Kierkegaard and the Origins of the Post- Modern Self

Transcription

1 Kierkegaard and the Origins of the Post- Modern Self Michael Weston If traditional metaphysics sought to find some point of reference transcendent to or immanent within our forms of thought and practice which could serve to validate or discredit them, then the figures we are inclined to call post-modern have, in various ways, tried to show this project as misconceived. Kierkegaard is often twinned with Nietzsche as a major source of this move. John Caputo in his new book On Religion tells us that today a good many post-modernists number [Kierkegaard] among their prime progenitors (Caputo 2001: 51), and cites his attack on Hegel s systematic ambitions in support of this claim, an attack which was part of Kierkegaard s general rejection of the necessity for an appeal to what Johannes Climacus calls objective truth to justify subjective truth, the truth of appropriation. The possibilities of subjectivity are to be liberated from having to answer to a philosophical tribunal. Yet, when we ask what these possibilities are for Kierkegaard, we nevertheless find them subject to a demarcation of intelligibility the nature of which is far from clear. In their Supplement to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the Hongs give us the following excerpt from Kierkegaard s Journals: their [the pseudonymous authors] entire importance... unconditionally does not consist in making any new proposal, some unheard of discovery... but simply and solely in precisely the express opposite, in once again reading through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of existence-relationships, all the old and familiar text... (in margin) the original text of individual or human existence relationships (Kierkegaard 1992: 115). It can be dangerous, of course, to use Journal entries: they were not intended for publication, may contain ideas Kierkegaard would have rejected, and may constitute drafts for the varied voices of the pseudonyms whose opinions cannot simply be attributed to Kierkegaard. Nevertheless, I m inclined to think this has an authentic ring to it. The excerpt tells us that there is an original text of existence-relationships, that the spectrum of existence- relationships is already given and that it is familiar, in some sense a matter of existing knowledge. The range of possible existence-relationships has already been demarcated and is already known. Kierkegaard s pseudonymous writings propose nothing new because there can be nothing new here: all has been circumscribed by the original text. This immediately makes one want to ask how Kierkegaard knows this. European Journal of Philosophy 10:3 ISSN pp Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

2 Kierkegaard and the Post-Modern Self 399 Is it to be taken as a brute datum, exemplified in history but against which there could be contrary factual evidence? But this would hardly justify the confident tone Kierkegaard adopts here. Or is it to be derived, in an a priori demonstration, from the notion of existence-relationship which restricts the possibilities to those we have already historically encountered? What is it which determines there can be no new proposal here? This issue arises, I think, from within Kierkegaard s published writings in relation to his interpretation of the work of Friedrich Schlegel. I intend to show that Kierkegaard misinterprets Schlegel because he operates with a conception of the self (capable of different inflexions) which is embodied within certain historical forms of existence relationships. Seen from this perspective, Schlegel appears to present us with a proposed form of existence which is incoherent and can only be adopted through self-deception. However, I shall suggest, with reference to Schlegel s texts, that he is more properly understood as proposing what Kierkegaard has denied is possible, a new form of existence relationship, the articulation of which requires the generation of a new field of concepts in relation to the self, a field whose exploration is at the heart of many so-called post-modern thinkers. My strategy, therefore, will be to contrast Kierkegaard s interpretation of Schlegel, situated within the context of the existence relationships he recognizes, with Schlegel s own writings in order to characterize the nature of its misunderstanding. I then trace Kierkegaard s misinterpretation to certain preconceptions about the notion of the self found in The Concept of Irony, and contrast this conception with the emerging new understanding in Schlegel, before finally briefly relating this to some contemporary developments. Schlegel is discussed at some length in The Concept of Irony and is I think fairly obviously the model for the aesthete A in Either/Or. Judge William in his criticisms of A identifies an existence relationship as a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and of its purpose (Kierkegaard 1987: 179), and claims that one must either live an aesthetic or an ethical conception of this significance. Such a view is supplemented rather than negated by a religious conception which appears as an accentuation of and concentration on the relation to the infinite which is already involved, as the Judge repeatedly asserts, in the ethical. One only comes to the religious through the ethical, and the ethical maintains its claim, although relativized now by the primacy of the claim of the infinite itself. According to Judge William, an aesthetic view of life is one which sees its meaning as lying in enjoying life. Such enjoyment is dependent on external or/and internal conditions which the individual herself cannot determine: the maintenance of health and beauty, the achievement of wealth and position, the successful development of a talent, and so forth. The self of the aesthetic individual, who she considers herself to be and the story she can tell about what her life is essentially, will, therefore, be determined by contingent factors, what may or may not befall her. The ethical, on the other hand, is presented by the judge as centred on freedom; indeed, the ethical self is, he says, freedom. Ethically one takes over what one has been given, in the way of talents, abilities, social and historical situation, and physicality, through unconditional choice. Choice is,

3 400 Michael Weston therefore, initially the choice of choice itself, of choosing oneself in an absolute sense. The ethical self has an internal continuity given by the operation of the individual s active unconditional choice. Her history is not, as with the aesthetic individual, the sum of what has happened to her in relation to her desires, but, is her own work, as the judge puts it. Her talents become the basis for vocation, 1 her sexuality for marriage, and, since her choices are unconditional, she accepts what may befall. She takes over her past, what has been given, in relation to the infinite (that is, not in terms of finite conditions) and thus forms herself as a single individual who has not only a personal but a social self. Taking over oneself in relation to the infinite in this sense is something we all can do: it is the universal task, as the judge says. Such a view Kierkegaard himself expresses in the Journals (Kierkegaard : entry 4444) and contrasts its universality with the exceptional which characterizes the religious (4469). The religious form of existence gives the primacy in the individual s life to the infinite itself. Here the task is not, as with the ethical, to try to live the exercize of one s talents, relationships and physical life in relation to the infinite, but, as it were, to infinitize oneself. The ethical life is lived in the world of family and work, its orientation is outwards, although a movement illuminated by the infinite. In this way, it depends on conditions (the existence of institutions, members of one s family, one s own characteristics, and so forth), but ones which are chosen in the absolute sense. Religiously, one engages in a voluntary giving up of such conditions, in the sense of one s attachment to them, of severing all ties with the world. To die to the world means voluntarily to give up the things of the earth. This is Christianity (3768). This cannot be done of one s own power and hence the recourse to grace (3772). The religious existence in this sense seeks a direct relation to the infinite, one not mediated through the social forms of family, work and leisure. As such, the religious life embodies the possibility of the primacy of the relation to the infinite requiring the violation of what otherwise would be requirements of the ethical life, a hypothesis pictured for us in Fear and Trembling by Abraham s intended sacrifice of Isaac. The religious self, formed in terms of the primacy of the infinite, does not live the continuity of the ethical. That continuity was formed by the individual s maintenance of their absolute choice, through their own effort: the attempt to make themselves. But the religious individual, although involved actively in dying to the world, is both dependent on grace and open to the possibility of being subject to the demand for evidence of the primacy of the infinite in their lives and so for a course of action in the world which violates the requirements of ethical life. Such an individual will not be able to explain what they do by appealing to the standards of the ethical life: they can only express it to themselves and others as a command of the infinite directed to them as individuals and not to people in general. In this way, the religious self is dependent for the story it can tell of itself, its continuity, on something other than itself. It has the continuity of a task, of dying to the world, yet the successes and failures of this cannot be self-attributed: they are gifts of grace. And even this continuity is open to the possibility of a disruption by what de Silentio calls a teleological suspension of

4 Kierkegaard and the Post-Modern Self 401 the ethical. If the aesthetic self is what it is courtesy of contingency, and the ethical self is what it becomes through its own powers of commitment to its absolute choice, the religious self is a gift of grace. What then of Schlegel? In The Concept of Irony, Schlegel is characterized as attempting to present an ironic form of existence, one which directs irony at the entire given actuality at a given time and under certain conditions.... It is not this or that phenomenon but the totality of existence that it contemplates [under the aspect of irony] (Kierkegaard 1989: 254). Now, of course, something similar could be said of Socrates who too engaged in an ironic rejection of the actuality of his time. In The Concept of Irony Kierkegaard identifies Socratic irony as the separation of subjectivity from the substantiality of Greek life, that is, as the recognition of subjective freedom in relation to the actuality of life. In this, he freed the single individual from submersion in communal ethical life (p. 176). But his activity was essentially negative. He did not then think the nature of life lived in terms of this freedom, and so in relation to the infinite: he did not, in this way, project an ethical or religious existence. He is an intermediate stage between the substantiality of the immersion of the individual in communal life and the life of the free individual. As such, he is true, Kierkegaard claims, to the nature of irony (p. 213). Irony is essentially transitional, the rejection of an actuality but without the positive projection of an ideality (p. 213). 2 Herein lies Schlegel s difference from Socrates. Schlegel, according to Kierkegaard, tries to make ironic distance from historical actuality into a form of existence itself. The Schlegelian ironist frees himself from his historical actuality and then tries to make this negative freedom the principle of his existence. Negative freedom is the recognition that, as free, one is not bound by the substance of one s historical actuality. This is the Socratic insight, and the basis from which the ethical as the exercise of the positive freedom of absolute choice can form a new way of taking over history. But Schlegel converts the ironic detachment from the claims of historical and social substance into the principle of play. Freedom from the claims of actuality is freedom from all claims and so the freedom of infinite possibility. Historical actuality becomes a field in which the individual may play as he wishes. All destinies, Kierkegaard says, have for him the validity of possibility (p. 282): they can be taken on as roles and then discarded for others. Life is for him a drama in which he is a spectator even when he is the one acting (pp ). In this way, his life has no continuity save that of his abstract I and its arbitrary choices which can be changed whenever he pleases (p. 275). This detachment from engaged action means that life is nothing except moods, passive feelings in relation to the roles he plays. But to be free, he must even control the moods themselves and he does this by imposing meaning on them (p. 285). The underlying mood which gives his life the only continuity it has is, however, Kierkegaard claims, that of boredom. He claims to live poetically by playing with the roles historically and socially available to him and so seeming to create his own meaning. Yet these efforts at self-creation are only an attempt to stave off the boredom which his disengagement from actuality produces. The passivity Schlegel emphasizes in his novel Lucinde as characterizing this life is due to the impossibility of this

5 402 Michael Weston project of creating the meaning of his own life: all that is left is the yearning for such control (p. 296, footnote). We can recognize in this Judge William s criticisms of A in Either/Or. The judge charges A with wanting to liberate himself from everything established by divine and human law. This freedom then enables the project of self-creation, of living poetically by imposing his own meaning, in having his own way, with the available possibilities. His life lacks the continuity that characterizes ethical existence, ending in a multiplicity he has, the judge says, no self. Avoiding engagement in life, whether externally in ethical action or internally in the formation of religious inwardness, his life is a matter of moods, most notably a melancholy which marks the meaninglessness of his life. For the judge and the Kierkegaard of The Concept of Irony, the Schlegelian proposal is to be characterized as an essentially unstable intermediary between the aesthetic existence of enjoyment and the ethical life of absolute choice. Aesthetic existence aims at the satisfaction of its desires, whatever these may be, and this depends on conditions beyond the individual s control. Irony opens up a gap between the individual and her actuality: what is she now to choose? It then appears, as A says, that whatever you do you will regret it since to decide to follow one choice involves the impossibility of following others and a regret at lost possibilities of pleasure. The reflective aesthete responds to this by treating his desires and the possibilities they indicate as material on which to impose his own will. One enjoys things because they satisfy one self: in essence, enjoyment is a matter of having one s own way courtesy of the world. The Schlegelian aesthete according to Kierkegaard now intends to enjoy himself whatever the world may say by imposing his own meaning, creating his own significance. Yet, as the judge suggests and A sometimes recognizes, this project is incoherent, since any meaning he imposes at one moment can always be reversed the next. A can only live an illusion of complete control which masks a sense of the pointlessness of life which is the consequence of his withrawal from it. The revelation of negative freedom must be replaced by the active choice of positive freedom, of the unconditional choice of ethical existence through which a stable identity, oriented towards the unchangeableness of the infinite, may be formed. As it is, A has no self, only the illusion of one. The self has a history. The aesthetic self has its external history of its strivings for what it wants of finite goods, its successes and failures due to contingencies. The ethical individual has her internal history of her strivings to choose herself in her actuality in relation to the infinite. The religious individual has her history of dying to the world and the activity of grace in her life. But A has no history, no coherent story to tell. Not only can he at any point will the opposite of what he did a moment ago, but he can at any time attempt to make his past mean something quite different to him now in recollection than it did at the time. As the editor of the papers which constitute Either/Or says, a single, coherent aesthetic view of life cannot be carried out. The ordinary aesthetic individual, the ethical and religious individual, can have a self because they relate themselves, as an I, to something more or less fixed. The aesthetic individual identifies herself with some aspect or aspects of her given nature, her

6 Kierkegaard and the Post-Modern Self 403 dispositions and capacities in their historical and social context. Even if she changes her allegiance, her past will attain a new story in terms of those new aspects of her nature with which she now identifies herself. Her life will have some sort of coherent story from her own point of view. The ethical individual relates her given nature in this sense to the infinite and will have a coherent and continuous story of her forming herself in relation to this unchangeable point, while the religious individual will have the story of the infinite s activity in her life. But the Schlegelian aesthete has no fixed point in terms of which his story can be told: his I, embarked on a project of determining his own significance, must be involved in an incoherence which reveals the project as an illusory mask for the pointlessness he really feels. Thus Kierkegaard s account of Schlegel. But does it correspond with what we find in Schlegel s own writings? Schlegel situated his intellectual activity in relation to Kant, and in particular to Kant s recognition and explanation of historical conceptual change in The Critique of Judgement. Although Kant criticized metaphysics for its claim to know the nature of reality as it is in itself, he nevertheless maintained that reflection on our experience showed that we were required to believe in the actuality corresponding to the ideas of things in themselves. We are required to believe, although we cannot be said to know, that we are immortal souls embodied in a world designed by a benevolent deity to fit our capacities for thought and action who will reward us according to our moral desert after death. Our thought is directed towards the final truth about the world, as our moral lives are to be directed towards the final state of holiness, so that belief in the reality corresponding to these regulative ideas is required of us. Now, thought involves concepts and hence concept formation. In The Critique of Judgement Kant argued that concept formation, reflective judgement, presupposed the principle that the world was conceptualizable, that it was formed according to concepts we can grasp. We cannot know this to be true, but it is something the nature of our thought requires us to believe. We must regard the world as if it has been made by an intelligence although not our own, as a work of art. Schlegel, however, argued that all thought arises only in relation to paradox or the incomprehensible. It is this which provokes the formation of concepts and makes thought possible. Notions of finality are, therefore, unintelligible: isn t this entire, unending world constituted by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos? he asked rhetorically (Schlegel 1971: 268). All understanding reveals new forms of incomprehensibility: the more one knows, the more one still has to learn. Ignorance increases in the same proportion as knowledge or rather, not ignorance, but the knowledge of ignorance (Schlegel 1971: 200). The idea of the final truth involved in the Kantian ideas of reason and in the metaphysical attempt to know the nature of reality as it is in itself is incoherent, ignoring as it does what prompts thought and which must be maintained for thought to exist. What prompts thought, concept formation, is what cannot be thought, what lies beyond the grasp of concepts. This beyond cannot, therefore, be construed in terms of a final vision of an ultimate reality, in terms of Kantian Ideas of Reason, which presuppose that thought and reality can be purged of opacity. Rather, the beyond here

7 404 Michael Weston lies within thought itself, in an inevitable failure to achieve a finality which thought nevertheless desires, and so in internal paradox or incomprehensibility. Now, irony for Schlegel is a form of communication related to this source of thought. Irony he says is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great. Irony in general means a disparity between what is said and the way it is said or with the person who says it. For Schlegel, irony preserves the relation between what is said and the incomprehensible, a relation which involves a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication (Schlegel 1971: 155). In irony, what is said appears affirmed as truth, and yet the manner of its saying dislodges this appearance of finality: it s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two (Schlegel 1971: 167). In this, Schlegel recognizes that thought is necessarily paradoxical, both aiming at or claiming finality while recognizing at the same time the impossibility of such finality. Thought about thought, which has previously been philosophy directed towards truth whether as metaphysical knowledge or Kantian belief, must take on this paradoxical character, the character of something said which cannot be completely grasped, the character which Kant attributed to poetry. Philosophy and poetry, Schlegel said, must become one. The sense of poetry in Schlegel thus takes up Kant s emphasis that poetry cannot have a determinate interpretation. Kant attributed this to the role of aesthetic ideas, of symbols and images, which prompt much thought, in relation especially to the ideas of reason, but no determinate thought. Schlegel, having jettisoned the ideas of reason, sees the opacity of poetry as reflecting its preservation of a relation to the source of thought, to the incomprehensible. In poetry we are made aware of what we forget in our practical and theoretical relations to the world, that we only have the understanding we do in relation to an impenetrability which will also inhabit our current understanding and provoke new thought. Poetry shows us the world in its impenetrability. It is this which characterizes, then, the primordial poetry of the world and which equally applies to ourselves: nobody has ever understood himself yet (Schlegel 1971: 132). The human being can concern himself forever with himself and forever find new matter to occupy him (Schlegel 1971: 138). Just as our understanding of the world stands in a relation to opacity, so does our understanding of ourselves, of who we are, of the self we are aware of. The present self has emerged in relation to opacity and contains within itself what can prompt change. To realize this is to see life as a constant venture into the unknown: Whoever desires the infinite does not know what he desires (Schlegel 1971: 149). Here the infinite is the negation of the finite from within, that which prevents any finite position of thought being final. To relate to the infinite is to relate to the opacity which prompts change. Such a life for Schlegel becomes, exists as constant becoming, without a predetermined end or idea. It is in this sense that the individual becomes their own law. Individuality is precisely what is original and eternal in man. To pursue the cultivation and development of this individuality as one s highest calling would be a

8 Kierkegaard and the Post-Modern Self 405 godlike egoism (Schlegel 1971: 247). It is this character of life which underlies the role of passivity in Schlegel s thought. A relation to what is beyond consciousness and knowledge as their source can only occur through passivity. We are aware of this in thought: talking and ordering are only secondary matters in all the arts and sciences: the essence is thinking and imagining, and these are possible only in passivity (Schlegel 1971: 66). Thought as talking and ordering is like Kant s determinative judgement, it uses already formed concepts and theories, it runs on ready made tracks. But such tracks were not always there. Talking and ordering presuppose the formation of concepts and new ways of thinking. We don t have control of this process since it is the production of the means for any control. New concepts and ways of thinking emerge only through maintaining a passive openness to the new in our thinking. This is what is involved in creativity and life as a poem, the maintenance of a constant relation to the source of the new, and so maintaining life as alive, as not fixed, already ordered, directed towards some already understood plan or ideal. This sense of life disrupts the idea of the unity of the self where that is provided by orientation to some fixed nature or ideal; of this only a mind is capable that contains within itself simultaneously a plurality of minds and a whole system of persons, as Schlegel says (Schlegel 1971: 176). The point of the form of Schlegel s writings, in their use of irony, wit, and the fragment, is to maintain the reader s relation to the source of new thought, to keep thought and life alive. This cannot be done by a philosophical treatise which gives us something to understand. Any attempt to formulate Schlegel s position, as I have been doing, leaves itself open to the problem of how to deny finality to thought without asserting this itself as a final thought. Schlegel s procedure is, rather, to intervene in philosophical thought, to prompt a self-recognition of illusion in the claim to finality. Our thought is put again into motion through disruption, through breaking in upon the fixed patterns of our thinking so that the order imposed through history and habit becomes not fixed and dead but moving and alive. What is required is an interventionary form of writing: You are not really supposed to understand me, but I want very much for you to listen to me (Schlegel 1971: 253). To listen is to have the fixed order of one s thinking about the world or one s life disrupted and put into motion. The fragment form, which is not a fragment of a greater whole (and so is itself a paradoxical form) is an antidote to spiritual sloth (Schlegel 1971: 199). The fragment achieves its individuality through irony and wit, structures which resist understanding but which precipitate the movement of thought. Schlegel contrasts in this way the analytic writer who observes the reader as he is, and accordingly makes his calculations and sets up his machines in order to make the proper impression on him with the synthetic writer who constructs and creates a reader as he should be; he doesn t imagine him calm and dead, but alive and critical (Schlegel 1971: 156). In this sense, we should become synthetic writers of our own lives, maintaining them as living, always open to the summons of the new which will show us that we are not the selves we thought we were. In the light of this, let me now briefly review the aspects of Schlegel s vision

9 406 Michael Weston criticized by Kierkegaard and which led him to characterize it as an unstable intermediate position between the aesthetic and the ethical. Kierkegaard s claims are as follows. 1) Schlegel proposes an ironic form of existing which involves a detachment from all historical and social actualities within which 2) those actualities become possibilities for play. They are to become the material for 3) the individual to do as he pleases and so have his own way, thus living a life of enjoyment independently of conditions beyond his control. This life of play in which the individual determines what will and will not have significance for him, and how it will, is 4) what constitutes living poetically, the controlling creation of one s own meaning. 5) This project of having one s own way is, however, an illusion, since one can always reinterpret what has been and so exist in contradiction to oneself. There is nothing which coherently is my own way. This is why A lacks a self. The Schlegelian ironist, in so far as he claims to live poetically, is necessarily involved in illusion. Let me now match these charges against Schlegel s writings. 1) Irony is not the product of detachment. It is a paradoxical form of expression which recognizes a paradoxicality in human life: the necessity and impossibility of complete communication. What is central to ironic utterance is an opacity, an impossibility of even the appearance of final interpretation. This opacity 2) is essential to thought and life. It is what characterizes poetry. To live poetically is not to play from a position of mastery with historical and social actualities, but to relate to the source of living thought and life, to the source (paradox, incomprehensibility, opacity, etc.) of the new within them. It is to engage in making one s historical actuality anew. 3) Such a relation is not a matter of having one s own way but rather involves one s subordination, a passivity. Passivity is not a result of self-absorption, as Judge William claims, but rather an openness to the possibility of the advent of the new. It is something evident in all real thinking rather than the use of already existing tracks of thought. 4) To live poetically is to relate to one s own life in this way, not to create one s own meaning but to participate in maintaining a living relation to one s own life, to the constant possibility of the new. 5) This is not the proposal of an essentially illusory mastery over the meaningfullness of one s own life which results in the impossibility of continuity, history and so a sense of self. Rather, the continuity is that of constant becoming and not the repeating of an already written script. It has the history of true history, the emergence of the new in the light of which the past appears constantly differently. It does not have the coherence given by orientation to something relatively fixed, like aesthetic nature, or unchangeable, like the idea of the infinite. Rather, it has the coherence of a relation to the source of change, of the new, to what cannot be grasped, over which there can be no mastery, since it is the source of concepts which are the instruments of grasping and control. One relates to it only in the attempt to think or live differently, to remain open to the advent of the new. Kierkegaard engages in a systematic misreading of Schlegel. Why? Because Kierkegaard takes it for granted that the continuity and history implied by the

10 Kierkegaard and the Post-Modern Self 407 notion of a self can only be formed in relation to some, relatively or absolutely, fixed point, relation to which precludes radical rather than developmental change (except, of course, in the sense in which coming first into relation with the infinite involves radical change). Such a fixed point is provided by an ideal towards which development or from which degeneration is measured: the imitation of Christ, holding before oneself the ideal husband/civil servant, being tempted to aspire to be the one who has it all so beloved of the popular press, and so on. Behind such ideals lie the ideas of the infinite or our given nature. Criticizing Schlegel in The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard makes this basis for his criticism explicit. Unlike the Christian, the ethical individual or the aesthetic Greek, he says, Schlegel does not have an absolute objective. Only if the individual had such a conception can she become for herself (fur sich) what she is in herself (an sich). The Schlegelian ironist has no an sich because for him all roles are simply material for play (Kierkegaard 1989: 282). Now, it might seem as if Schlegel, on the account above, does have an ideal, that of experimental or creative life. But Schlegel would reply to this that he indeed has no an sich, no determinate ideal, since Kierkegaard s notion of an ideal is of something in terms of which the individual becomes a self having a linear history, approaching or regressing from it. Schlegel s proposal, however, involves the inapplicability of notions of development and regression in this sense. The Schlegelian self does not have a linear history. He is proposing a life which would be open to the new, whose future is essentially open. There can be no ideal external to such a life to direct change since this would preclude the creativity involved in radical change, make the future a continuation of the past. Rather, such a life must be sensitive to its own sense of life, to recognize when it has gone dead and to be open to the summons of the new. Such a life can indeed have a continuity and a history, but not that towards a given ideal, but something more like we find in the development, say, of a tradition of art where the continuity is seen retrospectively rather than prospectively. A new sense of self we might say. Schlegel s writings stand at the beginning of the attempt to sketch out such a sense, and to exemplify it in the way literature can, which has been going on in certain circles ever since. Think of D.H.Lawrence s my soul is a dark forest... my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest... gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back... I must have the courage to let them come and go (Lawrence 1971: 24). Or think of Stanley Cavell s perfectionism, which has its roots in American Romanticism, in which the self is open to the further self, in oneself and in others, which means holding oneself in knowledge of the need for change, having a self is a process of moving to, and from, nexts... the self is always attained, as well as to be attained (Cavell 1991: 125 and 12). Or think of Jacques Derrida s more recent discussions of ethics which focus upon the relation to a wholly other form of alterity (Derrrida 1995: 71) which allows there to be history in allowing the future to be future, not a projection of the present but beyond thought: There is the future. There is something to come. That can happen... and I promise in opening the future or in leaving the future open (Mouffe 1996:

11 408 Michael Weston 83). These suggest an existence-relationship which does not fall within Kierkegaard s categories, a new proposal which may in general be characterized in terms of Schlegel s original model outlined above. What is central to these proposals, indicated by Schlegel s paradox, Lawrence s gods, Cavell s repressed self or Derrida s wholly other form of alterity, is holding oneself in a relation to the source of change, both individually and, since such individual life involves the current conceptual possibilities of one s culture, socially and historically, an openness to the future. As Schlegel points out, this involves a certain passivity which is neither the passivity of the aesthetic in relation to what the world may bring for the satisfaction of its already formed desires, nor that of the religious in respect of a grace operating in the context of an active project of dying to the world and of the possibility of a teleological suspension of the ethical. It is, rather, the passivity in which one waits for new thoughts and the felt necessity of that depends on a sensitivity to when old ones have run their course. But to speak in this way, of old thoughts having run their course, is already to be thinking in terms of this conception. Judge William s relating of the finite to the infinite is precisely a rejection of the finite containing within itself its source of change as this talk of sensitivity to one s sense of life implies. That, rather, is to be located by turning from the finite to the unchangeableness of the infinite. It is just that turn which provides the fixed point in terms of which the identity of the self can be attained. For the judge, anything else must fall within the character of relative rather than absolute willing and so be, at bottom, a determination of the significance of one s life in terms of one s desires, the aesthetic life of enjoyment. But this is not so. The aesthetic life presupposes the givenness of desires whereas the Schlegelian conception involves a rejection of determination by the given in a relation to what can precipitate change over and beyond what is comprehensible in terms of one s present factual state. Hence it rejects too the relation to the infinite as that which gives a fixed continuity to one s life in favour of an infinite as the other in one s present which is the source of its possible change, as one s repressed self or the absolutely other. It proposes a new sense of self, having the continuity not of fate (the aesthetic self) nor will (the ethical self) nor grace (the religious self) but perhaps of living history, whose story can be told only retrospectively and which unfolds in an attempt to keep the future open. 3 Human beings do not just have a life, but rather live their lives in terms of some sense of its significance, in relation to what Judge William calls a life-view. Through this, they understand their lives in their continuity of direction, and so of change and transformation, and thereby they understand themselves as the selves they are. What drives directionality and change is the perception of unsatisfactoriness, what Buddhists call dukkha. But such perception can proceed from differing roots. It can arise from the perception of the discrepancy between one s present and an aesthetic goal or an ethical ideal, or from the sense of absolute discrepancy involved in the religious perception of one s nothingness before God. These are possibilities of subjectivity formed in terms of what Kierkegaard calls an absolute objective which he rightly claims Schlegel lacks. But there is also the possibility sketched by Schlegel and developed by others in varying ways, of a

12 Kierkegaard and the Post-Modern Self 409 discrepancy which is unending, not generated by relation to an absolute, but in terms of the internal possibilities of change within life, of, if you like, an internal infinite, a wholly other form of alterity, as opposed to the transcendent infinite characteristic of Kierkegaard s portrayals of ethical and religious life. Such a life would show not a linear sense of development or regression in terms of a prospective view but an historical continuity seen in retrospect, the kind of continuity characteristic of genuine history which is unpredictable, which is not an unfolding in terms of a pre-arranged plot. That there should be disagreement about the theoretical exposition of such life and its experiential development in literature is not surprizing and is indeed expected. After all, there is no essence of Christianity, but rather Christian conceptions delineate a field in terms of which conflicting interpretations and forms of life can develop. In a parallel way, Schlegel stands at the start of the development of a field of new understandings of life and subjectivity, and perhaps of religion too, although whether this can produce a new sense of Christianity itself, I don t know, and I doubt whether it would be one to find favour with Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard s infinite is transcendent in an existential sense. That is, to live in terms of this infinite is to turn away from the world, ultimately to die to it. The significance of one s life is to become immune to what happens within the world, in time. The knight of faith recovers the world from such a position of immunity: he gives thanks always, no matter what occurs, the culmination for Kierkegaard of the Christian form of existence. Such faith is a gift of grace, not something we can accomplish. But what we can do, in the light of such an ideal, is practice infinite resignation, turn inwards to practice dying to the significance of what happens in time. Hence the importance of asceticism to Kierkegaard since this represents the fundamental religious way we must live in terms of the transcendent infinite outside of the life of the knight of faith. Thus, in the Journals Kierkegaard writes: asceticism is really the view of life that regards God as the unconditioned and believes that before God this world is immersed in evil, is... a penitentiary, and asceticism voluntarily endeavours to express this idea of the world that God has (4057). Both the practice of infinite resignation and the ideal of the knight of faith are independent of actual social relations since they concern the relation of the individual to the transcendent infinite whatever those relations may be. This leads to some of Kierkegaard s more notorious pronouncements (all of which have orthodox Augustinian or Pauline precendents), on politics ( Christianity is political indifference; engrossed in higher things, it teaches submission to all public authorities (4193)), the family ( the propagation of the race is sin... Your father s guilt which brought you into existence... has been atoned but now stop (4051)), marriage ( Christianity does not want you to marry (2917), the solitary life is more pleasing to God although it is better to marry than to burn (2908)), and the society of one s fellow humans ( sociality is... a concession to human weakness... The idea of the race, of sociality, is... a middle term between God and the single individual (1377)). Schlegel s infinite, however, is immanent, to live in terms of it is to live in the world in a way responsive to the possibility of the new. To do so is to relate

13 410 Michael Weston to the world not in terms of already formed desires and so in terms of an active grasping after predetermined goals, as the aesthetic does, but rather in terms of listening, of an openness to the new. Not asceticism, but an engagement in forms of life which seeks to keep them alive, as constantly renewed. Not an indifference to politics, but an opposition to those forms of domination which attempt to suppress this sense of life and change through the imposition of fixed forms of thought and life. Not a relinquishment of sexuality, reproduction and the intimate relations within which they can take place, but a keeping of such relations alive from the impositions of habit and determination by received forms. Not sociality as a concession which ideally we could do without, but a recognition of social forms as the locus of the alterity relation to which is the very principle of living history both individual and cultural. Responsibility becomes responsiveness to this alterity. It is what Derrida has called, in a deconstructive paradoxicality, absolute responsibility, the relation to the wholly other form of alterity in one other or some other persons, but also places, animals, languages (Derrida 1995: 63). It is the relation to what prevents me from being a self, to what prevents whatever becomes manifest in language from being wholly manifest. It is the wholly other form of alterity which always summons me to thought, to responsibility and action but which can never be exhausted there, an excess which means there is always more responsibility or thought than responsibility or thought can encompass. It is why I always fail to be responsible or to think adequately, it is what necessarily disrupts the fields of consciousness, action and thought. I know that I have not done enough, and it is in this way that morality continues, that history and politics continue... The relation to the other does not close itself off and it is because of this that there is history and one tries to act politically (Mouffe 1996: 87). That is, if one wants morality, history and politics to continue rather than seeing such continuation as a perhaps unavoidable concession to a weakness which a relation to the transcendent infinite can remove. I asked at the start what could justify Kierkegaard s assertion that there was an original text of existence-relationships. His confidence seems generated by a preconceived notion of the self to be formed through such relationships. The issue of these relationships is how what is given, whether physically, socially or historically, is taken over by an I in such a way that they have a sense of themselves as individuals. The aesthetic taking over in pursuit of the satisfaction of given desires, the ethical in terms of the infinite and so absolute choice, or the religious dying to the world indeed represent ways a sense of self can be formed. But they can t be justified as the only possible existence-relationships by appeal to a sense of self which is itself already involved in their description: that is, by a notion of self defined in terms of the relation of the I to an an sich, to something fixed, relatively or absolutely, which provides the fixed point against which change or development is to be measured and which gives to the self a certain linear continuity. Notions of self are already involved in those of existence-relationships and cannot justify the latter or rule out the possibilities of new senses of self being developed through new existence-relationships. Kierkegaard misrep-

14 resents Schlegel, fails to recognize him as being involved in such a development, because his conceptions of the self are determined by an historically specific set of possible existence-relationships. Kierkegaard would, however, have been quite right to object to Schlegel s attempt to justify this development by appeal to philosophical argumentation. Kierkegaard objected in general to the idea that existence-relationships needed such justification, suggesting that such an attempt was itself part of an existence-relationship, one characterized by a prevarication which could not be lived, one of the forms of illusion under which intellectuals may live. Something similar might be said against the attempts to argue from the linguistic constitution of human life to the claim that therefore only a life of constant invitation to change can be justified. Language equally makes possible a life of ethical or religious commitment in Kierkegaard s sense and one which places at its centre the notions of creativity and the emergence of the new. The sense of our own lives should not blind us, philosophically, to other possibilities nor incline us to think that, philosophically, we can speak with an authority we must lack as one human being among others. The continuing significance of Kierkegaard s work lies above all in helping us rid ourselves of such an illusion. Michael Weston Department of Philosophy University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester CO4 3SQ UK mhweston@essex.ac.uk Kierkegaard and the Post-Modern Self 411 NOTES 1 There s no sign that the judge envisages for his wife what he takes for granted in his own case. But we can imagine conceptual space for regarding all subjects as having the capacity for unconditional choice in relation to their abilities. 2 Kierkegaard repeated this view of Socrates late in his life. See Kierkegaard , entry 4304, dated I discuss the contemporary authors cited here in Weston REFERENCES Caputo, J. (2001), On Religion, Routledge: London. Cavell, S. (1991), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Open Court: La Salle. Derrida, J. (1995), The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills, University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Kierkegaard, S. ( ), Journals and Papers, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Indiana University Press: Bloomington.

15 412 Michael Weston Kierkegaard, S. (1987), Either/Or Part Two, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press: New Jersey. Kierkegaard, S. (1989), The Concept of Irony, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press: New Jersey. Kierkegaard, S. (1992), Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Supplementary Volume, trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press: New Jersey. Lawrence, D.H. (1971), Studies in Classic American Literature, Penguin: Harmondsworth. Mouffe, C. (1996), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, Routledge: London. Schlegel, F. (1971), Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. P. Firchow, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. Weston, M. (2001), Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good, Routledge: London.