Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic
224
Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic
224Overview
Through a close consideration of his authorship in the context of nineteenth-century German idealism, Michael O'Neill Burns argues that Kierkegaard develops an ontology, anthropology and theory of the political that are outcomes of his critical appropriation of the philosophical projects of Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte. While starting out in the philosophical concerns of the nineteenth century, the book offers an interpretation of Kierkegaard that shows his relevance to philosophers and political theorists in the twenty-first century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783482047 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2015 |
| Series: | Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking the Political |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 748 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy
A Fractured Dialectic
By Michael O'Neill Burns
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Michael O'Neill BurnsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-204-7
CHAPTER 1
Idealism Before Kierkegaard
The relationship between Søren Kierkegaard and the main figures of German idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) has been historically cast in an extremely one-sided fashion. For example, Fichte, the figure most responsible for charting the idealist trajectory that would come to define the projects of both Schelling and Hegel, and who serves as a critical point of reference in the second half of Kierkegaard's dissertation, warrants very little mention in the secondary literature on Kierkegaard. Schelling has been largely dismissed as a serious influence on the work of Kierkegaard due to the negative comments Kierkegaard left in his journals after attending Schelling's inaugural Berlin lectures in 1841–1842. While the previously mentioned figures, Fichte and Schelling, have more or less been brushed aside as figures playing a substantial role in the development of Kierkegaard's thought, the literature on Hegel and Kierkegaard has grown consistently throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The problem with this literature is that it is largely concerned with perpetuating a reading in which an irrevocable gap exists between the totalizing project of Hegel's dialectical system and the ethico-religious project of Kierkegaard, which emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual human subject which stands in opposition to the system. Equally problematic has been the tendency of Kierkegaard scholars to take his reading of Hegel far too literally and use this as the hermeneutic guide for their own interpretations of Hegel. The important question lingering in the wake of the literature on the Hegel-Kierkegaard relationship is inevitably one of 'whose Hegel?' and 'which Kierkegaard?'
While for the most part the crucial relationship between German idealism and Søren Kierkegaard has tended to evade the majority of those working under the general rubric of Kierkegaard scholarship, many figures not generally associated with the work of Kierkegaard have made brief, but crucial, comments on the necessity of rethinking this relationship. In his important volume of lectures Between Kant and Hegel, German philosopher Dieter Henrich notes that it is 'impossible to understand any basic doctrine of Kierkegaard without knowing both Hegel and Fichte'. Paul Ricoeur, in an essay titled 'Philosophy After Kierkegaard', comments that 'at any rate a fresh interpretation of Kierkegaard must certainly entail a reconsideration of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel himself'. While Ricoeur's article provides a programmatic overview more than it does a step-by-step argument, he makes it clear that any future philosophical engagement with Kierkegaard must necessarily entail his being read within the philosophical context of German idealism and that this reading can equally enrich our understanding of the idealists. More recently, Lore Hühn and Philipp Schwab have echoed Henrich and Ricoeur by stating:
There is no doubt that, philosophically, German Idealism constitutes the background and point of departure for Kierkegaard's thinking. Essential concepts, ideas, and moves in Kierkegaard's oeuvre are indebted to impulses from Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and are, in the first instance, to be understood by reference back to classical German philosophy.
In a sense then, my current intention is to consider Henrich's and Ricoeur's comments as dual aspects of a method of reconsidering the relationship between the writings of Kierkegaard and the philosophical project of German idealism. With Henrich, I think it is absolutely crucial to note the manner in which a rigorous philosophical understanding of the work of Kierkegaard necessitates that one takes seriously the projects of Fichte and Hegel, as well as of Schelling. This is not for the sake of undermining the uniqueness of Kierkegaard's own project but rather so that one can see the manner in which Kierkegaard was deeply intertwined with many of the dominant philosophical debates of his age. In the second sense, following Ricoeur, it is crucial to note that this reconsideration of Kierkegaard does not simply imply that we evaluate his project in terms of the established canon of German idealism but, rather, that we equally reconsider the traditional readings of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Thus, the aim of the present chapter should be seen as an attempt to briefly chart out this sort of reading to set up the rest of the argument of the book.
A final and unexpected voice in the rallying cry to reconsider the philosophical relevance of Søren Kierkegaard through a consideration of his engagement with German idealism is Slavoj Zizek. Zizek, whose own work can best be summarized as a Lacanian and Marxist re-interpretation of the ontology of German idealism, makes the surprising move of dedicating almost an entire chapter of his 'magnum opus', The Parallax View, to his own Hegelian rereading of Kierkegaard. In this chapter Zizek focuses on what he sees to be the 'unexpected continuity between German Idealism and Kierkegaard'. Zizek goes on in this chapter to reconsider Kierkegaard's relationship to Hegel in light of Zizek's own interpretation of Hegel, one in which the flight of the owl of Minerva does not signify the closure of the system but rather reads contingency back into the seemingly necessary events of the past.
While the primary philosophical aim of this book is to develop an ontological and political reading of the works of Søren Kierkegaard, it is my claim that unless one reads Kierkegaard's works as critically responding to the figures and shared problems of the German idealist tradition, a rigorous ontological and political reading of his work is destined to fall short. In light of this, I will begin with an overview of the figures and issues of German idealism that I identify to be primary in producing a critical response from Kierkegaard. It is worth noting that in the discussion of each of these figures attention will be given specifically to the aspects of their work that Kierkegaard seems to be responding to at various junctures and, in particular, providing an account of their work that is in line with Kierkegaard's own interpretation. Because much of Kierkegaard's knowledge of idealism was transmitted to him through his teachers at the University of Copenhagen and the various texts that were made available to him during his studies, his depiction of the issues framing early-nineteenth-century German philosophy is in no way comprehensive, and in many ways his reading lacks the interpretive subtlety that one would desire. Nevertheless, the slower pace of cultural and intellectual dissemination in the nineteenth century meant that during his studies at the University of Copenhagen, both theologians and philosophers were deeply engaged in the issues of early-nineteenth-century German Idealism, and thus both the systematic framework and lingering problems of this tradition would have been deeply influential in Kierkegaard's own philosophical development.
In this book I will be reading Kierkegaard's own thought in terms of his critical reaction to the theories of immediacy, reflection and practical philosophy present in the work of the idealists. In this reading Kierkegaard's authorship can be read as an account of the subject's journey from a break with immediacy (which brings with it the emergence of freedom and the experience of anxiety), to the opening of reflection (leading to despair), to the necessity of action or practical philosophy (which is the overcoming of reflection's despair) and finally returning to a higher immediacy in the work of love. Throughout this interpretation, I will be referring to the idealist figures as representing both the problems to which Kierkegaard is critically responding, as well as providing the concepts which serve as the inspiration to Kierkegaard's creative attempt to move past idealism. The aim of the present chapter will be to provide a point of reference for the conceptual interaction with idealism that will take place in the subsequent chapters.
This chapter will proceed as follows. First, I will begin with a discussion of J. G. Fichte, the earliest representative of the post-Kantian idealist position. Of primary importance in my discussion of Fichte will be presenting his account of the immediacy of the self-positing subject as it is presented in the 1794 version of the Wissenschaftslehre (The Science of Knowledge), focusing particularly on the absolute immediacy of this self-positing subject which Kierkegaard would go on to identify as his critical point of departure in both the second half of The Concept of Irony and in the early sections of The Concept of Anxiety. After outlining both Fichte's early theory of subjectivity and his notion of the absolute immediacy of the grounds of reflection, I will move on to briefly discussing The Vocation of Man, a text intended for a popular audience, which was written after the atheism controversy caused a considerable amount of damage to Fichte's academic reputation. Finally, I will consider recent interpretations that argue that when considering the whole of his authorship Fichte is not, in fact, the absolute subjective idealist that Kierkegaard and others accuse him of being.
After discussing Fichte, I will move on to a consideration of Schelling. The starting point of this discussion will be an account of Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism (hereafter STI), in which he presents a theory of subjectivity which begins from the same absolute immediacy with which Fichte grounds his early Wissenschaftslehre. I will then outline the break made between the System of Transcendental Idealism, and Schelling's 1809 essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Paying attention to this shift in Schelling's philosophy will serve our interpretation of Kierkegaard in two respects; first, it will show how Schelling's break with Fichte follows a similar line of critique as that of Kierkegaard, and second, Schelling's grounding of both human freedom and the capacity for good and evil in the urgrund of an absolute indifference further paves the way for the account of freedom and evil in Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety, and subsequently leads into the development of reflection in The Sickness Unto Death.
Finally, this chapter will briefly outline what I will refer to as an open interpretation of the work of G. W. F. Hegel which has been developed in recent scholarship. The point of this discussion will be to show the way in which much of Hegel's work can be seen as a systematization of the idealist systems that came before (i.e., Fichte and Schelling) more so than as a unique system in its own right. Along with this, I will consider the manner in which this open reading of Hegel has already been used to reconsider the traditional systematic reading of the relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard and emphasize systematic elements of Kierkegaard's thought along with existential elements of Hegel's.
While one may at this point wonder why a book purporting to present an ontological and political reading of Kierkegaard through considering his work as a response to German idealism has yet to mention socio-political aspects of German idealism itself, this question will not garner much importance in the subsequent chapters. In the ontological and political reading I develop hereafter, the socio-political aspects of Kierkegaard's thought emerge precisely through the ontological response and critique of idealism, rather than through his direct critique of the practical and political philosophies offered by idealism. Put otherwise, it is not a critique of the political philosophy of German idealism that leads to Kierkegaard's socio-political importance but rather his critiques of the theorization of both immediacy and reflection among the German idealists that leads to an emphasis on action and a break with reflection that enables me to develop a socio-political interpretation of Kierkegaard. Thus, while the first half of the book will continue to build on largely ontological and speculative questions, this will be for the sake of underpinning the social and political discussions that will make up a majority of the second half of this book.
1.1 J. G. FICHTE
It could rightly be argued that Fichte was the first philosopher to develop a systematic post-Kantian Idealism. While some, such as Reinhold, had published attempts at their own Kantian systems, Fichte was the first to move firmly beyond the Kantian paradigm by providing both a systematic account for the primary unity of both theoretical and practical philosophy (the lack of which he thought to be one of the primary shortcomings of Kant), as well as an account of the self-positing absolute subject which did away with the Kantian thing-in-itself. At issue for Fichte was the establishment of a primary principle by which philosophical speculation could properly begin and a principle that would provide the grounds for both the theoretical and practical aspects of critical philosophy. He opens Part I of the 1794 The Science of Knowledge by stating, 'Our task is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge. This can be neither proved nor defined, if it is to be an absolutely primary principle.' As we will later see, this desire to discover an absolute and immediate beginning for human knowledge is what Kierkegaard will come to critique so fervently in both The Concept of Irony and in the opening pages of The Concept of Anxiety.
Before providing a summary of the conceptual developments made by Fichte in The Science of Knowledge (hereafter the SK) there are some structural and methodological aspects of this work worth considering. The first of these involves the structure of the 1794 SK, which is set into three parts: 'Fundamental Principles of the Entire Science of Knowledge', 'Foundation of Theoretical Knowledge', and 'Foundation of Knowledge of the Practical'. In the first section, Fichte provides an account of the principles that will be at the heart of both the theoretical and practical aspects of his philosophy, the main principle being the self-positing I, or, the self identical I=I. Once he establishes this primary principle, he moves on to outline how this principle operates in the speculative activities of theoretical knowledge. After this, once theoretical knowledge can go no further, Fichte concludes the work with an account of how this primary principle functions in its practical role as the striving activity that is the self.
While much time could be spent charting the argument of this text, the important aspect for the argument of this book is 'Part I: Fundamental Principles of the Entire Science of Knowledge', as this is the point in the text where Fichte provides the most straightforward account of the primary principle of his entire system, which is the activity of the self-positing 'I'. This is crucial for the present argument as the idea of the self-positing 'I' as the foundation, or beginning, of knowledge is the aspect of Fichte's early system that Kierkegaard takes serious issue with.
In the first introduction to SK, Fichte makes clear that his intention is to discover the absolute starting point of philosophy through a radical turn inward, opening this introduction by stating:
Attend to yourself: turn your attention away from everything that surrounds you and towards your inner life; this is the first demand that philosophy makes of its disciple. Our concern is not with anything that lies outside of you, but only with yourself.
It is clear from the outset that Fichte's idealism searches for its practical and theoretical unity with a turn inward, rather than an appeal to a thing-in-itself that is indefinitely 'out there', forever removed from the access of the subject. Fichte goes on to note, 'This idealism proceeds from a single fundamental principle of reason, which it demonstrates directly in consciousness'. This principle which Fichte's idealism proceeds from must be one that is immediate to consciousness, rather than being the product of some prior state of reflection. While in this introduction Fichte proclaims this single, fundamental principle upon which reason is founded, he does not elaborate on what this principle actually is until Part I of the main text.
(Continues...)
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