Kierkegaard’s speculative despair
Kierkegaard’s speculative despair
Judith Butler
Every movement of infinity is carried out through passion,
and no reflection can produce a movement. This is the
continual leap in existence that explains the movement,
whereas mediation is a chimera, which in Hegel is supposed
to explain everything and which is also the only thing he
never has tried to explain.
(Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 42)
Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel concerns primarily the failure of a
philosophy of reflection to take account of that which exceeds reflection
itself: passion, existence, faith. The irony in Kierkegaard’s challenge to
Hegelianism is, however, minimally twofold. On the one hand,
Kierkegaard will ask, where is it that Hegel, the existing individual, stands
in relation to the systematic totality that Hegel elucidates? If Hegel the
individual is outside the complete system, then there is an “outside” to
that system, which is to say that the system is not as exhaustively
descriptive and explanatory as it claims to be. Paradoxically, the very
existence of Hegel, the existing philosopher, effectively—one might say
rhetorically—undermines what appears to be the most important claim in
that philosophy, the claim to provide a comprehensive account of
knowledge and reality. On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s counter to Hegel
consists in the valorization of passion and existence over reflection and,
finally, language. It is in relation to this criticism that a different sort of
irony emerges, one which Kierkegaard appears not to know, but which
attends his various claims to be writing on behalf of that which is beyond
speculation, reflection, and language. If Kierkegaard is right that Hegel
omits the existing individual from his system, that does not mean that
Kierkegaard maintains an unsystematic or nonspeculative view of the
existing individual. Although Kierkegaard sometimes uses the speculative
terminology of Hegelianism, he appears to parody that discourse in order
to reveal its constitutive contradictions. And yet, in Kierkegaard’s
descriptions of despair in Sickness unto Death (1849), his use of Hegelian
language works not only to displace the authority of Hegel, but also to
make use of Hegelianism for an anlaysis that both extends and exceeds the
properly Hegelian purview. In this sense, Kierkegaard opposes himself to
Hegel, but this is a vital opposition, a determining opposition, one might
almost say ‘an Hegelian opposition,’ even if it is one that Hegel himself
could not have fully anticipated. If Hegel’s individual is implicated in the
very existence that he seeks to overcome through rationality, Kierkegaard
constructs his notion of the individual at the very limits of the speculative
discourse that he seeks to oppose. This appears to be one ironic way, then,
that Kierkegaard’s own philosophical exercise is implicated in the tradition
of German Idealism.
DESPAIR AND THE FAILURE TO ACHIEVE IDENTITY
In the following, I will try to make clear why despair is a category or, in
Kierkegaard’s terms, a sickness and a passion, whose analysis is crucial to
both the extension and critique of Hegel in Kierkegaard’s work. Insofar as
despair characterizes the failure of a self fully to know or to become itself,
a failure to become self-identical, an interrupted relation, then despair is
precisely that which thwarts the possibility of a fully mediated subject in
Hegel’s sense. That subject is documented in Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit as an emerging set of syntheses, the subject as one who mediates
and, hence, overcomes that which initially appears as different from itself.
The success of this mediating activity confirms the capacity of the subject
to achieve self-identity, that is, to know itself, to become at home in
otherness, to discover that in a less than obvious and simple way it is that
which it incessantly encounters as outside of itself.
Hegel narrates in The Phenomenology of Spirit the various ways in
which this mediating relation can fail, but insofar as Hegel claims that
subject is substance, he defends the ideal possibility of articulating the
successful mediation of each and every subject with its countervailing
world. The various failures to mediate that relation effectively are only
and always instructive; they furnish knowledge that leads to more effective
proposals for how to mediate that apparent difference. Each time the
subject in The Phenomenology of Spirit claims to discover the condition
by which the mediating relation works, it fails to take into account some
crucial dimension of itself or of the world which it seeks to bind together
in a synthetic unity. That which it fails to comprehend returns to haunt
and undermine the mediating relation it has just articulated. But that
which remained outside the relation is always recuperated by the subject’s
synthesizing project: there is no final or constitutive failure to mediate.
Every failure delineates a new and more synthetic task for the emerging
subject of reflection. In a sense, Kierkegaard enters Hegel’s system at the
end of the Phenomenology: if Hegel thought that the subject of the
Phenomenology had taken account of everything along the way which
turned out to be outside the terms to be mediated, understanding what
needed to be synthesized as well as how that synthesis could take place,
then the last laugh is on Hegel’s subject. In its mania for synthesis, the
subject has forgotten to include that which can never be systematized, that
which thwarts and resists reflection, namely, its very existence and its
constitutive and mutually exclusive passions: faith and despair.
In Kierkegaard’s view, despair is precisely that passion that can never be
‘synthesized’ by the Hegelian subject.1 In fact, despair is defined by
Kierkegaard as “a misrelation” (SUD, 14),2 one which confirms the failure
of any final mediation and, therefore, signals the decisive limit to the
comprehensive claims of the philosophy of reflection. Despair not only
disrupts that subject’s efforts to become at home with itself in the world,
but it confirms the fundamental impossibility of ever achieving the self’s
sense of belonging to its world. The Hegelian project is not only thwarted
by despair, but it is articulated in despair (“the category of totality inheres
in and belongs to the despairing person”: SUD, 60). As we shall see, one
form of despair is marked by the effort to become the ground or origin of
one’s own existence and the synthetic relation to alterity. A kind of
arrogance or hubris, this conceit of the Hegelian project suffers a
humiliation at Kierkegaard’s hands. To posture as a radically selfgenerated
being, to be the author of one’s will and knowledge, is to deny
that one is constituted in and by that which is infinitely larger than the
human individual. Kierkegaard will call this larger-than-human source of
all things human “God” or “the infinite.” To deny that one is constituted
in that which is larger than oneself is, for Kierkegaard, to be in a kind of
despair. Toward the end of this essay, we will consider just how crucial this
form of despair is for Kierkegaard’s own authorship. Indeed, it may turn
out that the despair that Kierkegaard diagnoses in Sickness unto Death,
and which, in part, he attributes to Hegel, conditions essentially the very
writing whose object it is to denounce and overcome despair.
So despair is a “misrelation,” a failure to mediate, but what are the
terms to be mediated? And if Hegel fails to understand (his own) despair
in the system he articulates, is it also true that Kierkegaard fails to
understand the speculative conceptualization that inheres in the very
notion of despair by which he counters speculation?
The opening page of Sickness unto Death appears to be a properly
Hegelian exegesis populated with familiar terminology: ‘self,’ ‘spirit,’
‘mediation,’ ‘relation.’ And yet, as the first paragraph proceeds it becomes
clear that Kierkegaard is parodying Hegel’s language; significantly,
however, this is a parody that does not entail a thorough rejection of
Hegel. On the contrary, through parodying Hegel, Kierkegaard both
recirculates or preserves some aspects of Hegel’s system and jettisons some
others. Parody functions like the Hegelian operation of Aufhehungy set
into motion this time, ironically, by Kierkegaard to preserve, cancel, and
also transcend the Hegelian corpus itself. The crucial dimension of
synthesis is, of course, absent from this Kierkegaardian redeployment of
Hegel. Parody functions for Kierkegaard as an Aufhebung that leads not
to synthesis between his position and Hegel’s, but to a decisive break.
Kierkegaard does not lay out his arguments against Hegel in propositional
form. He re-enacts those arguments through the rhetorical construction of
his text. If the issues he has with Hegel could be rationally decided, then
Hegel would have won from the start. Kierkegaard’s texts counter Hegel
most effectively at the level of style, for part of what he wants to
communicate is the limits of language to comprehend that which
constitutes the individual. Let us, then, consider the way in which this
argument is performed through the parodie reiteration of Hegel at the
outset of Sickness unto Death.
Kierkegaard begins Part One of this text with a set of assertions and
counter-assertions, splitting his own philosophical voice into dialogic
interlocutors, miming the dialectical style which dates back to Socrates:
“A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is
the self?” (SUD, 13). Then comes a ponderous sentence which one might
expect to encounter at the hilarious limits of rationality in a Woody Allen
film: “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.” The first part of the sentence is a
disjunction, but it is unclear whether the disjunctive “or” operates to
separate alternative definitions or whether it implies that the definitions
that it separates are essentially equivalent to one another. Prior to the
semicolon, there appear to be two definitions: one, the self is a reflexive
relation (the self is that which takes itself as its own object), and two, the
self is the activity of its own reflexivity (it is that process of taking itself as
its object, incessantly self-referential). If this is an Hegelian exposition,
then one expects that this self will achieve harmony with itself, but here it
seems that the more the possibility of a synthesis is elaborated, the less
likely that synthesis appears.
In the above quotation, then, we might ask: can the self both be the
relation and the activity of relating? Can the differently tensed definitions
be reconciled? Is the first a static conception, and the second, a dynamic
and temporalized one which is incompatible with the second? Or will we
learn, Hegelian style, that the static notion is aufgehoben in the second,
that the temporalized version of the reflexive self presupposes, transforms,
and transcends the static one? After the semicolon, the sentence appears to
contradict the definition of the self as static relation and to affirm the
temporalized version of the self, thereby undermining the possibility of an
emerging synthesis between the two versions: “the self is not the relation
but is the relation’s relating itself to the self.” The original ambiguity over
whether the “or” functions to set up a mutually exclusive set of
alternatives or a set of appositional and equivalent definitions appears
temporarily to be resolved into the first alternative.
The development of the sentence echoes the narrative logic of Hegel’s
Phenomenology, but in that text it is more often the case that mutually
exclusive alternatives are first laid out only then to be synthesized as part
of a larger unity. Already in Kierkegaard’s style of exposition, we see how
the expectation of an Hegelian logic is both produced and undermined.
Indeed, as the paragraph proceeds, that failure to conform to Hegelian
logic turns into a full-blown illogic, a kind of high philosophical comedy.
The rest of the paragraph reads as follows:
A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the
temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a
synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this
way, a human being is still not a self.
Here the development of what appears to be an argument takes several
illogical turns and seems by the propelling force of rationality to be
spiraling into irrationality. By the end of the first sentence, we have
concluded (a) that the self is temporalized, (b) that it is the activity of
relating, and (c) that it is not a static relation. The possibility of a synthesis
is therefore negated. This next sentence, however, poses as a logical
consequence, but only to make a mockery of logical transition. Here we
have the sudden and unwarranted shift from a discussion of the “self” to
that of the “human being,” and the announcement that the human being is
a synthesis. Moreover, the terms of which that synthesis is composed are
in no way implied by the static/temporal opposition that preoccupied the
preceding sentence. Instead, we find wild generalizations asserted at once
in the mode of a conclusion and a premise. As a conclusion that follows
from the earlier sentence, this second sentence makes no sense. As a
premise, it is equally absurd: the synthesis is asserted and described, and
then the appearance of a conclusion emerges, “in short, a synthesis,”
which can be read only as a flagrant and laughable redundancy.3 A
didactic sentence follows, which is itself nothing other than a repetition of
the obvious: “a synthesis is a relation between two.” And then a most
curious sentence concludes the paragraph in which Kierkegaard appears to
take distance from the Hegelian voice that he has both assumed and
mocked. “Considered in this way,” the sentence begins, suggesting that
there might be another way, Kierkegaard’s way, “a human being is still not
a self.” Here Kierkegaard offers a distinction to suggest that what is called
“the human being” is not the same as the self. But interestingly, we are
also recalled to the problem of the temporality and tense of the self. What
is described as the human being is “still not a self,” not yet a self, a self
that has not yet been articulated, or, rather, cannot be articulated within
the language of synthesis.
Kierkegaard proceeds to take issue with this self which seems never to
coincide with itself. He remarks that any synthesis requires a third term.
The second and third paragraphs proceed in a note of tentative
seriousness, making use of an Hegelian schematic precisely in order to
show the way beyond it. The second paragraph begins: “In the relation
between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two
relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation.” The examples of
the terms to be related are the “psychical and the physical” in this textual
instance. Kierkegaard argues that if the self is a synthesis of psychical and
physical dimensions, and if it is also the activity of relating its psychical
aspect to its physical aspect, then that very act of relating will have to be
composed of one of those aspects. Here he assumes that the activity of
“relating,” a term that seems to have been kept purposefully abstract in
the previous discussion, calls now to be specified as a psychical activity.
This more specifie determination of that relating activity will become even
more significant as Kierkegaard’s text proceeds to distinguish between
reflection, the Hegelian way of understanding that constitutive relation,
and faith, Kierkegaard’s preferred way. As this semi-Hegelian exposition
proceeds, Kierkegaard will show what is concretely at stake for the
existing individual in this abstract logic.
Kierkegaard begins here to confound the distinction between the self as
a static relation and the self as a temporal or active one. The two
dimensions of the self to be related must already in some sense be the very
relation, which is to say that psychical and the physical, as parts of the
relation, are defmitionally related, that is, presupposed as related, and are
constantly in the activity of becoming relating. These two dimensions of
that relation cannot be captured by a logic of noncontradiction. The
reflexivity of this relation is what marks the relation as a self. For it is the
distinguishing feature of a self to endeavor to become itself, constantly
and paradoxically to be in the process of becoming what it already is. For
one can always refuse to ‘relate’ to oneself, to endeavor to become a self,
but even then that very refusal will still be a way of relating to the self. To
deny that one has a self, to refuse to become one: these are not only modes
of reflexivity, but specifie forms of despair.
This paradoxical view of the self, as that which incessantly becomes
that which it already is, coincides partially with Hegel’s view of the
subject. Hegel argues that the subject of the Phenomenology will develop
and become increasingly synthetic, including all that it discovers outside
itself in and as the world. And this subject, which successively appears to
be identified as life, consciousness, self-consciousness, Spirit, Reason, and
Absolute Knowledge, discovers finally that implicitly it has always been
what it has become. The becoming of the Hegelian subject is the process
of articulating or rendering explicit the implicit relations which constitute
that subject. In this sense, the Hegelian subject is successively discovering
what it has always already been, but has not known that it has been. The
development of constitution of the Hegelian subject is the process of
coming to know what it is that that subject already is.
For Kierkegaard, however, this view of the subject is only partially true.
For Hegel, the subject is every aspect of this relation: the subject is itself,
the activity of relating, and that to which it relates (since the world, or
Substance, turns out to be synthetically unified with the subject). It is
precisely this circle of immanence, however, that Kierkegaard tries to
break; he performs this break, however, by working Hegel’s own logic to
its own breaking point. A new paragraph following the above exposition
graphically enacts the break with the Hegelian argument. Kierkegaard
states an either/or question that cannot be asked within the Hegelian
framework: “Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either
have established itself or have been established by another.” Here
Kierkegaard raises the question of the genesis of this relation. It is not
enough to know what the relation constitutes, nor to know that in some
way it constitutes itself. The question remains: What has constituted this
relation as a self-constituting relation? What put this circular relation into
motion? Kierkegaard infers that there must be a relation that is temporally
prior to the self-constituting self, that this prior relation must be reflexive
and constituting as well, and that the self must be one constituted product
of that prior relation. This prior relation appears to be God, although
Kierkegaard almost never supplies a definition of God.
PASSIONATE SELVES AND THE AFFIRMATION OF FAITH
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Kierkegaard makes clear
that he is not interested in proving rationally that God exists, but only in
the question of how to achieve faith as it arises for the existing individual:
how do I become a Christian, what relation can I have to faith?4
If that which constitutes the self remains part of that self, then the self
whose task it is to take itself as its own object will of necessity take that
prior ground of its own existence as its object as well.5 It is in this sense
that for Kierkegaard the self which takes itself as its own object will of
necessity take “another” as its object as well. In Hegel, this same
formulation applies, but the “other” who constitutes the self will be the
social other, the community of other subjects who collectively supply the
common social and historical world from which the particular subject is
derived. That move, however, is for Kierkegaard symptomatic of a refusal
to see that which transcends the social and human world, namely, the
transcendent or the infinite from which the social world in its concreteness
is derived.
The task of the self, for Kierkegaard, is indissolubly twofold: selfconstituting
yet derived, the self is “a relation that relates itself to itself
and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another” (SUD, 13–14).
Insofar as “another” is infinite, and this prior infinity constitutes the
self, the self partakes of infinity as well. But the self is also determined,
embodied, and hence finite, which means that every particular self is
both infinite and finite, and that it lives this paradox without resolution.
Faith will be described by Kierkegaard as infinite inwardness, the
unceasing and passionate affirmation of the infinite, and in this sense
faith will be an occasion for infinity to emerge within the self: “that
which unites all human life is passion, and faith is a passion” (FT, 67).6
In yet another sense, that self, however capable of infinite faith, will
never be equivalent to the infinity that is prior to the individual, which
Kierkegaard calls “God,” but which is sometimes figured in terms of
infinite possibility.7 However infinite in its passion and faith, the self is
still existing and, hence, finite. Strictly speaking, the infinity prior to the
self, the infinity from which the self emerges, does not exist. For
unactualized and infinite possibility to exist, it would have to become
actualized, which is to become finite and, hence, no longer to be
definable as infinite possibility. This infinite possibility, this ground or
God, cannot be known or affirmed as a finite object, but can only be
affirmed by a passionate faith that emerges at the very limits of what is
knowable.
This is an affirmation that cannot take place through rationality,
language, or speculation; it emerges as a passion and a possibility only on
the condition that reflection has failed. In Kierkegaard’s Philosophical
Fragments (1844), he refers to this crisis in speculative thought as “the
passion of Reason” and “the passion in all thinking” (PF, 46).8 Here
passion carries the meaning of suffering and longing, and Kierkegaard
appears to imply that passion is generated precisely at the moment in
which thought fails to grasp its object. Because part of what is meant by
comprehending an object is comprehending its origin, and because that
origin or ground is the infinity of God, every act of knowing is haunted by
the problem of faith and, hence, also by passion. Kierkegaard
commentator Niels Thulstrup describes this passion as “something which
reason cannot comprehend and which leads reason to founder in its
passion, the passion which wills the collision, which strives to discover
that which cannot be thought and cannot be comprehended in the
categories of human thought.”9 In the face of the infinite, thought can
only supply a finite concept or a word, but both of these are finitizing
instruments which can only misconstrue and, indeed, negate that which
they seek to affirm. This is, of course, also the problem with Hegel’s
reliance on the concept to grasp infinity.10
One might be tempted here to think that Kierkegaard proposes that the
self overcome its finitude in order to affirm through passionate inwardness
the infinity from which that self emerges. But that is, for Kierkegaard, an
impossibility. And here is where he appears to take Hegel seriously, even
as he finally disputes him: the self is inevitably both finitude and infinitude
which the self lives, not as a synthesis, and not as the transcendence of the
one over the other, but as a perpetual paradox. Inasmuch as the self is selfconstituting,
that is, has as its task the becoming of itself, it is finite: it is
this self, and not some other. Inasmuch as the self is derived, a possibility
actualized from an infinite source of possibility, and retains that infinity
within itself as the passionate inwardness of faith, then that self is infinite.
But to reconcile existence and faith, that is, to be an existing individual
who, in its finitude, can sustain itself in infinite faith, that is the paradox
of existence, one which can only be lived but never overcome. As
Kierkegaard puts it with characteristic irony: “to be in existence is always
a somewhat embarrassing situation” (CUP, 404).
Let us return then to the sentence from Sickness unto Death which
suggests that the Hegelian subject, reconceived as a self (with the capacity
for inwardness), and understood as derived from an infinite source, is both
self-constituting and derived, “a relation that relates itself to itself and in
relating itself to itself relates itself to another.” This sentence, which
appears logical and to some extent implicitly theological, leads to the
introduction of despair as a psychological category:
This is why there can be two forms of despair in the strict sense. If a
human self had established itself, then there could be only one form:
not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there
could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself.
(SUD, 14)
Despair is the result of the effort to overcome or solve the paradox of
human existence. If one seeks to be grounded in the infinite and to deny
that one exists and is, therefore, finite, one falls into the despair of the
infinite, willing not to be the particular self that one is. But if one denies
the infinite and seeks to take full responsibility for one’s own existence,
viewing all of one’s self as one’s own radical creation, that is the despair of
the finite.11 It is this second form of despair, the despair of willing to be
oneself, that is, to be the ground or sole source of one’s own existence,
that is more fundamental than the first. This second form constitutes a
refusal to be grounded in that which is more infinite than the human self
and so constitutes a defiance of God. The primary way in which human
selves fall into despair is through the repudiation of their infinite origins.
This despair is marked by a certain hubris or arrogance and, at its limit,
becomes demonic, understood as a willful defiance of the divine. We will
consider that demonic extreme of despair toward the end of our remarks
when we consider Kierkegaard’s ambivalent relationship to his own
authorship.
What this means, of course, is that if one knows one is in despair and
seeks by one’s own means to extricate oneself from despair, one will only
become more fully steeped in that despair. That self is still trying to refuse
its groundedness in that which is greater than itself. Paradoxically, the self
that refuses the infinite must enact that refusal infinitely, thereby
recapitulating and reaffirming the infinite in a negative way in the very
gesture of disbelief. If Hegel thought that the subject might be a synthesis
of finite and infinite, he failed to consider that that subject, reconceived as
a self with inwardness, can never mediate the absolutely qualitative
difference between what is finite in that self and what is infinite. This
failure of mediation is what underscores the paradoxical character of
existence; the passionate and nonrational affirmation of that paradox, an
affirmation that must be infinitely repeated, is faith; the effort preemptively
to resolve this paradox is the feat of despair. In this sense,
despair marks the limit of dialectical mediation or, rather, every effort at
mediation will be read by Kierkegaard as symptomatic of despair. Every
synthesis presumes and institutes a repudiation of that which cannot be
comprehended by thought; infinity is precisely that which eludes
conceptualization. That refused infinity returns, however, as the infinite
movement of despair in the existing individual who seeks to resolve the
paradox of existence through thought. Through the invocation of despair,
Kierkegaard marks out the limits of the Hegelian ideal of synthesis:
“Despair is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself
to itself” (SUD, 15).
The Hegelian ideal of becoming at one with oneself is achieved
through one’s social relations and through one’s relation to everything
that is outside the self. For Hegel, the subject discovers that other human
beings and objects are part of its own identity, that in relating to others
and to objects, the human subject enacts (or actualizes) some of its own
most fundamental capacities. Hence, the subject achieves a certain
oneness with itself through relating to that which is different from itself.
This oneness, however, is not a possibility for the Kierkegaardian self. As
much as that self might want to affirm itself as the ground or origin of
its own relations with others, it is bound to fail. This self can take
responsibility for its own capacities by denying that it is itself produced
by that which is greater than itself. That is one kind of despair, the
despair of willing to be oneself. On the other hand, if that self tries to
relinquish all responsibility for itself by claiming that some greater and
infinite reality, God, has produced everything about that self, then that
self is in a different kind of despair, the despair of willing not to be
oneself. There is no escape from this paradox. Hence, to be a self means
either to be in one of these two forms of despair or to have faith. But in
both despair and faith, this paradox is never resolved. In despair, one
lives one side of the paradox and then another (one takes radical
responsibility for oneself or not at all), but in faith, one affirms the
paradox, taking responsibility for oneself at the same time affirming that
one is not the origin of one’s existence.
One might ask, is one always either in despair or faith? The answer
for Kierkegaard is yes. For the most part, human beings live in despair,
and they do not even know that they are in despair. In fact, this not
knowing that one is in despair is a symptom of despair. The person who
does not know that there is a task, a struggle to affirm oneself in this
paradoxical way, makes some set of presumptions about the solidity of
its own existence which remain unquestioned and, hence, outside the
difficulty of faith. And there appears to be no way to faith except
through despair. But faith for Kierkegaard does not provide a solution
for the paradox of the self. Indeed, nothing provides such a solution. The
self is an alternation, a constant pitching to and fro, a lived paradox, and
faith does not halt or resolve that alternation into a harmonious or
synthetic whole; on the contrary, faith is precisely the affirmation that
there can be no resolution. And insofar as ‘synthesis’ represents the
rational resolution of the paradox, and the paradox cannot be resolved,
then it follows that faith emerges precisely at the moment at which
‘synthesis’ shows itself to be a false solution. This is, as it were,
Kierkegaard’s last laugh on Hegel. Whereas Hegel argues that the failure
of any given synthesis points the way to a greater and more inclusive
synthesis, Kierkegaard tries to show that synthesis itself, no matter how
inclusive, cannot resolve the paradox of the self. Concretely, this
difference between Hegel and Kierkegaard implies that the self will
ultimately have a very different experience of and in the world. For
Hegel, the subject will eventually find a unified and harmonious relation
with what appears at first to be outside itself, so that it can, ideally, find
itself at home in the world, ‘of ’ the world that it is ‘in.’ But for
Kierkegaard, that which is ‘outside’ the finite self, namely, the infinite, is
also ‘within’ the self as freedom and the dual possibility of despair and
faith (all of which are ‘infinite’ passions, passions that can have no end);
further, the infinite that persists as the ground of the finite self or within
the self as its own passion will never fully belong to the finite self or the
finite world in which it nevertheless exists in some less than apparent
way. Hence, for Kierkegaard, the infinity that is the source of the self
and which persists in the self as its passion will never fully be ‘of’ the
world in which it dwells. The self, for Kierkegaard, will be perpetually
estranged not only from itself, but from its origins and from the world in
which it finds itself.
One might imagine an Hegelian rejoinder to Kierkegaard’s affirmation
of the paradoxical self. Hegel might argue that if there is something in the
self which is infinite, that infinity must nevertheless appear in some way in
order to be known. In Hegelian language, one might say that for the
infinite to become actual and, hence, knowable, it must become
determinate or appear in some form. And Hegel imagined that certain
kinds of concepts could be both finite (particular, determinate, specific)
and infinite (nonspecific, indeterminate, unbounded). Hegel wanted to
arrive at a concept, understood as a kind of speculative thought, in which
the finite and the infinite would not only coexist, but be essentially
dependent on one another. Imagine a thought which would be your
thought, specifically yours, and therefore determined and specific, but
which would at the same time be a thought of that which is infinite and,
hence, not bound to you at all, indeed, not bounded or limited by
anything. Hegel imagined that the thought of the infinite depends on the
determinate thinker, the place and existence of that thinker, at the same
time that that infinite thought exceeds that determinate place and thinker.
In this sense, the infinite thought depends on the finite thinker in order to
be thought, in order to have its occasion and its form; and the finite
thinker is no thinker, that is, is not really thinking, thinking thought
through to its infinite possibility, unless that finite thinker is able to think
the infinite. Hence, for Hegel, a mutual dependency exists between that
which is finite and that which is infinite in the human subject, where both
the finite and the infinite form the project of thinking.
Kierkegaard’s rejoinder is firm. If one tries to think the infinite, one has
already made the infinite finite. There can be no thinking of the infinite,
for the infinite is precisely that not only which cannot be thought, but
which insistently forces a crisis in thought itself; the infinite is the limit of
thinking, and not a possible content of any thought. To the Hegelian claim
that the infinite must first appear before it can be known, Kierkegaard
would have to respond that the infinite can neither appear nor be known.
Hence, it is to some extent against Hegel that Kierkegaard formulates his
notion of the infinite and, therefore, also of faith: the infinite eludes the
dialectic, the infinite cannot be grasped or ‘Understood’ by any rational
effort of thought or synthesis. The infinite can be affirmed nonrationally
and, hence, passionately, at the limits of thought, that is, at the limits of
Hegelianism.
FEAR, TREMBLING, AND OTHER INWARD PASSIONS
This opposition to Hegel puts Kierkegaard in a bind, for Kierkegaard is a
writer, he puts his opposition to Hegel into words, and he produces
concrete and determinate texts, finite things, which house his claims about
that which is infinite. How do we understand Kierkegaard, the finite man
or ‘existing individual,’ in relation to this notion of the infinite that can
never fully be expressed by any finite or determinate statement or text. As
finite expressions, Kierkegaard’s own texts, the Sickness unto Death itself
or Fear and Trembling (1843), can only fail to express the very notion of
infinity that they seek to communicate. Whereas an Hegelian might argue
that Kierkegaard’s writing of the infinite is itself essential to the infinite
that it expresses, Kierkegaard’s response will be that if there is an infinite
that can never be resolved with the finite, then Kierkegaard’s own texts
will always fail to communicate the infinite. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s
response will be: ‘My texts must fail to express the infinite, and it will be
by virtue of that failure that the infinite will be affirmed. Moreover, that
affirming of the infinite will not take the form of a thought; it will take
place at the limits of thought itself; it will force a crisis in thought, the
advent of passion.’
So, for Kierkegaard to set about to write a book against Hegel, against
synthesis, and in favor of passion and faith, he must write a book that fails
to communicate directly the very passion and faith he seeks to defend. An
author cannot embody or express the infinite, for that ‘expression’ would
inadvertently render finite that which must remain infinite. Indeed, the
words “passion” and “faith” cannot express or communicate passion and
faith; they can only fail to communicate, and in failing, point the way to
an affirmation that is fundamentally beyond language. Aware of this
paradoxical task of trying to write about that which cannot be delivered in
language, Kierkegaard insists upon the necessity of indirect
communication, a kind of communication that knows its own limitations,
and by enacting those limits, indirectly points the way to that which
cannot be communicated.
Evidence of Kierkegaard’s views on indirect communication can be
found in the fact that he often wrote and published under a pseudonym.
Sickness unto Death was published with “Anti-Climacus” as its author.
Fear and Trembling was written by “Johannes de Silentio,” and
Philosophical Fragments by “Johannes Climacus,” also the author of
Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Other pseudonyms include
“Constantin Constantius” (Repetition, 1843) and “Victor Eremita”
(Either/ Or, 1843). The use of a pseudonym raises the question of who is
the author behind the author? Why is Kierkegaard hiding? What is it that
is concealed in this writing, and what is it that is revealed? Does the
author mean to say what he says, or does the pseudonymous author allow
the ‘real’ author to write what he would not write under his own name.
What does it mean to write under the name of another? I do not want to
suggest that pseudonymous authorship always works in the same way or
for the same reasons in Kierkegaard’s work. But it does seem directly
related to the problem of writing the infinite that we mentioned above.
The false name suggests that whatever is written under that name does not
exhaust the full range of what the author, Kierkegaard, might be.
Something is not being uttered or expressed or made known. Minimally, it
is Kierkegaard the man who to some degree hides behind the fictional
author under whose name he writes. On an existential level, however,
there is something in every self which cannot be expressed by any act of
writing. There is that in every self which is silent, and Kierkegaard is clear
that in the end faith, and passion more generally, is not a matter of writing
or speaking, but of remaining silent.
If Kierkegaard’s texts, then, are to be works of faith, they must not
only be a labor of language, but a labor of silence as well. This is
suggested by the pseudonym “Johannes de Silentio,” the ‘author’ of Fear
and Trembling. And in that text, we encounter the figure of Abraham
whose silence cannot be understood by the author. Indeed, Abraham
stands for faith; he is called “a knight of faith,” and yet he does not
speak and leaves us no clues by which we might be able to find reason in
his faith. The author tries repeatedly to understand Abraham’s faith, but
fails.
What is the story of Abraham, and what is the nature of Abraham’s
faith? Abraham receives a sign from God that he is to take his son to
the top of a mountain, Mount Moriah, and there to slay his son as an
act of faith. According to the Bible, Abraham does not tell Isaac, his
son, what he is about to do, and neither does he tell Sarah, his wife.
Through the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard opens
Fear and Trembling by telling the story of Abraham several times. Each
effort to narrate what happened with Abraham is also an effort to
fathom how it is that Abraham could prepare himself to act in such a
way. If Abraham were willing to slay his son, he risks becoming a
murderer according to conventional ethical norms; he destroys his own
son, his own family, breaking the most cherished of human bonds.
Johannes de Silentio tries to fathom how it could be that Abraham,
who loved his son, was nevertheless willing to defy, resist, or suspend
that love as well as one of the most fundamental laws of ethics in order
to perform his faith. What kind of faith has God exacted from
Abraham such that he must prepare himself to sacrifice that worldly
connection that is most important to him. Is this a cruel God, one to be
disobeyed? And why does Abraham persist in his course, silently
bringing Isaac to the top of Mount Moriah, and draw his hand only
then to have his hand stayed by God?
The example is, of course, a shocking one, but Kierkegaard rehearses
that scene of Abraham climbing Mount Moriah, drawing the sword, and
he tries to understand how any human being could turn against that which
is most important to him in the world. Abraham supplies no explanation,
and Kierkegaard leads us to the point of understanding that there can be
no explanation in words. In the name of what? For what higher good? For
Johannes de Silentio, the answer never comes, but the questions repeat
themselves insistently, exhausting language and opening out into the silent
void of faith.
Kierkegaard imagines how it would be for Abraham to feel the full
force of his love for Isaac and at the same time follow the dictate of a faith
that requires the sacrifice of Isaac. This is surely a paradox, and in the
story of Abraham we receive from Kierkegaard something like an allegory
of the paradoxical self. There is no way to reconcile the profoundly finite
and worldly love of a father for his son with a notion of faith which is
infinite, ‘in’ the world but not ‘of ’ it. This is precisely the kind of paradox
that cannot be thought, cannot be resolved into some harmonious
solution, but which wrecks thought, forces an exposure of thought itself.
In Kierkegaard’s indirect words: “I cannot think myself into Abraham”
(FT, 33); “For my part, I presumably can describe the movements of faith,
but I cannot make them” (FT, 37); “faith begins precisely where thought
stops” (FT, 53).
But Kierkegaard is not only horrified by the sacrifice that faith has
exacted from Abraham. He is also appalled by the fact that Abraham
appears to get Isaac back, that God not only asks for a sacrifice, but
returns what has been lost, and all this without reason. Furthermore, it
appears that Abraham does not turn against the God who has, it seemed,
played so cruelly with the most precious object of Abraham’s human love:
to be able to lose one’s understanding and along with it everything
finite, for which it is the stockbroker, and then to win the very same
finitude again by virtue of the absurd—this appalls me, but that does
not make me say it [faith] is something inferior, since, on the
contrary, it is the one and only marvel.
On the one hand, Kierkegaard is appalled by the arbitrariness and
whimsical character of the way in which God is figured here as giving and
taking away. On the other hand, Abraham’s faith is a marvel, since it does
not waver in the face of the alternating beneficence and cruelty of this
ultimate authority. Abraham is not shrewd with respect to God. Abraham
does not figure that if he only acts as if he is willing to sacrifice Isaac, God
will stay his hand: “he had faith by virtue of the absurd, for all human
calculation ceased long ago” (FT, 36). If faith designates the limit of
thought, if faith emerges precisely when thought fails to comprehend what
is before it, then Abraham climbs the mountain and draws the sword
without knowing that God will return Isaac to him. What is awesome in
Abraham is that he sustains his faith without knowing that he will receive
Isaac back. Faith is not a bargain; it is that affirmation that emerges when
all bargaining has failed. This is what Kierkegaard means when he claims
that Abraham has faith by virtue of the absurd. And if faith is a leap, it is
a leap beyond thought, beyond calculation, a leap made from and with
passion that can be neither comprehended by thought nor communicated
through language.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard claims that he cannot yet make this
leap, but that he can only trace its steps and applaud that movement as a
marvelous thing. He knows enough to recognize that Abraham must have
been in anxiety at the moment in which he drew that sword. And whereas
there are those who would defy God and return to the ethical world,
refuse to draw the sword, and allay their anxiety in that way, Abraham is
not one of them. And whereas there are those who would turn against
their love for Isaac and deny the importance of that bond, Abraham is not
one of them. He turns against neither the finite (Isaac) nor the infinite
(God), but prepares for the paradoxical affirmation of both. In preparing
to sacrifice Isaac, however, Abraham performs “the teleological
suspension of the ethical” (FT, 54). This is not the denial of ethics, but the
suspension or post-ponement of the ethical domain in the name of that
which is higher, namely, the infinite or the divine. The human and finite
world is grounded in that which is larger than itself, namely, the infinite,
and there are occasions in which the affirmation of that infinity takes
priority over the affirmation of that finite and ethical domain which is the
product of that infinity. But this suspension of the ethical entails anxiety,
and faith does not resolve anxiety, but exists with it. Any finite individual
can have faith only by contracting anxiety, for all faith involves some loss
or weakening of worldly connections, including the worldly connection to
one’s own finite, bodily self. There is in faith a dying away of the finite
self, this body, this name, these worldly connections to family, friends,
lovers, this belonging to a time and a landscape, a home, a city. Faith
underscores that all those finite things in which we are invested are
perishable, and that there is no necessary reason or assurance that they
will remain as we know them or survive at all.
If the story of Abraham is an allegory of faith, and if Abraham himself
is a figure for faith, then we can read the story for its more general
philosophical implications. Aristotle once claimed that philosophy begins
with a sense of wonder, the wonder that there are things rather than no
things. Aristotle’s ‘wonder’ is not so different from Kierkegaard’s sense of
the marvelous in his encounter with Abraham’s faith. For Aristotle,
wonder emerges over the fact that there are things, not over how things
came about—although that interested him, too—but that things came
about at all. Kierkegaard writes of “the emotion which is the passionate
sense for coming into existence: wonder” (PF, 99). In Kierkegaard’s terms,
it is, on the one hand, a marvel that these specific finite beings, humans,
the elements, objects of all kinds, came into the world rather than some
other set of beings. On the other hand, it is terrifying that all that exists
appears to come into the world for no necessary reason at all. For if there
is no necessary reason that things came into the world, there is no
necessary reason that sustains those very things in the world, and there is
no necessary reason that keeps those things from passing out of the finite
world. If these finite beings came into the world from a set of infinite
possibilities, then why is it that, of all the myriad and countless beings that
came into the world, these came into being? There appears to be no
necessity that these beings came into existence, and that others did not, if
we consider that the source or origin of all things is infinite possibility,
another name for God. But the wonder or marvel is provoked by another
realization as well. If that which exists in the finite realm is the
actualization of a set of possibilities, and this set of possibilities is only a
subset of the infinite possibilities that are not actualized in the existing
world, then how do we account for which possibilities made the passage
from infinite possibility into that which exists in the finite world? No
reason can be supplied: there is no necessity for what exists to exist. In
fact, not only is there no necessity for the infinite, God, to create the finite,
the human world, but it is perfectly absurd that he did at all.
The finite is grounded in the infinite: we know this from Kierkegaard’s
analysis of despair. But the finite never fully expresses the infinite which is
its origin. Precisely to the extent that an existing individual, for instance, is
finite, that is, limited, mortal, located in space and time, and bodily, that
individual is clearly not infinite and, hence, does not fully express the
infinity out of which he or she (absurdly) arises. This passage from the
infinite to the finite cannot be thought; it is wondrous and a marvel, but
also quite terrifying, for there is no necessary reason for anything to exist
or, for that matter, to persist in its existence, that is, to stay alive.
Whatever God is for Kierkegaard, ‘he’ (Kierkegaard tends not to personify
God) is not that which supplies a reason or a necessity for that which
exists. On the contrary, the postulation of the Kierkegaardian God
underscores that existence itself is absurd.
The story of Abraham suggests that whatever exists in this world does so
by virtue of a kind of grace, an arbitrary and irrational act. Existence can be
understood as a kind of unexpected gift, one which comes just as easily as it
is taken away. To have faith means to affirm this contingency, this absurd
coming-into-being of existence, regardless of the suffering that recognition
of absurdity causes. To transform the terror produced by the recognition of
existence in its absurdity is no easy task. Indeed, the aesthete and the ethicist
cannot find relief from this terror; they are in despair to the extent that they
are run by this terror and involved in sensuous or ethical endeavors which
seek to quell the anxiety produced by the fact of human contingency. The
Knight of Resignation in Fear and Trembling can be understood as a figure
at the limit of the ethical domain, tracing the movements of faith, but not
able to make the necessary leap. As a consequence, he is horrified by the
prospect of Abraham’s ‘sacrifice’ of his own son; indeed, the Knight of
Infinite Resignation can understand Abraham’s intended act as a murder—
and not a sacrifice or offering to God.
We might then understand the movement from the ethical domain to
that of faith as the transformation of terror into a sense of grace. The
difficulty with making this movement, however, is that the prospect of
losing one’s worldly attachments, indeed, one’s own finite existence for no
necessary reason, is not easy to face with anything other than terror.
Kierkegaard understood that the task of faith would be especially difficult
to accomplish by those who lived according to the romantic impulse to
invest existing individuals with such enormous value that they cannot
imagine themselves continuing to exist in a world without them. This was
the anguished predicament of the young man in Repetition, and there is
good evidence to support the view that Kierkegaard himself felt just this
way about Regine Olsen with whom he broke off an engagement to be
married. This broken engagement can be understood as Kierkegaard’s own
‘sacrifice’ which, from an ethical point of view, appeared to be the
emotional equivalent of murder.
In the midst of Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham’s faith in Fear and
Trembling, he remarks with due irony that if Hegel’s philosophy were
right, then Abraham would, indeed, be a murderer. For Kierkegaard,
Hegel represents the ethical domain, for in Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit and Philosophy of Right, he argues that the individual realizes his or
her true and proper purpose in a community bound by ethical laws.
Indeed, Hegel argues that if an individual holds him- or herself to be
above the ethical law, that individual is sinful. Kierkegaard objects to
Hegel’s characterization of the assertion of individuality as sin. According
to Kierkegaard, Hegel fails to understand that the individual is higher than
the universal ethical norm, that there are times when ethical laws must be
‘suspended’ or ‘surrendered’ so that a higher value can be affirmed,
namely, the value of faith—which, of course, for Kierkegaard, is always an
individual affair. The relation to God cannot be mediated (this belief
aligns Kierkegaard with Luther). Hegel would believe that God is present
in the ethical law, and that individuals, by submitting to the ethical law,
come into a mediated relationship to God. This happy reconciliation of
the ethical (called ‘the universal’) and the religious (called ‘the absolute’) is
one that Kierkegaard firmly rejects. The middle term, the ethical or
‘universal,’ which Hegel understands to mediate between the individual,
on the one hand, and the divine, on the other, is, for Kierkegaard, precisely
that which must be subordinated and suspended for the absolute and
immediate relation of faith to take place between the individual and God:
“this position cannot be mediated, for all mediation takes place only by
virtue of the universal; it is and as such remains for all eternity a paradox,
impervious to thought” (FT, 56).
In Kierkegaard’s view, Hegel’s ethical community requires the sacrifice
of the individual to an anonymous law. As law-abiding citizens, we are
interchangeable with one another; each of us expresses our true and
proper self through the same acts by which we conform to a law which
applies to all human beings regardless of our differences. In this sense,
none of us are individuals before the law or, rather, each of us is treated by
the law as an anonymous subject. Insofar as Abraham takes distance from
the ethical law which prohibits murder, he becomes an individual, and the
more he refuses to honor the authority of that law over his own existence,
the more individuated he becomes. This act of putting into question the
ethical law as a final authority over one’s life engages Abraham in anxiety,
for in questioning the law, Abraham encounters his own being apart from
the ethical community in which he stands.
Opposing himself to Hegel’s notion of individuality as sin, Kierkegaard
values this anxiety as human freedom, the demand to make a decision
whether or not to comply with the law or whether to follow a higher
authority. Although Hegel appears to worry about such a moment in
which the individual stands apart from the ethical community, suspending
the power of its laws to govern his or her life, Hegel also appreciates fear
and trembling as necessary moments in the development of the human
subject.12 Significantly, Kierkegaard does not acknowledge that moment in
Hegel in which fear and trembling are considered to be necessary
experiences in the acquisition of human freedom. We can find that
moment at the end of Hegel’s well-known chapter in the Phenomenology
entitled “Lordship and Bondage.” There the bondsman who has been the
property of the lord has cut himself loose from his own enslavement. What
we might expect is the jubilant celebration of freedom, but what we
encounter in the emerging bondsman instead is a shattering fear. Consider
the following description of the emancipated bondsman from Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit as an example of the fear and trembling
produced by the experience of human freedom temporarily untethered by
authority. The bondsman labors on objects, and for the first time
recognizes his own labor in that which he makes. In the recognition of
himself in the object of his making, he is struck with fear:
the formative activity…has the negative significance of fear. For, in
fashioning the thing, the bondsman’s own negativity [his freedom]
becomes an object for him…this objective negative moment is none
other than the allen being before which it has trembled.
(PS, 118)13
Whereas the bondsman has been afraid of the lord, he is now frightened of
his own freedom now that that freedom has become that which ‘lords’
over his own existence. A few lines later, Hegel continues with a passage
that further links the expression of freedom through work with the
experience of fear:
Without the formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and
consciousness does not become explicitly for itself. If consciousness
fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an
empty self-centred attitude…. If it has not experienced absolute fear
but only some lesser dread, the negative being has remained for it
something external [its freedom still appears to belong to another
and is not yet its own], its substance has not been infected by it
through and through.
(PS, 119)
Hegel goes on to remark that if the bondsman has not been shaken by fear
in the very fiber of its being, it will remain “a freedom enmeshed in
servitude.”
We can begin to see here that Kierkegaard’s characterization of Hegel is
not always fair. Hegel is clearly not in favor of the enslavement of the
individual to the ethical law, for the fear and trembling associated with the
moment of emancipation will inform the individual as he or she enters
ethical life in the following chapter in the Phenomenology. Indeed, one
might well ask the question of whether Kierkegaard’s very language of
“fear and trembling” is not derived from Hegel’s description of the
emerging bondsman in The Phenomenology of Spirit. How far is the
bondsman’s trembling at the sight of his own freedom from Abraham’s
anxiety in the face of his own potential act? How do these ‘tremblings’
differ?
Whereas Hegel’s bondsman trembles before that which he has created,
the external confirmation of his own power to create, Abraham trembles
(inwardly) before that which he is compelled by God to sacrifice and
destroy. Whereas the bondsman is frightened of his own capacity to
create, a capacity which in its apparent limitlessness makes the bondsman
into a figure with enormous responsibility and power, Abraham is
compelled to act according to a divine demand that he cannot understand.
In this sense, Abraham’s freedom is not guided by reason, but by that
which is irrational, beyond reason, and which requires an obedience to
that irrationality over any human law. The bondsman, on the other hand,
appears to legislate a law for itself, expressed in its own ‘formative
activity’ or labor. The bondsman appears to be temporarily without an
authority, a ‘lord,’ who is other to himself. But Abraham, he is enthralled
to a Lord who is so radically different from himself that he cannot
understand him at all. That the bondsman is compelled to be free without
the guidance of a supervening authority is an unbearable situation which
leads to the development, in the following chapter on the “Unhappy
consciousness,” of a conscience, the self-imposition of an ethical law, what
Hegel himself understands as a form of self-enslavement. Hence, Hegel’s
bondsman retreats from the fearful prospect of his own freedom through
enslaving himself to ethical projects and practicing various rituals of selfdenial.
Abraham, on the other hand, must bind himself to an authority
whose demands are incomprehensible, an act which leaves him
frighteningly detached from the ethical community and from his own
rational capacities. Kierkegaard tells us that it is through this persistence
in fear and trembling that Abraham comes to the full and gracious
experience of faith.
The task of faith is to continue to affirm infinite possibility in the face
of events which appear to make existence itself a radically impossible
venture. What astonished Kierkegaard about the Abraham story is that
Abraham faced the prospect of losing what was most precious to him in
the world, and he still did not lose faith and curse God: he maintained his
faith not only in the face of that loss, but in the face of having to make
the sacrifice himself.14 Abraham loves Isaac, but that human bond
cannot be the most important passion of his life, for what merely exists
can come and go, and that transience can never be the object of faith. If
in the throes of romantic love or in the complicated emotional ties of
family life, we say that our existence is meaningless without some
existing individual, that is a symptom that we are in despair. For
Kierkegaard, if any existing individual becomes the fundamental reason
to live, that individual must be sacrificed so that faith can return to its
proper object: the infinite.
In Repetition, published simultaneously with Fear and Trembling,
Kierkegaard relates the story of how a young man, a thinly veiled
substitute for Kierkegaard himself, breaks off an engagement with a girl
he loves. The sacrifice appears absurd, for he has not fallen out of love
with her. And yet, if the girl has become the ultimate reason for living, the
source of all affirmation, then the young man has transferred and invested
the boundlessness of his passion onto an existing individual: this is, for
Kierkegaard, a kind of despair and a failure of faith. Precisely because she
has become an object he is not willing to lose, he must demonstrate his
willingness to lose her altogether. His sacrifice is not unlike Abraham’s,
except that Abraham, being a “Knight of Faith,” receives Isaac back
again, whereas the young man, a veritable “Knight of Resignation,”
appears to orchestrate and suffer an irreversible loss. He knows how to
sacrifice finite things, and to avoid the despair that characterizes the life of
the aesthete as well as the ethicist, but he does not know how to affirm
that infinity which appears to make existence utterly absurd.
What does it mean that whereas Abraham receives Isaac back, the
young man in Repetition fails to have his love returned? To have faith
means no longer to invest absolute meaning in what is finite, whether it is
an individual person, a set of objects or possessions, a homeland, a job, a
family. All of these sites of investment are finite and perishable, and when
we transfer religious passion onto those things, according to Kierkegaard,
we turn away from God and invest the things of this world with a
displaced religious meaning and, hence, fall into despair. If one makes the
leap of faith, then one invests absolute passion and meaning in the infinite;
this entails a suspension not only of the ethical, but of the finite realm
altogether, for any finite object of passion will now be understood as
emerging as a gift from the infinite and passing back eventually into the
infinite. For Kierkegaard, it is only once we affirm the transience and
contingency (nonnecessity) of that which we love in this world that we are
free to love it at all. If Abraham gets Isaac back, it is because he has
suspended his attachments to that which is finite, affirmed the infinite, and
so understood that nothing that exists in this world can sustain an
absolute passion. It is in this sense that Isaac was always a gift from God;
one’s own existence is a gift, and that of every other existing thing.
Of course, to recognize that there is no necessary reason that some
beings exist and other possible beings do not produces not only a sense of
wonder, but a sense of terror as well. The thought of an existing life as a
contingency, as an arbitrary event which just as well could not have
happened, or which could without reason pass away, this is a thought
that, strictly speaking, cannot be maintained; it is a thought which
founders on itself, for how can a thought think the contingency of the
thinker who thinks it? But it is this thought that leads to the anxiety over
existence that leads to the question of faith. To witness the existing world
this way, as a terrifying and wondrous gift, is to know that one is not the
author of that world, that the father, strictly speaking, is not the ‘origin’ of
the son, and that not only do all things originate—absurdly, wondrously—
in the infinite, but all existing things return there as well.
For Kierkegaard, this problem of the contingency of existence has
implications for human love, a passion that verges on faith, but which
becomes despair when it becomes too much like faith, an absolute or
infinite passion. To love that which exists without at the same time
knowing the fragile and contingent nature of existence is to be in despair;
if one tries to love a human object as if it were absolute, one projects a
religious passion onto a human object. The result, for Kierkegaard, is to
become wracked with displaced passion and a constant sense of loss.
Kierkegaard describes this problem at some length in the first volume of
Either/Or. Considered to be part of Kierkegaard’s early writings, Either/
Or is composed of two volumes. The first offers writings that enact and
explore the aesthetic point of view; the second volume offers sermons and
treatises in the ethical point of view. Neither of these perspectives is the
same as faith, but Kierkegaard, in unmistakenly Hegelian fashion, suggests
that these two spheres, these two ways of approaching the world, have to
be experienced in order to understand the limits of each and the
superiority of faith. There is no writing in the perspective of faith in either
of these volumes, but it is unclear that such a writing could exist; faith is
nevertheless there in the writings as the path not chosen, the way to affirm
the paradox that emerges between the aesthetic and ethical perspectives.
The vain effort to make of a human being an object of absolute and
infinite passion is the fateful predicament of the aesthete in Either/Or. The
alternative in that text is to become a purely ethical being, one who makes
no attachments to anything finite, but acts in accordance with a universal
law, a law that applies to everyone, and which makes of its obedient
subject an anonymous and impersonal subject. The aesthete, on the other
hand, values what is most immediate and finite as if it were absolute; the
ethical person (also termed the “Knight of Infinite Resignation”) treats the
human law as if it were absolute, and invests his or her full passion into
the application of that law. The one in faith, however, lives fully in the
finite world, but affirms its contingency at the same time. This is the
marvel that Kierkegaard claims he cannot perform, to love that which
exists and to affirm that it might be lost, that it cannot serve as the
ultimate object of passion, that for which one lives. Human love requires
the knowledge of grace, that what is given for us to love is not ours, and
that its loss refers us to that which is the origin of all things finite,
including ourselves. This means that for the one who has faith, love is
always an anxious and ironic affair, and there is no way to see directly
how that infinite faith in that which is infinite lives alongside the finite
love of that which exists. In Kierkegaard’s terms, “absolutely to express
the sublime in the pedestrian—only that the knight [of faith] can do it, and
this is the one and only marvel” (FT, 41).
One implication of Kierkegaard’s paradoxical view of faith is that it is
not a form of asceticism. Kierkegaard does not advise a turning away from
the finite world. On the contrary, he imagines that the Knight of Faith will
be one who dwells among the ordinary world of things, a “tax collector”
he suggests in Fear and Trembling. One would not be able to see from the
outside that this individual has faith, for faith, by virtue of its radical
inwardness, is inexpressible. The entirety of the finite realm would be
‘returned’ to such an individual for the paradoxical reason that, through
faith, he or she no longer fears the loss of what exists; in faith, the
individual affirms the absurdity and arbitrariness by which the existing
world comes into being and passes out again. That affirmation is not a
kind of wisdom or knowledge, but an irrational passion that emerges at
the limits of all thinking.
THE PARADOXICAL LANGUAGE OF FAITH
Although it is clear that Kierkegaard writes in favor of faith, there are at
least two remaining questions that trouble any reader of his works. The
first question concerns the ‘what’ of faith: in what does Kierkegaard have
faith? What is this God which appears to be the infinite or, more
specifically, infinite possibility? The second question is intimately related
to the first: how could we have received an answer to the question ‘in
what does Kierkegaard have faith?’ if we expect the answer to arrive in
language? After all, we have already learned that faith cannot be
expressed in language, that it is the infinite passion of the inwardness of
the self. But what is the status of Kierkegaard’s own texts, if we
understand the purpose of these texts to be an incitement to faith? How
do these texts work? How do they achieve their purpose, if from the start
we know that they can never express faith or, if they claim to have
expressed faith, they have failed in that very task?
Kierkegaard’s God is in-finite which means that this God can never be
identified with one of his products. This God is said to be the origin of the
existing world, but this is not a God who, in a personified form, at some
point in history—or prior to history—said ‘Let there be light’ and light
suddenly there was. And it is not that Kierkegaard disputes the truth of
the Bible, but he insists that the truth of the Bible is not to be found in the
language of the text. In this sense, Kierkegaard is against a literal reading
of the Bible, one which takes every word printed there to be the
transmitted word of God. On the contrary, the ‘truth’ of the Bible is not,
properly speaking, in the text, but is to be found in the reader, in the
various acts by which the various injunctions to faith are appropriated and
taken up by those who read the text. The truth of the Bible is to be found
in the faith of those who read the Bible. The text is a condition by which
a certain kind of instruction in faith takes place, but faith can never be
achieved by learning what the Bible says, only by finally turning away
from that text and turning inward to discover the infinite passion that
emerges from the demand to affirm contingency. In Philosophical
Fragments, the Bible and biblical scholarship are treated with irony: these
texts can deliver no historical truth of interest to the person interested in
faith, for no historical documentation regarding the existence or teachings
of Jesus Christ can ever convince a person into faith. Faith does not arrive
as the result of a persuasive argument; faith (along with its alternative,
despair) is precisely what has the chance to emerge when all
argumentation and historical proof fail.15
But there is a further difficulty with an historical approach to faith.
Some Christian scholars argue that it can be proven that Jesus Christ lived,
that he came into the world, and that he was the son of God. The proof
‘that’ he existed is, however, not enough for Kierkegaard. That assertion
simply prompts him to ask a series of philosophical questions which the
historical enquiry cannot answer: what does it mean for anything to ‘come
into existence’? If something can be said to ‘come into existence,’ then at
some early point in time, it did not exist at all. How, then, can something
which is nonbeing become transformed into being? This is, of course, the
question that preoccupied us above when we considered how
philosophical wonder focuses on the apparent absurdity that some things
exist rather than not, that certain possibilities become actual or finite,
whereas other possibilities remain merely possible. Possibility and
actuality are mutually exclusive states, that is, a thing is either possible or
actual, but it would make no sense to say that it is both at once.
Therefore, to say that a given thing has come into existence implies that it
has moved from a state of possibility to one of actuality. This transition
cannot be ‘thought,’ says Kierkegaard, but is a contradiction, one that
accompanies all ‘coming into being.’
In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard considers the highly
significant paradox that in the person of the Savior (whose historical
status remains uncertain or, at least, irrelevant), it appears that what is
Eternal has come into time, and that what is infinite has appeared in
finite form. Whereas Hegel would claim that the finite appearance in
this consequential instance expresses and actualizes the infinite, that
this person in time, aging and mortal, expressed that which can never
die; Kierkegaard takes issue with such a notion, arguing that this
occurrence is utterly paradoxical, that the human and divine aspects of
the figure of Christ can never be reconciled; insofar as he is infinite, he
cannot appear in finite form, without losing his status as infinite; and
insofar as he is finite, he cannot become infinite, for finitude implies
mortality.
What is striking about Kierkegaard’s writing in Philosophical
Fragments is that the so-called miracle of God coming into existence
recurs at every moment that some finite thing ‘comes into being.’ Christ is
no exception to this paradoxical movement, but neither is he singular.
After all, every human self emerges from a set of infinite possibilities and
so moves from the infinite (which is nonbeing, that which is not yet finite
and does not yet have a specified kind of being) to the finite (or being).
Indeed, anything that comes into existence is miraculous for the very
reasons we set out above in our discussion of wonder. In making this
move, Kierkegaard appears to be taking an almost arrogant distance from
the church authorities, the Scriptures, and the religious authorities whose
task it is to settle historical details about Christ’s sojourn on earth. Indeed,
Kierkegaard goes so far as to subject the key concepts of Christianity to a
new set of definitions, ones that are devised by him. Kierkegaard is not
interested in testing his interprerations against the Bible or against earlier
interpretations; he devises and sets forth his own. Throughout the
introductory chapter of Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard appears to
take over the power to name that properly belonged to God in the book of
Genesis. In Genesis, God spoke and said, ‘Let there be…light, man,
woman, beasts, etc.,’ and the very power of his voice was sufficient to
bring these entities into being. Kierkegaard appears to appropriate this
power of naming for himself, but the entities he brings into existence
through his writings are Christian concepts. As a result, he names these
concepts and, in the naming, revises their meaning according to his own
inter-pretive scheme: “What now shall we call such a Teacher, who
restores the lost condition and gives the learner the Truth? Let us call him
Saviour…let us call him Redeemer” (PF, 21). Further definitions are
offeredfor“conversion,”“repentance,”“NewBirth,”andmore
(PF, 22–3).
What are we to make of this Kierkegaardian willingness to fabricate
new meanings for the orthodox terms of Christianity? Is it not a kind of
arrogance or pride to offer new interpretations for such words? By what
right does Kierkegaard proceed with such obvious enthusiasm to create
new meanings for old words? Is this creative way with words related to
Kierkegaard’s enigmatic career as an author?
What is the authority of the author? For Kierkegaard, faith cannot be
communicated, so that any effort to write a book that communicates faith
will, by definition, have to fail. In this way, then, Kierkegaard must write
a book which constantly fails to communicate faith, a book which
insistently renounces its own authority to state what faith is, a text which
turns back upon itself and effectively wills its own failure. If the reader of
his book knows that the book cannot offer knowledge of faith, then that
reader will be seduced by the promise of that knowledge only to be
disappointed in an instructive way. Kierkegaard’s language must, then,
perform the paradoxical task of enacting the limits of language itself. The
author who wishes to point the way to faith must resist every effort to
communicate faith directly; in other words, that author must will the
failure of his own book, and in that very failure, know its success.
In Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard considers the peculiar kind of
despair that afflicts “poets” and makers of fiction. We can read in this
diagnosis a thinly veiled autobiographical confession. Consider that
Kierkegaard is a kind of poet,16 one who produces a fictional narrator for
most of his early texts through the construction of various pseudonyms.
He then produces “examples” of faith and despair, fabricating “types” of
individuals, embellishing on biblical and classical characters: Abraham,
Don Juan, etc. And now consider Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the person
who suffers from defiant despair, the will to be oneself, that is, the will to
be the sole ground and power of one’s own existence and, therefore, to
take the place of God:
this is the self that a person in despair wills to be, 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…the self in despair wants to
be master of itself or to create itself.
(SUD, 68)
Kierkegaard then explains that this kind of despairing individual
regularly fantasizes that he or she is all kinds of things that they are not:
“the self in despair…constantly relates to itself only by way of imaginary
constructions” (SUD, 68). This fiction-producing self can make itself
into “an imaginatively constructed God,” but this self is for that reason
“always building castles in the sky…only shadowboxing” (SUD, 69). At
an extreme, this defiant form of despair becomes demonic despair, and
here the will to fabricate and fictionalize asserts itself in clear defiance,
even hatred, of God. Is there, for Kierkegaard, a stark opposition
between the life of faith and that of fiction-making? And can
Kierkegaard himself give up his imaginary constructions in order to live
the life of faith, one which we know, from the consideration of
Abraham, is a life of silence?
Demonic despair, which Kierkegaard calls the most intensive form of
despair, is rooted in “a hatred of existence”: “not even in defiance or
defiantly does it will to be itself, but for spite” (SUD, 69). And what
evidence does such a person have against existence? The one in demonic
despair is himself the evidence that justifies his hatred of existence. This
appears to imply that the one in demonic despair, that incessant maker
of fictions, hates himself for producing an imaginary construction of
himself, but nevertheless persists in this self-fabrication. This is a self
which, through fiction-making, postures as the creator of its own
existence, thus denying the place of God as the true author of human
existence. But this demonic self must also despise itself for trying to take
over the power of God. This self in demonic despair alternates between
self-fabrication and self-hatred. Inasmuch as this demonic one is an
author, and is Kierkegaard himself, he produces a fiction only then to
tear down the construction he has just made. The one in demonic despair
can acknowledge the divine authorship that enables his own fiction, his
pseudonymous work, only by admitting that what he has produced is a
necessary fraud.
At the end of Part One of Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard appears to
begin this disavowal of his own production, clearing the way for an
appreciation of God as the only ‘first-rate author’ in town, acknowledging
that Kierkegaard’s own work must always be under-stood as derived from
the power that constitutes him, a power that precedes and enables his own
imaginary production:
Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author’s
writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error—perhaps
it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential
part of the whole production—and now this error wants to mutiny
against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to
correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No, I refuse to be
erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a
second-rate author.
(SUD, 74)
Written thus in 1848 and published in 1849, we can see here the fruition
of Kierkegaard’s intention to resist the seduction of authorship. Two years
earlier, he wrote in his journal: “My idea is to give up being an author
(which I can only be altogether or not at all) and prepare myself to be a
pastor.”17 It appears that Kierkegaard gave up his career as a literary and
philosophical author after Sickness unto Death, and persevered in writing
purely religious tracts. Had he achieved faith? Did he overcome despair?
Was his writing as compelling after the leap or did it turn out to require
the very despair he sought to overcome?
NOTES
1 It would be interesting to compare this claim with Freud’s efforts to address
the question of ‘anxiety’ through analysis.
2 SUD: Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. H.V.Hong and E.H.Hong
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
3 “Hegel and Hegelianism constitute an essay in the comical.” Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, trans. D.Swenson and W.Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1974), henceforth referred to as CUP, p. 34.
4 “In order to avoid confusion, it is at once necessary to recall that our
treatment of the problem does not raise the question of the truth of
Christianity. It merely deals with the problem of the individual’s relationship
to Christianity. It has nothing whatever to do with the systematic zeal of the
personally indifferent individual to arrange the truths of Christianity in
paragraphs; it deals with the concern of the infinitely interested individual for
his own relationship to such a doctrine.” Ibid., p. 18.
5 Descartes, Fifth Meditation. God is perfect and can only make that which is
equally perfect or less perfect than him-/her-/itself, for nothing can be more
perfect than God. If there is something which has some degree of perfection in
it, that thing must be produced by that which is at least as perfect or more
perfect than the thing itself. There is nothing in the world that is more perfect
than human beings even though human beings are imperfect in some ways
(they sin, they are ignorant). This implies that human beings must be created
by that which is equally or more perfect than themselves. And it is perfect
being that is called God.
6 FT: Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. H.V.Hong and E.H.Hong
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
7 See Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham, ibid.
8 PF: Philosophical Fragments, ed. N.Thulstrop, trans. D.Swenson and H.V.
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).
9 “Commentator’s introduction,” PF, p. 1xxv.
10 See Kierkegaard’s discussion of the limits of speculative thought in CUP, ch. 2,
“The speculative point of view.”
11 This is a view which is falsely attributed to existential philosophy generally,
but which we can see ought not to be ascribed to Kierkegaard.
12 It is interesting to note that Kierkegaard takes the phrase “fear and trembling”
from the New Testament, Philippians 2:12–14, but applies it to an Old
Testament figure, Abraham. Hegel’s placement of “fear and trembling” in
relation to work is perhaps slightly closer to the meaning of the New
Testament use: “Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in
my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling: For it is God which worketh in you both to
will and to do of his good pleasure.” The Dartmouth Bible, ed.
R.B.Chamberlin and H. Feldman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961).
13 PS: Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V.Miller (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977).
14 Imagine if Hegel’s bondsman were to have created a son with a woman, and
that he was then compelled to sacrifice that son, how would Hegel’s analysis
have to change in order to take account of Abraham’s anguish?
15 Note Kierkegaard’s ironic tone in his writing against the historical efforts to
supply a proof of God’s existence: “And how does the God’s existence emerge
from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach of
continuity?…As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i.e. continue to
demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason than that
I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there.
But this act of letting go is surely also something; it is indeed a contribution of
mine. Must not this also be taken into account, this little moment, brief as it
may be—it need not be long, for it is a leap. However brief this moment, if
only an instantaneous now, this ‘now’ must be included in the reckoning.” PF,
p. 53.
Kierkegaard here plays on the double meaning of the act of letting go
being “a contribution of mine.” On the one hand, this is his philosophical
contribution to the critique of rationalism, and “the leap” is a concept he
introduced into philosophical and religious discourse. On the other hand, he is
suggesting that no person, including himself, can arrive at faith without
making a contribution of him- or herself. And this contribution, being one of
passion, has to come from the inwardness of the self, and be directed toward a
faith which no ‘proof can automatically produce.
16 See L.Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1971).
17 Quoted in the Introduction to CUP, p. xiii.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Original language editions
11.1 Kierkegaard, S. Samlede Vaerker, 20 vols, ed. P.Rohde, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske
Boghandel, 1962–3.
English translations
Works cited
(Dates of original publication in Danish are given with the first reference to the
work in the text.)
11.2 Kierkegaard, S. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D.Swenson and
W.Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.
11.3 Kierkegaard, S. Either/Or, 2 vols, trans. D.Swenson and L.M.Swenson,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
11.4 Kierkegaard, S. Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. H.V.Hong
and E.H.Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
11.5 Kierkegaard, S. Philosophical Fragments ed. N.Thulstrup, trans.
D.Swenson and H.V.Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962.
11.6 Kierkegaard, S. Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. H.V.Hong and
E.H.Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Works not cited
11.7 Kierkegaard, S. Attack upon “Christendom”, trans. W.Lowrie, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1940.
11.8 Kierkegaard, S. The Concept of Dread, trans. W.Lowrie, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1957.
11.9 Kierkegaard, S. The Concept of Irony, trans. L.M.Capel, New York:
Harper & Row, 1965.
11.10 Kierkegaard, S. Edifying Discourses: A Selection, trans. D.F.Swenson and
L.M.Swenson, New York: Harper & Row, 1958.
11.11 Kierkegaard, S. For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourselves!, trans.
W.Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.
11.12 Kierkegaard, S. The Point of View for my Work as an Author, trans.
W.Lowrie, New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
11.13 Kierkegaard, S. Purity of Heart, trans. D.V.Steere, New York: Harper &
Row, 1956.
11.14 Kierkegaard, S. Stages on Life’s Way, trans. W.Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1940.
11.15 Kierkegaard, S. Training in Christianity, trans. W.Lowrie, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1944.
11.16 Kierkegaard, S. The Works of Love, trans. H.V.Hong and E.H.Hong, New
York: Harper & Row, 1964.
11.17 Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 4 vols, ed. and trans. H.V.Hong
and E.H.Hong, assisted by G.Melantschuk, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1967–75.
Bibliographies
11.18 Himmelstrup, J. Soren Kierkegaard International Bibliografi, Copenhagen:
Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 1962.
11.19 Jorgensen, A. Soren Kierkegaard-litteratur, 1961–1970, Aarhus:
Akademisk Boghandel, 1971; also Soren Kierkegaard-litteratur,
1971–1980, Aarhus: privately printed, 1983.
11.20 Lapointe, F. Soren Kierkegaard and his Critics: An International
Bibliography of Criticism, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980.
11.21 McKinnon, A. The Kierkegaard Indices, 4 vols, Leiden: E.J.Brill,
1970.
11.22 Thompson, J. (ed.) Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, New
York: Doubleday Anchor, 1972.
Influences
11.23 Crites, S. In the Twilight of Christendom: Hegel vs Kierkegaard on Faith
and History, AAR Studies in Religion, 2, Chambersburg, Pa.:
American Academy of Religion, 1972.
11.24 Dupré, L. A Dubious Heritage: Studies in the Philosophy of Religion after
Kant, New York: Paulist Press, 1977.
11.25 Heiss, R. Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx: Three Great Philosophers whose Ideas
Changed the Course of Civilization, trans. E.B.Garside, New York:
Delta, 1975.
11.26 Kroner, R. “Kierkegaard or Hegel?” Revue International de Philosophie 6,
I (1952): 79–96.
11.27 Löwith, K. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-
Century Thought, trans. D.Green, New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1964; London: Constable, 1965; Garden City: Doubleday
Anchor, 1967.
11.28 Taylor, M.C. Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980.
11.29 Theunissen, M. The Other, Boston: MIT Press, 1987.
11.30 Thulstnip, N. Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. G.L.Strengen,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
11.31 Wahl, J. Etudes kierkegardiennes, 4th edn, Paris: J.Vrin, 1974.
General surveys
11.32 Adorno, T. Kierkegaard: Constructions of the Aesthetic, trans. R.Hullot-
Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
11.33 Agacinski, S. Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Soren Kierkegaard, trans.
K.Newmark, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988.
11.34 Collins, J. The Mind of Kierkegaard, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953.
11.35 Holmer, P.L. The Grammar of Faith, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978.
11.36 Lebowitz, N. Kierkegaard: A Life of Allegory, Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1985.
11.37 Mackey, L. Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1971.
11.38 Malanfschok, G. Kierkegaard’s Thought, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971.
11.39 Perkins, R.L. (ed.) Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling”: Critical
Appraisals, Birmingham, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1981.
11.40 Smith, J.K. (ed.) Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of Self, Psychiatry
and the Humanities Series, 5, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1981.
11.41 Thompson, J. (ed.) Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden
City: Doubleday Anchor, 1972.
11.42 Thompson, J. The Lonely Labyrinth: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works,
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967.
11.43 Wyschogrod, M. Kierkegaard and Heidegger, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976.
Routledge History of Philosophy.
Taylor & Francis e-Library.
2005.