CHAPTER 1 KIERKEGAARD S CREATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY. implications of our answers for how we live individually, socially, economically, and

Transcription

1 CHAPTER 1 KIERKEGAARD S CREATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY Who thinks of hitching Pegasus and an old nag together to one carriage for a ride? And yet this is what it is to exist [existere] for one compounded of finitude and infinitude. 1 What is it to be a human being? This question is as old as the human race itself, and yet we continue to ask it, probing the depths of who we are as people, and exploring the implications of our answers for how we live individually, socially, economically, and theologically. Both Søren Kierkegaard and Walker Percy join the ranks of those who have asked, yet they do so in a uniquely theological way. For instance, they presuppose creation; they assume that human beings are made by God in a certain way. Both Kierkegaard and Percy suggest that the things which comprise our make-up, our core constitution as human beings, have come from the hand of the Triune God. We have been shaped, formed, given abilities and proclivities as a result of God s creational intent and action. By presupposing these things, these two thinkers part ways with many who have posed the question of human being from different premises. In what follows both in Chapters One and Two of this study, some of Kierkegaard s and Percy s own assumptions are carried into the discussion. For instance when we speak of the essential composition of human beings, their fundamental make-up, we will use phrases 1 Søren Kierkegaard s Journals and Papers, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, eds. and trans., assisted by Gregor Malantschuk, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 55 [V B 198]. Note: these Journals and Papers are a seven volume set, and hereafter all citations from these volumes will be indicated as JP, followed by volume number and the Hongs journal entry number (not page number). For example, JP 1:55 (vol. 1, journal entry 55). 17

2 18 like creational selfhood and the creational ground of the self. These phrases presume two things: that divine agency is operative in creation and that the ground of human beings is the Triune God of orthodox Christian faith. He is not only creational cause, but ontological ground, and so all that being human means takes its flight or fall from this point of departure. While we seek be true to Kierkegaard s and Percy s creational and ontological presuppositions, there is a built-in danger of straying from them, especially in a discussion over creation. Often these words are closely associated with thoughts of what the original sinless state of humanity was like. What must it have been like to be Adam or Eve, enjoying a state of innocence that none of us have ever known? This sort of speculation of what humanity used to be (i.e. the ideal possibility of a perfect Edenic selfhood, which some theologians apply to Adam and Eve) is simply not a concern for Kierkegaard or Percy. Rather, they are focused, even when addressing creation, on humanity as it is. In other words, both thinkers seem to engage in a kind of phenomenological, existentially personal analysis of creation as it exists for the individual. Eden and the question of trees is an existential reality rather than a primeval, historical one. In our approach here, we shall seek to give sufficient nuance to these thinkers, both in their use of traditional theological categories, and in their specialized, unique usages as well. At this point, we turn now to investigate Kierkegaard s view of the fundamental ground of creational selfhood, which will be divided into the subcategories of constitutional and referential ground. Here we will seek to demonstrate that for Kierkegaard, creational selfhood consists in a relational synthesis that is both structural being and teleological task, and is thus necessarily marked by the essential element and revelatory agent of anxiety, while also standing in absolute referential relation to God in a way which

3 19 properly orients essential relation to others. In addition, our hope is that a clear grasp of Kierkegaard s creational anthropology will also set the proper parameters for discussion of Percy s view of creational selfhood in Chapter Two, and place a comparative treatment of the two thinkers (Ch. 3) and an analysis of Percy s fiction (Ch. 4) within the proper interpretive grid. I. Constitutional Ground of the Self: A Relational Synthesis in Anxiety The Self: A Relational Synthesis The concept of a human being as a compound, composite, or synthesis of various elements goes back at least as far as Plato, in his triadic explication of human beings as a composite of three distinct elements: body, mind and soul. 2 Of course since Plato, nearly every philosopher has made some attempt at making sense of these (and other) various elements that seem to make up a human being as an intermediate creature, positioned somewhere between two poles of infinitude and finitude, freedom and necessity, physicality and rationality, and many other combinations of poles. As the opening quotation suggests, Kierkegaard is no exception. In his magisterial philosophical work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard s pseudonym Johannes Climacus puts it this way: 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 2 Of course Plato s anthropology is dualistic, in the sense that body and mind are completely distinct entities, driven by the controlling force of the soul. In addition to Plato s dualism, there are various other philosophies of what makes a human being. These include subsets of monism (mind and matter are essentially the same), idealism (everything is mental), materialism (everything is physical), and of course many other variations. Our point here is simply to say that the ideas regarding man as some kind of combination between, or unity of mind, body, spirit, soul, etc (others use terms like beast and angel ), is an age-old philosophical formula.

4 20 intermediate being such as a human being is. 3 However, Kierkegaard communicates most clearly what he means by this intermediate being in the opening comments of his mature philosophical anthropology, The Sickness unto Death (SD). 4 Here he clarifies his definition of intermediate being, but inserts a uniquely Kierkegaardian qualification into the mix: 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 terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self. 5 This quotation reveals two central points of interest. First, we can clearly see here as Kierkegaardian scholar Arne Grøn has pointed out that with this 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. 6 Secondly, however, the last part of the quotation indicates that given this synthesis as a mere relation between two terms, a human being is not yet a self. This, then, is Kierkegaard s unique qualification. The longstanding description of a human being as an intermediate being situated somewhere between various poles out of which s/he is constituted, appears to be, for Kierkegaard, an 3 Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 329 (emphasis mine). I am indebted to Arne Grøn for calling my attention to this quotation and for his articulation of Kierkegaard s unique approach to the idea of human beings as intermediate. Cf. Arne Grøn, The Human Synthesis in Anthropology and Authority: Essays on Soren Kierkegaard, ed. Poul Houe, Gordon Marino and Sven Hakon Rossel, trans. Jon Stewart (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000). 4 In Sygdommen til Doden (1849; 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. Grøn, SD, 43. Mark Taylor notes that Kierkegaard s use of freedom for one pole of this synthesis is misleading. Later on in SD, in his analysis of the various poles, Kierkegaard himself proceeds by using the term possibility in the place of freedom. In addition, Kierkegaard goes on to equate the self with freedom, and says that like self, freedom is the dialectical element or third term in relation to the polarity of possibility and necessity (SD, 162). Mark C. Taylor, Time s Struggle with Space: Soren Kierkegaard s Understanding of Temporality in The Harvard Theological Review 66, no. 3 (July, 1973): 319, nt Grøn, 31.

5 21 incomplete definition of human selfhood. For Kierkegaard, a synthesis of opposites such as those listed here, does not comprise a fully human self, or human being. The existence of a fully human self requires a third element that unites, sustains and constitutes the synthesis of opposites. Thus, in The Concept of Anxiety (CA) he says that Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical [soul and body]; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit. 7 Later on Kierkegaard indicates that this third element called spirit not only unites the psychical and physical poles, but also that man is a synthesis of psyche and body that is constituted and sustained by spirit. 8 Of course this begs the question: what exactly does Kierkegaard mean by spirit? While he does clarify this in CA, he most clearly defines spirit in SD where he explicitly equates it with the human self in what is perhaps his most famous quotation: The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation s relating to itself. 9 Here we come to that aspect of intermediate being that is so unique to Kierkegaard. By situating the human self between itself as finite, bodily, temporal, etc and between itself as infinite, soul-possessing, and eternal, Kierkegaard alters the traditional conception of 7 CA, 43. In SD the word Kierkegaard uses for this psychical or soul element is Sjel. As Taylor notes, Sjel is an incredibly difficult word to translate into English. Though we may read religious connotations into the word soul, Sjel includes but is not limited to these. It can also refer to the psychic and mental aspects of a person, and thus could also be rendered mind. Louis Dupre adds more light here when he shows the contrast between Kierkegaard s use of Sjel in this context and his use in his more explicitly religious works. Here, says Dupre, Sjel means no more than the animating principle that has the potential to become spirit but has to pass through a process of reflection in order to do so. It is a category of immediacy. In our view, Dupre s is the best interpretation, and so we will treat Sjel throughout this work as a category of immediacy. Taylor, Time s Struggle with Space, 318, nt. 11; Louis Dupre, Of Time and Eternity, in IKC (CA), CA, 81 (emphasis mine). 9 SD, 43.

6 22 the human person as a intermediate being by adding the category of relationality. The human self is not merely the synthesis, since for Kierkegaard, a synthesis is a relation between two terms [but] not yet a self. 10 Rather, the human self is that which relates itself to these various poles of the synthesis, which are also the self. The significance of this relational category simply cannot be overstated. With it, Kierkegaard effectively defines human selfhood as not only a creational given, but also a teleological task. The category of relation of self to itself means that the givenness of creational human being also orients the self toward human becoming; there is a teleological element built into the creational constitution of every human person. Kierkegaard brings this odd couple together when he says, Well, of course, every human being is something of a subject. But now to become what one is as a matter of course who would waste his time on that? 11 For Kierkegaard, individuals must waste time on this precisely because in his view, the ontological and the ethical are held together in the creational ground of the self. Thus Kierkegaard attributes the possibility of falling into sin or despair to the fact that God, who constituted man a relation, releases it from his hand, as it were that is, inasmuch as the relation relates itself to itself. 12 Here, being released from God s hand indicates, as C. Stephen Evans notes, that The self is an ethical task, not a fixed entity, but the task itself is part of the self s ontological givenness. It is the form of being granted the self by the creator. Its being essentially requires the self to become Ibid. 11 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 130 (emphasis mine). I am indebted to C. Stephen Evans for calling my attention to this quotation. C. Stephen Evans, Who is the Other in Sickness unto Death? in Kierkegaard Studies, Yearbook 1997 (offprint), ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), SD, 16 (emphasis mine). 13 Evans, Who is the Other, 10.

7 23 What is the self to become? The answer to this question is the subject of numerous volumes of Kierkegaardian scholarship and a thorough treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of our work here, since our aim is primarily to establish that Kierkegaard construes selfhood as both being and task. However, it will suffice to say that the content of the task has to do with the relation of the self to the poles of the synthesis: body/soul, temporal/eternal, finite/infinite, and necessity/possibility (freedom). Throughout much of his work, Kierkegaard describes how the self s relation to these elements (i.e. relation to self) can become misrelated or imbalanced. A person may take flight into abstractions or infinite possibilities and ignore temporal limitations, finite relationships and responsibilities, such that the self is swallowed up in the abyss. 14 Thus in the initial creational ground of selfhood, the self is given as a relational synthesis, but the harmonious balance of and selfrelation to the synthesis elements is a task to be achieved. Having summarized the content of the task, we now turn to examine how the capacity for awareness of the task is built right into the creational ground of the self. The Creational Ground of Anxiety The placement of relation into the traditional conception of human beings as intermediate introduces, for Kierkegaard, both a dire problem and a blessed potential within the self called anxiety, and he writes the entirety of CA in an effort to understand how the existence of anxiety within a created individual makes the fall into sin possible, 14 In SD, for example, Kierkegaard writes about what happens to the self who embraces possibility at the expense of necessity : Now if possibility outstrips necessity, the self runs away from itself in possibility so that it has no necessity to return to.just when one thing seems possible some new possibility arises, and finally these phantasms succeed one another with such speed that it seems although everything were possible, and that is the very moment the individual himself has finally become nothing but an atmospheric illusion. SD, 66.

8 24 without being its cause. Throughout much of CA, Kierkegaard deals with anxiety as the presupposition or explanation of sin in terms of its origin. 15 He seeks to avoid deterministic explanations of hereditary sin and tries show how the presence of anxiety places every individual, in a qualitative sense, in exactly the same position as Adam was in terms of the possibility of falling into sin. 16 Here, two points of clarification are in order. First, by bringing the category of anxiety into the picture, Kierkegaard is trying to see how far psychology can bring us toward an explanation (though not a cause) of the fall. 17 Consequently, much of CA, as the book s subtitle suggests, is a simple psychologically orienting deliberation regarding hereditary sin. This means that in most cases, the anxiety Kierkegaard deals with has to do 15 This is clearly indicated by the title of the first chapter in CA: Anxiety as the Presupposition of Hereditary Sin and as Explaining Hereditary Sin Retrogressively in Terms of its Origin. CA, 25. We must not assume however, that the attention Kierkegaard gives to hereditary sin means that he is out to simply explain how human beings passively inherit a sinful state. Rather, Kierkegaard deals precisely with the fall into sin as a personal act, showing how the constitutional presence of anxiety in human beings leads to the point of an unexplainable leap into sin on the part of each individual. 16 In terms of the possibility for each individual to fall, here Kierkegaard is careful to distinguish between qualitative alignment with Adam, but quantitative difference. Those of us who come after Adam are recipients in a way that Adam was not of a quantitative build-up of sinfulness in the world, including generational sin, sinful societal structures, and the like (CA, 32-33). Here, C. Stephen Evans s summary statement is quite helpful, since we do not have the space or time to develop this area here: In the Concept of Anxiety Vigilius Haufniensis maintains that every individual is both himself and the race (CA 28). Original sin is not simply a physical, inherited malady. To the extent that I am a sinner, it is because I have chosen to be a sinner, just as Adam chose sin. Such a choice is scientifically inexplicable, but that simply shows that sin must be understood as the result of freedom (CA 32-33, 51, 92). Qualitatively, therefore, the sin of every individual is the same. This does not mean, however, that sin does not have real consequences for the individual and for the race. The individual who is born to a sinful race does not begin life with a blank slate, but as possessing sinful inclinations, which he or she did not choose him or herself and which qualitatively differ from the innocence of Adamic Eden. C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard s View of the Unconscious in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. Martin J. Matustik and Merold Westphal (Indiana University Press, 1995), For our limitations regarding the field of psychology, see introduction, note 30.

9 25 with what happens within a person prior to their own fall into sin. 18 Thus, as is our aim, we are dealing primarily with Kierkegaard s view of the creational ground of human selfhood. The second point springs logically from the first, as it helps to clarify what exactly Kierkegaard means by placing anxiety in Eden. In CA, Kierkegaard does not define essential anxiety as an affection, emotion or consequence of a fearsome object; it is not a fretful response to a perceived or real threat. For Kierkegaard (at least in CA), anxiety is not pathological or object-based, but is rather an ontological characteristic; it is a basic structural element of human being that does not spring from any externality or circumstantial vicissitude. 19 In what follows we will attempt to explain the significance of this category for Kierkegaard only in terms of its existence as part of the human self s creational ground. The soul-body dialectic we mentioned above is, for Kierkegaard, related to the earliest stages of human life and personal consciousness. Consequently he speaks of this polarity in terms of the consciousness of children. 20 Thus these two poles (body/soul) possess a quality of immediacy, an immediate unity wherein an individual rests in a state of ignorance, peace and repose, an innocence like that of Adam and Eve prior to any 18 Though not developed here, the whole issue of sin as an act versus sin as a state is a hotly debated issue within Kierkegaard scholarship. There are times when Kierkegaard seems to affirm both, and in his journals he even appears to align with Augustine s view of original sin as a state. For more on this complex issue, see Lee Barrett, Kierkegaard s Anxiety and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin in IKC (CA), It is important to note that for Kierkegaard, anxiety can become pathologically tied to sin. However in its essence or fundamental form, it is not pathological. For Kierkegaard, anxiety comes from God s hand as a consequence of the relational way we have been created. Thus, as Evans puts it, Anxiety is not the cause of sin, and it does not explain why human beings sin. However, it does explain why it is possible for human beings to sin. C. Stephen Evans, Søren Kierkegaard s Christian Psychology: Insight for Counseling and Pastoral Care (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), While we will not go into Kierkegaard s analysis of the state of children in particular, we must note here that his attributing of the soul-body immediacy to children makes sense, in that here we are dealing with human selfhood at its least self-conscious and least self-reflective. Of course, in any investigation of Kierkegaard s view of creational selfhood, this is the proper place to start, since on an existential-phenomenological level, this posture of innocence and immediacy is equivalent for Kierkegaard with the Edenic state of human beings.

10 26 knowledge of good and evil. In this immediate state the third element of spirit, which introduces the self as self-relation and task, lies suspended in a state of dreaming. However, since spirit is precisely the self for Kierkegaard, it naturally projects its own actuality and in doing so, directly disturbs the peaceful, ignorant immediacy of the soulbody synthesis. 21 Since this dreaming spirit constitutes the self, the self in ignorant immediacy is drawn to it; it is drawn to itself, which it does not yet fully possess. This is why Kierkegaard famously defines anxiety as a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy and as a quality that is uniquely a mark of human beings as opposed to animals. 22 It will also be helpful here to clarify further how Kierkegaard defines anxiety [Angest] which cannot be rendered clearly in English. Kierkegaardian commentator Arnold Come notes that in Danish, Angest has both a positive and a negative connotation at the same time, whereas in English only negative aspects are heard. 23 Come isolates a key quotation from CA that captures these two aspects: This anxiety belongs so essentially to the child that he cannot do without it. Though it causes him anxiety, it captivates him by its pleasing anxiousness [Baengstelse]. 24 Come suggests that the closest the English language might come to this pleasing anxiousness would be the thought of an anxiousness to get going, in its positive, future-oriented sense. 25 In summary, on the other side of this analysis what we essentially have in hand is 21 CA, 41, Ibid., 42 (emphasis original). 23 Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen s University Press, 1997), CA, Come, 166.

11 27 Kierkegaard s treatment of the psychological implications arising from what is for him, at least in part, a relational achievement theory of the self. 26 Because he holds the ontological and the ethical together here, each self is placed in a situation of having to become itself in relation to itself; it is this dynamic relation to self that makes anxiety not only possible, but a fundamental aspect of human consciousness. All of this is of course very confusing, and here two significant quotations help to bring all of these pieces together: Innocence is ignorance. In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit but is psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition. The spirit in man is dreaming. In this state there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret to innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety. Dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself. 27 So spirit is present, but as immediate, as dreaming. Inasmuch as it is now present, it is in a sense a hostile power, for it constantly disturbs the relation between soul and body, a relation that indeed has persistence and yet does not have endurance, inasmuch as it first receives the latter by spirit. On the other hand, spirit is a friendly power, since it is precisely that which constitutes the relation. What, then, is man s relation to this ambiguous power? How does spirit relate itself to itself and to its conditionality? It relates itself as anxiety. Do away with itself, the spirit cannot; lay hold of itself, it cannot, as long as it has itself outside itself. Nor can man sink down into the vegetative, for he is qualified as spirit; flee away from anxiety, he cannot, for he loves it; really love it, he cannot, for he flees from it. Innocence has now reached its uttermost point. It is ignorance; however, it is not an animal brutality but an ignorance qualified by spirit, and as such innocence is precisely anxiety, because its ignorance is about nothing. 28 While this text is central for Kierkegaard s understanding of creational humanity, its 26 C. Stephen Evans notes that in the field of philosophical anthropology, relational achievement theory is one answer to the question: What is a self? In this theory a human being is seen to be a self in terms of having a special status, a status that is linked to social relationships. On such a view, a human being may become a self, or might cease to be a self. Evans argues, rightly in my view, that Kierkegaard leans toward an achievement theory, while also retaining something of a traditional metaphysical view of human beings as a substance, an ontological entity or thing with certain characteristics. Evans, Who is the Other, CA, Ibid.,

12 28 latent opacity begs several clarifying remarks. First, the actuality of the self, here spoken of as spirit, is both a friendly and a hostile power. It both attracts and repels and the fallout is the anxiety over nothing. This situation comes about precisely because human beings are more than a mere dyadic synthesis of body and soul, they are triadic beings who are qualified as spirit. Again, we must recall that the spirit qualification is that element of created selfhood that constitutes a task, it is something that the self is, but also that which it must become. 29 Second, when we make these connections, it becomes evident that anxiety is a constituent part of creational human being; it is a necessary result of the relational character of creational selfhood, which we described above. This is why Kierkegaard says, at the close of CA, If a human being were a beast or angel, he could not be in anxiety. Because he is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety 30 In light of this reality, Reidar Thomte can speak, in his introduction to CA, of Kierkegaard s anxiety over nothing as that pregnant anxiety that is a pristine element in every human being. 31 And, in reference to the source of this element, Arnold Come rightly concludes that for Kierkegaard, there is an infinite and absolute goodness that never leaves the human spirit alone but implants an inescapable angst at the core of human consciousness, an angst that beckons the spirit outward and onward. 32 Come s comment here provides an appropriate janus. Having established anxiety as a core element of creational being, we turn now to expand on its instrumentality. 29 Cf. Evans, Who is the Other (7), where he argues that The self I must become is in some sense a substantial self. 30 CA, Reidar Thomte, Historical Introduction to CA (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), xiii. 32 Come, 136.

13 29 The Instrumentality of Anxiety What we have explored above is only the first stage in a progressive concentration of the state of innocence. In CA Kierkegaard moves his Edenic self through varying degrees of self-consciousness in relation to awareness of itself as a task. What is important for us to note here, is that anxiety is the agent within the self that propels each person toward a more concrete realization of their own freedom. C. Stephen Evans puts it simply: anxiety [is] the companion of freedom. 33 Thus in a secondary stage of innocence, Kierkegaard notes how a child moves into a vague awareness of the possibility of being able, and this essentially is a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, possessing the same attraction-repellent effect noted above. It continues as a higher form of ignorance because this immediate self, like Adam, is without the capacity to grasp what it is able to do, and so the object of such anxiety is precisely nothing. As the self becomes more reflective and anxiety more developed, Kierkegaard says that the nothing that is the object of angst becomes, as it were, more and more of a something. 34 In other words, the self in innocence progressively moves into an increasing realization of personal possibility a growing clarification of what its freedom might entail and this is what makes anxiety into more and more of a something; the object of anxiety solidifies. For example, on the outside edge of innocence, just prior to the fall, anxiety s object solidifies to the point at which the self clearly understands and desires its own possibilities, it own freedom, and yet becomes terrified at the prospect of failing to 33 Evans, Christian Psychology, CA, 55.

14 30 become the self it is called out to be. 35 Arnold Come summarizes the whole process in this way: For Kierkegaard, the five-fold concentration of the nothing of innocence described above is what sets the stage for the decisive event in which the child/youth will become conscious of being constructed as a unity of both the sensuous (finitude) and the psychic (infinitude), namely, when the child/youth is able to pervade [the synthesis] differentially, will then be aroused by the passionate determination to posit or actualize that synthesis, and hence, in this way, will seek to become her/his potential self The point of this discussion is simply to show that for Kierkegaard, there is a telos of the self for which anxiety serves as agent, due to the creational constitution of human beings. In short, anxiety appears to be a progressively revelatory agent, ever sharpening the focus of the self on its own freedom, in both its limitations and terrifying possibilities, ever disrupting the comfortable stasis of immediacy. This is why we have argued that for Kierkegaard, anxiety is non-pathological in its essence (though it can become so). Rather, it both is a necessary aspect of human being that springs from our creational constitution, and possesses a quality of instrumentality in relation to freedom. In the International Kierkegaard Commentary (IKC) on CA, Dan Magurshak eloquently brings these threads together, effectively calling us back to the original immediate synthesis of body/soul: No matter how far one has developed, unless one has achieved complete self-realization, anxiety s disclosure of possibility will always be disquieting. The possibility is that calls for decision will always be experienced as threatening the self-integration achieved thus far. Anxiety, then, in its essential moments, is the fundamental mode of affective selfawareness in which a person discovers the possibility of his free self-determination and its existential possibilities Come states this quite well: as one in innocence is powerfully excited and allured by the freedom s possibility, so now one is also terrified and repelled by the possibility of failure. Come, 168. Evans, on the other hand, describes this as the essentially ambiguous possibility that I may fail to be anything at all.terrifyingly, this possibility both repulses and attracts me. I want to will my own independence and autonomy, even if it means my destruction. Evans, Christian Psychology, Come, Daniel Magurshak, The Keystone of the Kierkegaard-Heidegger Relationship, in IKC (CA), 173. Here we must note our disagreement with Magurshak s use of the phrase, free self-determination. Against this stands

15 31 Thus far we have examined that, in his conception of the constitutional ground of creational selfhood, Kierkegaard aligns himself with traditional conceptions of the self by viewing the human person as an intermediate being, situated somewhere between the dialectical poles of body and soul, finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility, and temporality and eternality. Yet as we have noted, Kierkegaard introduces the new element of the self as a relation to itself, and this introduces human selfhood as a task to be achieved. For Kierkegaard, this shape of human being has been constituted by God, who himself built the task orientation of selfhood right into its structural constitution. Consequently, Kierkegaard holds that anxiety is a necessary, fundamental aspect of humanness, which acts as a revelatory agent, illumining the self s possibilities and freedom in a way that both attracts and repels it. II. Referential Ground of the Self: God and Others We have established that for Kierkegaard, selfhood is both a creational given, and a task to be achieved, and thus created with the possibility of anxiety. We have also established that for Kierkegaard, God, who constituted man a relation, is the origin and ground of the creational self. However, Kierkegaard s definition of the self and its task as a relation that relates itself to itself has caused considerable confusion for scholars. Is the task of selfhood merely self-referential? Is Kierkegaard s ideal self the archetypal acosmic individualist whose sole purpose is existential self-authenticity? In Kierkegaard s wake, many existentialist thinkers preeminently Jean Paul Sartre have indeed taken their thinking in all that Kierkegaard says about the self as an established relation that is called, precisely in the act of becoming itself, to rest transparently in the power that established it (SD, 44). Even amidst his emphasis on the ethical task of selfhood, Kierkegaard never loses sight of the self s inability to bring this about autonomously.

16 32 this direction by saying that the self s task is to become fully authentic with reference primarily to one s own subjectivity. 38 This is not Kierkegaard s position. As we will presently demonstrate, Kierkegaard holds that self-relation necessarily means relation to an other, an assertion by which, we will argue, Kierkegaard sets up a divine referential ground, or fundamental reference point of the created self and its task before God. Indeed for Kierkegaard, the self receives its creational being and constitutional shape from God, but an ineradicable aspect of this being is the vertical orientation of the self toward God, which makes the task of selfhood possible only in absolute, referential relation to God. 39 Referential Ground in The Concept of Anxiety As we investigate Kierkegaard s conception the self s vertical ground, we must reiterate what we have said elsewhere, that CA is both an early book in Kierkegaard s corpus, and widely considered one of the most difficult of Kierkegaard s works. 40 Consequently CA will not be our definitive treatment of this referential aspect of selfhood. However, it does make good start at moving us on into Kierkegaard s more definitive and clear referential 38 Though of course there is a whole stream of existentialist thinking which sees relation to others as an essential, ontological element of human selfhood. Thinkers in this camp include Albert Camus, Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. 39 The phrase vertical ground may be an oxymoron, but it is an intentional one. It bespeaks of both the vertical relation of the self who is, for Kierkegaard, always standing infinitely before God, and this relation is precisely the ground of the self who cannot become him/herself without it. As we have noted above, the relationality of the self (here with reference to God) is, in part, the constitutional ground of the self. While we have said that the constitutional ground clearly includes relational elements, here we focus in exclusively and more comprehensively on that relational component in terms of its reference point in God; yet it is more than a reference point, since it is at once the ground of selfhood also. Thus: vertical ground. 40 Reidar Thomte, in the historical introduction to CA, xii. In light of these two issues, the anthropological study of CA must always keep the conclusive statements of SD within its purview, as our method will indicate by moving from this section into some key texts in SD. This method is appropriate for exclusive studies on Kierkegaard, but especially apropos when looking for connections with Walker Percy, since he repeatedly acknowledges the significant impact of SD on his anthropology and writings.

17 33 statements in SD. We have already noted that in CA, Kierkegaard describes the human being as a synthesis of body and soul united by the third term of spirit, which he equates with the self that each person is and must become. In CA however, Kierkegaard goes on to add additional texture to his initial conception of human selfhood, and this brings a wholly new and transformational category into play: Man, then, is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. 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. 41 In this text Kierkegaard appears to imply that the second synthesis that is the expression for the first synthesis is that of the temporal and the eternal, united and sustained by the third term of spirit (self). However, shortly after drawing up this second synthesis, Kierkegaard surprisingly equates the third term, spirit, with the eternal, the latter of which is one of the two dialectical poles of the temporal-eternal synthesis: 42 The synthesis of the psychical [soul] and the physical [body] is to be posited by spirit; but spirit is eternal, and the synthesis is, therefore, only when spirit posits the first synthesis along with the second synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. 43 Here is the crucial moment where Kierkegaard equates spirit (self) with the eternal, and this second category is both a lynchpin, but also maddeningly complex Kierkegaardian concept. Thus for our purposes here, we will merely 41 CA, 85; I owe this insight to Mark C. Taylor, who points out that...there are four terms which Kierkegaard used do designate one aspect of the self system: spirit, eternal, freedom, and self. Taylor goes on to analyze the implications of Kierkegaard s equation of these terms. Taylor, Time s Struggle with Space, CA, (emphasis mine).

18 34 draw up its broad contours. 44 For Kierkegaard, the eternal speaks of both a subjective quality of human being that has its ground in God, and the objective reference point, the absolute standard and telos of human becoming. 45 As the text above indicates, by equating the terms self, spirit and eternal, Kierkegaard tightly binds the subjective constitution of the self as eternal, to an objective reference point in God as eternal. Here it seems evident that the eternal category introduces what Kierkegaard has taken for granted all along, that there is an objective, transcendent orientation to being a self that is discernible within the constitutional subjectivity of human being. As Louis Dupre states, The eternal, as such, introduces a transcendent dimension, absent from the previous categories, that wholly transforms the existing synthesis. 46 Dupre further notes how thoroughly the category of the eternal pervades and relativizes all other aspects of Kierkegaard s view of the human self in a way that precludes a self-determined view of human being: [Kierkegaard] was fully aware of the consequences involved in simply identifying selfhood with self-determination and thereby tying it to an insurmountable temporality. He also took measures to avoid them. For him the ultimate category of selfhood is not infinite possibility, which is indefinite openness, but eternity. Moreover, the category of 44 For more on the eternal, see Dupre (IKC [CA]) and Taylor, as well as CA 85-93, where Kierkegaard works out the intricacies of the relation of the eternal to temporality, and the designations of past, present and future. Here Kierkegaard states that the eternal is the present or the moment in which time and eternity touch each other within time, and only with the moment does history begin (CA, 86-87; 89). These texts show that for Kierkegaard, the eternal is a fundamental category of the self because without it, there can be no temporal-developmental self-relation as an individual engages the task of human becoming. By recovering the moment for each human being, the eternal orients the self toward the future. And, when the self is designated and qualified as eternal, the future invades the present synthesis in the same way that possibility invades it and draws the self onward and outward toward authentic selfhood through the agent of anxiety. 45 Stephen Dunning notes that many interpreters see the eternal as external to the human subject. Against this, he argues that this concept involves the internalization of the eternal, and he applauds this move as one of Kierkegaard s most significant characterizations of the divine, namely, the concept of the eternal as an other that can only be known inwardly. Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaard s Systematic Analysis of Anxiety, in IKC (CA), Louis Dupre, Of Time and Eternity, in IKC (CA), (emphasis mine).

19 35 eternity is not merely one element of a concluding synthesis.the relation to the eternal that concludes the constitution of selfhood has no dialectical counterpart. But since this relation also penetrates all other temporal aspects of the self, the eternal must, in addition, establish a bipolar synthesis with the temporal. Without this final synthesis the eternal would simply abolish the temporal and suppress the entire process of free selfrealization. Hence, the eternal, though clearly transcending the temporal, must also relate to it. It could not enter the existing synthesis without inserting itself into it as one of the two elements of a new synthesis. But it is the eternal alone that determines the self as spirit. 47 It is indeed the eternal alone that determines the self as spirit, because for Kierkegaard the self cannot relate itself to its own temporality without also being related to the eternal. A vertical orientation is a necessary element for a being which must relate itself to its own temporality. Kierkegaard explains this further by arguing that time itself is merely an infinite succession, and only when the category of the eternal is introduced do the distinctions of past, present and future gain any meaning at all. 48 In other words, an individual cannot relate to herself, that is, acquire a history in relation to herself, without also relating to the eternal which places her precisely in the moment where such relation takes place. 49 In this way, any movement of the self toward becoming fully human is impossible without the designation of eternity invading and defining time. 50 Thus the eternal as such becomes the 47 Ibid., 123. One textual piece of evidence showing the preeminence of the eternal here, is that by equating spirit and eternal, Kierkegaard makes the eternal both a pole of the temporal-eternal synthesis and the third uniting element. This adds strength to Dupre s assertion here that it penetrates all other temporal aspects of the self and that it is the eternal alone that determines the self as spirit. 48 CA, 85ff. 49 The moment is a vastly complex concept of Kierkegaard s, but in brief we can say that at bottom, it appears to be that which enables an individual to achieve a conscious relation to her own temporality: 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 (CA, 89). In addition, it is interesting to note that Kierkegaard sees the Incarnation as a key moment in history when the moment is fully realized. 50 Without delving too deeply into Kierkegaard s complex view of time and selfhood, we must mention that Kierkegaard exerts a great deal of effort to show how the designations of past, present and future have no

20 36 primary designation of the self as spirit, placing the ground and task of the creational self in time, in an irreducible relation to it. With his introduction of the eternal in CA, Kierkegaard has begun the process of teasing out his view of the divine referential ground, the verticality that also belongs inextricably to the constitution of creational selfhood. What remains is to shed the lingering ambiguity involved in his concept of the eternal, whereby this vertical referentiality comes into sharper focus. For this task we turn to SD. Referential Ground in The Sickness unto Death The referentially vertical ground and orientation of the self immediately rush to the fore in the opening pages of SD: Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself or been established by another. A few lines later, Kierkegaard answers his own query: The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. 51 Here we have an explicit statement indicating that the human self is established in such a way that self-relation necessitates relation to another. About a page later, Kierkegaard defines another more specifically when he describes the ideal state of the self: in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it. 52 Further, in the latter half of SD, the power is identified as God, and Kierkegaard meaning apart from the eternal category, the latter also being that which gives the moment its content and meaning in relation to temporality. 51 Emphasis mine. Here we ve chosen the Hong translation, which uses the term another, in contrast with Hannay s phrase, something else. Another seems to be more consistent with the whole of SD, which later on, plainly identifies God as the one who has established the self. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), SD, 44. For this cit. and hereafter, the Hannay translation is used.

21 37 argues that the teleological task of selfhood is only oriented toward and defined by God: The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude, which relates to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can only be done in relation to God. 53 As Kierkegaard progressively develops this concept, he underscores the magnitude of what it means for an individual as spirit, as eternal, to have this referentially vertical ground and orientation of always existing before God : what an infinite accent falls on the self by having God as the criterion! 54 And, the phrase before God becomes a favorite of Kierkegaard s for stressing the reality of divine referentiality and its implications for the self, whether consciously known or not: Every human existence not conscious of itself as spirit, or not personally conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some abstract universal (state, nation, etc.), or in the dark about its self, simply takes its capacities to be natural powers, unconscious in a deeper sense of where it has them from, takes its self to be an unaccountable something Here is a moment at which ontology and ethics come together. Ontologically, the human self is qualified as spirit, as eternal, irrespective of consciousness and is in absolute relation to and accountable before God. However ethically, it appears that transparency before God is an option, a relational telos that the self may leave off in favor of any variety of selfopacities. As in CA, the referential ground of creational selfhood appears to include both what the self constitutionally is, and what it must become. This is even more clear where Kierkegaard indicates that being a self who is before God also amounts to an invitation for intimacy with God: 53 Ibid., 59 (emphasis mine). 54 Ibid., Ibid., 76.

22 38 And now Christianity! Christianity teaches that this single human being, and so every single human being, whether husband, wife, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student, etc., this single human being is before God - this single human being, who might be proud to have spoken once in his life with the king, this human being who hasn't the least illusion of being on an intimate footing with this or that person, this human being is before God, can talk with God any time he wants, certain of being heard; in short this human being has an invitation to live on the most intimate footing with God! 56 We have certainly established that for Kierkegaard, the self that is a relation to itself is clearly not an autonomous, individualistic and self-referential being. If Kierkegaard had stopped with a view of the self merely as a relation that relates itself to itself, then Sartre would indeed have been justified in turning Kierkegaard s existentialism into a thoroughgoing anthropology of subjectivity. Rather, the self is not only qualified as eternal, but is established in a way that both defines the transcendent orientation of selfhood, and issues a call for the self to become its true self by resting transparently in the power that established it. 57 The importance of this transcendent category is clear not only in SD, but throughout Kierkegaard s corpus. However one task yet remains. Many scholars have noted that in SD in particular, Kierkegaard glaringly omits any reference to horizontal relations, though some scholars argue that the latter is presupposed, though undeveloped in SD. 58 Does the vertical 56 Ibid., SD, Sylvia Walsh, in her article, On Masculine and Feminine Forms of Despair (IKC [SD]), calls the omission of the human other rather puzzling in light of Kierkegaard s treatment of it elsewhere, especially in Kierkegaard s Works of Love, which we will turn to shortly. Arnold Come goes further: Surely, this view is implicit in one of Kierkegaard s basic contentions in Sickness: that God has built into the very fabric of the human creature the potentiality of being spirit/self so that no human can ever get rid of this concession and demand from the Eternal, because if spirit-love (Kjerlighed) to both God and Neighbor is the fulfillment of selfhood, then an essential relation to neighbor is a given relationship just as is the relation to self: in the very fabric of existence. If Kierkegaard had made this insight explicit in Sickness, he would have defined the self as a relation that relates to itself and, in so doing, also relates simultaneously to both the Power that established it and to its neighbor. Come, 210.