, “The Expectancy of Faith,” notes.³ The ability to be occupied with the future is “a sign of the nobility of human beings”: “if there were no future, there would be no past, either, and if there were neither future nor past, then a human being would be in bondage like an animal, his head bowed to the earth, his soul captive to the service of the moment.” But the sign of nobility turns out to be ambiguous: “where should we place the limit; how much do we dare to be occupied with the future? The answer is not difficult: only when we have conquered it, only when we are able to return to the present, only then do our lives find meaning in it.”⁴ Thus, Kierkegaard’s first upbuilding discourse already outlines the problem in dealing with the future, the time, which is to come to us (det Tilkommende): how do we return to the present (det Nærværende)? The – perhaps surprising – answer is: only by struggling with oneself. Why? Because the future borrows its power from the one who battles with the future. “When a person struggles with the future, he learns that however strong he is otherwise, there is one enemy that is stronger – himself, there is one enemy he cannot conquer by himself, and that is himself.”⁵ The fact that returning to the present is problematic indicates human beings’ temporality. We are “in” the present and yet the question is how we are present in

 SKS 5, 26 / EUD, 17.  Ibid.  SKS 5, 27 / EUD, 18.

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it. In relating to the future, one relates to oneself, without having first chosen to do so. “[T]he future is indeed light and elusive and more pliable than any clay, and consequently everyone forms it entirely as he himself is formed.”⁶ The open question then is whether it is possible, in dealing with the time to come, to encounter something other than oneself. The discourse answers by pointing to the expectancy of faith: “When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars…By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed.”⁷ Anticipation belongs together with memory. Both pose the problem of returning to the present. One of Kierkegaard’s discourses from 1844, “The Thorn in the Flesh,” deals with the past hunting Paul. We may think that time can help a human being to forget the past, but this “help” requires that the one seeking to forget “lets time go its way.” This means that “time as such will not help a person to forget the past, even though it mitigates the impression.”⁸ But if we decide to let the past behind, we are once again battling with ourselves: will we be free as we decide? In time, there is no security; if one is running in time, “one does not run past time.” What is left behind “will come again as the future with new terror.”⁹ Expecting and remembering are ways of dealing with time that apparently move in opposite directions and yet they are intertwined. This indicates that they are ways of being human. In dealing with the time to come, but also with the past, we face the question: how are we to live our lives? As humans, we are concerned beings. We are expecting and remembering because something matters to us. Concern (Bekymring) is a key notion in Kierkegaard’s approach to what it means to be human. The upbuilding discourses have as their addressee a reader who is concerned. But concern is human in that it displays ambiguity: it can turn into worry. This is the motif of one of the Christian Discourses from 1848: “The Care of Self-Torment.” This discourse indicates the inherent relation of selfhood and temporality in concern or care: “All earthly and worldly care [Bekymring] is basically for the next day. The earthly and worldly care was made possible precisely by this, that the human being was compounded of the temporal and the

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

5, 5, 5, 5,

29 / EUD, 20. 28 / EUD, 19. 327 / EUD, 338. 331 / EUD, 343.

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eternal, became a self, but in his becoming a self, the next day came into existence for him. And basically this is where the battle is fought.”¹⁰ A human being is not first a self and then relates to time, but becomes a self in relating to time. In order to understand how a human being as a self is a temporal being, we must take into account another key notion in Kierkegaard: courage. Again, the upbuilding discourses provide the clue. Humans need to be edified because they can lose courage in carrying the burden of time – the courage to be oneself and to live one’s life. The burden of time implies the task to carry oneself. This means that “time itself is the task.”¹¹ How to comport oneself in time is addressed in another 1844 discourse, “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience.” Since life is uncertain, one desires to preserve what one is concerned about. There is “danger to life and land, to health, honor, to welfare and property.”¹² Such dangers may lead us to ignore a danger, which tends to hide in “earthly dangers”: the danger of losing one’s soul. This “eternal” danger concerns how we deal with our human condition in terms of “the shortness of life and the certainty of death.”¹³ We carry the danger with us. Therefore, there is only one means to preserve one’s soul and “this means is patience.” “Patience” (Taalmodighed) means the courage (Modet) to endure or to bear (til at taale). To preserve oneself in patience is to endure time and to bear oneself in time. The point in speaking of preserving “one’s soul” is that one is to preserve oneself in time also against oneself: as the one who can give oneself up. This insight implied in “preserving one’s soul in patience” is crucial in order to understand why concern and courage, understood as ways of “taking time,” are key concepts in Kierkegaard’s approach to the question: what it means to be a human being. But in order to understand how time plays into selfhood, we need one more step in reconstructing the analysis of temporal phenomena, taking anxiety as self-disclosure into the account.

3 Self, Time, and History The Concept of Anxiety from 1844 re-examines the question as to what it means to be a human being. Why then is it a book about anxiety? Obviously, anxiety concerns the future, but what do we relate to in anxiety? In contrast to fear, anxi-

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

10, 80 / CD, 71. 7, 152 / CUP1, 164. 5, 187 / EUD, 183 – 184. 5, 187 / EUD, 184.

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ety relates to “nothing.” While fear is directed towards the object, which causes fear, anxiety reflects the one who is anxious: “Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”¹⁴ In relating to the future, we encounter ourselves. We anticipate, expect, and fear, but what we relate to is not yet. It may turn out to be our own ideas, expectations, worries and fears. We are not simply concerned, but may subject ourselves to worries – as the discourse on the care of self-torment in Christian Discourses notes: “What is anxiety? It is the next day.”¹⁵ What is reflected in anxiety is the fact that we relate to ourselves in dealing with the time coming to us. Anxiety is self-disclosure in an eminent sense: disclosure of what it means to be a self. This is only disclosed as an experience of oneself in – relating to – time. How is the temporality of selfhood brought out in Kierkegaard’s text? The concept of anxiety leads to the definition of what a human being is: “That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns. Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit.”¹⁶ Spirit is not a third constituent, but the fact that a human being relates to herself as soul and as body. As it stands, it is not evident how time is involved in this definition, but Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonymous author, adds a second definition: “Man, then, is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.”¹⁷ Here, time appears to be one element of the composite, as the definitional counterpart of eternity. This may suggest that we, as humans, stand between time and eternity as between two worlds. What is misleadingly expressed in terms of two “worlds” is the idea that time and eternity are radically heterogeneous. This means that, being a synthesis, human beings individually face the task of holding themselves together. But if we look at the definition itself it is striking that time occurs in two places: in the synthesis as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, and in the synthesis as a synthesis. As a synthesis, a human being is distended in time. She is not only a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, but also a synthesis in time; she is the first only in terms of the second. Defining being human as a synthesis thus points to the finitude of human existence.    

SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 365 / CA, 61. 10, 87 / CD, 78. 4, 349 / CA, 43. 4, 388 / CA, 85.

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“What, then, is the temporal?” Haufniensis asks. Apparently, time may be defined in two ways: as an infinite succession, or as the time of different time dimensions: present, past, and future. But how do we get from the first to the second? The distinction between different time dimensions is not implicit in time itself. This would require that a “foothold” could be found in time as such, but then time would not be infinite succession. The distinction in time between different dimensions appears only, Haufniensis claims, “through the relation of time to eternity and through the reflection of eternity in time.”¹⁸ But if eternity is “the present,” as annulled succession, how is it reflected in time? The decisive move taken by Haufniensis reads: If “time and eternity touch each other, then it must be in time, and now we have come to the moment.”¹⁹ “The moment [Øieblikket],” he notes, “is a figurative expression”: “Nothing is as swift as a glance of the eye [Øiets Blik], and yet it is commensurable with the content of the eternal…A glance [Blik] is therefore a designation of time, but mark well, of time in the fateful conflict when it is touched by eternity.”²⁰ Haufniensis concludes: “The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time. As a result, the above-mentioned division acquires its significance: the present time, the past time, the future time.”²¹ Again, time occurs in two places: first as counterpart to eternity (time as infinite succession – eternity as the present as annulled succession), second as the time in which time and eternity touch each other. Temporality appears not only as one element in the composite of the temporal and the eternal, but also as temporality, the concept of which is first posited with the synthesis itself. In the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, where is the “third” (“spirit”)? Haufniensis answers: “The synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is not another synthesis but is the expression for the first synthesis, according to which man is a synthesis of psyche and body that is sustained by spirit. As soon as the spirit is posited, the moment is present.”²² This implies that an account of the concept of spirit, the ‘third’, must take the form of an account of time and history, focusing on the moment. The secret of spirit is that it has a history.

    

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 4, 4, 4, 4,

388 / CA, 85. 390 / CA, 87; my italics. 390 – 391 / CA, 87. 392 / CA, 89. 392 / CA, 88.

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Therefore, it becomes a sort of formula in The Concept of Anxiety, that “only with the moment does history begin.”²³ What is implied in this? In the second part of Either/Or from 1843, “time is turned to account for the ethically existing individual, and the possibility of gaining a history is continuity’s ethical victory over hiddenness, depression, illusory passion, and despair.”²⁴ According to the ethicist in Either/Or, one gains continuity in and through choosing oneself as the ethical subject. The Concept of Anxiety is also a book about what it means to acquire a history, but this is not secured by one’s choice of oneself; rather, the self-choice turns out to be problematic in terms of one’s history. The individual receives a history in facing herself as a task. The key notion in Haufniensis’ account is sin. He insists that sin only enters the world through the individual who fails, and each time sin comes into the world it is something new. This is not to deny that humans have failed before. On the contrary, ethical faults committed by humans accumulate in the history humans share. But this is the history of sinfulness. The distinction between sin and sinfulness has deep implications in terms of history. “Each individual begins in a historical nexus,” Haufniensis notes.²⁵ The historical character of being human, however, is not exhausted by the observation that we grow up having “an historical environment.”²⁶ The pivotal point is beginning. In the “Epilogue” of Fear and Trembling, which came out in 1843 after Either/Or, the notion of a primitive beginning is invoked: Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation begins primitively, has no task other than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance further, insofar as the previous generations did not betray the task and deceive themselves. The essentially human is passion, in which one generation perfectly understand another and understands itself. For example, no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a more abridged task than the previous one.²⁷

To begin primitively means to begin on one’s own, but we only begin ourselves if we begin with ourselves. In The Concept of Anxiety, the primitive beginning is both situated and accentuated. Each individual is born into a historical context, but is also to begin on her own. Let us unfold this, step by step.

    

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 392 / CA, 89. 7, 230 / CUP1, 254. 4, 376 / CA, 73. 4, 377 / CA, 73. 4, 208 / FT, 121.

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Firstly, the distinction between sinfulness and sin implies a double notion of history – the history of the “race” (Slægten) and the history of the individual. It is essential to human existence “that man is individuum and as such simultaneously himself and the whole race.”²⁸ When the individual begins herself, she gains her own history, but she begins in a history already begun, a history, which she shares with others. Secondly, it is possible to get this essential relation between one’s own history and a shared human history wrong. This is the case when the individual “forthwith confounds himself with the race and its history.”²⁹ As humans, we share “the presupposition of sinfulness,” but this is a presupposition to be appropriated by separating oneself from others. Beginning one’s own history, one is to account for oneself. Thirdly, how then does one gain a history? The decisive moment is when one discovers oneself as guilty. One cannot explain oneself from the historical surrounding, and yet one is “under influence,” affected by what happens to oneself. This is where anxiety as self-disclosure comes into the picture. Let us once again look at the passage comparing anxiety with dizziness. After the quote given above Haufniensis continues: Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.³⁰

What is the decisive moment here? Remarkably, Haufniensis points to what happens between the moment of succumbing and the moment of rising. One fails in anxiety, succumbing to the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when looking down into one’s own possibility. Do the possibilities we see come from the future or from our own “eyes”? Haufniensis claims: “[H]e who becomes guilty through anxiety is indeed innocent, for it was not he himself but anxiety, a foreign power, that laid hold of him, a power that he did not love but about which he was anxious. And yet he is guilty, for he sank in anxiety, which he nevertheless loved

 SKS 4, 335 / CA, 28.  SKS 4, 377 / CA, 73.  SKS 4, 365 / CA, 61.

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even as he feared it. There is nothing in the world more ambiguous.”³¹ Both the moment before and the moment after concern time as reflected in the act of seeing: succumbing in looking down into the abyss of one’s possibility (future) and rising, seeing that one is guilty. What comes in between is the leap, which “stands outside of all ambiguity.”³² One stands out as the one having failed. Whether others have also failed is in that moment not one’s concern. The one who is becoming guilty is oneself – and no other. This is not just part of a common history (of sinfulness), but marks the beginning of one’s own history. Therefore, there is a moment of decision to follow: the decision of assuming oneself as having become guilty. This opens up a history, one’s own, in which the decision is to be carried through from moment to moment. What is at issue in selfhood is continuity in the strong sense of preserving oneself as a matter of patience. This task testifies to the deep temporality of selfhood, but also to the history of freedom. Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety and the ethicist in Either/Or share the problem: how is it possible to gain continuity with oneself in a history in which one is situated? But while the ethicist argues that this history can be appropriated, Haufniensis accentuates the problematic character of the history, which is supposed to be one’s own. It is a history in which freedom can not only be lost, but lose itself. The ambiguity of anxiety points not only to selfhood as temporal synthesis, but also to the character of the history of freedom implied in being spirit. Time and history are written into the account of what a human being is. As humans, we face the task of becoming ourselves. What does this mean? The Sickness unto Death (1849) answers: “To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. Consequently, the progress of becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process.”³³ Dealing with time in becoming oneself is a double, infinitizing movement, which is already implied in the notion of returning to the present in relating to the future and carrying the past in facing the time to come. How does this “repetition” relate to the moment? Repetition takes place in the moment, but in repetition there is also a “take” on “the whole” of one’s history. What is decided in the moment of decision, then, is the character of one’s

 SKS 4, 349 / CA, 43.  Ibid.  SKS 11, 146 / SUD, 30.

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history as a history of becoming oneself. Conversely, the moment of decision takes a history that is opened in the moment. This leads us to the concept of existence.

4 Existence Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) coins the notion of existence as human existence, which later philosophies of existence draw upon. How is existence defined? First, human existence is “in becoming”: “to exist is to become.”³⁴ This does not mean that being is translated into becoming. What we are, is not just a matter of what we become, as if we were either the outcome of a process or ourselves defining what we are. Rather, human existence is being in becoming. This raises the question as to whether we, in becoming, become ourselves, and this then leads to the second feature of existence: self-relation. These two features of human existence – being in becoming and self-relation – go together: subjectivity implies the task of becoming subjective. What then does the notion of existence add to the concept of selfhood in terms of time and history? There is a difference in context. Human existence is in two senses an existence “in between.” First, a human being exists “between” the finite and the infinite, “situated in time [bestedt i Tiden].”³⁵ This remarkable accentuation of time has implications for how a human being is placed in relation to truth. Situated in a world of change, like a sailor on the ocean, we look for points of orientation. But these must have something to do with the problems facing us in the midst of life’s changes: Of what help is it to explain how the eternal truth is to be understood eternally when the one to use the explanation is prevented from understanding it in this way because he is existing and is merely a fantast if he fancies himself to be sub specie aeterni, consequently when he must avail himself precisely of the explanation of how the eternal truth is to be understood in the category of time by someone who by existing is himself in time.³⁶

Suppose that the paradox of Christianity places the existing human being “more decisively than any judge can place the accused, between time and eternity in time, between heaven and hell in the time of salvation.”³⁷ Being situated in

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 183 / CUP1, 199. 7, 202 / CUP1, 221; my italics. 7, 176 / CUP1, 192. 7, 197 / CUP1, 215; my italics.

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time affects the condition for understanding the question of the eternal truth: “[W]hether it will be manifest when everything is settled in eternity that the most insignificant circumstance was absolutely important – I do not decide. I can truthfully say that time does not allow me to do that – simply because I am in time.”³⁸ This indicates the second sense of existence “in between.” We exist between birth and death, which means that we cannot place ourselves at the point of beginning (birth) or at the point of ending (death). Being on one’s way, one can anticipate and remember, but only while living; we may even come to live a life in anticipation or in memory. The context of existence is this double sense of being “in between”: being oneself finite and infinite, and being “caught” between birth and death. Thus, the concept of existence accentuates the relation of selfhood and temporality. Each human being comes into existence as this individual, has her own life to live, and dies her own death. The critical point is that existence means to be situated “in time.” Existing “in between” and “in becoming” excludes a concluding panoramic view on human existence. Humans cannot place themselves in God’s “point of view;” they can only imagine what such a point of view would mean for their existence. The implication is radical: to be situated “in time” is to be “lodged in existence” in such a way that it is impossible to take oneself back into eternity.³⁹ But this means that transcendence as a human movement beyond time is broken off. If we are looking for orientation in the eternal like a sailor looking at the stars, we are still “on the ocean.” Eternity offers no retreat out of time – retreating would still take place “in time.” But this does not mean that human existence is enclosed upon itself. “At a Graveside,” the last of Kierkegaard’s Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions from 1845, addresses the question: how do humans deal with death as both part of and the end to human existence? The discourse is about thinking in earnestness. The thought of death changes the relation to time. It reminds us about the time we have taken for granted and questions what we use time for; “with the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity so that the year and the day receive infinite worth.”⁴⁰ Thinking the thought of death, then, is a countermove against forgetting existence. “My main thought was that, because of the copiousness of knowledge, people in our day have forgotten what it means to exist,” Climacus declares.⁴¹ This is implied in forgetting    

SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 374 / CUP1, 411. 7, 191 / CUP1, 208. 5, 453 / TD, 84. 7, 226 / CUP1, 249.

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to ask what it means to die. We forget because of our ways of knowing, and we forget in and through our ways of talking: the orator “forgets to think the uncertainty into what he is saying about uncertainty when he, moved, speaks harrowingly about the uncertainty of death and ends by urging a purpose for the whole of life.”⁴² Thinking ourselves into world history is to forget the temporal character of our human existence. It is also to forget the ethical. In dealing with the time to come we encounter ourselves, anticipating the future. The question is not only whether we, in dealing with time, encounter something other than ourselves, but also whether we, in becoming, become ourselves. These two questions, time as relation to oneself and time as relation to the other, go together in the issue of ethics and time.

5 Ethics, Time, and History The ethicist’s account of the ethical in Either/Or turns on the relationship between ethics and time. Ethical choice requires a moment of decision. What is decisive in the moment is how we place ourselves in the next moment. The moment of decision now is itself “the next moment” for a previous moment. It is already situated in a history, which involves the one making the choice. Before beginning in the moment of decision, one has already begun. Although indicated in Either/ Or, this becomes a critical point in the revision of ethics after Either/Or. Let me quote the Postscript: In existence, the individual is a concretion, time is concrete, and even while the individual deliberates he is ethically responsible for the use of time. Existence is not an abstract rush job but a striving and an unremitting “in the meantime.” Even at the moment the task is assigned, something is already wasted, because there is an “in the meantime” and the beginning is not promptly made. This is how it goes backwards…And just as the beginning is about to be made here, it is discovered that, since meanwhile time has been passing, a bad beginning has been made and that the beginning must be made by becoming guilty, and from that moment the total guilt, which is decisive, practices usury with new guilt.⁴³

Ethics accentuates existence, but this does not leave ethics as it is. Already in the ethicist’s account of the ethical, there is a tension. Obviously, the ethical concerns the future, but the past too becomes a matter of ethics. It is not simply a past to be left behind. Rather, choosing oneself becomes a matter of “repenting oneself back” into one’s history, thereby “repenting oneself.”  SKS 7, 154 / CUP1, 166.  SKS 7, 478 / CUP1, 526.

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“The moment of choice” is not only the moment we choose, but also the moment that comes to us: “the moment comes when what really matters is beginning to live” and in this moment “it is a dangerous thing to have split oneself up in such a way as to make it difficult to gather oneself together.”⁴⁴ But when one has the courage to choose oneself “in one’s history,” by repenting, one’s “personhood forms a closure.” Thereby one gains sovereignty over oneself: Only when one has taken oneself over in the choice, has put on one’s self, has totally penetrated oneself in such a way that every movement is accompanied by the consciousness of responsibility for oneself – only then has one chosen oneself ethically, only then has one assumed oneself in repentance, only then is one concrete, only then, totally isolated, is one in absolute continuity with the reality to which one belongs.⁴⁵

The ethicist concludes: [The temporal] exists for the sake of human beings and is the greatest of all gifts of grace. For the eternal dignity of a human being consists in the ability to acquire a history, and the divine element in human beings lies in their ability to make this history coherent, if they wish to; for it is not just the sum-total of all that has happened or occurred to me that give my life coherence, but it only acquires this through my own action, in such a way that what has happened to me is transformed and translated by me from necessity to freedom.⁴⁶

On the ethicist’s account, then, history is a challenge to ethics, but the one choosing can find an answer. Repentance becomes a sort of instrument for gaining continuity with oneself. But upon closer reflection the very temporality of repentance presents a problem. Repentance means “taking the past upon oneself” in order to open the future. It appears to be a way of dealing with time, which can let the past be past; in repenting, one seeks to “redeem” oneself. Yet, repentance cannot make oneself free. It always comes “a moment too late.”⁴⁷ Furthermore, repentance itself takes time. While repenting, time has been passing, and one is in danger of absorbing oneself in a self-encircling movement, which diverts from the ethical task. This means that “repentance is the highest ethical contradiction.”⁴⁸ The question of ethics and time is intensified: how do we use time?

    

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

3, 308 – 309 / EO2, 327. 3, 237 / EO2, 248. 3, 239 / EO2, 250 – 251. 4, 417 / CA, 115. 4, 419 / CA, 117.

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The introduction to The Concept of Anxiety draws the conclusion: “Sin, then, belongs to ethics only insofar as upon this concept it is shipwrecked with the aid of repentance.”⁴⁹ It then introduces a distinction between “first” and “second” ethics: the first ethics is ethics shipwrecking upon the concept of sin, the second taking its point of departure in this shipwrecking and the possibility of a new beginning. This second ethics is what we find in Works of Love. For the ethicist, the eternal is to be seen in the trace of the historical. In particular in the Postscript, the relation of ethics and history is more complicated: “The objection is this: If one posits only the development of the generation or the race or at least posits it as the highest, how does one explain the divine squandering that uses the endless host of individuals of one generation after the other in order to set the world-historical development in motion?”⁵⁰ According to Climacus, the only answer to this objection is the ethical understood in terms of “becoming subjective.” But what is the objection? It targets a panoramic view on world history. For such a contemplating view, history has ended: it is not a drama that is ethical in nature.

6 Faith, Time, and History The underlying question is: what does it mean to be a human being? But Kierkegaard’s authorship also poses a second question: what does it mean to be a Christian? Obviously, one cannot be a Christian in the same way that one is a human being. In the second question, “becoming” is accentuated: how does a human being become a Christian? Furthermore, it is not a question to be asked in general, but in person: how do I become a Christian? Yet, the second question relates to the first. This comes to the fore in the way existence is accentuated by the paradox of Christianity. This paradox “continually uses time and the historical in relation to the eternal.”⁵¹ But what does the paradox do to the understanding of time and the historical? The Postscript sees the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal in human existence as paradoxical in structure: a human being is “an existing infinite spirit.” This “prodigious contradiction that the eternal becomes, that it comes into existence,” is reflected in the paradox.⁵² But the paradox of Christianity both “fits” human existence and contradicts our “take on” human existence. What    

SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 324 / CA, 17. 4, 147 / CUP1, 158. 7, 94 / CUP1, 95. 7, 81 / CUP1, 82.

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is important for us here is how the paradox complicates the relation of time and eternity. That is in a sense the whole point. The Socratic paradox that the eternal truth relates to an existing human being brings together what does not match: eternal truth and existence in time. But the paradox of Christianity brings eternity and existence together in the truth itself, claiming that “the eternal truth has come into existence in time.”⁵³ What is accentuated by the paradox is the how in terms of “the relation of the existing person, in his very existence, to what is said,” and this “how” is “dialectical also with regard to time.”⁵⁴ This is to be seen in the temporality of faith: “[W]hen the retreat out of existence into eternity by way of recollection has been made impossible, then, with the truth facing one as the paradox, in the anxiety of sin and its pain, with the tremendous risk of objectivity, there is no stronger expression for inwardness than – to have faith.”⁵⁵ What then is the relation of faith and history? The problem addressed by Philosophical Fragments is, to quote the Postscript to the Fragments: “How can something historical be decisive for an eternal happiness?”⁵⁶ The eternal is not simply to be contrasted to the historical. Rather, the question is how can a historical point of departure “be of more than historical interest”?⁵⁷ Firstly, faith does not follow from history. Historical truths are as such contingent. By contrast, faith implies a decision, which is a matter of “an infinite concern.” Contemplating history distracts us from this concern and may distort or even pervert the question of faith. This is the case when one lets one’s faith – one’s ultimate decision – depend on whether others have faith. This indicates that the first move – contrasting faith and history – implies a second in return: faith concerns one’s history in terms of one’s existence. Linking faith to “an infinite concern,” Climacus invokes the notion that humans are concerned beings. But what does “infinite” mean? It points to what is at stake in the decision of faith: the single individual’s “eternal happiness.” This does not lead us outside existence. “Infinite” means that the individual herself, her life as a whole, is concerned, but “eternal” also means that the final answer is not given by finite human judgements, neither by oneself, nor by others. Secondly, what or who is contradicted in “the dialectical contradiction” of the paradox? The contradiction concerns our expectations in terms of how we orient ourselves in the world and what we maintain as important for us. These     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 191 / CUP1, 209. 7, 185 – 186 / CUP1, 202– 203. 7, 192 / CUP1, 209 – 210. 7, 92– 93 / CUP1, 94. 4, 213 / PF, 1.

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are expectations in which we “have ourselves.” They show how we take ourselves as humans. We are, then, ourselves contradicted in terms of our human self-understanding. Along this line of interpretation, we can understand the contradiction of the paradox in terms of vision. The reformulation of the paradox in Practice in Christianity (1850) is remarkable. At a first glance, the claim appears to be that faith has nothing to do with history. The history, which has come in between, the “intervening period,” “which at this time is about eighteen hundred years,” must be bracketed.⁵⁸ To become a Christian means to become transformed “into the likeness with God” in becoming contemporary with Christ.⁵⁹ The one being addressed must place herself in “the situation of contemporaneity.” But this is not to transport oneself back into a historical situation in the past. What is decisive is the opposite movement back to the situation of the addressee. What is emphasized, then, is both the situation of the paradox, as “a historically actual situation,” and the historical situation of the one being addressed. The historical character of the first is only to be understood in terms of the historicity of the second. It is in this sense that to be contemporaneous with Christ is faith. If we take history as the past, which we can approach in terms of knowledge or contemplation, Christ as the paradox is “an extremely unhistorical person.”⁶⁰ “Becoming contemporaneous” converts the attitude of the one approaching. It is about the figure in which the believer sees Christ: the form (Skikkelse) of abasement.⁶¹ This is the figure in which the believer is to see herself. Becoming contemporary is how one is to go one’s own way: as “imitator [Efterfølger].”⁶² What is to be disclosed is one’s heart. “In relation to the absolute, there is only one time, the present; for the person who is not contemporary with the absolute, it does not exist at all.”⁶³ “That with which you are living simultaneously is actuality – for you.”⁶⁴ What does this imply in terms of history? Practice in Christianity opposes world history and sacred history, but how does the second relate to the first? The answer appears to be straightforward: “[F]or Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands alone by itself, outside history.”⁶⁵ And yet, the sacred history

       

SKS 12, 39 / PC, 24. SKS 12, 75 / PC, 63. Ibid. SKS 12, 17 / PC, 9. SKS 12, 230 – 233 / PC, 237– 240. SKS 12, 75 / PC, 63. SKS 12, 76 / PC, 64. Ibid.

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has as “its counterpart” “the profane history [den vanhellige Historie].”⁶⁶ It is not just beyond or outside world history, but rather contradicts history as humans tend to see it. The history of suffering and abasement is hidden in, or by, world history. The figure of the servant is incognito, unrecognizable, but this tells something critical about human history. If the sacred history were simply external to world history, it would be impossible to account for the contradiction. The paradox as “a sign of contradiction” is to be read in and through situated existence. It “draws attention to itself and then it presents a contradiction. There is something that makes it impossible not to look – and look, as one is looking one sees as in a mirror, one comes to see oneself, or he who is the sign of contradiction looks straight into one’s heart while one is staring into the contradiction.”⁶⁷ This means that faith is a way of seeing – as the one being seen while staring into the contradiction. The implication is that faith has something to do with history as lived by humans and even with world history. It concerns a new beginning in a historical situation, which can be turned into a situation of contemporaneity. Faith sees “in conversion,” against world history. It is not historical in the sense that it would depend on history providing some sort of proof in order to be faith, but rather the converse is the case: it is faith in a sacred history, which contradicts how history “works” as the history of the victorious, and it concerns human history “in situation,” taking place in the moment.

7 Love, Time, and History Both the ethical and the religious concern what humans share as humans and both address the single individual as the one concerned. In Works of Love (1847), time in relation to oneself and time in relation to the other are brought together. The issue of love and time leads us back to where we started: time and edification. In order to understand love we must reflect on how time is experienced. This does not mean that love follows from how we experience time. Rather, the claim is that it is only in love that we can preserve ourselves in time, and this requires that we carry the burden of time and even counteract the force of time. What is the power of time? Time is not only passing (as noted in The Concept of Anxiety), but also changing – to the point of changing us. It is important to

 SKS 12, 68 / PC, 56.  SKS 12, 131 / PC, 126 – 127.

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bear in mind that the possibility of changing is crucial in order to stay human. In Sickness unto Death, it is noted that we “breathe” through possibility. What is first brought into focus in Works of Love, however, is the possibility that love changes. Love can change within itself, and it can change from itself. ⁶⁸ When love is changed into its opposite, hate, it is changed “within itself.” Although it has perished (gaaet til Grunde), “down in the ground” (nede i Grunden) love is still aflame. But love can also be changed “over the years” and lose “its ardor, its joy, its desire, its originality, its freshness.” As time goes by, love is dissipated in the “indifference of habit.” Love is here changed “from itself,” but this is difficult to see, since habit is “cunning enough never to let itself be seen.”⁶⁹ This indicates that it is difficult to “read” the phenomena of love. They may be ambiguous, and the ambiguity may pertain to the way love shows itself: it may hide what it shows. “However joyous, however happy, however indescribably confident instinctive and inclinational love, spontaneous love, can be itself, precisely in its most beautiful moment it still feels a need to bind itself, if possible, even more securely. Therefore, the two swear an oath, swear fidelity and friendship to each other.”⁷⁰ Why? If love is as it claims to be, there should be no need to bind itself more securely and no need to make a test of love. The need to secure itself indicates that there is still “an anxiety about the possibility of change.”⁷¹ This anxiety is known by the burning craving that hides it. Experiences of love are accompanied by the question, maybe unspoken, but disturbing: does love last or remain? Love’s change does not follow from the fact that time is changing – even when we take into account that we are changed in time. Rather, time changing constitutes the test of love. When love changes, it “falls away” from itself. It fails as love. But if this is all there is to be said, there would be no edification. In love, however, concern and courage are at issue in an intensified manner. This comes to the fore in the opening discourse of Works of Love, which deals with seeing love and strikes a note of reflection that resounds in the entire book. If it were so “that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love.”⁷² Believing in love, one runs the risk of being deceived. But, the discourse asks, “which deception is the more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of the one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see?” It an    

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 41– 43 / WL, 34– 36. 9, 43 / WL, 36. 9, 37 / WL, 29. 9, 40 / WL, 32– 33. 9, 13 / WL, 5.

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swers: “To defraud oneself of [bedrage sig selv for] love is the most terrible, is an eternal loss, for which there is no compensation either in time or in eternity.”⁷³ Can one believe in love? The “natural” way of finding an answer is to go out in the world in order to see whether love is to be found. But taking the question in this way we have already begun; we are already seeing in a certain way. The more radical question to be asked, then, is whether there is love in the way we see when looking for love. The almost paradoxical claim of the discourse is that love is to see love. The discourse thus performs a reversal of perspective. Being exposed to time’s change, our attention is drawn to the possibility that we are being deceived. As a countermove, the discourse redirects our attention to the possibility of an eternal loss, that of deceiving or defrauding oneself. This does not mean that the possibility of being deceived is not a matter of concern. Rather, precisely because being deceived by others would affect us in our ways of finding ourselves in the world, it is all the more important to point to the danger hidden in this: that of despairing or giving up oneself. When we lose a loved one, it is still imperative that love remains. Therefore, Kierkegaard contrasts sorrow and despair: 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.⁷⁴

In despair, one’s concern is diverted: although one is brought to despair by the loss of another, one’s concern encloses upon oneself, as the one bereaved. As indicated in The Sickness unto Death: we can suffer a loss that brings us to despair, and yet we despair. That is, despair does not simply follow from what happens to us, and yet the possibility of despair shows how we are situated beings, exposed to what happens to us. In contrast to the position taken by the ethicist in Either/Or, continuity in time is no longer secured by self-choice, but remaining true to oneself is at stake in relating to the other. The relation to the other has broken into the continuity with oneself – not only in terms of the possibility to suffer a loss, or to be

 SKS 9, 14 / WL, 5 – 6.  SKS 9, 50 / WL, 43.

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deceived, but also as the possibility of oneself failing. The radical danger in being thus exposed to time and the other is to deceive oneself and to give oneself up. The point is ethical: both in terms of being addressed as the one to love the neighbor and in terms of the duty to love oneself. Where then is the answer to the problem of time? Should we find the answer in eternity – like a sailor who looks up into the heaven in order to find his point of orientation in the stars? Let us see how the distinction between time and eternity plays into love. After the first discourse performing a reversal of perspective (love is to see love), the second discourse in Works of Love accentuates the duty in the commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matt 22:39). By becoming a duty, love undergoes “the change of eternity” and thereby gains “enduring continuance.”⁷⁵ What does this mean? The change of eternity is a change against the change, which time seems to induce, but how is this second change possible? It implies that the contrast between time and eternity is complicated. Eternity is not just beyond time; rather eternity’s change takes place in time, as a change of time. But this requires that time is not one thing; rather, temporality “divides within itself”: “Only the eternal can be and become and remain contemporary with every age; in contrast, temporality divides within itself, and the present cannot become contemporary with the future, or the future with the past, or the past with the present.”⁷⁶ The eternal is not seen against the background of time as infinite succession, as in The Concept of Anxiety, but in contrast to time being divided into irreducible time dimensions: “The temporal has three periods [Tider] and therefore does not ever actually exist completely or exist completely in any of them; the eternal is.”⁷⁷ The eternal is present in a sense in which time is not, but this presence of the eternal is explained in terms of the temporal: “Only the eternal can be and become and remain contemporary with every age.” What this implies is then explained in terms of what it means to be a self in time: A temporal object can have many various characteristics, in a certain sense can be said to have them simultaneously insofar as it is what it is in these specific characteristics. But a temporal object never has redoubling [Fordoblelse] in itself; just as the temporal vanishes in time, so also it is only in its characteristics. When, however, the eternal is in a human being, this eternal redoubles in him in such a way that every moment it is in him, it is in him in a double mode: in an outward direction and in an inward direction back into itself, but in such a way that this is one and the same, since otherwise it is not redoubling.⁷⁸

   

SKS 9, 39 / WL, 32. SKS 9, 39 / WL, 31– 32. SKS 9, 278 / WL, 280. Ibid.

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Eternity’s change concerns love in time; the critical insight is repeated that time and eternity touch each other – in time. But what does it imply that it is the duty to love one’s neighbor that constitutes “the change of eternity”? Love as “eternity’s bond” testifies to the fact that a human being is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. The duty to love as eternity’s change still bears witness to the fact that temporality and eternity are “heterogeneous.”⁷⁹ If eternity is about continuity in time, in contrast to the temporal vanishing in time, what does it mean that, in love, the eternal “redouble” in a human being? Let us first clarify what the duty to love one’s neighbor means. Firstly, that it is a duty prohibits one from letting time slip by. Asking questions about what love is and who one’s neighbor is, takes time and is already a matter of ethics: we are to account for the time used. Opening up an interval, a spare moment, “a concession is made to curiosity and idleness and selfishness.”⁸⁰ A key passage reads: When the Pharisee, “in order to justify himself,” asked, “Who is my neighbor?” he presumably thought that this might develop into a very protracted inquiry, so that it would perhaps take a very long time and then perhaps end with the admission that it was impossible to define the concept “neighbor” with absolute accuracy – for this very reason he asked the question, to find an escape, to waste time, and to justify himself.⁸¹

Being addressed by the commandment to love one’s neighbor, one does not begin in a free moment, but in a history where some time is already lost. The moment one is to begin already carries a history of time wasted: “God is an eternity ahead – that is how far the human being is behind. So it is with every one of eternity’s tasks. When a person at long last starts to begin, how infinitely much was wasted beforehand, even if for a moment we would forget all the deficiencies, all the imperfections of the effort that at long last had its beginning!”⁸² Secondly, the duty of love is “eternity’s change” in that it transforms the way we see the other. We are to see the other beyond “the world” of differences and changes by which humans can judge each other. This is the world of “temporality,” but in what sense? If it simply prevents us from seeing the other, we could not be addressed to see the other differently. “The world” of temporality is what humans tend to make out of temporality. The duty of love counteracts this tendency by addressing humans as situated beings who can be caught in their ways of already seeing each other. The duty of love turns the addressee towards her   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 14 / WL, 6. 9, 102 / WL, 97. 9, 101 / WL, 96 – 97. 9, 106 / WL, 102.

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self: as the one to fulfil the commandment. This is “infinity’s change,” which “is not in the external, not in the apparent,”⁸³ but concerns our approach to the world of time and history – and to the other who is not just part of this world. Thirdly, the duty to love is also the duty “to remain in love’s debt to one another.”⁸⁴ It holds love on to itself. That love remains or “abides”⁸⁵ could be read as love “overcoming” time, but it is only possible to remain faithful in dealing with time, not using time to evade, and in acknowledging that we only begin within a history, which has already begun. How does this become a duty to remain in debt? Here, the relation of ethics, time and history is once again intensified. Love only remains love if it remains in love’s debt. This means that a “bookkeeping arrangement [Regnskabs-Forhold]”⁸⁶ is excluded. The attempt to settle an account means that one steps out of love. If we think we can rid ourselves of the debt of love, we place ourselves in a wrong position in relation to the other. Again, the motif of beginning turns out to be pivotal. It has two aspects: we have already begun, and we are to begin ourselves. When we plan to make a beginning, we have already spent some time. The ethical demand questions us before the beginning we want to be the one counting. The two aspects concern how we are ourselves in time (we have already begun and are to begin ourselves). We only begin ourselves if we appropriate ourselves and acknowledge our failed beginnings. This acknowledgement goes together with the insight that “settling an account” is excluded in love. Both are implied in the duty to remain in love’s debt. What more is said here compared to The Concept of Anxiety? Being human is still seen as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal – a synthesis that implies the task of becoming oneself. Love not only testifies to, but also fulfils the synthesis. Yet, the problem inherent in the synthesis is intensified. What is at issue in love is the relation of self and the other. This intensifies the heterogeneous character of human existence and the task implied in the synthesis as a synthesis. In love, a human being is exposed to the change of time in ways that affect her relation to the world. As a countermove, the duty to love one’s neighbor is “infinity’s change,” which implies a “redoubling.” What does this mean? In the perspective of Works of Love, edification is concern for the other: it is to give courage to the other as a concerned being who can despair. Courage here means the courage to stand by oneself in leading one’s life, and not to give in to    

SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 137 / WL, 135. 9, 175 – 204 / WL, 175 – 204. 9, 298 – 311 / WL, 300 – 314. 9, 178 / WL, 178.

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despair. Works of Love does not follow two separable tracks, one leading to the other as the neighbor, the other to oneself. It is a book about love that builds up the other. Yet, it is also a book about the self-relation of the one obligated to love the neighbor. What makes us fail in seeing and edifying the other is first and foremost a concern, which makes us use for ourselves what we do for the other. This already indicates that the motif of self-relation is not a subordinate one in the book. Rather, a clue to understanding edification is the sentence following the distinction between sorrow and despair: “You shall preserve love, and you shall preserve yourself and by and in preserving yourself preserve love.”⁸⁷ The question of the other leads us to the claim that “the greatest beneficence” is “in love to help someone toward that, to become himself, free, independent, his own master [sin Egen], to help him stand alone.”⁸⁸ This brings us back to the question of becoming oneself, but in terms of the other becoming herself. The second question – becoming oneself – leads us to the just quoted claim: one only preserves oneself in preserving love. This implies the duty to love the other. Thus, there is no symmetry between the two questions. Both lead to edification in terms of the other. Yet, Works of Love is also a book about the burden of time implied in edification. The burden is to carry the weight of oneself in time, not giving up oneself. The task of “becoming oneself” implies preserving oneself against oneself. Why is this only possible in love? The answer is the “redoubling”: the eternal is in a human being in a double mode, “in an outward direction and in an inward direction back into itself, but in such a way that this is one and the same.” The discourse continues: “So also with love. What love does, that it is; what it is, that it does – at one and the same moment. At the same moment it goes out of itself (the outward direction), it is in itself (the inward direction).”⁸⁹ The redoubling reformulates the double movement: the other has already broken into the movement of going out of oneself and returning to oneself. In doing the work of love, one is absolved from oneself. But being absolved from one’s selfconcern (in moving beyond oneself) is also receiving oneself (returning to oneself). In the outward direction of love, one is preserved. The inward direction is how one is changed in doing the works of love. In this “doing,” time is received as a gift. The motif of death as a detour to life is consequently reformulated in terms of memory as a work of love, returning to the present: “Yes, go out to

 SKS 9, 50 / WL, 43.  SKS 9, 272 / WL, 274.  SKS 9, 278 / WL, 280.

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the dead once again, in order there to take an aim at life.”⁹⁰ Time receives infinite worth.

 SKS 9, 339 / WL, 345.

Chapter 32 Future of Hope – History of Hope 1 Opening: Past Future We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but…Bless me anyway. I want more life.¹

This is a quote from Perestroika, the second part of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. The character Prior Walter is in Heaven, arguing for returning to life. He has been living in an atmosphere of death coming; he has found himself struggling with AIDS, being deserted, witnessing friends dying. There has been enough reason to give up hope, and yet he lives “past hope.” Is there hope implied in living “past hope”? Is this hope indicated in “I want more life”? Reading Prior Walter’s words, how do we come from “We live past hope” to “I want more life”? The difference between life and death is absolute – yet life can be marked by death coming, in the figures of friends that have died and in death approaching. The life Prior wants more of is fragile, finite, a life in the shadow of death, but it is life he wants, not the shadows turning life into death. He says: “Death usually has to take life away.”² “We live past hope”: even if there appears to be no hope we still live. “Appears” here functions in a notable way: it is not a matter of observing, but of facing, yet there is a moment of “appearing”: even when we appear to face a life without hope we live past hope. We do not simply give up hope. Living past hope becomes a matter of finding hope: “If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do.” What about the past we live past in the hope for more life? This is the question I would like to discuss. To put my question in the context of Angels in America: is the “deep” motif “hope past hope” linked to a second motif we could call: “hope as commemoration”? The first part of the title of my essay – “Future of Hope” – appears to be superfluous, and the second part – “History of Hope” – meaningless, on precisely the ground that makes the first part superfluous. When taken together, however, they open up the question: is the future of hope part of a history of hope? Put

 Tony Kushner, Angels in America. Part Two: Perestroika, London: Royal National Theatre 1994, p. 89.  Ibid. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-038

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differently, what is the temporality of hope? Apparently, the answer is easy: hope is future-directed, indicating that future is the primary time-dimension of human existence. The suggestion I want to probe is the following. Being human, we live time in – as – the intertwinement of past and future. Yet the temporality of hope does not simply fit into but rather complicates the apparent interplay of time-dimensions. Again in the context of Angels in America: can past and future be intertwined in the double movement of turning away from a past in the shadow of death and yet commemorating the past in a ‘hope past hope’? What about the present in the temporality of hope? Hope moves in what Jean Améry calls “the genuine human dimension.” I quote a key passage in his essay on resentment: In pondering [Nachdenken] this question, it did not escape me that resentment is not only an unnatural but also a logically inconsistent condition. It nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future.³

Améry does not mention hope. Yet, what is at stake in his pondering or “Nachdenken”?⁴ His essays in At the Mind’s Limits are reflections – “Nachdenken” – on the victim’s condition. The essays perform a remarkable movement of thinking through which the reader herself is moved. Where does this movement point? Améry insists on his resentment – in order to maintain the truth of history: “The social body is occupied merely with safeguarding itself and could not care less about a life that has been damaged. At the very best, it looks forward, so that things don’t happen again. But my resentments are there in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity.”⁵ However, in insisting on his resentment, does Améry also

 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella A. Rosenfeld, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, p. 68; in German: “Es ist meinem Nachdenken nicht unentdeckt geblieben, dass das Ressentiment nicht nur ein widernatürlicher, sondern auch ein logisch widersprüchlicher Zustand ist. Es nagelt jeden von uns fest ans Kreuz seiner zerstörten Vergangenheit. Absurd fordert es, das Irreversible solle umgekehrt, das Ereignis unereignet gemacht werden. Das Ressentiment blockiert den Ausgang in die eigentlich menschliche Dimension, die Zukunft” (Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 2004, p. 111).  See Arne Grøn and Thomas Brudholm, “Nachdenken,” in On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe, ed. by Magdalena Zolkos, Lanham: Lexington 2011, pp. 193 – 215.  Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 70; see Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive, Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2008.

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point beyond resentment – to a truth to be remembered in hoping for the future? If so, does he point to a hope past hope? We should (I think) be reluctant to answer affirmatively. If the movement of Améry’s essays reflects or encircles a hope, it is a hope beyond hope – but not in the sense that we then have a hope that is beyond hope. Rather, we should understand Améry as being situated in a struggle with hope, almost giving up, and yet, insisting on resentment appears to be to hope for a hope, without being able to formulate this as a hope. This approach is refracted, indirect, and negative. What is the peculiar intertwinement of future and past in forms of hope (the presence of hope)? The intertwinement of time-dimensions is not without problems – they do not simply play into each other (intertwinement is not just interplay). Hope moves in the genuine human time-dimension, the future, to the point of letting the past appear as past to be left behind. It seems to intensify the future-directed character of human existence: it re-directs us from the past to the future, to the point of setting us apart from the past. Yet hope also may bear the weight, or even the burden, of history. It can even take care of hopes that history has turned into past hopes. The motif of my essay, then, is twofold, indicated by the two questions: How should we understand hope as a response to despair (negative approach)? Can hope past hope take the form of hope as commemoration?

2 Time Passing – Time Coming Time is time passing and time coming.⁶ Yet, these two time-dimensions do not simply co-exist. Or rather, their co-existence concerns our existence now: First, time does not simply pass away, but leaves traces that may turn the future (time coming) into the future of the past. Second, time coming may now appear to be time coming in order to pass away. Is this not what time is about: we are about to pass away in time? Yet, human existence is not simply caught between past and future. Although time is time coming and time passing as if there is no time left to be in-between, we are only able to have time as a problem (asking whether we are ourselves about to pass away in time) due to the fact that there is time left to relate to time. In Augustine, this is the move from time-dimensions to

 See Book 11 of Augustine’s Confessions (Augustine, Confessions, Vol. 2, Book 8 – 13, ed. and trans. by Carolyn J.-B. Hammond, Cambridge: Havard University Press 2016 (Loeb Classical Library), pp. 190 – 259).

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human attitudes: relating to time coming in anticipation, relating to time passing away in memory. Again, time passing is time passing now, and time coming is time coming now. In memory, we relate to time that has past. But memory is itself time passing leaving its traces in us – now. What about anticipation? Time comes to us now – it may come as a time we have anticipated. But time coming to us now also makes possible that we anticipate a time still to come. This means that “time coming to us” (in German: Zu-kunft, in Danish: det til-kommende) is both time come to us now and time still to come (now). This corresponds to time passing now – and time that has gone (it is now past). The difference is marked by putting “now” in brackets.

3 Anticipation and Hope Anticipating time to come is not, as such, hoping. Hope is anticipation, but anticipation qualified. Let us take our point of departure in Kierkegaard’s definition: to hope is to expect the good. The following long quote is a passage from the discourse “Love Hopes All Things – and Yet Is Never Put to Shame” in Works of Love: To hope relates to the future [det Tilkommende], to possibility, which in turn, unlike actuality, is always a duality, the possibility of advance or of retrogression, of rising or falling, of good or of evil. The eternal is, but when the eternal touches the temporal or is in the temporal, they do not meet each other in the present, because in that case the present would itself be the eternal. The present, the moment, is over so quickly that it actually does not exist; it is only the boundary and therefore is past, whereas the past is what was present. Therefore, when the eternal is in the temporal, it is in the future (because it cannot get hold of the present, and the past indeed is past) or in possibility. The past is the actual, the future is the possible; eternally, the eternal is the eternal; in time, the eternal is the possible, the future. This, of course, is why we call tomorrow the future, but we also call eternal life the future…On the other hand, when a person to whom the possible pertains relates himself equally to the duality of the possible, we say: He expects. To expect contains within itself the same duality that the possible has, and to expect is to relate oneself to the possible purely and simply as such. Then the relationship divides according to the way the expecting person chooses. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope, which for that very reason cannot be any temporal expectancy but is an eternal hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. But both the one who hopes and the one who fears are expecting. As soon, however, as the choice is made, the possible is changed, because the possibility of the good is the eternal. It is only in the moment of

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contact that the duality of the possible is equal; therefore, by the decision to choose hope, one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision.⁷

This passage raises, or rather provokes, several questions – not least as to the temporality of hope and the eternal, and to the choice of hope. First, let us note the quite minimal definition of the present. We only need to go back to Kierkegaard’s first upbuilding discourse “The Expectancy of Faith” (on the occasion of the New Year’s Day) in order to get a different notion of the present into view. In this first discourse, the point of departure is that human existence is futuredirected – to the point of this becoming a problem. As human beings we live ahead of ourselves, but the future is not yet. Dealing with the future we come to relate to ourselves, battling with our conceptions and fears of the future: “The ability to be occupied with the future, then, is a sign of the nobility of human beings; the struggle with the future is the most ennobling,” but struggling with the future a person learns “that however strong he is otherwise, there is one enemy that is stronger – himself; there is one enemy he cannot conquer by himself, and that is himself.”⁸ We can lose ourselves in the future, in possibilities and our thoughts about the future, so that the problem is to return to the present. How do we come to live in the present? Let us move one step further, to the concept of the moment in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety: If “time and eternity touch each other, then it must be in time, and now we have come to the moment,” Vigilius Haufniensis claims.⁹ The eternal and the temporal touch each other in time – in the moment (Øieblikket). Compare this notion of the moment with the quote from the discourse on hope in Works of Love: “The present, the moment, is over so quickly that it actually does not exist; it is only the boundary and therefore is past, whereas the past is what was present.” Now, in The Concept of Anxiety, the moment is not time passing, almost non-existent, but the decisive moment in which the relation to time – past and future – is changed. Still, Vigilius Haufniensis states that “the eternal first signifies the future” or “the future is the incognito in which the eternal, even though it is incommensurable with time, nevertheless preserves its association with time.”¹⁰ This indicates how misleading Heidegger’s criticism of Kierkegaard in Being and Time is: that Kierkegaard’s ontology is completely dependent on Hegel and

 SKS 9, 249 / WL, 249 – 250.  SKS 5, 27 / EUD, 17– 18.  SKS 4, 390 / CA, 87.  SKS 4, 392 / CA, 89.

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ancient philosophy as Hegel saw it,¹¹ and that Kierkegaard clings to the ordinary conception of time, defining the “moment of vision” with the help of the “now” and the “eternity.”¹² The context in The Concept of Anxiety Chapter 3 is the question of what it means to be a human being. The answer is that as a human being, we are distended in time so that the moment can become decisive. The quote from The Concept of Anxiety leaves us with the question: what is the relation of the moment and the future? If the moment is the moment of decision – if it is not only decisive in the sense that something happens that changes our condition, but also in the sense that we are ourselves implied or involved in that we “decide ourselves” – what is decided in the moment? The obvious answer would be: the future. The moment then concerns the time coming to us. It is the present turned towards the time to come, but in the relation to time being transformed. Let us bring the two passages – the first from the discourse on hope in Works of Love and the second from The Concept of Anxiety chapter 3 on the moment of vision – together by addressing the twofold question of the choice of hope (“the decision to choose hope” in the first quote) and the decision of the moment (in the second). First, in what sense is hope a choice? What does it mean to choose (to) hope? This opens up the question of the subjectivity of hope. If we choose to hope can we bring ourselves over into hoping? We could answer that to hope is a matter of courage, but this only leads us one step back. Do we choose to have courage? The decision to hope takes courage. “I’ve got the courage” indicates both the taking oneself in having courage and getting – or receiving – courage. What it means to choose to hope is (I think) only to be understood when taking the moment of decision into account. In the moment of vision (Øjeblikket), we are required or called to respond. In deciding we respond to “the moment.” The situation is up to us, it depends on what we decide. The moment means that we are situated – as the one to respond. The “moment of vision” is both the moment given to us (time coming) and the moment of decision. In a sense, then, we do not choose or decide to hope – we respond in hoping, and in this (hoping) we choose. If we do not choose to hope, but choose in hoping, what kind of choice is this? The decision in the moment of decision responds to the moment. What is the moment? It is time coming to us as possibilities not only at our disposal (so as to choose between them), but as possibilities in which something of crit Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, rev. and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press 2010, p. 225 / Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1972, p. 235.  Ibid., p. 323 / p. 338.

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ical importance is at stake for us. The “moment of vision” in this sense not only concerns the moment, but – in and through the moment – the history of which it is the moment: the history, which is open in the moment. The choice in hoping implies that we “throw” ourselves into the moment. Using the word “throwing,” what I have in mind is not a blind choice. It is “throwing” in the sense used by Heidegger in Being and Time, but with the qualification that in throwing, we recognize that something is at stake for us, and that this is our history. There is something at stake in the moment and in choosing to hope we put ourselves at stake. This indicates the existential character of hope.

4 Temporality of Hope – Possibility of Hope Generally it is thought that there is a certain age that is especially rich in hope, or we say that at a certain time, at a particular moment of life, one is or was so rich in hope and possibility. All this, however, is merely a human manner of speaking that does not get at the truth; all this hope and all this despair are as yet neither authentic hope nor authentic despair.¹³

This is a quote from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, a passage in the section on “Necessity’s Despair Is to Lack Possibility.” The temporality of hope does not consist in “times of hope.” Why not? If it did, hope would be something we happened to have at certain times. But hope is not something we happen to have. It concerns us in what we are: existing beings. Thus, understanding the temporality of hope is a matter of understanding what it means to hope, that is, the existential character of hope. Note that what Kierkegaard calls the merely human manner of speaking misses what is human. We can hope for a specific possibility, but in this more is at play. If hope concerns the possibility of the Good, the possibility implied in hope is more fundamental: “When someone faints, we call for water, eau de Cologne, smelling salts; but when someone wants to despair, then the word is: Get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation. A possibility – then the person in despair breathes again, he revives again, for without possibility a person seems unable to breathe.”¹⁴ The Sickness unto Death is about despair – not as a specific possibility at a certain time in life, but as a possibility that concerns one’s whole life. It concerns ourselves in how we exist. Correspondingly, hope is the possibility through which we breathe.  SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 38.  SKS 11, 154 / SUD, 38.

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What is the point in pointing to possibility as such? What do we do in hoping? The possibility of hope is to keep possibility open in hoping. Possibility is not there to be used in hoping. It is possibility in hoping. The point is, then, that in hoping we keep time open – as possibility. It is to receive time that comes to us as possibility for the Good. The Good is already at play in keeping time open – as possibility. Getting the existential character of hope into view, we are also led back to the intertwinement of time-dimensions. What does it mean to hope – in existing? In hoping, “we” keep time open – now. Hope is future-directed, but in a movement back to the present: now. Hope concerns the future, the time to come, but in a double movement – back to the time now. This backward movement is implied in the existential character of hope. As a way of existing, hoping changes the time now – forwards, keeping time open in possibility. What does all this show? Hope – hoping – belongs to human existence, but not as a matter of course. Rather, we exist in hoping in that we can give up hope: we can despair.

5 Hope in Despair (Negativity) What is meant by “can” in saying that we can despair? If the choice to hope is the choice in hoping, correspondingly we do not choose to despair, but choose in despairing. Bringing the possibility of despairing (we can despair) into view, we may come to see clearer the choice implied in hoping. Put differently, the decision to hope comes to the fore negatively. Although we do not choose to despair, there is choice in despairing: in what we do, we give up hope. Let me explain a bit further the distinction I have in mind. If we would speak of a direct choice of hope, taking the decision to hope would still leave open whether we can bring ourselves into actually hoping. That is what I have called the choice in hoping. But what is this a choice of? My suggestion is that, ultimately, it is the choice not to despair. Not to despair means: not to give up hoping. The indirect character of the choice of hope thus comes to the fore if we take the negative detour, asking what is implied in despairing. In a sense, then, the ultimate alternative is either to despair (give up on hope) or to hope. Yet, we do not face this as an option, precisely because it is ultimate. It is a choice we make – a decision we take – in what we do and in our ways of relating to what we experience and what we do. If we consider hope and despair as options we face, we would not recognize what is at stake in this choice: the life we are going to live. The radical character

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of the possibilities – to hope and to despair – means that they do not fit into the possibilities of an option we have. Yet there is will at play in despairing.¹⁵ The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard’s book on selfhood and despair, is indirectly a book on hope in so far as to despair is to give up hope.¹⁶ Yet Kierkegaard does not offer a thorough discussion of the issue of the will implied in despairing.¹⁷ Instead, we should look into what his analysis of despair shows. Reading the way Kierkegaard describes what he claims to be examples of despair I find it striking that it is often ambiguous whether they are in fact phenomena of despair. If we focus on the ambiguity we may get a remarkable feature into view. To despair is not simply to give up hope, but rather to struggle with hope, at least in so far as despairing is the act of despairing. In the terms of struggling, there is an option of hoping or despairing. If we follow this suggestion we may come to understand the temporality of hope as indicating a history of hope – in the sense of a struggle to preserve oneself in hoping and not to lose hope. What is striking, then, is that we cannot just give up on hope (and then choose (to) despair). We cannot just – not hope. In despairing there is hope to struggle with. If we give up hope our life changes. As I suggested earlier, it would be challenging to read Jean Améry’s essays At the Mind’s Limits with the question of hope as our lead. If we did, we would have to formulate a refracted, indirect and negative approach to hope. At least, such an approach would make clear both that hope is not something there, to be had, and that it is not something just to be given up. Rather, it is a matter of struggling for hope – even when there is no mention of hoping. In that sense, we do not “have” the option either to hope or to despair. Yet, there is a decision taken in hoping and in despairing, but this may not be obvious, even not to the one concerned. For example, let me refer to the opening of the first discourse in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. When we speak of love,

 See the sentence I quoted earlier from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death: “someone [who] wants to despair” (SKS 11, 154 / SUD, 38).  However, this must be qualified. The book offers a negative approach to the question: what it means to be a self. It does not deal negatively in the same way with the subjectivity and temporality of hope. On Kierkegaard’s negative approach, See Michael Thuenissen, “Kierkegaard’s Negativistic Method,” in Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self. Psychiatry and the Humanities, ed. by Joseph H. Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press 1981, pp. 381– 423; Michael Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, trans. by Barbara Harshav and Helmut Illbruck, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005; Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Jeanette B.L. Knox, Macon: Mercer University Press 2008; Arne Grøn, “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,” Chapter 20 in this volume.  The most explicit passages are to be found in Chapter 2, “The Socratic Definition of Sin,” in the second part on willing and knowing (SKS 11, 201– 208 / SUD, 87– 96).

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negative possibilities come into play, first and foremost the possibilities of being let down and deceived. The discourse turns the negative possibilities around by stating: “To defraud oneself of love [At bedrage sig selv for Kjerlighed] is the most terrible, is an eternal loss, for which there is no compensation either in time or in eternity.”¹⁸ What is this eternal loss in time about? Although there is no mention of hope here I think the answer is that it is about love’s hope. This has to do with the question: what is decided in hope – and in the loss of hope? It is the future as a matter of the character of the life one is to live. This brings us back to the question of time implied in the temporality of hope. Hoping is about receiving the time to come.

6 Time and Forms of Hope In order to see this more clearly, let us look at an apparently different kind of anticipation than hope, namely running ahead of ourselves towards death. Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside,” the last of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845), performs a notable (and memorable) movement taking the motif of thinking the thought of death in earnestness as its lead. I only outline the two critical steps. Firstly: “That death can make a finish is indeed certain, but the challenge of earnestness to the living is to think it, to think that all is over, that there comes a time when all is over. This is the difficult thing, because even in the moment of death the dying person thinks that he still might have some time to live.”¹⁹ It is difficult to think what death means for one’s life. The challenge is to think that there comes a time when there is no more time. Why is this difficult? The difficulty lies with us: thinking that there comes a time when there is no more time runs counter to the fact that we live thinking that there is still time. We take time, and we give ourselves time, first and foremost in delaying. But there is also passivity at play in thinking: we carry ourselves, or the weight of our existence (this is what the earnestness in thinking is about). If we can endure thinking that there comes a time when there is no more time, then “[d]eath in earnest gives life force as nothing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else

 SKS 9, 14 / WL, 5 – 6; “At bedrage sig for” means “to deceive oneself of.” There is self-deception at play: one does not only defraud oneself of love – one also does not see what one does.  SKS 5, 449 – 450 / TD, 79.

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does…the thought of death gives the earnest the right momentum in life and the right goal toward which he directs his momentum.”²⁰ Secondly, the turning point of the discourse is that we – in thinking that all is over – can be struck by the thought that all is not yet over. That is, we can come to receive time as a gift. “Indeed, time is also a good,” the discourse states.²¹ The thought of death changes the relation to time. It reminds us about the time we have taken for granted and questions what we use time for: “with the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity [at gjøre Dyrtid] so that the year and the day receive infinite worth.”²² Thinking that there is still time, avoiding or opposing to think that there comes a time when there is no more time, could this not be to live “past hope,” as Prior Walter says in Angels of America? He reflects: “Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it is not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope.”²³ Although there appears to be no hope, we cannot just give up. However, we must make two distinctions here. Firstly, there is a difference between thinking that there is still time in that we are not able to give up, on the one hand, and taking time as something given we can use, on the other. Secondly, the movement performed by Kierkegaard’s discourse on thinking the thought of death in earnestness points to the pivotal difference between taking time as something at our disposal and time as a gift to be received. Could we then speak of two forms of hope: a hope, which is not easily given up (the animal life, living past hope), and a hope that is not easily received (time as a gift)? Why is the last form of hope a difficult one? My suggestion is that this has to do with the link between the two motifs: hope past hope and hope as commemoration. This leads us back to the intertwinement of time-dimensions. Hope past hope is both the hope, which is not easily given up (in the words of Prior Walter: to live past hope), and the hope we seek when struggling with despair (“Wherever I can find hope…”).

7 Hope – Past Hope The temporality of hope seems to intensify the future-directed character of human existence. It not only shows us to be future-directed – it redirects us to   

SKS 5, 53 / TD, 83. Ibid. SKS 5, 53 / TD, 84. Kushner, Angels in America, p. 89.

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wards the future. The momentum of this re-directing seems to come from setting us apart from the past. Leaving the past behind us gives us the force to redirect ourselves. Yet, is this so – is this all there is to the temporality of hope? When we set ourselves apart from the past, it becomes “the past.” In contrast to the future, which is not yet, the past seems to be there – in the past. However, as we do not have the future, but struggle with ourselves in hoping – not hoping, we do not have the past, but struggle with ourselves in (not) remembering. Seeing the past as past is our perspective now, but there are more possibilities to this – our – perspective. Thus, we can be struck by the fact that what we now see as the past was then – at that time, in the past – a living presence with hopes for the future, hopes that are not absorbed into what became the future. People in the past did not live the past as past. They too were struggling with hopes. What we have as past is also past hopes. And past hope is not only hope belonging to the past that we have turned our back to; it is also past future – in the sense that it transcends what became the future, our present. To the temporality of hope belongs the past as past future. As our present is not simply the fulfilment of past hopes, they – past hopes – may for us go beyond ourselves, redirecting us towards the future. They can transcend our presence in that they may redirect us beyond the future we project. Where does this take us? What is “the point” beyond the future we project? One answer is that it is the future as the time that comes to us. But hope does not just consist in accepting the time to come. It is hope in the possibility of the Good, to use Kierkegaard’s phrase. My suggestion is to understand the temporality of hope in terms of what is at stake in the intertwinement of time-dimensions: future, present, and past. What is “between” past, present, and future, is the possibility of the Good. It is “in between” in the sense that it is the possibility we share with people in the past and in the future – as the possibility of the Good beyond what we see as our possibilities. The Good is a formal indication. It is not absorbed into specific formulations or interpretations of the Good. It is defined as that which we can will wholeheartedly – which should not be understood as an attitude, but as the question: what we do – does that leave us divided? This is, I’ll argue, implied in Kierkegaard’s notion of Eenfoldighed: to be of one mind (German: einfältig). It is a matter of how we are situated with ourselves in what we do, situating ourselves. This suggestion may also help us to understand what is implied in speaking of “the eternal hope.”²⁴ The eternal hope is a hope human beings harbor in time

 See the quote earlier from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (SKS 9, 249 / WL, 249).

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concerning time. It concerns that which can be shared in and through differences in time dimensions. This is (so my suggestion) the possibility of the Good.²⁵ The intertwinement of past, present, and future is not only complex – it is also complicated. I noted earlier the double movement back from the future to the present. In hoping now time is kept open in possibility. Subsequently, I have aimed to outline a double movement back from the past – in terms of past possibilities and hopes. Our present is not only what we make out of it. There are other perspectives to our perspective now, other possibilities than what we take to be our own (also if these are qualified as our “ownmost” possibilities, to use Heidegger’s notion in Being and Time). Understanding our own history as open has to do with understanding history as the history of others. We can seek to appropriate the past, but the fact of the past being past means that something is lost. Yet we may be struck by the fact that the past is past hope – not only in the sense that it is hope belonging to the past, but also hope that goes beyond (passes) our presence, offering us the possibility of re-directing ourselves. In concluding, let me briefly return to Jean Améry. His essays show in an acute manner the difficulty of both hoping and giving up hope. Resentment is “unnatural” as it blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future, and yet, he insists on his resentment.²⁶ Why? Writing his essay in the mid1960’s, seeking to clarify the victim’s condition, Améry faces a culture that encourages acting as if nothing has happened and letting what has happened – the catastrophe, the Holocaust – remain in the past. But the time-sense of the one who lets what has happened remain what it was, who lets time heal his wounds, “has not moved out of the biological and social sphere into the moral sphere,” Améry claims.²⁷ The absurd demand that the irreversible be turned around is a counter-move against the tendency to live as if nothing has happened. While the first is naturally impossible, the second is morally impos-

 In her thoughtful response to an earlier version of the essay presented at Claremont Graduate University, Friederike Rass argued that, according to the existential approach, “past and future would have to be absolutely inseparable from the claimed eternal momentariness of existence.” I agree. That is why I have argued that what is at stake in the moment is the history of which it is the moment, and that what is “between” past, present, and future, is the possibility of the Good. If I should continue my argument here I would speak of transcendence of time in time (which I have done in, for example, Arne Grøn, “Zeit und Transzendenz,” Chapter 22 in this volume and Arne Grøn, “Time and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. by Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 435 – 455).  Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 68.  Ibid., p. 71.

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sible. Not letting the past be past, but absurdly demanding that the event be undone, is to insist on remembering – although remembrance refracted and far from redemptive. I have distinguished between two forms of hope: the hope that is not easily given up and the hope that is not easily found. In the passage from Angels of America, Prior Walter moves between the two: “We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do.” This indicates that we do not have the option of choosing between the two. The second is more seeking to find hope in the first – in living past hope. Let me conclude with one further suggestion. If we take the first form in isolation it appears to be a hope that moves us forward almost without hope (living past hope). In contrast, the second form – the hope that is not easily found – may make us pause. Would that not constitute two different forms of bearing the past in hope? While the first form of hope implied in living past hope may be fleeing the past (or seeking to turn our back to the shadows of death, making them belong to the past), the second may be commemorating the dead.

Chapter 33 Kierkegaards „zweite“ Ethik 1 Eingang Im dänischen Kontext sind die Fächer Ethik und Religionsphilosophie so eng miteinander verwoben, dass der Eindruck entstehen könnte, als würden diese ein Fach ausmachen. Dieses Verhältnis geht in erster Linie auf Kierkegaards Bestimmung des Ethischen und des Religiösen zurück. Kierkegaard spricht von dem Ethischen und dem Religiösen und nicht nur von Ethik und Religion. Man kann sagen, dass mit dieser Bestimmung Kierkegaards die Fächer Ethik und Religionsphilosophie als Ethik-und-Religionsphilosophie begründet werden. In den letzten zehn Jahren hat sich die Kierkegaardforschung verstärkt für das Ästhetische und das Verhältnis des Ästhetischen zum Religiösen interessiert. Dies hat zur Folge, dass das Ethische in die Klemme gekommen ist, ja übersehen wird. In dieser Situation hilft es wenig, wenn man auf die traditionelle Auffassung vom Ethischen als einem Durchgangsstadium zwischen dem Ästhetischen und dem Religiösen zurückgeht. Es gilt vielmehr zu erkennen, dass Kierkegaards Bestimmung des Ethischen übersehene Möglichkeiten enthält. Es gibt nicht „den einen“ Begriff des Ethischen, der sich von Entweder/Oder bis zur Schrift Der Liebe Tun unverändert durchhält. Im Gegenteil, dieser Verlauf ist spannungsgeladen und das Resultat ist wesentlich radikaler, als es von der traditionellen, wie auch von der – wie es scheint – untraditionellen, postmodernen oder dekonstruktiven Diskussion, angenommen wird. Wenn ich von Kierkegaards „zweiter“ Ethik spreche, bedeutet dies, dass innerhalb des Kierkegaardschen Werkes sich ein Bruch zwischen einer „ersten“ und einer „zweiten“ Ethik auftut. Die Ethik ist gebrochen. Sie bleibt nicht länger dieselbe, sondern wird zu einer anderen. Wie wir sehen werden, ist es genau dieser Bruch, der mit der Bedeutung des Religiösen zu tun hat. Und insofern könnte der Titel meines Essay lauten: „Das Ethische und das Religiöse bei Kierkegaard.“ Was ich abhandeln möchte fällt in zwei Teile. Im ersten Teil werde ich in einem textnahen Ausgang vom Begriff Angst die Bewegung von einer „ersten“ zu einer „zweiten“ Ethik aufzeigen. Im zweiten Teil möchte ich systematisch bestimmen, was die Ethik zur „zweiten“ Ethik macht und was für eine Ethik die „zweite“ Ethik ist.

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2 Von einer „ersten“ zu einer „zweiten“ Ethik Den Ausdruck „zweite“ Ethik verwende ich hier in bezug auf Kierkegaard, doch ist dies ein Ausdruck, der sich auch bei Kierkegaard findet. Auf diesen stößt man in der Einleitung zum Begriff Angst, wo Kierkegaards Pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis zwischen einer „ersten“ und einer „zweiten“ Ethik unterscheidet. Vigilius Haufniensis faßt seine Bestimmung folgendermaßen zusammen: „Die erste Ethik ignoriert die Sünde, die zweite Ethik hat die Wirklichkeit der Sünde innerhalb ihres Bereichs.“¹ Abschließend fügt Vigilius Haufniensis hinzu: „Die erste Ethik setzt die Metaphysik voraus, die zweite die Dogmatik, vollendet sie aber auch dergestalt, dass hier wie überall die Voraussetzung hervorkommt.“² Die „zweite“ Ethik ist also eine Ethik, die die Dogmatik zur Voraussetzung hat. Es scheint naheliegend zu sein, dies so zu erklären, dass die zweite Ethik eine Sonderethik ist, die nur dann gilt, wenn wir uns über die religiöse Voraussetzung einig sind. Vigilius Haufniensis sagt aber, dass auch die „erste“ Ethik eine Voraussetzung hat, nämlich die Metaphysik, eine Voraussetzung, die problematisch ist. Es ist bemerkenswert, dass Vigilius Haufniensis in seiner Ausführung, die der zusammenfassenden Bestimmung vorausgeht, zu zeigen versucht, dass die „erste“ Ethik von innen heraus zusammenbricht. Indirekt gibt er hiermit Argumente für das, was er „zweite“ Ethik nennt. Es ist wichtig zu sehen, welchen Charakter Vigilius Haufniensis’ Argumente haben. Diese wenden sich nicht an ein Subjekt, dem es freigestellt ist, zwischen den Möglichkeiten einer „ersten“ und einer „zweiten“ Ethik zu wählen. Die Argumente verweisen auf eine Grundsituation, von der vorausgesetzt wird, dass sie den Leser trifft und der Leser sie kennt. Vigilius Haufniensis beginnt also nicht damit, eine „erste“ und eine „zweite“ Ethik aufzustellen, zwischen denen der Leser dann wählen könnte. Er läßt vielmehr die zweite Ethik auf die Schwierigkeit antworten, die den Zusammenbruch der ersten Ethik bedingt. Kurz gesagt, die „erste“ Ethik ist die Ethik, welche an der Wirklichkeit der Sünde scheitert, während die „zweite“ Ethik die Ethik ist, welche – mit Vigilius Haufniensis’ Worten – sich dadurch ändert, dass sie „ihre Idealität in dem durchdringenden Bewußtsein der Wirklichkeit, der Wirklichkeit der Sünde“ hat.³ Das Schlüsselwort in der Einleitung zum Begriff Angst ist „Wirklichkeit.“ Dass die Wirklichkeit die Wirklichkeit der Sünde ist, ist eine Behaup-

 SKS 4, 330 / BA, 21.  Ibid.  SKS 4, 328 / BA, 18.

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tung, jedoch eine Behauptung, mit der auf die Wirklichkeit aufmerksam gemacht wird, durch die der Einzelne selbst bestimmt ist. Die Aufmerksamkeit des Lesers muss deshalb von der abschließenden Unterscheidung zwischen der „ersten“ und der „zweiten“ Ethik auf das Problem der Ethik zurückgeführt werden, das durch Vigilius Haufniensis aufgedeckt wird. Die ziemlich komplizierten Ausführungen von Vigilius Haufniensis möchte ich nun auf folgende Weise wiedergeben: Die Ethik setzt voraus, dass der Mensch, an den sich die ethische Forderung richtet, im Besitz der Bedingungen ist, um die Forderung zu erfüllen. Aber – sagt Vigilius Haufniensis – „hierdurch entfaltet die Ethik einen Widerspruch, indem sie gerade die Schwierigkeit und die Unmöglichkeit deutlich macht.“⁴ Worin besteht nun diese Schwierigkeit und diese Unmöglichkeit? Der Mensch, an den sich die Forderung richtet, wird durch die Forderung selbst bestimmt. Die Ethik will deshalb, mit Vigilius Haufniensis’ Worten, einen jeden Menschen „zum wahren, zum ganzen Menschen“ machen.⁵ Die Ethik stellt unterdessen dieses Ideal nicht nur auf, sondern fällt ein Urteil über den Menschen, der dieses Ideal nicht erfüllt. Der Mensch, der das Gute will in der Weise, dass er es auch tut, kann zwar für das einstehen, was er tut; er will nur Eines oder ist mit sich selbst einig. Mit ihrer Forderung schärft aber die Ethik gleichzeitig das Bewußtsein des Einzelnen, dass er zu kurz kommt. Die Ethik dreht sich hiermit nicht nur um das Verhältnis zwischen Idealität und Wirklichkeit. Die Wirklichkeit ist nicht nur die andere Seite des Ideals, der Ort, wo sich das Ideal realisieren soll. Die Wirklichkeit ist auch dadurch bestimmt, dass die Forderung nicht erfüllt wird. Wie man mit den Situationen zurechtkommt, wo man selbst versagt hat, ist ebenfalls ein ethisches Problem. Auf die Situationen, in denen das ethische Ideal nicht verwirklicht wurde, muss es also eine ethische Antwort geben. Diese Antwort ist die Reue, welche eine entscheidende Bedeutung hat für die Position des Ethikers in Entweder/Oder. Doch während für den Ethiker die Reue eine erlösende Macht hatte, heißt es in der entscheidenden Passage der Einleitung zum Begriff Angst: „Die Sünde gehört also der Ethik lediglich insofern zu, als es dieser Begriff ist, an dem sie vermittelst der Reue strandet.“⁶ Die Ethik strandet also am Begriff der Sünde, und sie strandet wohlgemerkt vermittelst der Reue.Warum aber vermittelst der Reue? Während wir bezüglich dieser Frage bei Vigilius Haufniensis unmittelbar keine nähere Erklärung finden, erhalten wir Hilfe von einer Fußnote in Furcht und Zittern. Parallel zur Passage im Begriff Angst heißt es hier: „Sobald die Sünde in Erscheinung tritt,

 SKS 4, 324 / BA, 13 – 14.  SKS 4, 325 / BA, 15.  SKS 4, 324 / BA, 14.

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geht die Ethik zugrunde, eben an der Reue.“⁷ Die Fortsetzung lautet: „denn die Reue ist der höchste ethische Ausdruck, aber eben als solcher der tiefste ethische Selbstwiderspruch.“⁸ Dies erfordert eine nähere Erklärung: Auf der einen Seite ist ethisch gesehen die Reue gefordert, wenn man die ethische Forderung nicht erfüllt. Wenn man in dieser Situation nicht bereut, hat man nicht verstanden, was die Forderung bedeutet. Auf der anderen Seite kann die Reue eben nicht das leisten, was sie infolge des Ethikers leisten soll: nämlich den Menschen freizumachen. Ganz im Gegenteil ist es die Frage, wann man von der Reue frei kommt. Diese kann sich eben nicht selbst zum Stehen bringen. Ethisch betrachtet ist die Reue suspekt, ja sogar unethisch, indem sie die Aufmerksamkeit des Menschen von dem ablenkt, was er jetzt und hier zu tun hätte. Dieser Widerspruch oder gar Selbstwiderspruch, von dem Vigilius Haufniensis im Begriff Angst und Johannes de silentio in Furcht und Zittern sprechen, besteht darin, dass die Reue ethisch gefordert ist, doch wird diese ernst genommen, versetzt sie den Menschen in eine Unfreiheit, so dass es ihm unmöglich wird, die ethische Forderung zu erfüllen. Wie bereits erwähnt gibt Vigilius Haufniensis in seiner Einleitung unmittelbar keine Erklärung dafür, warum durch die Reue die Ethik am Begriff der Sünde strandet. Andererseits macht er in einer langen Fußnote einige Bemerkungen, die nicht nur einen Schlüssel für das Verständnis abgeben, warum die Ethik strandet, sondern auch die Bestimmung einer zweiten Ethik antizipieren. Die Anmerkung beginnt eben mit einem Hinweis zu Furcht und Zittern. Von Johannes de silentio wird gesagt, dass er die religiöse Idealität als die „Idealität der Wirklichkeit“ zum Vorschein bringt, und zwar so, „dass diese Idealität hervorbricht in dem dialektischen Sprung und in der positiven Stimmung: ‚siehe, es ist alles neu geworden‘, und der negativen Stimmung, welche die Leidenschaft des Absurden ist, wozu der Begriff: ‚die Wiederholung‘ die Entsprechung ist.“⁹ Dies ist ein antizipierender Verweis auf die „zweite“ Ethik, die Ethik der Wiederholung. Dass Vigilius Haufniensis erklären möchte, warum die Ethik scheitert, und wie diese sich ändert, geht aus der Fortsetzung hervor: Entweder das ganze Dasein ist in der Forderung der Ethik zu Ende, oder die Bedingung wird herbeigeschafft, und das ganze Leben und das ganze Dasein fängt von vorne an, nicht durch eine immanente Kontinuität mit dem Vorhergehenden hindurch, welches ein Widerspruch ist, sondern vermöge einer Transzendenz, welche die Wiederholung durch eine Kluft von dem ersten Dasein scheidet.¹⁰

 SKS 4, 188 / FZ, 111.  Ibid.  SKS 4, 324 / BA, 14– 15.  SKS 4, 324 / BA, 15.

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Dieser Gedanke wird in der Fußnote eine Seite weiter vertieft: Wofern die Wiederholung nicht gesetzt ist, wird die Ethik eine bindende Macht, deshalb sagt er [nämlich Constantin Constantius in der Wiederholung] vermutlich, dass sie die LosungLösung in der ethischen Anschauung sei. Wenn die Wiederholung nicht gesetzt ist, vermag die Dogmatik überhaupt nicht zu existieren; denn im Glauben fängt die Wiederholung an, und der Glaube ist das Organ für die dogmatischen Probleme.¹¹

Diese beiden, in der langen Fußnote versteckten Zitate, geben, wie gesagt, einen Schlüssel für das Verständnis, was mit einer „zweiten“ Ethik gemeint ist. Das erste Zitat stellt die Alternative auf: Entweder endet das ganze Dasein in der Forderung der Ethik, oder die Bedingung wird zuwege gebracht, die Bedingung, die einen neuen Beginn bedeutet. Das zweite Zitat geht auf den ersten Teil der Alternative zurück: Wenn die Wiederholung nicht gesetzt ist, wird die Ethik zu einer bindenden Macht. Wenn das ganze Dasein in der Forderung der Ethik endet, sind wir in einem Universum eingeschlossen, das vom Ideal und von unserem Streben bestimmt ist, dieses Ideal zu verwirklichen. Sich selbst überlassen wird die Ethik zu einer bindenden Macht, die unfrei macht. Zuvor hatte Vigilius Haufniensis deshalb hervorgehoben: „Es gilt von der Ethik, was da vom Gesetze gesagt wird, dass sie ein Zuchtmeister ist, welcher, indem er fordert, mit seinem Fordern lediglich richtet, nicht zeugt.“¹² Dass ein Mensch durch die Forderung der Ethik zu kurz kommt, ist es genau, was die Reue zeigt. Dies besagt, dass die Ethik nicht bloß an der Wirklichkeit der Sünde strandet, sie hilft auch dabei, „dass man alles verliert.“¹³ Dadurch wird unterstrichen, dass der neue Beginn außerhalb der Ethik liegt, zugleich aber wird die Ethik aufs neue eröffnet, als „zweite“ Ethik. Vigilius Haufniensis’ Unterscheidung zwischen Ethik als erster und Ethik als zweiter Ethik ist radikal. Trotzdem werden die Ausdrücke „erste“ und „zweite“ Ethik bei Kierkegaard später nicht mehr verwendet, und die Literatur über Kierkegaard hat sich kaum an dieser Distinktion orientiert. Dass später bei Kierkegaard von „zweiter“ Ethik nicht mehr die Rede ist, läßt sich auf zweifache Weise interpretieren. Entweder hat Kierkegaard diese Unterscheidung aufgegeben, oder diese ist so entscheidend, dass sie nicht erwähnt zu werden braucht, weil danach die Ethik als „zweite“ Ethik zu verstehen ist. Die erste Möglichkeit ist nicht zufriedenstellend, und schon aus dem Grund, dass man einen so entscheidenden Unterschied, wie den zwischen einer ersten

 SKS 4, 324 / BA, 16.  SKS 4, 324 / BA, 14.  SKS 4, 325 / BA, 16.

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und einer zweiten Ethik, nicht ohne nähere Begründung aufgeben kann. Ein positiveres und stärkeres Argument ist, dass Vigilius Haufniensis’ Pointe, dass die Ethik an der Wirklichkeit der Sünde strandet, den Verlauf von Entweder/Oder zum Begriff Angst zusammenfaßt. Sowie die Ethik an der Wirklichkeit der Sünde strandet, kommt sie als eine Ethik wieder, die ihren Ausgang von dieser Wirklichkeit nimmt. Insofern die Wirklichkeit der Sünde der Ausgangspunkt für das ist, was Kierkegaard nach dem Begriff Angst schreibt, ist die Ethik danach eine „zweite“ Ethik. Im Folgenden (zweiten Teil) möchte ich unter bezug auf Der Liebe Tun mit einzelnen Hinweisen eine systematische oder thetische Bestimmung davon geben, was eine zweite Ethik bedeutet. In welchem Sinne ist sie eine Ethik? Und in welchem Sinne ist sie eine zweite Ethik?

3 Die Ethik als „zweite“ Ethik Indem die zweite Ethik von der Wirklichkeit der Sünde ausgeht, setzt sie, wie bereits erwähnt, die Dogmatik voraus. Was aber bedeutet es, dass da ein anderer, ein religiöser Ausgangspunkt, ein religiöses Vorzeichen bestimmend ist? Im Dänischen bedeutet „anden“ Ethik sowohl „zweite“ als auch „andere“ Ethik. Die zweite Ethik ist nicht nur eine Ethik, welche mit der ersten Ethik konkurriert oder diese erstatten möchte. Die erste und die zweite Ethik haben eine intimere Verbindung zueinander. Dass die Ethik an der Wirklichkeit der Sünde strandet, ist der Ausgangspunkt für die zweite Ethik. Dies Scheitern bedeutet die Änderung der Ethik, sie wird zu einer zweiten Ethik. Die zweite Ethik ist eine Ethik, die aus den Bedingungen des Zusammenbruchs hervorgeht. Meine These lautet also, dass die zweite Ethik die Ethik ist, welche transformiert wurde. Aber wie geschieht die Umformung der Ethik zu einer zweiten Ethik? Auf die kürzeste Formel gebracht: Die zweite Ethik ist eine Ethik durch eine Ethikkritik, und sie ist eine Ethik in Kraft von etwas, was über die ethische Forderung hinaus liegt. Beide Punkte drehen sich um das Religiöse im Sinne Kierkegaards. Das Religiöse ist das, was über die Ethik hinaus liegt: die Transzendenz, der neue Beginn. Dieser resultiert nicht aus der Ethik, sondern bezeichnet genau das, was die Ethik mit ihrer Forderung nicht geben kann. Das Religiöse ergibt umgekehrt einen Sinn für das Problem der Ethik: Mit ihrer Forderung verbleibt die Ethik beim Urteilen, sie zeugt nicht, und mit ihrer Forderung ermöglicht sie ein moralisches Selbstbewußtsein, das die ethische Bedeutung der moralischen Handlung ändert.

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Dies sind die beiden Punkte – dass die zweite Ethik eine Ethik ist, die aus einer Ethikkritik hervorgeht, und dass sie eine Ethik in Kraft von etwas ist, das über die Ethik hinaus liegt –, die es zu vertiefen gilt. Die Frage lautete: Was ist mit der Transformation der Ethik zu einer zweiten Ethik gemeint? Das Andere dieser Ethik besteht nicht nur darin, dass sie religiös begründet ist und mit einem anderen Inhalt oder anderen Antworten sich zu den ethischen Fragen verhält. Dass die Ethik eine zweite Ethik ist bedeutet, dass sie als Ethik in einem radikaleren Sinne zu verstehen ist. Das, was sich ändert, ist das Verständnis des Ethischen, unsere Weise, wie wir fragen, oder mit anderen Worten: worauf wir zu achten haben, wenn wir ethisch fragen. In diesem radikalen Sinne ist von einer zweiten Ethik zu sprechen. Die Ethik selbst ist es, die sich ändert. Doch wie ändert sich die Ethik? Kurz gesagt tut sie dies dadurch, dass die ethische Frage radikalisiert wird, indem man sie als die Frage nach dem Wie versteht. Ethisch relevant ist also nicht bloß, was man tut, sondern wie man das tut, was man tut. Fragt man nach dem „Wie,“ dann hat es den Anschein, als sei dies eine extra Frage, die man der ethischen Frage, was soll ich tun, hinzufügt. Mit der Antwort auf die Frage, was ich tun soll, ist das Ethische aber nicht an sein Ende gekommen. Es gibt auch eine andere, nämlich die kritische Frage, wie ich das, was ich tun soll, tun werde oder getan habe, und diese Frage ist ebenfalls ethisch. Sie ist aber keine zusätzliche ethische Frage, sondern greift zurück und qualifiziert die erste Frage nach dem Was. Die Weise, wie man das Gute tut, kann den ethischen Charakter der Handlung ändern. Die Frage nach dem „Wie“ ist in den Text der Schrift Der Liebe Tun auf eine Weise verwoben, dass man sie übersehen kann. Deshalb möchte ich auf ein paar Stellen hinweisen, welche diese Fragestellung hervorheben. Die erste Stelle, auf die ich hinweisen will, ist die Rede VII der zweiten Folge: „Barmherzigkeit, ein Tun der Liebe, selbst wenn sie nichts geben kann, und nichts zu tun vermag.“¹⁴ In dieser Rede unterscheidet Kierkegaard zwischen Wohltätigkeit und Barmherzigkeit. Auf die Frage, was soll ich tun, lautet die Antwort (dies ist Kierkegaards eigenes Beispiel), ich soll dem Armen helfen. Kierkegaard behandelt die Frage, was man tun soll, als sei sie bereits entschieden. Erst daran anschließend setzen seine Überlegungen ein. Es ist nämlich möglich, das Gute zu tun, ohne dass dies ein Tun der Liebe ist. Dies ist der Fall, wenn man das Gute unbarmherzig tut. Barmherzigkeit ist – so Kierkegaard – an die Frage gebunden, wie man gibt.

 SKS 9, 312 / LT 324.

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Wie man gibt, hängt von der Frage ab, wie man den sieht, dem man gibt. Dies geht aus der zweiten Stelle hervor, die ich anführen möchte. In der Rede II C der ersten Folge heißt es im Anschluß an Lukas 14,12– 14: „denn wer den Armen beköstigt, aber doch nicht dergestalt über sein Gemüt siegt, dass er diese Beköstigung ein Gastmahl nennt, der sieht in dem Armen und dem Geringen nur den Armen und Geringen, wer das „Gastmahl“ macht, der sieht in dem Armen und Geringen den Nächsten – wie lächerlich das nun auch in den Augen der Welt scheinen kann.“¹⁵ Barmherzigkeit ist: wie man gibt, und das heißt, wie man den sieht, dem man gibt.Wenn man in ihm nur den Armen und den Geringen sieht, tut man vielleicht das Gute, aber man handelt nicht barmherzig. Hiermit bin ich nun in der Lage, eine genauere Formulierung meiner These zu geben. Die zweite Ethik, sowie wir sie im Text Der Liebe Tun finden, ist eine Ethik des Sehens. Bereits auf der ersten Seite von Der Liebe Tun wird dieses Thema angeschlagen: Wie nämlich derjenige, welcher handelt, sieht – den anderen und sich selbst. Die Welt, welche Kierkegaard in Der Liebe Tun beschreibt, ist eine Welt des Sehens. Es ist eine Welt, in der wir einander beurteilen: In welchen Augen gilt wer am meisten? Die ethische Bedeutung des Sehens liegt in der doppelten Möglichkeit: sehen und doch nicht sehen. Es ist möglich, den anderen Menschen zu sehen, ohne diesen zu sehen. Man kann auf eine Weise sehen, die ein Übersehen oder ein Herabsehen ist. Die vorfindbaren Unterschiede können das Auge gefangennehmen, sodass dieses sich fixiert. Man kann, wie Kierkegaard sagt, an der Verschiedenheit „sich versehen“; wenn man sich aber versieht, nimmt man Schaden an seiner Seele.¹⁶ Kierkegaards Beispiel hierfür lautet: Derjenige, der hochmütig ist, wird selber unfrei. Im Gegensatz zu diesen negativen Möglichkeiten gilt es, den anderen Menschen in einem emphatischen Sinne zu sehen. Es kommt darauf an, dass man im anderen Menschen den Menschen sieht, die gemeinsame Menschlichkeit, zugleich aber gilt es, die Eigentümlichkeit des anderen Menschen zu sehen, dass jener dieser bestimmte Mensch ist. Dies ist es, was beispielweise in der Rede IV der ersten Folge hervorgehoben wird: „Unsere Pflicht, die Menschen zu lieben, welche wir sehen.“¹⁷ All dies bedeutet, dass sich mit der zweiten Ethik die Auffassung davon, was ethisch relevante Phänomene sind, ändert. Mit der Frage nach dem „Wie“ (wie tue ich das, was ich tun soll) rücken Phänomene wie Barmherzigkeit, Hochmut, Neid, Mißtrauen, Glauben, Urteilen und Vergebung in den Vordergrund. Dies alles sind

 SKS 9, 88 – 89 / LT, 94.  SKS 9, 80 / LT, 84.  SKS 9, 155 / LT, 170.

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Verhaltensweisen, wie man den anderen Menschen sehen kann. Um dafür nur ein Beispiel zu geben, beziehe ich mich auf den „Schluß“ von Der Liebe Tun: „Es steht geschrieben: ‚Was siehest du aber den Splitter in deines Bruders Auge, und wirst nicht gewahr des Balkens in deinem Auge?‘ Ein frommer Mann hat folgende fromme Erläuterung dieser Worte gegeben: Der Balken in deinem Auge ist weder mehr noch weniger, als dass du den Splitter in deines Bruders Auge siehst und richtest.“¹⁸ Lassen Sie mich an dieser Stelle eine vorläufige Zusammenfassung geben. Die zweite Ethik ist keine zusätzliche Ethik, keine Sonderethik, sondern eine Transformation der Ethik. Sie ist eine andere Ethik dadurch, dass das Verständnis des Ethischen verschärft wird: Die ethische Frage, die sich darum dreht, was ich tun soll, wird zugespitzt, indem die Aufmerksamkeit auf das wie tue ich das, was ich tun soll, gelenkt wird. Mit der Frage nach dem „Wie“ ändert sich die Sichtweise für die ethisch relevanten Phänomene. Die zweite Ethik rückt die Aufmerksamkeit weiter zurück: Ich habe nicht nur verschiedene Handlungsmöglichkeiten vor mir. Die Frage ist, wie ich mich mit dem, was ich tue, zu mir selbst und zu dem anderen stelle. Man könnte dies eine Gesinnungsethik nennen, aber es handelt sich wohlgemerkt um die Gesinnung, die sich darin zeigt, wie man handelt. Ethisch relevant wird deshalb auch das moralische Selbstbewußtsein. Mit welcher Vorstellung von mir selbst handle ich? Wie stelle ich mich mit dem, wie ich mich zu einem anderen verhalte, zu mir selbst? Wenn ich im anderen Menschen nur den sehe, dem man helfen soll, oder den, dem man vergeben soll, dann sehe ich mich auch nur als den, der hilft, und als den, der vergibt. Die zweite Ethik ist eine Ethik der Kritik des moralischen Selbstbewußtseins. Das Problem, um das die Schrift Der Liebe Tun kreist, ist das Selbstbewußtsein, das ein Mensch erreicht, indem er das Gute tut. Er zieht seinen Verdienst aus dem, was er tut. Kierkegaard spricht deshalb an einer Stelle über den Lohn des stolzen Selbstbewußtseins. Man tut das, was man tut, um sich selbst zu rechtfertigen. Auf diese Weise will man sich selbst in eine freie Position bringen, durch die es einem frei steht, über andere zu urteilen. Die zweite Ethik schärft also den Sinn für das Ethische, indem sie den Sinn für die Wirklichkeit der Sünde schärft. Vigilius Haufniensis machte darauf aufmerksam, dass die zweite Ethik die Dogmatik zu ihrer Voraussetzung hat. Diese hat sie aber dadurch, dass sie die Wirklichkeit der Sünde voraussetzt. Es ist diese Voraussetzung, welche von der zweiten Ethik geltend gemacht wird. Die zweite Ethik

 SKS 9, 375 / LT, 419.

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setzt dadurch die Dogmatik nicht bloß voraus, sondern „vollendet sie aber auch dergestalt, dass hier wie überall die Voraussetzung hervorkommt.“¹⁹ So verstanden ist die zweite Ethik eine Ethik, die durch den Zusammenbruch der ersten Ethik bedingt ist. Sie geht von der Situation aus, dass der Mensch in seinem ethischen Streben strandet. Wie ist nun, trotz dieses Scheiterns, eine Ethik möglich? Möglich wird sie dadurch, dass etwas über das Ethische hinausgreift: der neue Beginn, die Transzendenz. Die zweite Ethik nimmt das Nicht-Meßbare zu ihrem Maßstab. Hier möchte ich besonders auf die letzte Rede der ersten Folge hinweisen: „Unsere Pflicht, in der Liebe Schuld gegeneinander zu bleiben.“ Derjenige, der die Handlung der Liebe vollzieht, ist selbst in einer unendlichen Schuld, die ein Rechenschaftsverhältnis ausschließt. Die Liebe ist schon im voraus gegeben, als Liebe Gottes. Auch die Liebe, welche man fühlt und gibt, ist einem gegeben. Man schafft diese Liebe nicht selbst, sie ist immer schon „im Grunde.“ Die zweite Ethik, die wir aus Der Liebe Tun herauslesen können, kann deshalb auch eine Ethik der Gabe genannt werden. Derjenige, der angesprochen wird, soll das Tun der Liebe vollziehen, und kann doch die Liebe nicht selbst schaffen. Die zweite Ethik ist näher besehen eine Ethik, die auf den Bedingungen der Vergebung ruht. Die Gabe ist die Vergebung. Die zweite Ethik ist dadurch eine Ethik, die sich aus dem ergibt, was über die Moral hinaus liegt. Die Vergebung kann nicht moralisch gefordert werden, sie ist vielmehr ein Tun der Liebe. Die zweite Ethik ist so eine Ethik der Liebe.²⁰

 SKS 4, 331 / BA, 21.  Übersetzt von Hermann Schmid.

Chapter 34 Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun? 1 Die einseitige Forderung Die Forderung der Nächstenliebe ist dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass sie einseitig ist, und dies in dreierlei Weise. Erstens hängt die Forderung, den Nächsten zu lieben, nicht von dem ab, was man selbst dafür bekommt. Die Liebe, die gefordert ist, erlaubt keine Berechnung. Zweitens kann man Gegenliebe nicht verlangen. Die Forderung läßt sich nicht gegen den anderen Menschen wenden als eine Forderung, die Liebe zu erwidern, die man ihm erweist. Drittens hängt die Forderung nicht einmal von dem ab, was der Nächste zuvor einem selbst gegenüber getan hat. Die Nächstenliebe ist souverän in dem Sinne, dass sie selbst die Situation verändert. Wenn man den einseitigen Charakter der Forderung der Nächstenliebe verdeutlichen will, so ist es erhellend, sie mit Anerkennung zu vergleichen.¹ Dass man den anderen Menschen, dem man gegenübersteht, anerkennen soll, hängt auch nicht von einer Berechnung darüber ab, was man dafür bekommt. Auch hier geht es darum, den anderen Menschen so zu sehen, wie er in sich selbst ist. Es besteht also eine entscheidende Ähnlichkeit zwischen Nächstenliebe und Anerkennung. Die Verbindung zeigt sich zudem auch in der Nächstenliebe selbst, da diese eine Anerkennung des Nächsten als eines anderen Selbst enthalten muss. Es besteht allerdings der Unterschied, dass man verlangen kann, selbst von dem anderen, den man anerkennt, anerkannt zu werden. Während die Forderung, den Nächsten zu lieben, einseitig ist, ist Gegenseitigkeit in Anerkennung also gefordert. Dass die Forderung, den Nächsten zu lieben, im entscheidenden Sinne einseitig ist, geht nicht zuletzt aus Der Liebe Tun hervor. Es handelt sich hier um ein Buch über die Nächstenliebe in ihrer Unterschiedenheit von anderen Formen von Liebe. Mit der Überschrift über die zweite Rede (II A) in der ersten Folge wird die Nächstenliebe als Forderung hervorgehoben: Du sollst den Nächsten lieben. Hier wird die Forderung herausgestellt, die das Buch zu verdeutlichen sucht. Und die Forderung wird dadurch verdeutlicht, dass ihr einseitiger Charakter immer wieder hervorgehoben wird. Meine Frage ist nun: Wie wird Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun verstanden? Die Frage entspringt einem Verdacht, dass gerade das Verständnis der Gegen Vgl. Arne Grøn „Liebe und Anerkennung,“ Kerygma und Dogma, Nr. 2, 1994, S. 101– 114. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-040

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seitigkeit in dem Buch besondere Probleme schafft. Dies macht sich vor allem in der vorletzten Rede von dem Tun der Liebe, eines Verstorbenen zu gedenken, bemerkbar. In der Rede geht es darum, seine Liebe auf die Probe zu stellen, und die wahre Liebe wird an einer Situation gemessen, in der jede Gegenseitigkeit ausgeschlossen ist. Ist aber alles damit gesagt, dass die Forderung einseitig ist? Ich möchte in drei Schritten vorgehen. Zunächst möchte ich den negativen Begriff von Gegenseitigkeit als Wiedervergeltung (dänisch: gengœld) heranziehen, zu dem die einseitige Nächstenliebe als Kontrast gedacht ist. Dann möchte ich zu zeigen versuchen, dass in Der Liebe Tun ein anderer Begriff von Gegenseitigkeit zu finden ist, eine Gegenseitigkeit, die die Nächstenliebe kennzeichnet. Schließlich möchte ich zu zeigen versuchen, dass Gegenseitigkeit dennoch ein entscheidendes, vielleicht das entscheidende, Problem in Der Liebe Tun darstellt. Ich möchte dabei das Hauptgewicht auf den zweiten Schritt legen, teils weil er sicher der überraschendste ist, teils weil er der Hintergrund für das rechte Verständnis des Problems der Gegenseitigkeit ist.

2 Gegenseitigkeit als Wiedervergeltung Wenn Kierkegaard in Der Liebe Tun die Forderung der Nächstenliebe zu verdeutlichen sucht, versteht er Gegenseitigkeit negativ als Wiedervergeltung. Der tragende Gegensatz im Buch ist der Gegensatz zwischen Vorliebe und Nächstenliebe. Den, für den man eine Vorliebe hat, hat man ausgewählt. Es ist der Freund oder der Geliebte. Aber Vorliebe versteht Kierkegaard auch mehr allgemein so, dass sie eine Trennung vollzieht zwischen denen, die zu einem (zum eigenen Kreis) gehören, und denen, die nicht zu einem gehören. Und das Kriterium ist, dass die, die zu einem gehören, das, was man ihnen gegenüber tut, erwidern können. Das geht nicht zuletzt aus der ersten Folge II C hervor, die eine Rede über den Unterschied ist, den die Vorliebe macht. Hier heißt es im Anschluß an Lukas 14,12: „Denn nach dem allgemeinen Sprachgebrauch ist wohl ungefähr folgendes das Verzeichnis derer, die zu einem Gastmahl eingeladen werden: Freunde, Brüder, Gefreundete, reiche Nachbarn – welche die Einladung erwidern können.“² Der Kreis der Vorliebe ist also durch Gegenseitigkeit als Erwiderung gekennzeichnet. Im Gegensatz hierzu gilt Nächstenliebe dem, der außerhalb des

 SKS 9, 88 / LT, 93.

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Kreises steht, da man nicht von vornherein eine Erwiderung von ihm erwarten kann.³ Der allgemeine Sprachgebrauch ist, was Kierkegaard an anderen Stellen im Buch die bloß menschliche Auffassung und Vorstellung von der Liebe nennt. Diese Vorstellung macht die Liebe zu einem bloß gegenseitigem Verhältnis. Ich zitiere aus der Rede III A in der ersten Folge: „Die bloß menschliche Auffassung der Liebe kann niemals weiter kommen als bis zu dem Gegenseitigen: dass der Liebende der Geliebte ist und der Geliebte der Liebende.“⁴ Das legt Kierkegaard so aus, dass das Verhältnis nach der bloß menschlichen Auffassung nichts anderes ist als eine gegenseitige Übereinkunft. Das Verhältnis ist nur eine Frage danach, was die Partner jeweils in das Verhältnis hineinlegen und worüber sie übereinkommen können. Und das bedeutet, dass das Verhältnis ein Verhältnis gegenseitiger Ansprüche wird. Zusammenfassend heißt es in der zweiten Rede in der zweiten Folge: „Es gibt eine niedrigere Auffassung der Liebe, also eine niedrigere Liebe, die keine Vorstellung von der Liebe an und für sich hat. Diese hält das Lieben für eine Forderung (die Forderung ist Gegenliebe), und das Geliebtwerden (die Gegenliebe) für ein irdisches Gut, für zeitliche – ach, und doch für die höchste Glückseligkeit.“⁵ Die Konsequenz ist, dass das Verhältnis selbst auf ein Verhältnis gegenseitiger Ansprüche und gegenseitigen Nutzens reduziert wird. Das Verhältnis wird in juristischen und wirtschaftlichen Kategorien gedacht. Das Zitat fährt fort: Ja, wenn es so ist, muß freilich der Betrug den Herrn und Meister spielen können, genauso wie in der Welt des Geldes. Man gibt sein Geld aus, um die eine oder andere Bequemlichkeit zu kaufen; man hat das Geld gegeben, aber die Bequemlichkeit nicht bekommen: ja, dann ist man zum Narren gehalten. Man betreibt den Umsatz der Liebe; man gibt seine Liebe hin, um einzutauschen, hat aber keine Gegenliebe in den Tausch bekommen: ja, dann ist man betrogen.⁶

Das Verhältnis wird zu einer Frage danach, worauf man Anspruch hat, wenn man Liebe gibt. Aber das bedeutet, dass man Liebe gibt, um Liebe zu erhalten. Die Kritik der bloß menschlichen Vorstellung von Liebe hat also als ihren Kern die Bestimmung der Gegenseitigkeit als Wiedervergeltung. Wenn dies alles ist, was man von Gegenseitigkeit sagen kann, ist es klar, dass die Forderung, den Nächsten zu lieben, Gegenseitigkeit ausschließt. Macht sich aber Kierkegaard  Ich vereinfache hier bewußt die Problemstellung. Der Liebe Tun zeigt, dass auch die Vorliebe durch das Gebot der Nächstenliebe verändert werden muss.  SKS 9, 124 / LT, 134.  SKS 9, 238 / LT, 263.  Ibid.

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nicht die Sache zu leicht, wenn er die wahre Vorstellung von Liebe im Widerspruch zu der Auffassung bestimmt, die das Verhältnis zu einer Frage nach gegenseitigen Ansprüchen und dem Umsatz der Liebe macht? Gehen wir zunächst näher darauf ein, was Gegenseitigkeit im Sinne von Wiedervergeltung oder Erwiderung bedeutet. Wie gerade erwähnt kann dies bedeuten, dass man Liebe gibt, damit man Liebe erhält. Gegenliebe wird damit zu einer Forderung, deren Erfüllung man beanspruchen kann. Aber Gegenseitigkeit als Vergeltung oder Erwiderung kann auch bedeuten, dass man hofft, dass die Liebe, die man einem anderen Menschen gegenüber hegt, erwidert wird.Während die Liebe im ersten Fall zu Berechnung wird, eine Investition, die man tätigt, ist sie im zweiten Falle spontan. In dieser Liebe, der man sich gar nicht entziehen kann, liegt eine Hoffnung, dass sie erwidert wird. Die Gegenliebe ist hier keine Forderung, sondern eine Hoffnung auf Gemeinschaft. Sollte der Glücksfall eintreffen, dass die Liebe erwidert wird, ist die Gegenliebe eine Gabe, nicht die Erfüllung eines Anspruchs. Es besteht also ein entscheidender Unterschied, ob man Liebe gibt, um selbst Liebe zu empfangen, oder ob man Liebe gibt in der Hoffnung auf Gegenliebe. Diesen Unterschied scheint Kierkegaard zu übersehen. Er scheint zu behaupten, dass sich Gegenseitigkeit auf Gegenseitigkeit im ersteren Sinne reduzieren lasse, wo Gegenseitigkeit zu einem Anspruch wird. Kierkegaards Behauptung, dass Vorliebe in Wirklichkeit Selbstliebe sei,⁷ muss bedeuten, dass man im gegenseitigen Verhältnis nur Liebe gibt, um selbst bestätigt zu werden, indem man selbst von dem Auserwählten geliebt wird. Aber Kierkegaard geht zugleich davon aus, dass der Mensch schon „in“ Liebe ist.⁸ Wollte man bloß Liebe geben, um sie wieder zu erhalten, müsste man über seine Liebe verfügen. Aber eben dies kann man nach Kierkegaard nicht. Die Liebe ist bereits da als Drang im Menschen. Deshalb kann man Liebe hegen, auch wenn sie nicht erwidert wird und selbst wenn man also nicht in seiner Liebe bestätigt wird. Dies deutet an, dass die Behauptung Kierkegaards dem widerspricht, was er selbst aufzeigt. Die Behauptung war, dass Vorliebe in Wirklichkeit Selbstliebe sei, da die Gegenseitigkeit im Verhältnis lediglich eine gegenseitige Selbstbestätigung ist. Man gibt nur, um selbst zu empfangen: um selbst geliebt zu werden. Sieht man

 Dies ist die Behauptung in der Rede II B in der ersten Folge. Die Behauptung wird so ausgedrückt, dass „leidenschaftliche Vorliebe eigentlich eine andere Form der Selbstliebe ist“ (SKS 9, 60 / LT, 60 – 61).  Siehe z. B. den Anfang von Rede IV in der erste Folge mit dem Einsatz: „Wie tief ist doch das Bedürfnis nach Liebe im Wesen des Menschen gegründet!“ (SKS 9, 155 / LT, 170). Oder die erste Rede vom „Leben der Liebe“ (SKS 9, 19 / LT, 14), das sich Äußerung verschafft, indem es einen Menschen bewegt.

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genauer hin, so zeigt Kierkegaard jedoch, dass die Forderung der Wiedervergeltung die Liebe selbst zerstört. Das Vorzeichen für seine Beschreibung der Vorliebe ist meist negativ. Das geht vor allem aus der Rede II A in der ersten Folge hervor. Kierkegaard beschreibt hier, wie sich die Vorliebe verändern kann, in sich selbst in Eifersucht oder Haß und von sich selbst in Gewohnheit. Eifersucht ist eine Vorliebe, die krankhaft nach Bestätigung sucht, die Bestätigung nämlich, die darin liegt, dass sie erwidert wird. Der Eifersüchtige „martert sich selbst mit dem Feuer der Gegenliebe, welches läuternd seine Liebe reinigen sollte.“⁹ Diese negative Beschreibung setzt voraus, dass die Vorliebe nicht ohne weiteres Eifersucht ist. Es zeigt sich, dass auch nicht die Liebe, die auf Neigung beruht, Anspruch auf Wiedervergeltung oder Erwiderung hat. Wenn man im Verhältnis der Vorliebe nur Bestätigung sucht, wenn man also nur Liebe gibt, um selbst Liebe zu empfangen, wird das Verhältnis zerstört. Das bedeutet, dass ein Widerstreit besteht zwischen dem, was Kierkegaard die bloß menschliche Vorstellung von Liebe nennt, und der Vorliebe selbst. Die bloß menschliche Vorstellung macht das Verhältnis der Vorliebe zu etwas anderem, als es ist: zu einem bloß gegenseitigen Verhältnis in dem Sinne, dass das Verhältnis zu einer Frage gegenseitiger Ansprüche und gegenseitigen Umsatzes wird. Das Verhältnis selbst wird reduziert, wenn es in juristischen und wirtschaftlichen Kategorien gedacht wird. Die Gegenliebe zu einer Forderung zu machen und das Verhältnis zu einer Frage des Umsatzes, ist bereits menschlich gesehen für die Liebe zerstörend. Bereits in der Vorliebe kann von einer anderen Form der Gegenseitigkeit die Rede sein, da in der Liebe, die auf Neigung beruht, ein Wunsch oder eine Hoffnung auf Gemeinschaft enthalten sein kann. Dass dies ein Wunsch oder eine Hoffnung auf Erwiderung ist, bedeutet, dass man nicht gibt, um wieder zu bekommen. Man gibt immer schon und hofft auf Erwiderung.

3 Ein anderer Begriff von Gegenseitigkeit Die Beschreibung Kierkegaards zeigt also, dass sich nicht einmal die Vorliebe durch einen negativen Begriff von Gegenseitigkeit als Wiedervergeltung einfangen läßt. Das gibt Anlaß, auf die Bestimmung der Nächstenliebe als einseitiger Forderung zurückzukommen. Ist auch in der Nächstenliebe eine Form von Gegenseitigkeit enthalten? Gegenseitigkeit als Wiedervergeltung wurde negativ als ein Anspruch auf Gegenliebe verstanden. Aber wie das Verhältnis zueinander nur in Gegenseitigkeit

 SKS 9, 42 / LT, 41.

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gelingt, läßt Gegenseitigkeit sich auch ethisch als die Forderung verstehen, das Verhältnis zueinander von der anderen Seite als der eigenen zu sehen. Dass das Verhältnis gegenseitig sein soll, ist hier kein Anspruch, den man dem anderen gegenüber geltend machen kann, sondern eine Forderung, die sich an einen selbst richtet. Diesen Gedanken der Gegenseitigkeit können wir in Der Liebe Tun finden. Ich deute kurz die einzelnen Schritte an. Zunächst müssen wir fragen, was die Alternative zu der bloß menschlichen Auffassung ist, die nicht über das „Gegenseitige“ hinauskommt: dass der Liebende der Geliebte ist, und der Geliebte der Liebende (wie es in dem Zitat hieß, von dem ich ausging). Die Alternative leugnet nicht, dass Liebe ein gegenseitiges Verhältnis ist, sondern hebt vielmehr das Verhältnis selbst als „das Dritte“ hervor. Ich zitiere aus der sechsten Rede in der zweiten Folge: „Man sollte glauben, und man meint wohl zumeist, Liebe zwischen Mensch und Mensch sei ein Verhältnis zwischen zweien. Das ist auch wahr, aber unwahr, sofern dies Verhältnis zugleich ein Verhältnis zwischen dreien ist. Zuerst ist da der Liebende; dann derjenige oder diejenigen, die der Gegenstand sind; aber zum dritten ist die Liebe selbst mit zugegen.“¹⁰ Wenn ich eben gesagt habe, dass das Verhältnis selbst das Dritte ist, so unter Hinweis auf das, was Kierkegaard selbst früher in seinem Buch gesagt hat. In Rede IV in der ersten Folge, die eine Rede über das Verhältnis ist, in dem man schon steht, wird auf das „Verhältnis selbst“ verwiesen.¹¹ Das Verhältnis ist mehr als das, was die beiden Partner im Verhältnis jeweils hineinlegen. Sie schaffen nicht das Verhältnis.Vielmehr ist die Liebe das Verhältnis selbst, das die beiden Partner im Verhältnis trägt.Von dieser Liebe ist in der sechsten Rede in der zweiten Folge die Rede unter der Überschrift: „Die Liebe bleibt.“ Unmittelbar wird „das Dritte“ jedoch die „Zwischenbestimmung“ meinen. Wenn Kierkegaard die drei Bestandteile aufzählt, sagt er, dass die Liebe drittens selbst gegenwärtig ist. Zuvor hat er jedoch hervorgehoben, dass die Liebe nicht „etwas Drittes für sich selber“ sei, sondern „die Zwischenbestimmung.“¹² Ich zitiere hier aus der dritten Rede in der zweiten Folge, aber das Zitat weist zurück auf Rede III A in der ersten Folge, wo der Ausdruck „Zwischenbestimmung“ seine entscheidende Bedeutung erhält: „Die weltliche Weisheit meint, Liebe sei ein Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Mensch; das Christentum lehrt, Liebe sei ein Verhältnis zwischen Mensch-Gott-Mensch, das heißt Gott sei die Zwischenbestimmung.“¹³ Später in der Rede heißt es wie oben zitiert, dass die bloß menschliche

   

SKS 9, 299 / LT, 332– 333. SKS 9, 167 / LT, 184. SKS 9, 259 / LT, 287. SKS 9, 111 / LT, 119.

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Auffassung niemals weiter kommt als bis zum Gegenseitigen: dass der Liebende der Geliebte ist und der Geliebte der Liebende. Kierkegaard sagt dann: „Zu einem Liebesverhältnis gehört das Dreifache: der Liebende, der Geliebte, die Liebe; aber die Liebe ist Gott.“¹⁴ Dies ist aber nicht so sehr eine Antwort als eine Frage: Was heißt Zwischenbestimmung? Was bedeutet es, dass ein Drittes im Verhältnis ist? „Das Dritte“ ist das, was in das Verhältnis zwischen einem Selbst und einem anderen eintreten kann, und es soll dies wohlgemerkt für einen selbst tun. „Das Dritte“ bestimmt so die Forderung im Verhältnis zum Nächsten. „Das Dritte“ betrifft jedoch nicht bloß die Forderung, sondern auch das Verhältnis selbst. Das Verhältnis ist schon gegenseitig in dem Sinne, dass das, was man dem anderen gegenüber tut, auch gegen sich selbst tut.Von Anfang an weist Der Liebe Tun auf den Umstand hin, dass das Selbstverhältnis des Einzelnen und das Verhältnis zum anderen Menschen miteinander verwickelt sind. So heißt es zu Beginn der ersten Rede, dass der, der sich dagegen zu sichern sucht, von anderen betrogen zu werden, indem er nicht liebt, sich selbst betrügt. Man ist selbst in das Verhältnis zum anderen einbezogen. Die Gegenseitigkeit, von der ich hier spreche, besteht darin, dass das Verhältnis schon ein Verhältnis auf beiden Seiten ist. Dies ist eine Gegenseitigkeit, die nicht erst hergestellt werden muss, sondern die bereits das Verhältnis zwischen den beiden Partnern im Verhältnis kennzeichnet. Dieser Gegenseitigkeit wird Gewalt angetan, wenn das Verhältnis einseitig gemacht wird. Dies ist freilich ein Begriff von Gegenseitigkeit, den ich von außen in den Kierkegaardschen Text hineintrage. Kierkegaard spricht nicht direkt davon, dass bereits eine Gegenseitigkeit in dem Verhältnis besteht, aber er zeigt es statt dessen. Die Gegenseitigkeit im Verhältnis bedeutet, dass das Verhältnis eine andere Seite hat in der Weise, dass es sich umkehren läßt: Man wird selbst ein anderer oder wie der andere. Man ist nicht nur der, der etwas in bezug auf den anderen tut, sondern auch der, mit dem etwas im Verhältnis geschieht. Kierkegaard kettet die beiden Momente zusammen, das aktive und das passive: Durch das, was man tut, geschieht etwas mit einem selbst. Eben dies zeigt Kierkegaard sowohl in der ersten als auch in der zweiten Folge von Der Liebe Tun. Zwei Beispiele spielen hier eine entscheidende Rolle. Das erste ist das bereits genannte, dass der, der vermeiden will, betrogen zu werden, indem er nicht liebt, sich selbst betrügt. Lieben heißt geben, aber so, dass man sich selbst hingibt, und der, der sich selbst hingibt, macht sich verwundbar. Das bedeutet, dass es bereits in dem Aktiven, im Geben, liegt, dass man sich selbst

 SKS 9, 124 / LT, 134.

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aussetzt. Das zweite Beispiel ist, dass der, der andere richtet, selbst gerichtet wird. Man entlarvt sich selbst durch das, was man tut. Ich zitiere aus der zweiten Rede in der zweiten Folge: „In derselben Minute, da du über einen andern Menschen urteilst, oder einen andern Menschen beurteilst, urteilst du über dich selbst; denn über einen andern urteilen, heißt im letzten Grund nur, über sich selbst urteilen, oder selbst offenbar werden.“¹⁵ Indem ein Mensch wählt, wird offenbar, was in ihm wohnt. Ja, „Leben heißt, über sich selbst urteilen, offenbar werden.“¹⁶ Gegenseitigkeit soll hier wie gesagt in dem radikaleren Sinne verstanden werden, dass das Verhältnis schon ein Verhältnis auf beiden Seiten ist. Dass das Verhältnis schon gegenseitig ist, bedeutet, dass man selbst im Verhältnis wie der andere wird. Dass sich das Verhältnis umkehrt, zeigt sich darin, dass man selbst von dem betroffen wird, was man an dem anderen tut. Man ist selbst ein Teil des Verhältnisses. Wenn Gegenseitigkeit dagegen auf gegenseitige Forderungen und gegenseitigen Umsatz reduziert wird, benutzt man das Verhältnis, um sich selbst zu bestätigen. Man erfährt nicht sich selbst als einen anderen im Verhältnis. Man kann fragen, ob die Gegenseitigkeit, von der ich hier rede, eigentlich Gegenseitigkeit ist. Das ganze vollzieht sich ja auf der einen Seite des Verhältnisses: Wie man andere urteilt, wird man selbst beurteilt. Aber dass das Verhältnis bereits gegenseitig ist, zeigt sich für den einzelnen, der im Verhältnis steht. Das Verhältnis hat eine andere Seite: Der, zu dem ich mich verhalte, verhält sich seinerseits zu mir, wodurch das, was ich tue, eine andere Bedeutung erhalten kann als die, die ich dem selbst beimesse. Aber dass das Verhältnis eine andere Seite hat, darum eben geht es in der Forderung. Die Forderung weist zurück auf die Gegenseitigkeit, die darin besteht, dass das Verhältnis bereits ein Verhältnis auf beiden Seiten ist. Das möchte ich gerne am Kierkegaardschen Text zeigen. Kierkegaard spricht wie gesagt nicht direkt von Gegenseitigkeit im positiven Sinne, sondern benutzt statt dessen den Ausdruck Gleichmaß oder Gleichheit.¹⁷ Die Forderung, den Nächsten zu lieben, ist eine Forderung, „die Gleichheit des Ewigen“ zu bewahren.¹⁸ Diese Gleichheit ist die grundlegende Gleichheit zwischen einem selbst und dem anderen, an dem man handelt. Das bedeutet, dass man den anderen Menschen wie einen selbst sehen soll. Dass es eine solche Grund-Gleichheit gibt, kann jedoch schwer zu sehen sein. Was das Auge einfängt, sind die Unterschiede, die man zum Anlaß nimmt, einander zu bewerten. Dies

 SKS 9, 234– 235 / LT, 259.  SKS 9, 229 / LT, 253.  Dänisch „ligelighed“ und „lighed,“ in der deutschen Übersetzung von Hayo Gerdes ist zuweilen auch „ligelighed“ mit „Gleichheit“ wiedergegeben.  SKS 9, 51 / LT, 51; das „Gleichmaß der Ewigkeit“ ist, dass man den Nächsten lieben will (SKS 9, 87 / LT, 92).

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können Unterschiede im sozialen Status sein oder grundlegende Unterschiede in der Frage, wer zu einem gehört und wer nicht.Was wie erwähnt ein Unterschied ist zwischen dem, von dem man Gegenleistung erwarten kann, und dem, von dem man es nicht erwarten kann. Die Grund-Gleichheit ist deshalb eine Gleichheit trotz der gegenseitigen Bewertung, und sie ist dies, indem sie eine Gleichheit in bezug auf die Zwischenbestimmung oder „das Dritte“ im Verhältnis ist. Es ist die „Gleichheit des Menschen vor Gott.“¹⁹ Was heißt es nun, den anderen Menschen als einen Menschen wie man selbst zu sehen? Was bedeutet die Gleichheit? Ich möchte versuchen, von der zweiten Folge von Der Liebe Tun her eine Antwort zu geben. Die erste Rede in der zweiten Folge schlägt das Grundthema an: Die Liebe erbaut. Der, der erbaut werden soll, ist hier der andere Mensch. Liebe erbaut jedoch nur, indem sie voraussetzt, dass die Liebe bereits im Herzen des anderen Menschen ist. Die Gleichheit wird also von Anfang an geltend gemacht. Das Erbauliche betrifft Mut, Glauben und Hoffnung des anderen Menschen. Das Thema, dass Liebe erbaut, wird deshalb weitergeführt durch die Frage: Wie ist der andere Mensch mit sich selbst durch das gestellt, was man an ihm tut? Dass man darauf sehen muss, wie der andere Mensch durch das gestellt ist, was man selbst tut, bedeutet, dass man sich selbst von der anderen Seite des Verhältnisses her sehen muss. Was schwer sein kann, wenn der Blick durch den Unterschied oder die Ungleichheit zwischen einem selbst und dem anderen gefangen ist. Die Reden der zweiten Folge beschäftigen sich besonders mit zwei Formen von Unterschieden. Die erste Form ist der Unterschied zwischen dem, der verletzt hat, und dem Verletzten. In der fünften Rede: „Liebe deckt der Sünden Mannigfaltigkeit,“ wird nun beschrieben, wie die Vergebung diesen Unterschied beseitigt. Vergebung ist freilich eine einseitige Bewegung, insofern sie von dem einen Partner, dem Verletzten, vollzogen wird. Die achte Rede: „Der Sieg der Versöhnlichkeit in Liebe, welche den Überwundenen gewinnt,“ bewegt sich deshalb von Vergebung zu Versöhnung. Ich zitiere: Wer bedarf denn der Vergebung: der Unrecht getan hat, oder der Unrecht gelitten hat? Freilich bedarf der, welcher Unrecht getan hat, der Vergebung, o, aber der Liebende, der Unrecht gelitten hat, hat das Bedürfnis zu vergeben, oder das Bedürfnis zur Aussöhnung, zur

 In der ersten Folge II C, die wie er wähnt eine Rede über den Unterschied ist, den die Vorliebe macht, heißt es, dass die „Verwandtschaft zwischen Mensch und Mensch…gesichert ist durch die gleiche Verwandtschaft jedes einzelnen mit Gott und sein Verhältnis zu Gott in Christo“ (SKS 9, 76 / LT, 79).

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Versöhnung, welches Wort nicht wie das Wort Vergebung Unterschied macht, indem es an Recht und Unrecht erinnert, sondern liebend im Sinne hat, dass beide bedürftig sind.²⁰

Kierkegaard hebt also nicht nur hervor, dass das Werk der Liebe, die Vergebung, einseitig ist, er sieht auch ein Problem in der Einseitigkeit. Die Vergebung soll das Verhältnis oder die Gleichheit im Verhältnis wiederherstellen, aber wenn ich „Gewicht lege“ auf die Vergebung,²¹ wird die Ungleichheit festgehalten. Wie vermeidet man dann, dass die Einseitigkeit zu Ungleichheit wird? Die Antwort, die wir den erwähnten Reden der zweiten Folge entnehmen können, ist die, dass nur der vergeben kann, der selbst bedürftig ist, indem er das Bedürfnis hat zu vergeben. Das wird dadurch unterstrichen, dass Kierkegaard auf die Erfahrungen verweist, die man dadurch gemacht hat, dass man selbst der Vergebung bedurfte. Ich zitiere: „Doch wofern du selbst jemals der Vergebung bedurft hast, so weißt du, was Vergebung vermag: weshalb willst du dann so unerfahren oder so lieblos von der Vergebung sprechen?“²² Man soll dem anderen gegenüber mit den Erfahrungen handeln, die man selbst gemacht hat, als man der Vergebung bedurfte. Das einseitige Werk der Vergebung tun erfordert also, dass man sich an die Stelle des anderen versetzt. Dass man selbst das Bedüfnis hat zu vergeben, ist eine Mitteilung an den anderen. Das heißt, dass man nicht nur sich an die Stelle des anderen setzt, sondern auch selbst den Ausgleich oder die Versöhnung sucht. Das ganze vollzieht sich nicht mehr nur auf der einen Seite. Die Versöhnung ist eine Bewegung auf beiden Seiten, da beide ihrer bedürfen. Erst in der gegenseitigen Bewegung der Versöhnung wird die Gleichheit im Verhältnis und damit das Verhältnis, das ein beiderseitiges Verhältnis ist, wiederhergestellt. Das ganze zielt auf das Handeln des anderen ab. Bliebe die Bewegung nur einseitig, nur die des Liebenden, wäre sie mißlungen. Sie zielt auf eine Antwort des anderen, dass der andere wieder aufgerichtet, frei wird.²³ Die Pointe ist also doppelt: Die Ungleichheit zwischen dem, der vergibt, und dem, der vergeben werden soll, wird nur dadurch überwunden, dass beide Seiten der Versöhnung bedürfen, und das, was in der Versöhnung aufgerichtet wird, ist nicht bloß die eine oder die andere Seite, sondern die Gleichheit im Verhältnis und damit das Verhältnis selbst. Die zweite Form des Unterschieds, mit dem sich die zweite Folge von Der Liebe Tun beschäftigt, ist der Unterschied zwischen dem, der gibt, und dem, der emp   

SKS 9, 331 / LT, 369. SKS 9, 292 / LT, 325. Ibid. SKS 9, 276 / LT, 307.

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fangen soll. Dieser Unterschied ist insoweit in dem ersten Unterschied zwischen dem, der vergeben soll, und dem, der die Vergebung empfangen soll, enthalten. Aber Kierkegaard trennt den Unterschied zwischen dem, der gibt, und dem, der empfängt, ab als selbständiges Thema in der siebten Rede, die zwischen der Rede über Vergebung und der Rede über Versöhnung angebracht ist. Diese siebte Rede in der zweiten Folge trägt die Überschrift: „Barmherzigkeit, ein Tun der Liebe, selbst wenn sie nichts geben kann, und nichts zu tun vermag.“ Die Rede geht aus von der einseitigen Rollenverteilung zwischen dem, der Macht hat zu geben, und dem, der nichts geben, sondern nur empfangen kann. Die Rede vollzieht eine Umkehr der Perspektive, indem sie paradoxerweise dem, der nichts geben kann, die Rolle zuweist, das Tun der Liebe, die Barmherzigkeit, zu erweisen. Das bedeutet, dass die Rede den Menschen zum Subjekt macht, der ausgeschlossen ist, indem er keine Gabe erwidern kann. Wieder hebt Kierkegaard nicht nur die einseitige Forderung hervor, sondern sieht auch ein Problem in der Einseitigkeit. Das Problem erscheint darin, dass der, der einseitig gibt, sich selbst als den sieht, der gibt, und den anderen als den, der lediglich empfängt. Die Einseitigkeit wird zu Ungleichheit, indem das Verhältnis seine Bedeutung von der einen Seite, der des Gebers empfängt. Die Rede kehrt nun gleichsam im Gegenzug die Perspektive um: Der, der nichts zu geben vermag, kann das Entscheidende tun, Barmherzigkeit zeigen. Und eben dies soll der, der Macht hat zu geben, selbst sehen. Er soll sehen, dass das Verhältnis auch für ihn selbst von der anderen Seite Bedeutung erhält. Die Reden in Der Liebe Tun beschreiben also verschiedene Formen von Ungleichheit, wo man die gemeinsame Gleichheit sehen sollte. Sie deuten an, dass das Verhältnis erst gleichwertig ist, wenn beide Seiten es als unermeßlich und unendlich sehen. In diesem Falle handelt es sich um „ein Wechselverhältnis, aber um ein unendliches von beiden Seiten.“²⁴ Dass es eine grundlegende Gleichheit gibt, bedeutet also, dass das Verhältnis zueinander ein Verhältnis von beiden Seiten zu sein hat. Kierkegaard hält aber zugleich daran fest, dass mitten im wechselseitigen Verhältnis die Asymmetrie besteht, dass die Forderung einseitig ist. Gegenseitigkeit ist so eine Forderung, die sich an einen selbst richtet: Man soll sich selbst an die Stelle des anderen versetzen und danach handeln. Dass das Verhältnis in diesem Sinne asymmetrisch ist, wird am Ende von Der Liebe Tun betont: „Du hast nur mit dem zu tun, was du gegen andere tust, oder damit, wie du aufnimmst, was andere gegen dich tun.“²⁵

 SKS 9, 181 / LT, 200.  SKS 9, 376 / LT, 420.

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Die Asymmetrie wird durch die Figur hervorgehoben, mit der die Reden in der zweiten Folge die Forderung beschreiben: den „Liebenden.“

4 Der Liebende „Der Liebende“ oder der „wahrhaft Liebende“ ist eine Gegenfigur. Im Gegensatz zu der Auffassung, die Gegenliebe zu einer Forderung macht, liebt der wahrhaft Liebende alle, „ohne Gegenliebe zu fordern.“²⁶ Es heißt zudem, dass er „seine Liebe hingibt unter Verzicht auf Gegenliebe.“²⁷ Aber eben dadurch, „dass er unbedingt auch nicht die geringste Gegenliebe fordert,“ hat der wahrhaft Liebende „eine uneinnehmbare Stellung eingenommen.“²⁸ Der wahrhaft Liebende tut also nicht nur dies, dass er keine Gegenliebe fordert, er verzichtet geradezu auf Gegenliebe. Es ist, als solle seine Liebe ohne Gegenliebe sein. Warum? Wenden wir uns direkt der Rede: „Der Liebe Tun, eines Verstorbenen zu gedenken“ zu. Das Problem der Gegenseitigkeit zeigt sich wie gesagt in dieser Rede am deutlichsten. Die Rede nimmt die Gelegenheit (den Tod) wahr, zu „einer Probe darauf, was doch eigentlich Liebe sei.“²⁹ Kierkegaard erklärt: „Wenn man sich davon überzeugen will, dass Liebe gänzlich uneigennützig ist, so kann man ja jede Möglichkeit der Wiedervergeltung entfernen. Aber dies fällt eben weg im Verhältnis zu einem Verstorbenen.“³⁰ Zunächst ist zu fragen, warum die Liebe auf die Probe gestellt werden muss. Ist es nicht verkehrt, die Liebe des anderen oder die eigene Liebe einer „Probe“ zu unterziehen? Wenn ein Mensch seine Liebe prüft, stellt er sich außerhalb des Verhältnisses zu einem anderen Menschen, in dem er selbst steht und das in dem Sinne gegenseitig ist, dass es ein Verhältnis auf beiden Seiten ist. Die Rede bestätigt jedoch, dass man seine Liebe prüfen soll, indem man sich außerhalb des gegenseitigen Verhältnisses stellt. Die Probe bezieht sich auf ein Verhältnis, das ohne Gegenseitigkeit ist, und dieser Mangel an Gegenseitigkeit wird merkwürdigerweise als ein Gewinn dargestellt. Warum? Die Rede gebraucht das Bild des Tänzers. Wenn man einen Tänzer dazu bringen könnte, den Tanz allein zu tanzen, den er sonst mit einem anderen tanzt,

 SKS 9, 238 / LT, 264; Hayo Gerdes übersetzt den sande Kjerlige an dieser Stelle mit „die wahre Liebe,“ deshalb sind wir hier von seiner Übersetzung abgewichen.  SKS 9, 242 / LT, 267.  SKS 9, 243 / LT, 268.  SKS 9, 341 / LT, 380.  SKS 9, 343 / LT, 382.

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„so könntest du seine Bewegungen am besten beobachten.“³¹ Versteht man aber dann seine Bewegungen, wenn sie Antwort auf die Bewegungen sind, die der andere macht? Das deutet an, dass die Rede aus einem anderen Grund von der Gegenseitigkeit abstrahiert. Der Gewinn bei der Abstraktion besteht nicht nur darin, dass die Bewegungen eines Menschen deutlicher werden. Die Liebe selbst ist leichter wahrzunehmen, weil sie einseitig ist. Der Liebende selbst muss von der anderen Seite abstrahieren. Der Liebende ist eine Figur der Souveränität der wahren Liebe. Die wahre Liebe reicht über den Wunsch oder die Hoffnung auf Gegenseitigkeit hinaus. Sie ist „die freieste Liebe“. Ich zitiere: „Was einem Menschen das Tun der Liebe abnötigen kann, kann das sehr Unterschiedliche sein und läßt sich demnach nicht aufrechnen. Das Kind schreit, der Arme fleht, die Witwe bestürmt, die Rücksicht nötigt, das Elend zwingt und so denn weiter. Aber alle Liebe in einem Tun, welches dergestalt abgenötigt wird, ist nicht ganz frei.“³² Die wahre Liebe ist souverän, da sie nicht genötigt ist. Sie ist nicht davon abhängig, dass das Kind schreit oder dass der Notleidende um Hilfe bittet. Im Gegenteil: „Je stärker die Nötigung ist, desto weniger frei ist die Liebe.“³³ Die Souveränität der Liebe, dass sie auf die vorliegende Situation antwortet, indem sie sie verändert, wird zu ihrer Unabhängigkeit. Diese Auffassung von der Unabhängigkeit der Forderung scheint Kantianische Züge zu tragen, da der Umstand, dass man selbst genötigt wird, als ein Teil der Neigung betrachtet wird. Aber Kierkegaard hat gerade den Drang oder den Antrieb rehabilitiert. Er hat zuvor hervor gehoben, dass der Drang oder Antrieb zu lieben nicht die eigene Leistung des Menschen ist, sondern ihm gegeben ist. Der Drang muss jedoch von innen kommen, nicht von außen. Das bedeutet, dass der Drang der Liebe ein Drang ohne Anlaß ist. Die Souveränität der Liebe wird damit zu ihrer Unabhängigkeit von dem anderen, der der „Gegenstand“ der Liebe ist. Das geht nicht nur aus der Rede über der Liebe Tun, eines Verstorbenen zu gedenken, hervor, sondern ist ein Thema, das sich durch die anderen Reden zieht. Dies wird dadurch unterstrichen, dass der Liebende den Schlüssel zum Verständnis des Verhältnisses zum anderen in der Hand hält. Die zentrale Passage darüber, dass der Liebende versucht, einem Menschen dazu zu verhelfen, „er selbst zu werden,“³⁴ habe ich oben so gedeutet, dass sie auf ein gleiches Verhältnis abzielt: dass das Verhältnis ebensosehr ein

   

SKS 9, 341 / LT, 380. SKS 9, 345 / LT, 385. Ibid. SKS 9, 276 / LT, 307.

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Verhältnis von der anderen Seite sein soll, da der andere frei wird, einem zu antworten. Aber die Passage kann auch in die entgegengesetzte Richtung gedeutet werden. Kierkegaard hebt nämlich das „Arbeiten“³⁵ des Liebenden hervor, und zwar im Verborgenen. Der andere darf nicht merken, dass der Liebende geholfen hat. Der Liebende soll so geben, dass der Empfänger glaubt, es sei sein Eigentum. Der Liebende soll sich also selbst verbergen, damit der andere nicht sieht, was er tut. Er soll sich sogar so verbergen, dass der andere ihn mißversteht. Die Frage ist, ob Kierkegaard hiermit das erreicht, was er will, nämlich „den Lohn des stolzen Selbstbewußtseins“ auszuschließen.³⁶ Soweit ich sehen kann, wird das Verhältnis zwischen dem Liebenden und dem „Gegenstand“ vielmehr ungleich.³⁷ In einem entscheidenden Sinne ist das Verhältnis nur auf der einen Seite, der des Liebenden. Der Liebende hält den Schlüssel zum Verständnis dessen in der Hand, was auf beiden Seiten geschieht. Er versteht nicht nur, was das, was er an dem anderen tut, eigentlich bedeutet. Er versteht auch die Antwort des anderen, hierunter dass der andere ihn nicht versteht oder ihn mißversteht. Die Souveränität der Liebe geht so weit, dass sie nicht mehr von dem anderen abhängig ist. Aber wenn das Tun des Liebenden von dem anderen unabhängig ist, an den es sich richtet, wird es um so mehr die eigene Leistung des Liebenden. Wie vermeidet man dann die Ungleichheit zwischen dem „Liebenden“ und dem „Gegenstand“? Indem man den Zusammenhang zwischen Geben und Empfangen sieht, den Kierkegaard dabei war, auf den Begriff zu bringen. Ein Mensch kann nur im Ernst geben, wenn er imstande ist zu empfangen. Kierkegaard deutet zudem an, dass Geben auch Empfangen ist. Das aber bedeutet, dass die Antwort in dem anderen Verständnis von Gegenseitigkeit zu suchen ist. Diese Gegenseitigkeit meldet sich auch als eine Forderung, selbst dem anderen im Verhältnis offenbar zu werden oder sich ihm zu erkennen zu geben. Dass die „Äußerung der Liebe“ gefordert ist, wird bereits in der ersten Rede in der ersten Folge gesagt.³⁸ Später wird zudem hervorgehoben, dass das Offenbarwerden nicht nur gefordert ist, es geschieht bereits durch das, was man tut. Leben heißt, über sich selbst urteilen, offenbar werden.³⁹ Gegenseitigkeit ist also ein entscheidendes, vielleicht das entscheidende, Problem in Der Liebe Tun. Es besteht in dem Buch ein Widerstreit zwischen der

 Dänisch „Arbejden,“ Hayo Gerdes übersetzt freier „die Arbeit.“  SKS 9, 276 / LT, 307.  Kierkegaard zählt wie erwähnt die drei Glieder des Verhältnisses so auf: „Zuerst ist da der Liebende; dann derjenige oder diejenigen, die der Gegenstand sind; aber zum dritten ist die Liebe selbst mit zugegen“ (SKS 9, 299 / LT, 333).  SKS 9, 19 / LT, 15.  SKS 9, 229 – 230 / LT, 253.

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Souveränität des Liebenden, die zu Unabhängigkeit von dem anderen wird, und der grundlegenden Gleichheit, die fordert, dass das Verhältnis ein Verhältnis von beiden Seiten ist. Im vorhergehenden habe ich mit und gegen Kierkegaard das Verständnis von Gegenseitigkeit zu nuancieren versucht. Aber wenn das gesagt ist, will ich keineswegs bestreiten, dass die Forderung der Nächstenliebe einseitig ist. Um auf die beiden ersten Bestimmungen zurückzukommen, die eingangs erwähnt wurden: Liebe erlaubt keine Berechnung und läßt sich nicht als Erwiderung fordern, sie ist vielmehr freies Geschenk. Ich möchte auch nicht den dritten Punkt leugnen, dass Nächstenliebe souverän ist. Vielmehr liegt darin ein Unterschied zwischen Nächstenliebe und Anerkennung. Liebe ist Macht, das Unvorhergesehene und Unerwartete zu tun, zu vergeben, wo ein Verhältnis in Schuld festgefahren ist. Aber Der Liebe Tun zeigt, dass die Souveränität auch zu einer subtilen Unabhängigkeit vom Nächsten werden kann. Die Forderung der Nächstenliebe ist einseitig, aber die Einseitigkeit birgt auch Gefahren in sich.⁴⁰

 Übersetzt von Eberhard Harbsmeier.

Chapter 35 Un-sichtbar. Den Nächsten sehen 1 Sehen – und doch nicht sehen Eine Kultur der Sichtbarkeit hat ihre eigene Blindheit. Wir leben in einer Kultur, die so auf Sichtbarkeit aus ist, dass Sichtbarkeit in Sichtbarmachen aufgeht. Sichtbar machen heißt dann nicht länger, Übersehenes oder Vergessenes, sondern sich selbst sichtbar machen. Dies wird zu einer Bedingung der Kommunikation. Wenn man etwas sein will, wenn man mit dabei sein will, muss man sich sichtbar machen. Man ist, wie man sich darstellt oder präsentiert. Image ist dann nicht eine Frage der Identität, sondern Identität eine Frage von Image. Wenn man erfolgreich sein will, muss man sich selbst so in der Hand haben, dass man sich erzählen und das eigene Leben in Narrative verwandeln kann. Es ist gleichsam eine Diktatur des Sichtbarmachens, nur dass wir alle mitmachen – das Leben geht ja darum, sich sichtbar zu machen, und wer will nicht erfolgreich sein? Menschliches Leben wird damit auf gelungenes Leben, gelungenes Leben auf erfolgreiches Leben reduziert. Wenn es darum geht, sich sichtbar zu machen, kann man sich leicht dafür blind machen, dass man selbst sieht. Man macht sich dafür blind, was man selbst tut, wenn man sieht. Eine Kultur, die darauf aus ist, dass man sich selbst sichtbar macht, schafft eine Blindheit, die eben das Sehen betrifft. Die Macht, die im Sehen steckt, wird nicht als ein Problem des Sehens verstanden. Worin besteht die Macht des Sehens? Sie ist Macht, Aufmerksamkeit zu schenken – oder nicht zu schenken, Bedeutung beizumessen – oder abzuerkennen. Sie ist die Macht, Andere und sich selbst einzuschätzen und zu beurteilen. Diese Macht durchzieht die Kultur der Sichtbarkeit. Sie kommt darin zum Ausdruck, dass es im Leben darum geht, von Anderen gesehen zu werden. Dadurch, dass man gesehen wird, erhält man selbst Bedeutung. Dass man aber selbst schon damit angefangen hat, Andere zu sehen, wird dabei leicht übersehen. Wenn man sieht, kann man sich darin verlieren, man kann vergessen, dass man sieht. So beschrieben scheint das Sehen eine einfache Sache zu sein: entweder sehen wir oder nicht. Sehen ist aber komplizierter, und so ist die Macht des Sehens. Die kann darin bestehen, dass wir sehen und doch nicht sehen.¹ Es gibt

 Zu diesem Ausdruck vgl. SKS 9, 13 / LT, 7; zu einer Ethik des Sehens im Anschluss an Kierkegaard vgl. Arne Grøn, „Kierkegaards ‚zweite‘ Ethik,“ Kapitel 33 in diesem Buch, und Arne Grøn, „Ethics of Vision,“ Kapitel 24 in diesem Buch. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-041

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Weisen zu sehen, die darin bestehen, dass man das, was man sieht, eben nicht sieht. Wenn man jemanden ignoriert oder übersieht, hat man ihn gesehen. Öfter als vielleicht gut ist, hat man den Menschen genau gesehen, den man nicht sieht. Man kann ihm sogar zeigen, dass man ihn nicht gesehen hat. Den Weg, den wir gehen, gehen wir auch mit den Augen. So im Vorbeigehen in der Stadt. Und so in der Erzählung,² die Jesus als Antwort auf die Frage gibt: Wer ist denn mein Nächster? Sichtbares wird oft und ohne Bedenken so verstanden, dass das, was sichtbar ist, vor den Augen liegt. Sichtbares liegt vor. Es liegt uns vor. Die Macht des Sehens kann dann so verstanden werden, dass Sehen ein Beherrschen ist, welches das, was gesehen wird, identifiziert und zum Selben reduziert. Wenn wir aber die Macht des Sehens so bestimmen, verstehen wir nicht, was es heißt zu sehen. Die Macht des Sehens kann umgekehrt verstanden werden: Wenn Sichtbares eben zu sehen ist, stellt sich die Frage, ob wir das sehen, was zu sehen ist. Die doppelte Möglichkeit, die im Sehen liegt – sehen und doch nicht sehen – bedeutet, dass Unsichtbares nicht einfach Nicht-Gesehenes ist. Unsichtbares ist umgekehrt eine Frage des Sehens. Es stellt uns in Frage, und zwar in die Frage: was sehen wir, wenn wir sehen? Unsichtbares als etwas, das einfach ausserhalb des Sehens fällt, lässt demgegenüber Sichtbares zurück als Immanenz des Sehens. Wir befinden uns im Sehen. Dass wir etwas tun, wenn wir sehen, dass wir so mit Sichtbarem umgehen können, dass es unsichtbar wird, verlieren wir damit aus dem Blick. Verstehen wir dann, was es heißt, dass etwas sichtbar ist? Dass Sichtbares auf denjenigen verweist, der sehen kann, lässt die Frage offen, ob Sichtbares auch Gesehenes ist. Die Macht des Sehens kann sogar auch darin bestehen, einen Anderen unsichtbar zu machen. Er ist da, wird aber so gesehen, dass man mit ihm nicht rechnet. Was nicht ausschliesst, dass man ihm eben dies zu verstehen gibt: dass er für einen nicht da ist.³ Mit der Möglichkeit zu sehen und doch nicht zu sehen wird genau dies zu einer Aufgabe: den Anderen zu sehen, den man sieht. Sehen erhält damit eine emphatische Bedeutung: wirklich zu sehen. Was heißt das aber? Die emphatische Bedeutung muss über negative Möglichkeiten des Sehens weiter geklärt werden.

 Lk 10,30 – 37.  SKS 9, 80 / LT, 84.

2 Den Nächsten sehen

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2 Den Nächsten sehen Was nicht nur vorliegt, sondern einem am nächsten ist, ist besonders sichtbar. So sollte man meinen. Das nächste zu sehen scheint leicht, ist aber schwierig. Etwas kann einem so nahe sein, dass man es übersieht. Was ist aber am nächsten? Dass es einem am nächsten ist, lässt – so scheint es – die Macht des Sehens noch deutlicher hervortreten. Was einem am nächsten ist, das ist eine Frage der Bedeutung, die man dem beimisst, was einen umgibt. Am nächsten ist, was einem am meisten bedeutet. Und was am meisten bedeutet, hängt von der Gewichtung ab. Die Kultur der Sichtbarkeit ist eine Kultur der Prioritäten-Setzung. Dass es einem darauf ankommt, von anderen gesehen zu werden, lässt das eigene Sehen zurück als: Aufmerksamkeit schenken. Man gibt, um zu empfangen, man sieht, um selbst gesehen zu werden. Sehen wird damit zu einer Art von Selbstspiegelung. Der Nächste ist einem aber in diesem Sinne nicht am nächsten. Der Nächste ist einem zwar am nächsten, aber nicht im Sinne der Vorliebe. In welchem Sinn dann? Der Nächste ist einem am nächsten derart, dass er einem ausgeliefert ist. Die Situation des Nächsten hängt davon ab, was man selbst tut.Was bedeutet es dann, den Nächsten zu sehen? In seiner Ethik der Liebe insistiert Kierkegaard darauf, die Frage Jesu genau zu verstehen, welche die erste Frage – „Wer ist denn mein Nächster?“ – in einer zweiten umkehrt: „Welcher dünkt dich, der unter diesen dreien der Nächste sei gewesen dem, der unter die Mörder gefallen war?“⁴ Den Nächsten sehen heißt, sich als der Nächste des Nächsten zu erweisen. Das kann im Anschluss an Kierkegaards „zweite“ Ethik (als Ethik der Liebe) hervorgehoben werden: das Selbst ist der Nächste des Nächsten. Was heißt das? Den Nächsten sehen fordert eine Umkehrung des eigenen Blickes. Man soll selbst anders sehen, um den Anderen als Nächsten zu sehen. Es geht hier nicht um einen Perspektivenwechsel oder eine Perspektivenübernahme, sondern genau um Umkehrung der (eigenen) Perspektive. Man kann die Perspektive des Anderen nicht übernehmen. Wenn man sie übernimmt, macht man sie zur eigenen. Was man aber tun soll, ist dies: selbst anders sehen. Es kann gezeigt werden, dass Kierkegaards Ethik der Liebe (Der Liebe Tun) mit einem Perspektivenwechsel anfängt, der diese Ethik bestimmt. Die Frage ist nicht, ob und wie man Liebe in der Welt finden oder sehen kann, sondern ob man selbst die Welt mit Liebe sieht. Die Frage ist schon eine Frage der Liebe. Ob man den Anderen sieht, hängt davon ab, ob man selbst dazu kommt, anders zu sehen. Man bekommt anderes zu sehen, die Frage ist aber, ob man

 Lk 10,36.

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selbst anders sieht. Anders sehen heißt nicht: anders priorisieren oder anders beurteilen, sondern die Grenze des eigenen Sehens zu sehen. Dies ist eine Frage von Un-sichtbarkeit.

3 Un-sichtbar Den Nächsten zu sehen erfordert eine Umkehrung der eigenen Perspektive. Man soll selbst anders sehen: um den Anderen zu sehen. Dass die Blickrichtung umgekehrt wird – die Frage ist nicht, wer mein Nächster ist, sondern ob ich mich als der Nächste des Nächsten zeige – bedeutet, dass es darum geht zu sehen, dass der Andere ein Anderer ist. Wie aber ist er ein Anderer? Man kann den Anderen nicht einfach als Anderen sehen. Er ist ein Anderer als der Andere, den man sieht. Den Anderen sehen muss insofern paradox bestimmt werden: Man soll sehen, dass der Andere anders und mehr ist als das, was man in ihm sieht. Wir sollen den Anderen, einander, als un-sichtbar sehen. Damit wird Identität in Frage gestellt. Wenn wir die Macht des Sehens als die Macht verstehen, Bedeutung beizumessen – oder abzuerkennen, scheint Sehen Identitätsgebung zu sein. Identität hängt davon ab, dass man von den Anderen gesehen wird, die für einen selbst bedeutungsvoll sind. Wenn das alles ist, sind wir in der sozialen Welt, die wir mit und gegen einander bauen, einander ausgeliefert. Wir sind in der Tat einander ausgeliefert. Deshalb stellt sich die Frage, was es heißt, den Nächsten zu sehen. Den Nächsten sehen wir jedoch nicht, wenn wir den Anderen nur als uns ausgeliefert sehen, sondern den Anderen sehen wir nur, wenn wir sehen, dass der Andere eine andere Identität hat: als ein Anderer. Die Identität des Anderen ist aber nicht einfach hinter dem Sichtbaren versteckt, sondern steckt darin. Der Andere als der Nächste ist sichtbar: er ist zu sehen. Dies bedeutet aber nicht, dass er ist, wie man ihn sieht. Dass er auch unsichtbar ist, hat eben damit zu tun, dass man ihn sieht. Den-Anderen-Sehen heißt nicht Sichtbarmachen, nicht Enthüllen, sondern Sich-zum-Anderen-Verhalten. Man kommt selbst dazwischen. Sehen heißt weder nur feststellen, noch Identität verleihen. Wir sollen den Anderen als un-sichtbar sehen. Wie genau?

4 Identität Die Identität des Anderen ist nicht festzulegen, deshalb können wir es versuchen. Wäre die Identität des Anderen die Bedeutung, die wir ihm beimessen, wäre er uns nicht nur ausgeliefert, sondern wir gäben ihm seine Identität. Sehen wäre damit Beherrschen.

5 Person

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Etwas aber stimmt nicht damit. Denn wie würden wir einen Anderen beherrschen? Vor allem dadurch, dass wir ihm zu erkennen geben, wer er ist. Damit ist er aber schon derjenige, dem wir dies mitteilen. Dies gilt auch, wenn Mitteilen hier Urteilen ist.Wenn wir einen Anderen als Person verurteilen, legen wir seine Identität fest. Wir tun dies dadurch, dass wir zu uns und zu ihm sagen, wer er ist: er ist derjenige, als der er sich gezeigt hat. Damit sagen wir, dass wir keine Zeit mehr brauchen, um zu sehen, wer er ist. Sehen als Be- und Verurteilen impliziert aber, dass Sehen dem Anderen nicht einfach Bedeutung gibt. Man urteilt ja darüber, was der Andere selbst gezeigt hat: er ist so, wie er sich gezeigt hat. Der Andere hat damit schon Bedeutung, er ist schon derjenige, den wir im Blick haben, wenn wir ur- und mitteilen wollen. Was man tut, wenn man sieht, kann man jedoch selbst so verstehen, dass man nur feststellt. Das heißt: man tut nichts. Man stellt nur fest, was der Andere ist, das heißt: wozu er sich gemacht hat. Dass man so zwischen Sehen als Bedeutungs-Geben und Sehen als Feststellen oder Beobachten pendeln kann, deutet an, dass man übersieht, was man dem Anderen damit antut, wenn man ihn so sieht, wie man ihn sieht. Man ändert die Situation des Anderen – das heißt aber: die Situation, die der Andere zu tragen hat. Was man tut, kann nicht einfach darauf zurückgeführt werden, dass man dem Anderen Bedeutung beimisst. Genauer, die Frage beginnt erst damit: Was bedeutet es, dass man ihm Bedeutung zumisst (oder nicht)? Wie sieht man ihn? Wie zeigt sich der Andere? Der Andere zeigt sich als „mehr“: er ist schon der Andere, dessen Identität man festlegen will, vielleicht um ihn zu beherrschen. Er hat schon eine andere Identität, sonst würde der Versuch, seine Identität festzulegen, keinen Sinn haben. Das heißt aber auch, dass man nicht ausschliessen kann, dass er sich dieser Identifikation widersetzt, die ihm auferlegt wird. Er kann sich als ein Anderer zeigen. Identität kommt nicht einfach durch Identifikation, sondern kann auch Widerstand gegen Identifikation leisten.

5 Person Dass der Nächste ein Anderer ist, heißt nicht nur, dass er uns ausgeliefert ist. Er ist uns auch entzogen. Als Person ist der Nächste beides in einem: ausgeliefert und entzogen. Er ist ausgeliefert: ein Mensch kann einen anderen dazu bringen, den Mut zu verlieren.Wenn man darüber nachdenkt, kommt einem das merkwürdig vor. Denn den Mut verlieren kann nur derjenige, der selbst seinen Mut verliert. Jedoch kann ein anderer Mensch ihn dazu bringen. Dies zeigt, dass ein Mensch – in bezug auf sich selbst – anderen ausgesetzt ist.

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Wie ist er ausgesetzt? Er ist dem Sehen anderer ausgesetzt. Er kann von Anderen beurteilt werden – Anderen, die ihm vielleicht bedeutungsvoll sind. Dies gibt aber auch eine Grenze an, eine Grenze des Sehens (in doppelter Bedeutung): Ein Mensch ist nicht nur derjenige, der von anderen gesehen wird. Er ist auch und schon derjenige, der die anderen sieht. Er sieht die anderen, die ihn sehen. Schon dadurch ist er ihnen entzogen. Sehend ist man selbst den anderen entzogen. Eine Person ist beides, in einem: ausgesetzt und entzogen. Heißt ausgesetzt dann sichtbar, und entzogen unsichtbar? Ich kann aber sehen, dass der Andere mir entzogen ist. Er kann mir z. B. den Rücken zuwenden. Sichtbar ist er mir entzogen. Er ist un-sichtbar.

6 Vertrauen, Verbergen, Vergeben Den Nächsten sieht man nur, wenn man sieht, dass er anders und mehr ist, als man sieht. Dieses „mehr als gesehen“ soll bestimmen, wie man ihn sieht. Es ist eine Frage des Sehens. Dies kann kurz durch Vertrauen,Verbergen und Vergeben beleuchtet werden.⁵ Wenn man einen Anderen mit Vertrauen sieht, ist Vertrauen keine Hinzufügung („mit Vertrauen,“ „vertrauensvoll“), sondern eine Sichtweise. Kierkegaard insistiert zwar darauf, dass Vertrauen und Misstrauen dasselbe wissen können: Sie sind Entscheidungen. Man sieht aber den Anderen anders, wenn man ihn mit Misstrauen sieht. Was man weiss, weiss man anders. Vertrauen weiss auf die Weise, dass es dem Anderen Raum und Zeit offen hält. Dass der Andere sichtbar ist, heißt nicht, dass man damit fertig ist, ihn zu sehen (ihn gesehen hat), sondern die Zukunft steht noch aus. Im Vertrauen ist der Andere, den man sieht, auch sichtbar in dem Sinne: noch zu sehen, noch nicht gesehen, un-sichtbar. Liebe heißt nicht nur (sich) Zeigen, sondern auch (den Anderen) Verbergen. In der Liebe geht es nicht nur darum, den Anderen so zu sehen, dass man ihn zu sehen bekommt. Liebe kann auch den Anderen verbergen – und zwar gegen andere, wohl aber auch gegen sich selbst. Das, was der Andere vielleicht falsch gemacht hat, verbirgt man derart, dass man es nicht weiter sichtbar macht, sondern verschweigt. Oder wenn das nicht möglich ist, hält man die Möglichkeit offen, das, was zu sehen ist, anders zu verstehen. Man kann aber nicht immer alles anders verstehen.Wenn weder Schweigen noch anders Erklären möglich ist, kann die Liebe das, was nicht zu verschweigen oder anders zu erklären ist, sondern zu sehen ist, vergeben. Vergeben sieht das, was es vergibt, sieht es aber so, dass es

 SKS 9, 227– 245, 278 – 297 / LT, 250 – 271, 309 – 330.

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„weggesehen“ oder unsichtbar gemacht wird. Das ist ein schwer gelingendes Kunststück. Wie ist es möglich, den Anderen durch Vergeben zu sehen? Noch intensiver als Vertrauen hält Vergeben dem Anderen die Zukunft offen. Vergeben gibt dem Anderen Zeit dazu, sich anders zu zeigen.

7 Den Nächsten sehen – Zeit geben Den Nächsten sehen wir nur, wenn wir ihn als un-sichtbar sehen. Er ist zu sehen, ja, es geht darum, ihn wirklich zu sehen, denn es ist möglich, ihn so zu sehen, dass man ihn übersieht – und also doch nicht sieht. Ihn wirklich zu sehen heißt aber nicht, dass man alles zu sehen bekommt, was zu sehen ist. Man muss auf den Anderen warten, dass er sich zeigt. Den Nächsten zu sehen, als un-sichtbar, hat mit Zeit zu tun. Als Person, ausgesetzt und entzogen, ist der Andere mehr als das, als was er sich gezeigt hat. Er verhält sich dazu. Das hat damit zu tun, wie er sich zeigt. Darin steckt ein Mehr. Der Andere kann sich noch anders zeigen, wird es auch, wenn wir darauf warten. Er trägt in sich eine Zukunft. Die Zeit ist eine Frage des Noch-nichtGesehenen und Noch-zu-Sehens. Der Andere ist aber auch ein Anderer in dem Sinne, dass wir ihn nur als Person sehen, wenn wir anerkennen, dass es etwas gibt, das wir nicht zu sehen bekommen und vielleicht eben nicht sehen sollen. Was das ist, wissen wir vielleicht nicht. Der Andere als Person kann sich nicht nur sehend unserem Blick entziehen, sondern ist uns schon entzogen. Sonst könnten wir ihn nicht als Anderen sehen. Was heißt das für die Macht des Sehens? Wie sollen wir dann die Macht des Sehens verstehen?

8 „À voir“: Eine Frage des Sehens Eine Kultur der Sichtbarkeit, die darauf aus ist, dass man sich selbst sichtbar macht, schafft eine eigene Blindheit des Sehens. Sie kann aus dem Sehen eine einfache Sache machen: etwas, das wir im Sehen beherrschen; im Sehen verfügen wir über das Sehen. Wir können dann die Meinung bekommen, dass wir über uns selbst verfügen. Die Macht des Sehens besteht nicht ohne weiteres darin, die Identität dessen, was man sieht, dadurch festzulegen, dass man ihm Bedeutung beimisst oder nicht. Sehen heißt nicht ohne weiteres Beherrschen. Dass der Nächste uns unsichtbar ausgeliefert und entzogen ist, dies gilt es zu sehen. Damit wird Sehen Anerkennen.

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Sehen ist eine Frage des Sehens: wie wir faktisch sehen. Es ist die Frage, ob wir das sehen, was wir sehen. Wir sind nicht ohne weiteres in unserem Sehen verschlossen, können uns aber darin verschliessen. Die Frage ist, wie wir uns sehend verhalten. Wie wir faktisch sehen, muss sich erst zeigen. Es ist à voir. Auch in diesem Sinne ist Sehen eine Frage der Zeit.

Index A Literary Review 10, 126 Abgrund 164 – 166, 212, 365, 368 Abschließenden unwissenschaftlichen Nachschrift 137 – 139, 140 – 141, 148, 171 – 178, 180 – 183, 190, 206, 211, 352 – 353, 382, 385 – 387, 389 – 391, 394 – 395, 513, 516 – 518, 529, 533, 536, 539 – 541, 543 – 544 Absolut 15, 24, 96, 104, 158, 170, 198 – 199, 201 – 203, 212, 298, 372, 386, 388, 390, 395 – 398, 437, 470 – 471, 542, 545, 550, 554 Absolute Paradox 24 – 26, 31, 111, 198 – 199, 203 – 204, 207 – 210, 212, 292, 385 – 390 Abstract 10 – 14, 17 – 19, 26, 28 – 30, 103, 242, 247, 272, 541 Abstraction 10 – 11, 13 – 15, 19, 23, 26 – 27, 30, 108, 252 Abstrakt 318, 321, 332 – 333, 339, 342, 351 – 352, 389, 392, 398, 400 Abstraktion 134, 136, 352, 374 – 275, 377, 590 Abyss 83, 224, 534, 538 Accusative 430, 446, 506 – 508, 510, 512 Activity 4, 10, 19 – 20, 94, 114, 129 – 131, 225, 233, 241, 253, 444, 510 – 511 Aesthetics 441 Affective 265 Affectivity 423, 444 – 445 Affektiv 353 Affirmation 148, 153 Akkusativ 166 Aktivität 134, 145, 153, 162, 165, 167 – 168, 170, 179 – 180, 189, 194, 356 – 357, 365 Alterity 52, 60, 97, 292, 420, 423, 448, 463 – 464, 468 – 472, 475, 478 – 482, 505 – 506, 518, 520 – 522, 526 – 527 Ambiguity 49 – 50, 67, 80, 86, 112, 225, 232, 241, 428, 445 – 446, 522, 527, 529, 532, 535, 538, 547, 562 Améry, Jean 436, 438, 555 – 556, 562, 566

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793895-042

Analysis of despair 42, 229, 236, 241, 245, 248, 253, 256, 274, 278 – 280, 562 Andersen, Marianne Krogh 422 Aneignung 174, 176 – 177, 179 – 180, 184, 360, 399 „An einem Grabe“ 150 – 151, 156 Anerkennung 62, 406, 578, 592 Anfang 141 – 142, 149, 160, 172, 175, 178, 180, 188 – 191, 193, 202, 212, 333, 335, 339, 348, 357, 371 – 372, 385, 396, 581, 584, 586 Angst 136 – 137, 142, 147, 159 – 170, 316, 319, 329 – 330, 338 – 339, 341, 355 – 369, 380, 394, 568 – 571, 573 Anthropologie 162, 369 – 370, 390 Anthropology 37, 42, 258 Anticipation 110 – 111, 116 – 118, 120 – 121, 259, 532, 540, 557, 563 Antwort 141, 145, 149, 151, 157, 159, 162, 167, 171, 175 – 176, 202, 206, 212, 304, 315 – 316, 325, 330, 333, 338, 353 – 355, 360, 362, 366, 369, 373, 376, 382, 569 – 570, 574, 584, 586 – 587, 590 – 591, 594 Anxiety 37 – 38, 77 – 78, 83 – 84, 97, 115 – 116, 121, 125, 127, 221, 224 – 226, 228, 233, 239 – 241, 246 – 247, 495 – 496, 507, 533 – 534, 537 – 538, 544, 547 Appropriation 30 – 31, 33, 55, 58, 66, 103, 234, 516 – 517, 520 – 522 Arendt, Hannah 9, 141, 225 Aristoteles 202 Aristotle 219 Arrogance 231 – 232, 411, 454 – 455, 461, 474 – 475 Ästhetische 520, 568 Asymmetrie 309 – 310, 588 – 539 Asymmetry 419, 421, 429, 439, 448, 461 – 462, 470, 477, 482, 522 – 525, 528 – 529 „At a Graveside“ 259, 540, 563 Attention 37, 39, 87, 92, 114, 130, 229, 231, 237, 260, 267, 270, 272, 410 – 412, 416 –

602

Index

417, 422, 425, 427, 444, 449, 453 – 454, 474, 483 – 484, 500, 546, 548 Aufgabe 134 – 136, 138 – 141, 143, 146 – 149, 155, 186, 193, 212, 297, 325, 347, 350, 363 – 364, 367 – 368, 376, 389, 391, 393 – 395, 398 – 399, 401, 594 Aufhebung 397, 487 Aufmerksamkeit 192, 332, 570 – 571, 576, 593, 595 Augenblick 136, 143, 146, 148, 153, 164 – 165, 178, 190, 324, 354, 367 – 368, 377 – 381 Augustine of Hippo 219, 265, 425, 556 Äußerlichkeit 342 Auslegung 136, 197, 312, 315, 317, 326, 328 – 329, 332, 346, 352, 387, 390, 393 Autonomy 13, 33, 62, 503, 505 Barmherzigkeit 574 – 575, 588 Befreiung 381 – 382 Begriff Angest 137 – 138, 142 – 143, 147, 159 – 165, 169 – 170, 330 – 331, 357 – 363, 365 – 369, 380, 385, 390, 392, 394, 569 – 572, 577 Benjamin, Walter 440 Betrachter 338, 343, 359 Bewegung 151, 158, 163, 172, 175 – 180, 184, 190 – 192, 198 – 199, 203 – 204, 208, 327, 330, 335, 343, 345 – 347, 350 – 351, 371 – 372, 375 – 381, 384, 390, 392 – 393, 395, 397 – 399, 401, 466, 568, 586 – 587, 590 Bewußtsein 323, 331 – 334, 342, 344, 347 – 352, 379, 386, 465, 569 – 270 Beziehung 145, 155 – 156, 183, 191, 206, 350, 359, 363 – 364, 369 Bild 142, 164 – 165, 193, 202, 335, 589 Birth 4, 6, 95, 100, 262, 531, 540 Blick 134 – 137, 143, 146 – 147, 151 – 154, 156, 163, 165, 167 – 170, 172, 179, 181, 186, 188 – 189, 191, 193, 196 – 198, 200, 203, 315, 322, 359 – 360, 371, 373 – 374, 376, 382, 390, 586, 594 – 595, 597, 599 Body 37, 39 – 41, 53 – 54, 57 – 58, 78, 81, 84 – 85, 88 – 90, 97 – 98, 100, 221, 224, 534 – 535, 555

Böse 160 – 161, 163, 166, 168, 170, 330, 357, 364, 370, 459 Brain 88, 90, 94 Break 25 – 26, 114, 120, 263, 301, 430, 432, 484, 490, 499, 526 – 527 Broken 99, 118, 131 – 132, 252, 301, 460, 485, 490, 540, 548, 552 Bruch 385 – 390, 393 – 394, 396 – 398, 568 Burden 18, 41, 81, 113 – 114, 116 – 117, 119 – 121, 408, 530 – 531, 533, 546, 552, 556 Busyness 114, 247 Care 41, 115, 500, 502, 532, 534, 555 – 556 Cavell, Stanley 433 Choice 3, 14, 129 – 131, 221, 224, 228, 230, 255, 489, 497, 503, 509, 516, 536, 541 – 542, 548, 557 – 561 Christ 281, 283, 444, 545 Christendom 284 – 285 Christentum 180, 211, 316, 386, 583 Christian Discourses 41, 115, 131, 532 – 534 Christianity 31, 35, 277, 283, 285, 287, 408, 410 – 411, 421, 454, 474, 488, 530, 539, 543 – 544 Chronos 381 – 382 Clark, Andy 88, 94, 96, 101 Cognition 62 – 64, 66, 88 – 89, 93, 96 Commemoration 554, 556, 564 Communication 35, 45, 219 – 221, 240, 257, 267 – 268, 287, 418, 432, 448, 494 Community 61, 529 Compassion 104, 434 Concept of Anxiety 12, 25, 37 – 38, 40, 54, 77 – 87, 91, 97 – 98, 100, 111 – 112, 115, 124, 220, 224 – 227, 230, 236, 241, 255, 270, 380, 406, 484 – 485, 490 – 495, 495 – 496, 507, 517, 530, 533 – 538, 542 – 543, 546, 549, 551, 558 – 559, 562 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 3 – 4, 6, 8 – 22, 23 – 36, 38 – 39, 83, 94, 97, 99, 126, 220 – 221, 234, 236 – 239, 252 – 253, 255, 270, 285, 287 – 288, 300, 484 – 485, 488, 490 – 491, 494, 497, 501, 513 – 514, 516 – 517, 528, 539, 541, 543 – 544 Concrete 11 – 12, 23, 28, 103, 113, 242, 500, 538, 541 – 542

Index

Conditio humana 84, 189, 191 – 192, 199 – 200, 203, 208, 210, 371, 375, 382 Confidence 117 – 118, 239, 291 Conscience 57, 102, 127, 220, 435 – 437, 445, 448, 451 Consciousness 8, 17 – 18, 30 – 31, 36, 41, 47, 53 – 59, 62, 76 – 77, 81, 89 – 93, 95 – 99, 102, 105 – 106, 108 – 109, 223, 226, 229, 240 – 243, 248 – 253, 271, 276, 278, 280 – 285, 292, 294, 299, 428, 443, 452, 464 – 467, 470 – 473, 492, 501, 507, 528, 542 Contingency 99, 121 Contradiction 26, 40, 84 – 85, 98, 113, 130, 291, 296, 495, 542 – 546 Courage 99, 117, 119 – 122, 239 – 240, 252, 255 – 257, 262, 265 – 267, 269, 293, 456, 477, 488, 533, 542, 547, 551, 559 Christian Discourses 41 – 42, 115,131, 533 – 534 Criterion 47, 49, 52 – 58, 100, 271, 275 – 278, 280 – 281, 284, 452, 468, 473 Critique 7, 104, 301, 430, 445, 463, 501, 505, 513 Culture 104, 221, 234, 374, 418 – 420, 509, 566 Dämonisch 161, 169, 308, 321, 330, 345 – 346, 351, 369 Danger 10, 18, 23, 41, 117, 257 – 267, 269, 444, 458, 511, 530, 533, 542, 548 – 549 Dative 222 – 223, 225 Death 4, 6, 95, 259 – 260, 264, 435, 531, 533, 540 – 541, 552, 554 – 555, 563 – 564, 567 Decision 14, 17, 34, 86, 129, 225, 231, 233, 258 – 260, 265, 273, 292, 303, 531, 538 – 539, 541, 544, 558 – 559, 561 – 562 Defiance 242, 248, 250 – 251, 274 – 275, 279 – 280, 283 Dejection 122 Demand 10, 13, 28, 41, 66, 68, 87, 95, 105, 108, 116, 129, 252 – 253, 262 – 263, 266, 293, 296, 405, 411, 413, 425, 427 – 431, 438 – 439, 443, 449 – 451, 454, 456, 466, 474, 476, 480 – 482, 497 – 512, 516, 525, 555, 566

603

Demonic 282, 495 Denken 136 – 137, 142, 148, 150, 156, 158, 198 – 209, 212 – 213, 309, 319, 330, 363, 367, 372, 374 – 375, 382, 384 – 390, 394 – 398, 400 Dennett, Daniel C. 76, 89, 107 – 109 Der Liebe Tun 144, 147, 149, 151, 154 – 156, 185, 325 – 327, 329, 353, 392, 574 – 577, 579 – 591, 593, 594, 598 Derrida, Jacques 426 Descartes, René 38, 104, 185 Despair 35, 42 – 43, 65, 68, 72 – 73, 101, 116 – 117, 120 – 122, 125, 227, 229 – 231, 233, 236, 239 – 254, 256, 266, 268, 270 – 285, 309, 485, 489 – 491, 494 – 496, 519, 536, 548, 551 – 552, 556, 560 – 562, 564 Desperatio 317, 325 – 326, 354 Destruction 101 – 102 Destruktion 200 De-zentrierung 196 – 197 Dialectics 23, 26, 33 – 35, 60, 62 – 63, 124, 126 – 128, 231, 256, 289, 292, 297 – 298, 300, 302, 463 – 483, 489, 522, 526 Dialektik 147, 182 – 184, 191, 271, 307, 315, 324, 365, 381 – 382, 384, 398 – 399, 406, 452, 466 Dichtung 371, 374 – 376, 380 Die Lilie auf dem Felde und der Vogel unter dem Himmel 148, 195 Die Wiederholung 392, 394 Dignity 66, 68, 434 – 437, 439, 542 Distinction 24, 27, 35, 45, 56 – 57, 86, 103 – 104, 112, 225, 244 – 245, 276, 281, 288, 293, 302 – 303, 406 – 407, 416, 450, 458, 460 – 461, 468, 502, 535 – 537, 543, 549, 552, 561, 564 Distinctiveness 413, 455 – 457, 460, 476 – 478, 524 – 525 Distraction 10 – 11, 13, 19, 114 Dogmatics 490 – 491 Dogmatik 360, 569, 572 – 573, 576 – 577 Doppelbewegung 151, 190, 377 – 382, 391 – 392, 398 – 400 Dostojewski, Fjodor 169 Double movement 82, 491, 521, 552, 555, 561, 566

604

Index

Drei Reden bei gedachten Gelegenheiten 148, 150, 195 Earthly 41, 115, 249, 260 – 261, 532 – 533 Edification 110 – 111, 120 – 122, 255 – 258, 264, 266 – 267, 531, 546 – 547, 551 – 552 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses 110, 113 – 114, 116 – 120, 239, 257 – 269, 531 – 533, 558 Einübung im Christentum 401 Either-Or 99, 405, 489, 496, 542 Ellison, Ralph 441 Embodiment 88 – 96, 98, 103 – 104, 189, 192, 290 Endlich 162, 195, 373, 380, 384, 391 – 392, 394 Endlichkeit 141, 164, 189 – 192, 209, 333, 377 – 380, 391 – 393, 399 – 400 Endurance 118 Entscheidung 138, 143, 147 – 153, 156, 165 – 167, 169, 175 – 176, 186, 193, 195 – 196, 317, 360, 598 Entweder-Oder 149 – 150, 385, 389 Envy 127, 132, 239, 454 – 455, 461, 475 Erbaulichen Reden in verschiedenem Geist 142 – 143, 154 – 155 Erfahrung 143, 150, 158, 160, 168, 185 – 186, 189 – 193, 195 – 196, 200, 202, 204 – 305, 208 – 210, 223, 311, 313, 316 – 317, 320, 326, 329, 373, 375 – 378, 587 Erinnerung 144, 199 – 200 Erkenntnis 319, 339, 384 Erleiden 152, 169, 191, 310, 312 – 314, 317, 320 – 321, 342, 345 Ernst 142, 144 – 145, 147, 150 – 151, 153, 167, 191, 212, 315, 317, 324, 327, 329, 336, 353, 359, 389, 571, 591 Eternity 6, 11, 13, 79 – 80, 83, 85 – 86, 111 – 115, 286, 410, 441, 487, 534 – 535, 539 – 540, 544, 548 – 550, 558 – 559, 563 Ethical Demand (the) 423, 429, 449, 470, 482, 497 – 512, 551 Ethical (the) 11, 21, 31 – 32, 55, 67, 70, 120 – 121, 128, 256, 272, 277, 405 – 407, 416 – 417, 421 – 424, 427, 429, 431 – 432, 435, 437 – 439, 441 – 442, 445 – 450, 452, 461 – 462, 470, 480, 482 – 483, 485,

488 – 491, 497 – 512, 517, 527 – 530, 536, 541 – 543, 546, 549 Ethics 67, 120, 405 – 406, 417 – 418, 423 – 424, 426 – 429, 431, 436 – 439, 441 – 442, 446, 448, 452, 462, 474, 478, 481 – 483, 490, 497 – 498, 501 – 503, 507, 524, 527 – 530, 541 – 543, 550 – 552 Ethics of vision 211, 231, 405 – 406, 415 – 417, 421 – 423, 427, 432, 443, 445 – 446, 452, 461 – 462, 474, 477 – 478, 481, 515, 524, 593 Ethik 316, 324, 329, 358, 360, 406, 452, 464, 489, 568 – 574, 576 – 577, 593, 595 Ethik des Sehens 211, 575, 593 Ethische (das) 146, 150, 167, 182, 328, 361, 385, 568, 570 – 577 Evil 225 – 226, 459, 557 Ewigkeit 203, 327, 358, 373, 379 – 380, 385, 393, 585 Existential Approach 91, 96, 99, 102, 105 – 106, 233, 237, 239, 566 Existential Hermeneutics 241 Existentialism 3, 91 Existential Philosophy 3, 90 – 91 Expectancy 118, 265, 531 – 532, 557 Experience 19, 37, 39 – 42, 50 – 51, 60 – 61, 64, 69, 71 – 74, 88 – 90, 92 – 93, 98, 100 – 101, 104, 109, 111, 113 – 117, 120, 122, 127, 223 – 225, 228 – 230, 233, 242 – 243, 263 – 264, 267, 297, 299 – 300, 302, 374, 427, 433 – 434, 443, 446, 448 – 449, 458 – 459, 468 – 472, 481, 511, 534, 546 – 547, 561 Exteriority 89, 95, 431, 435, 446, 448, 473, 479 – 480, 504, 513 – 515, 518, 520 – 529 Face

4, 16, 19 – 20, 45, 63, 76, 108, 127, 131, 218, 222, 225, 230, 243, 248, 256, 431 – 433, 437, 439, 441, 443, 451, 469, 480, 500, 504 – 506, 508, 523, 529, 532, 534, 538, 554, 561, 566 Faith 25, 83, 117, 121 – 124, 128 – 130, 132, 233, 239, 250, 271 – 275, 278 – 279, 285, 292, 295, 302 – 303, 414 – 415, 453, 457, 490 – 491, 530 – 532, 543 – 546 Fallibility 132

Index

Fear and Trembling 24 – 25, 46, 128 – 129, 273, 406, 491, 497, 501, 528, 536 Figure 10, 17 – 18, 51, 86 – 87, 91, 105, 118 – 119, 221, 227, 229, 236, 238 – 246, 248 – 254, 259, 270, 273 – 274, 276 – 281, 283 – 285, 289, 334, 368, 413, 437, 441, 443, 455, 461 – 462, 475, 500, 530, 545 – 546, 554 Finite 15, 38 – 39, 42, 79 – 81, 83 – 86, 95, 97, 99, 102, 113, 121, 471, 538 – 540, 544, 554 Finitude 34, 42, 79 – 84, 86, 94 – 96, 102, 112 – 113, 115, 121, 241 – 242, 276, 534 First-person perspective 73, 102 – 103, 121, 127 – 128, 130, 132 Flasch, Kurt 425 Forderung 155, 173, 181 – 182, 199, 201, 209 – 210, 324, 327, 329, 351, 353, 373, 382, 570 – 573, 578 – 585, 588 – 592 Forgetting 4 – 5, 10, 17, 20 – 22, 68, 82, 128 – 129, 131, 219, 221 – 222, 227, 234, 238, 252, 426, 540 Forgiveness 132, 282 – 284, 414 – 415, 439, 457 – 460 Formale Anzeige 135 Formal indication 3, 14, 21 – 22, 219, 261, 428, 442, 565 Fragility 448 Frankfurt, Harry G. 72, 135, 148, 152, 182, 185, 219, 236, 305, 315, 373, 379, 393, 425, 428, 489, 520 Free 70, 104, 132, 232, 239, 246, 250 – 251, 272, 292 – 293, 414, 422, 456, 477, 490, 499, 516, 532, 542, 550, 552 Freedom 24, 34, 77 – 78, 83, 87, 104, 121, 224, 226, 278, 488, 491 – 493, 517, 534, 537 – 538, 542 Freiheit 136 – 137, 160 – 162, 164, 167 – 170, 187, 239, 330, 355 – 371, 516 Freude 148, 195 Furcht und Zittern 141, 570 – 571 Future 45, 69 – 70, 95 – 96, 99, 112, 116 – 118, 121, 131, 414, 432, 438 – 440, 448, 488, 531 – 535, 537 – 538, 541 – 542, 549, 554 – 559, 561, 563 – 566

605

Gabe 577, 581, 588 Gaze 121, 420, 433 – 434, 472 – 473 Gebrochen 206, 350, 377, 386 – 387, 390, 568 Geburt 141 – 142, 189 – 190 Gedankenlosigkeit 147, 149 – 150 Geduld 330 Gefahr 137, 147, 193, 352, 401, 592 Gegenseitigkeit 460, 578 – 585, 588 – 592 Gegenwart 154, 381 – 382 Geheimnis 179 – 180, 360 Geist 92 – 94, 135 – 136, 138, 153 – 156, 164, 185, 189, 192, 304 – 305 316, 319, 336 – 337, 339 – 340, 351 – 352, 362 – 363, 366 – 367, 391, 465, 471 Geistlosigkeit 316, 319, 340 – 341, 351 – 352, 357 Gemeinschaft 169, 187, 581 – 582 German Idealism 90 – 91 Geschäftigkeit 319, 327, 340 Geschichte 138, 140, 142, 163, 169, 178, 180, 182, 190 – 191, 201, 203, 315 – 316, 350, 363, 367 – 368, 381 – 382, 385, 395, 399 – 401 Gewissen 139, 166, 170, 195 – 196, 327 – 328, 339, 350 Gift 232 – 233, 263, 456, 477, 542, 552, 564 Glaube 141, 146, 152, 156, 160, 185, 196, 316 – 317, 323, 325, 344, 347, 350, 353, 357, 393, 572, 575, 583, 586 God 57, 59, 119, 271 – 275, 280 – 283, 290 – 292, 295 – 296, 298 – 299, 374, 421, 456, 477, 505, 518, 540, 545, 550 Good 24, 59, 108 – 110, 226, 260 – 261, 282, 424, 434, 512, 557, 560 – 561, 564 – 566 Gott 138, 141, 150, 154, 187, 198, 200, 212 – 213, 308, 325, 358, 364, 386, 388, 392, 397, 577, 583 – 584, 586 Gottesfrage 198 Grenze 45, 163, 166 – 167, 187 – 192, 201 – 204, 206, 208 – 208, 310, 328, 353, 360 – 363, 373, 397, 596, 598 Ground 88 – 90, 104 – 105, 426, 532, 547, 554 Grund 134, 157, 164 – 165, 171 – 172, 175, 177, 179, 191, 195, 199, 201 – 204, 206,

606

Index

212, 306 – 307, 315, 317, 341, 354, 365, 378, 393, 395, 547, 572, 577, 585 – 586, 590 Guilt 12, 83, 113, 124, 292, 410, 434, 541 Gute 160 – 161, 169 – 170, 337, 364 – 365, 570, 574 – 576 Handeln 162, 169, 189, 191, 308, 310 – 312, 314, 317, 320 – 322, 331, 344 – 345, 587 – 588 Handlung 313 – 314, 320 – 321, 327, 342, 346, 372, 573 – 574, 577 Happiness 57, 122, 126, 544 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 62 – 63, 91 – 94, 96, 105, 124, 136, 181 – 182, 202, 205, 223, 226, 228 – 231, 236, 239 – 240, 253, 266, 288, 297, 315, 331, 348, 370, 394, 396, 399 – 401, 449, 452 – 453, 459, 463 – 466, 470 – 473, 477, 480 – 482, 521 – 522, 558 – 559 Heidegger, Martin 5, 11, 18, 21, 52, 80, 96, 105, 115 – 116, 135 – 136, 145, 150, 169, 200, 218 – 219, 253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 268 – 269, 425 – 426, 437, 440, 558 – 560, 566 Heidentum 317 Heinesen, William 422 Hermeneutical phenomenology 241, 253 – 354 Hermeneutics 69, 90, 221 Hermeneutik 45, 219 Herrschaft 371, 375, 377, 459, 464 Hiding 126, 128, 241, 252, 261, 414 – 415, 426, 431, 458 History 7, 40 – 42, 45, 64, 66 – 67, 70, 82, 85 – 87, 89 – 91, 93, 96, 98 – 102, 105 – 107, 109, 218, 225 – 226, 233, 241 – 242, 374, 424, 432, 438 – 442, 493, 498, 530 – 531, 533, 535 – 539, 541 – 546, 550 – 551, 554 – 556, 560, 562, 566 Hoffnung 154, 190, 325 – 328, 330, 352 – 354, 581 – 582, 586, 590 Hoffnungslosigkeit 325 Holocaust 566 Hope 99, 117, 121 – 122, 239, 252, 256, 273 – 275, 277, 441, 457, 460, 554 – 567 Horizon 13, 16, 89, 191, 223, 426, 518, 526

Idealität 569 – 571 Identität 45, 142, 155, 162 – 163, 180, 186, 192, 211, 213, 363, 391, 593, 596 – 597, 599 Identity 7, 39, 42, 44 – 56, 58 – 73, 76, 98 – 101, 105 – 107, 109, 366, 418 – 420, 448, 463 – 464, 469 – 470, 475, 478 – 479, 482, 524 – 525 Ignorance 132, 243, 245 – 247, 271, 276, 279, 281, 285, 299 – 300, 435, 437 Image 90, 118, 130, 417 – 419, 421, 439, 443, 445, 456, 476, 525, 593 Imagination 110, 190, 289 – 290, 300 – 301, 441, 500 Immanence 191, 288 – 289, 301 – 303, 426, 485, 487, 490 Immanenz 385 – 390, 393 – 400, 594 Immediacy 12, 123 – 132, 246 – 248, 251, 276 Inclosing reserve 220, 250 – 251, 274, 279 Index 376, 380 Indirect communication 21, 256, 524, 529 Indirect method 111, 113, 116, 122, 264 Individual 12, 21, 28, 38 – 42, 45, 47, 63 – 64, 82 – 84, 86 – 87, 94, 97 – 99, 104, 106, 115 – 116, 120, 122, 126, 249, 257 – 258, 277, 283 – 284, 290, 295 – 296, 413, 433, 459, 477, 485, 489, 492 – 493, 500 – 504, 507 – 508, 510, 514, 536 – 537, 540 – 541, 543 – 544, 546 Individuum 138, 356 – 357, 359, 364 – 365, 367 – 369, 382, 537 Infinite 9, 15, 26, 32, 38 – 39, 42, 80 – 83, 86, 94, 112, 126, 274 – 275, 467, 526, 535, 538 – 540, 543 – 544, 549, 553, 564 Infinity 83, 126, 129, 426, 431 – 432, 480, 498, 504 – 505, 513 – 514, 528, 551 Innerlichkeit 169, 172, 174, 176 – 180, 184, 385 Innocence 12, 124, 243, 245, 537 Intending 264, 269, 431 Interesse 389, 394 – 395 Interest 26 – 27, 29 – 30, 32, 492, 509, 544 Interiority 28, 87, 89, 94, 129, 234, 435, 445 – 446, 448, 513, 515 – 529 Interpretation 52, 55, 57, 77, 79, 84, 91, 93, 97, 108, 115, 132, 175 – 176, 178, 195,

Index

198, 217 – 218, 221, 226, 229, 239, 270 – 271 – 272, 276, 280, 285, 289, 291, 317, 352, 371 – 372, 375 – 376, 381, 392 – 394, 405 – 406, 440, 452, 458, 463, 466, 497, 509, 516, 545, 565 Inversion 244, 301, 372, 376 – 378, 407, 410 – 411, 414 – 415 Invisibility 413, 420, 423, 426 – 427, 431, 437 Irdische 312, 314, 319 – 320, 322 – 323, 343 – 344, 346 – 347, 349, 580 Ir-relation 526 Jensen, Johannes V. 118, 500 Jesus 193, 458, 594 Joy 81, 106, 118, 547 Kant, Immanuel 202, 297 Kisiel, Theodore 21, 135, 219 Kommunikation 161, 169 – 170, 368 – 369, 593 Konkret 134, 136, 160, 333, 351, 357, 389, 392, 398, 400 Kontingenz 189, 191 – 192. Korrektur 72, 170, 236, 305, 310 – 311, 379 Krankheit 304 – 307, 311, 319 – 320, 328, 331 – 332, 335, 340, 353 Krankheit zum Tode 145, 149, 152, 162 – 163, 168, 172, 180, 213, 304 – 309, 311 – 314, 317 – 327, 329, 331 – 346, 348–353, 364 – 365, 364, 369, 379, 391 – 393 Kritik 148, 200, 305, 307, 310 – 312, 315, 317, 326, 379, 396, 399 – 400, 576, 580 Kultur 186, 593, 595, 599 Leap 224, 429, 485, 490, 537 – 538 Leben 134 – 158, 169, 185 – 186, 188 – 190, 193 – 197, 200, 202, 310, 318, 324, 326 – 328, 338 – 339, 342, 358 – 359, 377 – 381, 571, 581, 585, 591, 593 Lebensphilosophie 156 – 158 Lebensprinzip 385 Leib 142, 155, 162, 340, 362 – 363, 366 – 367 Leidenschaft 141, 152, 174 – 176, 199, 202, 204 – 208, 210, 388, 394 – 395, 571

607

Leser 137, 171, 305, 332 – 333, 355, 358, 361, 375, 569 – 570 Levinas, Emmanuel 380, 430 – 433, 444 – 445, 448, 480, 497 – 501, 503 – 509, 512 – 515, 519 – 521, 526 – 529 Levi, Primo 434 – 435 Lidegaard, Else 422 Liebe 141, 144, 146 – 147, 151 – 152, 154 – 155, 204, 206, 211 – 212, 324 – 325, 327, 329, 344 – 345, 353, 369, 382, 406, 460, 568, 573 – 592, 595, 598 Limit 24 – 26, 95, 128, 132, 225, 289, 292, 297 – 298, 300 – 302, 424, 430, 434 – 436, 438, 448, 465, 478, 480, 482, 515, 524, 526, 528, 531, 555, 562, 566 Logos 217, 253 Løgstrup, Knud Ejler 497 – 509, 512 Loss 50, 82 – 83, 117, 119, 249, 267, 410, 489, 548, 563 Love 75, 108, 114, 120 – 121, 124 – 129, 132, 232, 239, 256, 259, 274, 291 – 292, 301, 406 – 416, 428 – 430, 433 – 434, 443, 453 – 461, 474, 476 – 477, 495, 499, 502, 505, 519, 524 – 525, 530, 536 – 537, 546 – 552, 557, 562 – 563 Luther, Martin 445, 521 Macht 137, 139 – 140, 142, 150 – 151, 154, 161 – 163, 165, 168 – 169, 173, 178, 187, 198 – 199, 208, 213, 308, 312 – 313, 318, 320 – 322, 326, 328, 330, 334 – 335, 339, 342 – 343, 347 – 349, 353, 356, 358 – 559, 364 – 365, 375, 378, 381 – 382, 385, 393, 397 – 398, 568, 570 – 572, 575 – 576, 579 – 582, 584, 586 – 590, 592 – 596, 598 – 599 Mastery 443 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 20, 88, 420 – 421 Metachronik 373 Metaphysics 45 Metaphysik 200 – 204, 208, 315, 371 – 376, 379, 382, 569 Metaphysikkritik 200, 202, 382 Method 24, 33, 72, 87, 111, 125, 217 – 220, 229, 231, 234, 236, 238 – 239, 243, 253, 264, 305 – 306, 311, 315, 330 – 331, 352, 358, 360, 453, 562

608

Index

Middle Term 505 Mirror 119, 126, 129 – 130, 546 Mis-relation 72 – 73 Mistrust 127, 132, 239, 414, 453 – 454 Mißverhältnis 311, 324 – 325, 348 Modernität 187 – 188 Modernity 3, 19, 487 – 488 Möglichkeit 134, 138, 140 – 141, 144 – 146, 149 – 150, 152 – 156, 160 – 161, 164 – 165, 168 – 170, 173 – 176, 180, 187, 189 – 191, 194, 198, 201, 205, 208, 210 – 211, 213, 306, 317, 321, 325, 329, 333, 340, 344, 348, 350 – 352, 355 – 357, 360 – 361, 363 – 364, 370, 372, 379 – 381, 390, 509, 568 – 569, 572, 575, 589, 594, 598 Moment 12, 40, 80, 85 – 87, 97 – 98, 106, 112, 114, 117, 119 – 120, 124 – 125, 162, 182, 224 – 226, 243, 251, 258 – 261, 263 – 266, 286, 292, 321, 332 – 333, 346, 363, 380, 385, 425, 463, 530 – 531, 535 – 539, 541 – 542, 546 – 547, 549 – 550, 552, 554, 557 – 560, 563, 566, 584 Moral 101, 284 – 285, 417, 435 – 436, 439, 498, 501, 509, 555, 566, 577 Morality 501 Movement 5, 7 – 15, 18, 30, 32, 34, 70, 78, 81 – 83, 86 – 87, 103, 119, 124, 129, 221, 229, 234, 238 – 241, 247, 249 – 250, 263, 274, 291, 297, 300, 374, 406, 408 – 410, 427, 449, 454, 459 – 460, 466, 470, 476 – 477, 480, 482, 487 – 488, 491, 493, 515, 517 – 518, 520 – 521, 525, 538, 540, 542, 545, 552, 555 – 556, 561, 563 – 564 Movement of transcendence 13, 298, 300 – 302 Mut 141, 153 – 154, 325 – 327, 330, 352, 586, 597 Nachdenken 136, 188 – 189, 194 – 195, 198, 202, 204, 436, 555 Nächste 155, 179, 193, 327, 329, 343, 376, 428, 575, 578, 580, 584 – 585, 592 – 599 Nächstenliebe 324, 578 – 580, 582, 592 Nakedness 432, 437, 439, 441 Narrative 7, 44, 70 – 71, 76, 99, 105 – 109, 439 – 441, 593

Narrative self 71, 105 – 108 Negativismus 305 – 306, 317, 329 Negativität 340, 381, 389, 391 Negativity 72, 217 – 219, 221, 226 – 228, 230, 234, 236, 241, 251, 254, 266 – 267, 285, 300, 468, 471 – 473, 481 – 482, 512, 561 Neid 330, 575 Neighbor 132, 232, 408 – 411, 428 – 430, 443, 454, 456, 474, 476, 499, 504 – 506, 525, 549 – 552 Neighbor love 409, 476 – 477 Nichts 137, 141, 150, 161, 163, 178, 207, 209, 321, 324, 329, 336 – 337, 339, 350, 357, 359, 361, 400, 574, 580, 588, 597 Nichtselbstseinwollen 309, 313 – 314, 318 Nietzsche, Friedrich 75 – 76, 96, 187, 207 Nihilismus 316, 329 Nominative 430, 446, 507 Normativität 154 Normativity 60, 65, 67, 72, 128, 413, 437, 442, 446 – 448, 472 – 473, 481 – 482, 497 – 498, 501, 503, 505 – 512 Nothingness 433, 453, 472 Oblivion 4 – 5, 11, 20, 31, 238, 426, 441 Observer 87, 220, 249, 259, 416, 495 – 496 Offenheit 389, 391, 399 – 400 Öffentlichkeit 187, 196 Ohnmacht 310, 328, 365, 381 – 382 Ontology 433, 453, 472, 558 Openness 118 Pagan 115, 487 Paradox 24 – 25, 35, 111, 113, 140, 143, 151, 155, 161, 179 – 180, 198 – 199, 202 – 213, 289 – 290, 292 – 293, 296, 298, 301 – 303, 317, 372, 380, 382, 385 – 390, 392 – 395, 397, 400, 539, 543 – 546, 596 Passion 24 – 26, 30, 119, 121, 128, 130, 170, 234, 292, 298, 300, 302, 408, 495, 536 Passivität 134, 145, 153, 162, 165, 167 – 168, 170, 179 – 180, 189, 194, 356 – 357, 365 Passivity 4, 127, 129 – 131, 170, 225, 233, 241, 253, 444, 450, 507, 510 – 511, 563 Past 41, 47, 50, 53 – 56, 58 – 59, 61, 66 – 67, 69 – 70, 95 – 96, 99 – 100, 112, 114, 120 –

Index

121, 291, 411, 418, 432, 438 – 440, 446, 454, 474, 531 – 532, 535, 538, 541 – 542, 545, 549, 554 – 558, 564 – 567 Patience 110 – 111, 113, 116 – 118, 120, 239, 257 – 258, 261 – 267, 269, 443, 533, 538 „Patience in Expectancy“ 265 Personal Identity 45, 47 – 48, 51, 53 – 55, 57 – 58, 60, 64 – 54, 69, 72, 75, 97 Perspective 30, 68, 73 – 74, 76, 83, 87, 94, 96, 102, 106, 108, 121, 222 – 223, 231 – 232, 239, 243 – 245, 255, 260, 263, 273, 289, 374, 405, 407, 410 – 411, 414 – 416, 429, 448, 455, 461, 463 – 465, 468 – 473, 475, 477, 479, 505 – 506, 509, 511, 517, 523, 525, 528, 548 – 549, 551, 565 – 566 Perspektiv 161, 166, 185, 187 – 188, 190 – 191, 193, 195 – 197, 306, 332, 361, 367 – 368, 371, 400, 588, 595 – 596 Phänomen 136, 138, 159, 162, 166, 194, 305, 308, 311, 314 – 317, 325, 330 – 331, 336, 355 – 356, 358 – 360, 368 – 369, 386, 575 – 576 Phänomenologie 72, 135, 229, 239 – 240, 276, 285, 330 – 331, 348, 350, 355 – 356, 360, 366, 368 – 370, 516, 562 Phenomenology 20 – 21, 70, 86 – 87, 90, 92, 191, 217 – 219, 222 – 224, 226 – 231, 233 – 236, 239 – 241, 248, 251 – 253, 284, 424 – 427, 441, 464 – 465, 473 Phenomenon 67, 73, 79 – 80, 114 – 116, 118, 120, 124, 217 – 218, 220 – 221, 224, 226, 232,239 – 241, 243 – 245, 248 – 249, 253, 424 – 425, 431, 439, 453 – 455, 461, 475, 480, 492, 496, 521, 531, 533, 547, 562 Philosophical Fragments 24 – 25, 202, 279, 286 – 303, 488 – 489, 491, 518, 544 Philosophie 94, 148, 182, 185, 188, 190, 200, 236, 355, 371, 393, 395 – 400, 513, 539 Philosophischen Brocken 181, 198 – 199, 204, 206, 209, 384, 386 – 388 Philosophy 3, 38, 47, 80, 91, 94, 115, 123, 127, 218, 236, 267, 286, 374, 424, 440, 459, 463, 486 – 487, 490, 497 – 498, 529, 555, 559 Philosophy of Religion 123, 170

609

Pindar 371, 375 – 378, 381 – 382 Plato 38, 288 Platon 184, 202, 372, 379 Poetry 23, 31, 374 Power 10, 78, 110, 114, 116, 119, 220, 259, 272, 274 – 275, 408, 411, 419, 433 – 434, 436 – 437, 441, 447, 454, 474, 477, 490, 492, 495, 531, 537, 546 Practice in Christianity 129 – 130, 545 Praesumptio 326 Preferential love 409 Presence 55, 112, 246, 549, 556, 565 – 566. Primitivity 121, 128, 130, 132, 231, 496, 536 Principle 57, 62, 100, 294, 423, 433 Prinzip 201 Process 8 – 9, 17, 28, 40, 48, 50 – 52, 65, 82, 88, 94 – 100, 102, 118 – 119, 223, 228 – 231, 240, 242 – 243, 248, 250 – 252, 276, 281 – 282, 284, 409, 466 – 468, 482, 521, 538 – 539 Prozess 166, 306, 313, 320 – 321, 326, 331, 333 – 334, 341 – 352, 466 Psychologie 136, 138, 164, 360 – 362 Psychology 87, 485, 490, 537 Questioning 17, 50, 218, 220, 222, 233, 258, 409, 440, 463, 511, 527, 529 Question of truth 515 – 516, 519 Rationalität 187 – 188 Reader 8, 77, 110, 119 – 120, 129, 221, 237, 245, 256 – 259, 264 – 265, 267 – 268, 291, 405, 407 – 408, 410 – 411, 422, 454, 457 – 459, 465, 469, 474, 484, 493 – 495, 515, 530, 532, 555 Reality 25, 275, 487, 490, 542, 555 Reciprocity 458 – 461, 466, 469 – 472, 477, 482 Recognition 45, 49 – 50, 60, 62 – 63, 66 – 69, 92, 240, 405 – 407, 418 – 420, 436, 452 – 454, 456, 459, 461 – 483 Reconciliation 439, 457 – 458, 460, 471, 490, 492 – 493 Reconstruction 44, 80, 380 Reduplication 18 Reflection 19 – 20, 46, 50, 52 – 53, 71, 87 – 89, 99, 105, 110, 120, 123, 125 – 132,

610

Index

218, 255 – 256, 405, 409, 422, 424, 436, 446, 495, 497 – 498, 535, 542, 547, 555 Reflexion 134, 136, 157, 163, 172 – 173, 314, 321 – 322, 332, 342 – 343, 362, 375 – 376 Reflexivity 130 Rekonstruktion 152, 307, 310 – 311, 326 Religion 61, 135, 185 – 194, 196 – 197, 374 – 376, 380, 426, 459, 568 Religionsphilosophie 188, 297, 376, 399, 568 Religiös 135, 161, 182, 185 – 186, 319, 328, 352 – 353, 355, 376, 390, 568 – 569, 571, 573 – 574 Religious 21, 61, 233, 255 – 256, 272 – 273, 277, 301, 448, 485, 489, 491, 496, 546 Repetition 484 – 496 Repetition 20, 30, 86, 126, 133, 280, 380, 441 – 442, 450, 484 – 496, 538 Resoluteness 259, 265 Response 7, 37 – 38, 68, 89, 222 – 223, 240, 256, 258, 267, 269, 273, 409, 430, 434 – 435, 439, 448, 460, 472, 497, 511, 521, 526 – 527, 531, 556, 566 Rest 15, 48, 187, 270, 272, 288, 292, 295 – 296, 298, 332, 361, 417, 491 Rhetoric 3, 18, 266, 405 Rhetorik 183 – 184 Ruhe 181, 338 Sartre, Jean-Paul 63, 69, 148, 433, 453, 464, 472 – 473, 512 Scham 366, 368 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 25, 384, 395 – 400 Schuld 195 – 196, 211, 325, 359, 361, 377, 381 – 382, 555, 577, 592 Schwachheit 308 – 309, 312 – 314, 317, 319 – 320, 323 – 326, 334, 341 – 342, 344 – 347, 349 – 351 Schweigen 137, 169 – 170, 317, 598 Science 71, 87 – 89, 94, 224, 248, 484, 490, 537 Second Ethics 485, 490 – 491, 499, 502, 543 Second Immediacy 123, 126, 128 – 133 Secret 57, 85, 91, 220, 411, 454, 474, 520 – 521, 530, 535

Seele 141 – 142, 147, 154, 162, 362 – 363, 575 Selbstauffassung 321, 349 Selbstbestimmung 161, 196 Selbstbetrug 321, 330 Selbstliebe 147, 206, 581 Selbstvergessen 199 Selbstverhältnis 157, 161 – 163, 194, 206, 307, 311, 317, 319 – 320, 323 – 326, 328 – 329, 339 – 340, 344 – 345, 352 – 354, 584 Selbstverschlossenheit 169 Selbstverstehen 198, 206, 209, 211, 213 Self-acknowledgement 477, 522 – 524, 527 Self-acknowledgment 228, 230 – 231 Self-appropriation 67 – 68, 70, 74, 94, 102 – 103, 107, 126, 132, 520 – 523 Self-conception 277 – 278, 411, 455 Self-concern 79, 103 – 104, 552 Self-consciousness 36, 62, 223, 226, 229, 250 – 252, 299, 452, 464 – 467, 473, 507 Self-deceit 106, 131 Self-denial 118, 129 Self-determination 33, 82, 510, 516 Self-enclosure 445, 520 Self-givenness 223 – 225, 227 – 228, 230, 234 Selfhood 7, 12, 48, 58, 60 – 65, 69, 99, 106, 226 – 227, 229, 236, 253, 255 – 258, 264, 268 – 269, 448, 463 – 464, 472, 478 – 481, 503, 520 – 521, 530, 532 – 534, 538 – 540, 562 Self-identity 46, 48, 51 – 53, 61 – 62, 64 – 72, 74, 76, 105, 463, 478 Self-love 456, 476, 525 Self-reflection 123, 127 – 128, 130 – 131, 227, 240, 519 Self-relation 12, 26, 29, 32, 34 – 36, 39, 41 – 42, 51 – 53, 60 – 62, 64 – 66, 70 – 76, 79, 81 – 82, 84, 86, 89 – 90, 92, 94, 100 – 102, 104 – 105, 107, 109, 126 – 131, 226 – 227, 229, 236 – 237, 239 – 240, 247, 250, 253, 261, 263 – 264, 269, 411, 455, 468 – 469, 475 – 477, 5185 – 19, 539, 552 Self-torment 79, 115 – 116, 534 Self-understanding 28 – 30, 35, 48 – 50, 52, 66 – 67, 69 – 71, 76, 104 – 107, 125, 131 –

Index

132, 221, 223, 228 – 231, 234, 240, 253 – 254, 267, 296 – 298, 417, 475, 516, 521 – 525, 545 Sensation 443 – 444, 448 Serious 24, 95 Shakespeare, William 433 Shame 433 – 437, 439, 557 Shamelessness 433, 435 – 436 Sicherheit 338 – 339, 341 Sichtbarkeit 593, 595 – 596, 599 Sickness 35, 240, 242, 246, 274, 285 Sickness Unto Death 7, 12, 34 – 35, 42 – 43, 52, 61, 68, 72, 78, 81, 84, 99, 100 – 101, 127, 133, 226 – 231, 229 – 231, 236, 240 – 242, 245, 248, 251, 253, 256, 268, 270 – 285, 290, 293 – 309, 452 – 453, 473 – 474, 496, 519 – 521, 538, 547 – 548, 560, 562, 565 Silence 118, 220 – 221, 437 Simplicity 129, 131 Sin 36, 41, 77, 82, 84, 114, 132, 148, 154, 172, 175 – 176, 181, 187 – 188, 201, 204, 225, 272, 278 – 285, 288, 292, 299, 303, 315, 326 – 328, 346, 393, 396, 411, 414 – 415, 454 – 458, 460, 474 – 475, 477, 489 – 490, 496, 530, 536 – 537, 543 – 544, 552, 562, 566, 573, 576, 595, 597 Socrates 38, 271, 288, 294 – 295, 299 Sonderethik 569, 576 Sorge 135, 145, 147, 165 Sorrow 106, 120, 122, 291, 548, 552 Soul 37, 40, 53 – 54, 58, 113, 117 – 118, 224, 243 – 246, 257 – 267, 269, 411 – 412, 454 – 455, 461, 474 – 447, 531, 533 – 534 Souveränität 364, 590 – 592 Sovereignty 542 Speculation 23 – 24, 26, 30 – 32 Spirit 35, 37, 40, 52 – 53, 77 – 79, 81 – 87, 91 – 94, 97 – 99, 133, 236, 239 – 242, 245 – 248, 252 – 254, 266, 272, 277 – 278, 284, 380, 457 – 459, 464 – 465, 469 – 472, 485, 492 – 493, 530, 534 – 435, 537 – 538, 543 Spiritlessness 87, 241, 248, 252 – 253, 272, 276 – 277, 283, 285 Sprung 160, 163 – 166, 356 – 357, 360 – 361, 364, 390, 571

611

Stadien auf des Lebens Weg 388 Subject 5, 7 – 8, 16, 29 – 30, 33, 35 – 36, 58 – 59, 67, 73 – 76, 78, 88, 93 – 94, 96, 98, 102, 104, 109, 116 – 117, 127, 168, 194, 220 – 222, 226, 233, 253, 257 – 258, 262, 264, 288, 293, 301, 303, 423, 425 – 426, 432 – 434, 436 – 437, 440, 443 – 444, 446 – 447, 449 – 450, 471 – 472, 485, 495, 497 – 498, 500 – 501, 503, 506 – 512, 514, 516, 519 – 520, 527 – 529, 534, 536 Subjectivism 91, 514 Subjectivity 4 – 5, 7, 9, 27, 33, 35 – 37, 39 – 40, 74 – 75, 79, 91, 93, 102, 107, 116, 122 – 123, 126 – 127, 129 – 130, 170, 219 – 227, 230 – 231, 234, 236, 239, 241, 244, 253 – 257, 289 – 290, 293, 299 – 301, 303, 423, 426, 443, 446, 448, 464, 471 – 472, 481 – 482, 497, 501, 503, 506 – 511, 513 – 521, 525 – 529, 539, 559, 562 Subjekt 75, 157, 159 – 162, 166 – 169, 173 – 176, 178 – 181, 183, 185, 189, 194 – 196, 198, 205, 207, 314, 322, 326, 348, 361, 364, 375, 389, 391, 394 – 395, 569, 588 Subjektivität 134 – 136, 145, 152 – 153, 157 – 160, 162, 165, 167 – 168, 170 – 189, 194, 196 – 197, 204 – 205, 207 – 208, 239, 355 – 357, 360 – 370, 384, 394 – 395, 399 – 400, 509, 516 Sünde 163, 167, 206, 211, 325, 328, 330, 351, 356 – 357, 360 – 362, 364, 368, 569 – 573, 576, 586 Suspicion 25, 125 – 127 Synthese 37, 141 – 142, 162 – 163, 332 – 333, 362 – 364, 366 – 367, 370, 379 – 381 Synthesis 11, 37 – 43, 53, 77 – 81, 83 – 86, 89, 97 – 100, 107, 109, 111 – 113, 121, 162, 164, 224, 241, 333, 362, 366 – 367, 391 – 392, 400, 534 – 535, 537 – 538, 543, 550 – 551 Task

7, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22 – 26, 30 – 36, 39 – 40, 79, 85, 97 – 98, 128, 133, 224, 227, 234, 238, 251, 254, 257, 265 – 267, 269, 413, 422, 492 – 493, 507, 510, 516,

612

Index

530, 533 – 534, 536, 538 – 539, 541 – 542, 550 – 552 Taylor, Charles 58, 93, 230 Telos 6, 34, 251 – 252, 283 – 284, 348 – 349, 351 – 352 Temporality 9, 12, 20, 40, 52, 60, 64 – 65, 67, 77, 79 – 81, 84 – 87, 95, 107, 110 – 113, 115 – 116, 121 – 122, 255, 264, 380, 432, 450, 531 – 532, 534 – 535, 538, 540, 542, 544, 549 – 550, 555, 558, 560, 562 – 565 „The Care of Self-Torment“ 41, 532, 534 „The Expectancy of Faith“ 116, 531 – 532, 558 „The Thorn in the Flesh“ 120, 239, 532 Theunissen, Michael 72, 148, 150, 152, 236, 305 – 307, 309 – 322, 324 – 326, 328 – 329, 352 – 354, 371 – 383, 393, 399, 562 Thinking 3 – 5, 7 – 22, 24 – 29, 31 – 33, 47, 53 – 55, 95, 115, 128, 219, 222, 236 – 239, 250, 252 – 253, 287, 289 – 290, 295, 298, 300 – 303, 405, 448, 463, 512, 516, 520, 526, 530, 540 – 541, 555, 563 – 564 Thoughtlessness 5, 17, 32 Threat 30 – 31, 81 Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions 259, 540, 563 – 564 Time 3, 5, 9, 11 – 15, 21, 26, 30 – 32, 35 – 36, 39, 41 – 42, 44 – 53, 57 – 58, 60, 64 – 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 79 – 83, 85 – 87, 89, 93, 95 – 96, 99, 103, 107 – 108, 110 – 122, 124 – 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 219, 228, 237 – 239, 242, 255, 257, 259, 262 – 267, 269, 273, 276 – 277, 286, 298, 374, 408, 410 – 411, 423 – 425, 427, 429, 432, 434 – 435, 438 – 442, 444, 446 – 451, 454, 474, 486 – 487, 489, 492, 496, 499, 507, 510 – 512, 524, 530 – 536, 538 – 553, 555 – 561, 563 – 566 Tod 139, 141 – 143, 145 – 148, 150 – 153, 155 – 156, 187, 189 – 190, 259, 589 „To Gain One’s Soul in Patience“ 113 „To Need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection“ 119 „To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience“ 117, 239, 257, 258, 264, 269, 533 Totalität 394, 396, 400

Totality 431 – 432, 480, 490, 504, 513 – 514, 528 Trace 45, 252, 281, 439 – 441, 459, 543, 556 – 557 Tradition 38, 42, 89, 91, 94, 134, 183, 187, 200 – 202, 209, 217 – 219, 222, 374, 382, 454, 513 Transcendence 82, 124, 191, 202, 286 – 289, 297 – 298, 300 – 303, 424, 426, 479, 488 – 490, 509, 526, 540, 566 Transformation 36, 94, 96, 113, 131, 297, 409, 453, 488 – 489, 491, 574, 576 Transzendenz 151, 198 – 199, 203, 208, 371 – 379, 381 – 382, 384 – 385, 387, 390, 392 – 401, 566, 571, 573, 577 Transzendenzbewegung 151, 190 – 192, 199, 203, 372 – 375, 377, 379 – 380, 390, 392 – 394, 397 – 401 Transzendenzdenken 208, 372 – 374, 376, 382 Transzendenzvorstellungen 208, 376 Trauer 152, 195 – 196, 327, 353 Trotz 144, 187, 307 – 308, 312 – 314, 317, 321, 323 – 324, 326, 328, 330 – 331, 334, 338, 341, 344 – 348, 350, 353, 577, 586 Truth 35, 72, 118, 230, 236, 244, 285, 287 – 289, 291 – 292, 296 – 297, 300, 305, 487, 489, 516 – 518, 539 – 540, 544, 555 – 556, 560, 562 Überschreitung 385, 391, 394 – 395, 398 – 399 Überstieg 195, 377 – 379, 382 Umkehrung 189, 323, 372, 389 – 390, 398, 595 – 596 Umwendung 371 – 372, 378, 380 Unbewußt 309, 321, 332, 334 – 335, 337 – 342, 348 Uncertainty 121 – 122, 267, 291, 541 Unconscious 248, 251 – 252, 254 Unconscious despair 243, 248 – 249, 272, 277, 279, 285 Undenkbarkeit 396 – 397 Unendlich 139, 162, 180, 191 – 192, 195, 212 – 213, 314, 320, 322, 326 – 328, 343, 349, 351, 373, 377, 379 – 381, 384, 391 – 392, 577, 588

Index

Unendlichkeit 141, 174 – 176, 195, 333 – 334, 377 – 379, 391 – 392 Ungewissheit 148, 174, 176 – 177, 182 Universal 122, 421 Unmittelbarkeit 314, 320 – 321, 338 – 339, 342 – 345, 347 – 349, 351, 395 Unruhe 338 – 339 Unsichtbarkeit 594, 596, 598 – 599 Unschuld 163, 165, 167, 325, 335, 357, 361, 364 – 365 Untruth 36, 230, 279, 283, 288 – 289, 291 – 294, 297, 299 – 301, 517 – 518 Unwahrheit 171 – 172, 177 – 180, 395, 400 Unwissenheit 309, 319, 339 – 341, 361 Varela, Francisco J. 88 – 89, 103 – 104 Veränderung 191, 201 – 203, 373, 375 – 376, 378 Verbergen 152, 340, 360, 591, 598 Verdacht 339, 578 Vergangenheit 381 – 382, 555 Vergänglichkeit 373, 376 Vergebung 330, 380, 575, 577, 586 – 588 Vergessen 135, 147 – 151, 175, 198 – 200, 202, 206, 304, 361, 367, 393, 395, 593 Verletzbarkeit 191, 193 Verlust 150, 152, 187, 195, 316, 319, 326 – 328, 343, 349, 352, 373, 376 Versöhnung 586 – 588 Vertrauen 372, 598 – 599 Verzweiflung 72, 146, 152, 154, 162, 168, 190, 195, 304 – 329, 331 – 354, 365 Verzweiflungsanalyse 152, 305, 311, 317, 320 – 321, 324, 329, 353 Visibility 87, 232, 406 – 407, 413, 415, 418 – 421, 424 – 433, 436 – 438, 441, 445, 448, 450 – 451 Vorliebe 155, 579 – 582, 586, 595 Vorstellung 145, 149 – 150, 156, 158, 165, 174, 192, 200, 202, 310, 327, 335, 339, 372 – 373, 376 – 377, 379, 381, 576, 580 – 582 Vulnerability 68, 448 Wahl 195 Wahrheit 155, 171 – 184, 203, 312, 314, 320, 336 – 337, 386, 388, 395 – 396, 400

613

Wahrheitsfrage 172 – 184 Wahrheitstheorie 183 Weakness 228, 242, 248 – 252, 274, 280, 283, 433 – 434 Welt 137 – 138, 141, 153 – 154, 163, 166, 170, 182, 185 – 192, 197, 200, 202 – 203, 207, 210, 318, 322, 325, 328, 348, 354, 357, 360 – 361, 364, 367 – 369, 372 – 374, 377, 382, 575, 580, 595 – 596 Weltgeschichte 401 Wende 201, 371 – 372, 374, 376 – 378, 569, 578, 589 Widerfahrnis 310, 312 – 313, 321 Widerspruch 199, 209, 306, 343, 349, 367, 385 – 389, 391 – 393, 570 – 571, 581 Widerwillen 318, 351 – 352 Wiederholung 192, 378, 380, 382, 392 – 395, 399, 571 – 572 Wiedervergeltung 579 – 582, 589 Wille 160 – 162, 169 – 170, 194, 318 – 319, 326, 329, 339, 350 – 352, 365 – 366, 369 Wirklichkeit 145, 160, 182 – 185, 187 – 188, 197, 203, 208, 318, 321, 337, 339, 342 – 343, 357, 360 – 361, 376, 379, 394, 509, 569 – 573, 576, 581 Wishing 264, 269 Wissenschaft 164, 166, 205, 207, 223, 360, 400 Works of Love 41, 114, 121, 124 – 125, 129, 132, 231 – 232, 256, 259, 293, 301, 405 – 417, 421, 443 – 444, 452 – 462, 464, 473 – 477, 502, 504 – 505, 515, 517, 519, 522, 524 – 425, 528, 530, 543, 546 – 553, 549, 551 – 552, 557 – 559, 562 – 563, 565 World history 99, 530, 541, 543, 545 – 546 Worry 41, 115 – 116, 121, 131, 266, 532 Würde 139, 147, 157, 161, 164, 167, 173, 198, 207, 211, 315, 319, 321, 337 – 338, 340, 354, 361 – 362, 393, 568, 597 Zäsur 316, 379 Zeit 5, 52, 80, 96, 115, 139 – 140, 143, 146, 150 – 151, 154, 165, 173, 178, 180, 183, 188, 193, 199 – 201, 203, 205, 209 – 210, 218 – 219, 255, 324, 327, 329, 371 – 382, 385 – 386, 393, 425 – 426, 559, 566, 597 – 600

614

Index

Zeitlichkeit 143, 180, 389, 393 Zerbrechlichkeit 364 Zur Selbstprüfung der Gegenwart anbefohlen 154 Zukunft 165, 326, 555, 598 – 599

Zweideutigkeit 159 – 161, 163 – 168, 170, 189, 192, 194, 211, 344 – 345, 356 – 357, 364 – 365, 385, 389, 395 – 396, 400 Zweite Ethik 324, 569, 571 – 577 Zweiweltenlehre 373 – 374 Zwischenbestimmung 141, 583 – 584, 586