KIERKEGAARD AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY
Barry Stocker
Introduction (page 2)
1. Tarquinius and Brutus: Political Fear and Trembling (page 5)
2. Previous Perspectives on Kierkegaard and Politics (page 29)
3. Kierkegaard and the Danish Political Community (page 47)
4. Communities of Liberty (page 59)
5. Ethical and Legal Community (page 84)
6. Tragic Community (page 99)
7. Political Irony (page 112)
Conclusion (page 140)
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Introduction
This book addresses political thought in a writer who was not attempting to make a
contribution to political thought. This seemingly perverse enterprise is justified, and
necessary, because political thought does not only exist in texts explicitly devoted to
expounding a position in political theory. For example, understanding of political thought is
clearly enhanced by knowledge of Homer, Greek tragedy, Shakespearean tragedy and the
master pieces of the ‘realist’ nineteenth century novel. This arbitrary list, which is by no
means a complete selection, refers us to literary works which give an archaic view of
kingship, a classical antique view of law and monarchy, a Renaissance view of
government and tyranny, and a more recent explorations of individual freedom and
democracy. We can imagine someone engaging in political theory without knowledge of
literature, but that theorist would have lost a lot in terms of understanding the different
possibilities of thinking about politics.
!
Equally the more epistemological and metaphysical parts of philosophy may use, or
even depend on political ideas. Descartes partly explains the benefits of his attempt to
reconstruct philosophy from first principles as a like than proper planning of a town by a
legitimate political power. Liebniz compares the metaphysical relation of God to the world
with that of a Prince to his people in a law governed state. John Stuart Mill thought that
knowledge benefits from the liberty of speech in general, which is partly justified by that
benefit. Kant sets up his Critique of Pure Reason in the Preface with reference to the
model of government through law as opposed to tyranny or anarchy.
!
One justification of thinking about Kierkegaard as a political thinker is then that he
was a literary writer and knowledge of literature is an important accompaniment to
knowledge of political thought. That argument is only going to have much force if there is
some political content to Kierkegaard’s writing and there is in two senses. One sense is
that on occasion political issues are at the centre of his writing; the other sense is that
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
much of what Kierkegaard writes has political implications. How that works is a large part
of what follows. Examples include Kierkegaard’s discussion of tragedy, which as just
mentioned, does frequently engage with political issues of law, kingship, justice, power,
tyranny and so on.
!
Another major way in which that works is the role of God in Kierkegaard, which is
clearly a major theme for this deeply Christian thinker. The idea of God and the idea of
government have always been intertwined. The idea of just rule of the other world, or of
the universe of the whole is never going to be completely separable from the idea of the
just rule of a state in this world. Divine and secular governance can never be completely
distinguished.
!
The idea of God as model of political government is one part of how Christian
themes in Kierkegaard have a political aspect. The other part is the relation of the single
individual (den Enkelte), a phrase Kierkegaard often uses, to God. That is questions of
how we can have a relation with God, know of God, have faith and communicate with the
absolute being. We come to two political theory issues now. First the issue of what the
individual is who has political agency and rights, and why the individuality of that single
individual is important in politics. Second the issue of the relation between the single
individual and the state, or the political world as a whole. The individual is a particular
compared with the universal nature of the political sphere and of civil laws; the individual is
a particular compares with the absolute nature of sovereignty, wherever it is we locate
sovereignty, the people, the ruler, the state and so on. The issues of the relation of
subjective particularity to ethical universality and to the absolute sovereignty of God are at
the heart of Kierkegaard’s writing. The nature of that subjectivity, that moral agency, raises
issues about political liberty; the history of subjectivity’s understanding of itself in relation to
its social world in Pagan and Christian worlds is intertwined with the history of political
liberty, of the changes the concept of that liberty in ancient and modern times.
4
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Kierkegaard’s own references to the political events, and conflicts, of his time are
brief, but no less significant for their brevity. He lived through the one really successful
transition to constitutionalism and representative government, amongst the many
European revolutions of 1848. Kierkegaard was sensitive to this drama, and the
underlying tension it exposed in modern politics: the tension between revolutionary
idealism and mundane pragmatism, a tension which parallels his view of Christian life. He
was critical of democracy as a political movement and as a social tendency towards
equality, but much of his criticism is similar to that of those recognised as thinkers about
liberal democracy, who wished to protect it against its own negative tendencies. Our
understanding of thinkers like Tocqueville and Mill will be enriched by comparison with
Kierkegaard, as will our understanding of Kierkegaard.
!
The reading of Kierkegaard that follows is one that rejects any idea that
philosophical texts can, or should be, identified as only pertaining to some one very well
defined and delimited branch of philosophy. Kierkegaard is a particularly strong example
of a philosopher, whose work does not even try to divide itself between discrete branches
and sub-branches of philosophy, indifferent texts, and which does not engage in well
ordered steps of pure deduction, within texts. Kierkegaard certainly makes arguments that
are well ordered and deserve reconstruction and reflection, but he is not purely engaging
with one step at any moment. His works demand to be read in a dialectical or interactive
way, with regard of interaction of ideas, interaction of texts, interaction between the parts
and the whole of his thought. Furthermore his thought cannot be defined as just
philosophy, as it also compasses theology, literary writing, religious sermons, and
journalism. These are not all equally present at all times, but Kierkegaard’s work as a
whole is conditioned by their interaction.
!
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Chapter One
Tarquinius and Brutus: Political Fear and Trembling
On My Work as An Author [On Min Forfatter-Wirksomhed, 1851]
‘Appendix’ 2 ‘My Strategy [Min Taktik]’
With regard to an “established order [Bestaaende] ,” I have consistently—
since my position has indeed been the single individual [den Enkelte], with
polemical aim at the numerical [Numeriske], the crowd [Mængde], etc.—
always done the very opposite of attacking. I have never been or been along
with the “opposition” that wants to do away with “government [Regjering]” but
have always provided what is called a corrective, which for God’s sake
wishes that there might be governing [regjeret] by those who are officially
appointed and called, that fearing God they might stand firm, willing only one
thing—the good.
(Kierkegaard 1998, 18/XIII 507)
Kierkegaard’s most widely ready book Fear and Trembling [Frygt og Bæven, 1843], begins
with, or is framed by, a political story from early Roman history, itself a topic deeply tied up
with republican political thought. Kierkegaard does this through a reference to Hamann
(2007), one of the German philosopher whose work he had studied deeply, rather than
through direct reference to Roman history: ‘What Tarquinius said in the garden by means
of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not’ (Kierkegaard 1983, 2), but
does often refer directly to ancient history.
!
The obvious source for this legendary moment in history would be Livy, who
recounts the story in The History of Rome, Book I.54-55 (Livy 2002, 96-97), and whose
Histories are themselves a part of antique republican thought. The indirectness of
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Kierkegaard’s approach to political issues is typical of the appearance of politics in his
writing, but that does not lessen the significance of such references. What Kierkegaard
refers to is Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, communicating the message to his
son, Sextus Tarquinius, to execute the leading men of Gabii, a city in conflict with Rome at
that time. The message is done through the King cutting off the heads of poppies in front
of the royal messenger, and not speaking to him so that the messenger thinks there is no
message to convey. If the messenger reports the scene, the son will understand what to
do, with regard to bringing Gabii under the control of the Roman monarchy through the
murder of the leading men. This story precedes the fall of Tarquinius Superbus, and the
birth of the Roman Republic, one of the major events of history, and a decisive event for
the tradition of republican thinking. The fall of Tarquinius Superbus, and the birth of the
Republic, involved Lucius Junius Brutus, the ancestor of Marcus Junius Brutus, the
assassin of Julius Caesar in a failed attempt, to preserve and revive the republic, which
had become increasingly dominated by generals seeking absolute power. Marcus Junius
Brutus was murdering a surrogate father figure, as Caesar has been a a close friend and
mentor. Not only that, Caesar had been the lover of Brutus’ mother Servilia, and it was
even rumoured that Caesar had fathered Brutus. That later story has even greater
resonance when we look at the history of the first Brutus.
!
The first Brutus’ reputation as the virtuous founder of the Republic, was further
enhanced by the story that he had his own sons executed for playing a part in a plot to
bring back monarchy to Rome, which Kierkegaard refers to briefly in Fear and Trembling,
Problema I (58/III 108), comparing Brutus with Abraham, as well as Agamemnon in
Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Aulis and the Biblical figure of Jephthah (Judges II:30-40) .
This is again one of the great legendary stories of early republicanism and one of the ways
in which a commitment to republican virtue was understood. We can see this in JacqueLouis David’s painting of 1789, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons, which
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
he exhibited as the French Revolution was beginning. It shows a stern Brutus and the
lictors in the shadows, while grieving female family members dominate the lighted part of
the canvas, and look at the body of one of the sons which is in light, though it is in the
mostly darkened part of the canvas. In retrospect, it seems like a terrifying prophecy of the
violence of the French Revolution, particularly the Terror inflict by the Committee for Public
Safety from 1793 to 1794. What it might also lead us to consider is that the liberties of
modern democracies under more moderate forms of government, have origins in stern
antique republican notions of law and virtue, and their influence on modern revolutions.
The first story we referred to, which has a republican purpose itself in showing the horrors
of tyranny, is itself referred to in a classic, if less well known painting, Lawrence AlmaTademus’ Tarquinius Superbus of 1867.
!
We can take something from a story of royal tyranny Kierkegaard brings up and
apply it to the nature of political community, in the Biblical story of Abraham (Genesis 22),
when ordered by God to kill his son Isaac, which is Kierkegaard’s prime focus in Fear and
Trembling. For Kierkegaard, we need to understand the story of Abraham and Isaac to
understand Christianity (presumably along with Judaism and Islam, but Kierkegaard does
not deal with those Abrahamic religions); and implicitly we need to understand the stories
of Tarquinius Suberbus and Lucius Junius Brutus to understand monarchical and
republican government. That is we need to understand the personalised and violent
nature of power and sovereignty, which Kierkegaard can help with due to the way he deals
with politics and political history, and the way he deals with religious issues which have
connection with questions of political thought.
!
Polybius and Cicero, a friend of Marcus Junius Brutus, turned the Roman political
system into a model republic of political thought; and that relation of Brutus to Cicero adds
further resonance to the association with Kierkegaard’s Tarquinius Superbus reference.
The creation of a literary model also takes place through historical work , which is most of
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
what of what Polybius does in the appropriately named Histories, and is a part of what
Cicero does in On the Republic. The republican history is treated in a more elegiac way by
Livy writing in the reign of the first ‘emperor’ (a translation of imperator which means army
commander and was not the primary title of any Roman ‘emperor’) , Augustus.
Machiavelli’s commentaries on Livy’s Histories in The Discourses (2003) is itself a major
moment in republican thought. The Roman Republic has remained a key example for
political thought ever since going, up to current prominent political theorists such as
Raymond Geuss (2001) and Philip Pettit (1997).
!
Kierkegaard seems to be putting himself in the position of the tyrant, by identifying
himself as the source of allegorical meaning. What commentators tend to concentrate on
is the idea of allegorical meaning, and the communication between father and son,
important to the story of Abraham and Isaac, on which the book is focused. The relation
between father and son is central to the Christian idea of God the Father and Christ the
son, and commentators on Kierkegaard sometimes see the story about Tarquinius
Superbus as referring to the relation between the Abraham-Isaac story and the story of
Jesus (Lippitt 2003), as indicating the need for an ‘anagogic’ reading of Abraham-Isaac, in
which the near sacrifice of a son by a father foreshadow the sacrifice of the Son by the
Father. Jesus was sacrificed on the cross, to serve his father. What has been less
emphasised is the context in which Hamann himself refers to the story. It is in a letter in
volume three of his collected works (1822, 190), and the context is one of ambiguities of
meaning, the relation of writer to audience and friends. This looks like an implicit
message about how to read Kierkegaard. That still leaves open the question of what
ambiguities Kierkegaard might want us to think about in his choice of epigram. Apart from
the possibilities above, there is the issue of his communication with his former fiancée,
Regina Ølsen, with regard to how concerns about his suitability for marriage, his
melancholic disposition, and his sense of the purpose of his life, led him to break their
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
engagement. The sense of purpose is that of devotion to Christianity, and a devotion to
writing guided by Christianity, as well as by his own sense of his own individuality. None of
this brings us into political concerns, but the epigram both refers to legendary political
events and to the ambiguities of communication. We can take the message that political
examples, and the ambiguities of their interpretation, are important in Kierkegaard’s
thought. Politics is not a major issue, at all in his writing, but we should not draw from that
fact the conclusion that politics is unimportant in interpreting his writing, or the conclusion
that there nothing to be gained in political theory from studying that writing.
!
The ambiguities of communicating subjective intentions are themselves part of the
meaning of Fear and Trembling; and building on that is the theme of subjectivity and the
ambiguities of trying to communicate what originates in subjectivity. That is explicitly a
major issue in Concluding Unscientific Postscript [Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift,
1846]. On one level the issue of the communication of subjectivity is how ethics must be
subordinated to the absolute nature of subjectivity, which is defined through the absolute
relation of subjectivity to the absolute, that is God, so that God’s command is both the
experience of the absolute outside ourselves, and the absolute nature of subjectivity.
From that there flow considerations of how ethics is subordinated to subjectivity, the
absolute relation of subjectivity with the absolute, and that must also apply to politics.
God’s commands only have meaning for Kierkegaard through the nature of our
subjectivity, how we see something absolute in out subjectivity, and then grasp our
subjectivity as only substantial when in an absolute relation with the the absolute (God).
That is why Kierkegaard’s philosophical-religious writing is important, it is certainly not
because he was reasserting Christian dogma, even through that was a major motivation.
The importance of these concerns to politics can be understood with reference to the ways
that antique thinkers regarded politics as part of ethics, as do the German Idealists who
were at the centre of Kierkegaard’s philosophical interests. Kierkegaard looks at ethics in
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
relation to subjectivity rather than politics, but that exploration of ethics cannot be
separated from exploration of political aspects of ethics in Plato and Aristotle, along with
Kant, Fichte, Humboldt and Hegel.
!
The political point of the Tarquinius Superbus story, as referred to by Kierkegaard
via Hamann, is that the power of the tyrant is what is hidden in politics, as the power of
subjective will, or the absolute, is hidden in ethics. That theme had been established in
political thought around the power of the sovereign which makes law and applies it, or of
the dictator who is unconstrained by normal political limits. The latter was an aspect of the
Roman Republic, which allowed for the power of the two annual elected consuls, which
had replaced the power of the king, to be itself taken over by a dictator for six months in
time of war. The relation between an ethical-legal aspect of sovereignty, and its coercive
power within sovereignty has been an issue in modern political theory since Machiavelli,
and is at the heart of thought about natural law and contract in politics since Grotius.
!
The nature of this dictatorship, and its apparent role in its original form in preserving
the republic, as opposed to its later abuse as an instrument of long term political power is
a topic of discussion in Machiavelli (The Discourses I.34), and Rousseau (The Social
Contract IV.6). Machiavelli dwells on kings and their resort to immoral and criminal means
to gain and hold power, in The Prince (1995), and those topics also appear in The
Discourses. The issue of the power necessary for there to be a state and for there to be
laws which protect liberty, along with the possibility that power will intrude on liberty is a
constant concern of political thought, going back at least to Plato’s concern with describing
a state based on pure justice. The issue becomes a more central one in political thought
from the Renaissance onwards, because the way politics is understood, starts to make a
much sharper distinction than the ancients did, between what comes from laws made by a
political agency, and the agency of government on one side; and what belongs to
individual lives, natural liberty and natural reason on the other. That process itself has
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
roots in the thirteenth century movement towards the intensive and extended study of
Roman law via Justinian’s Institutes in the new universities, and therefore to place more
emphasis than the Roman jurists themselves on the unity and sovereignty of law (what
Foucault calls juridification, 1985, 29-30). Though the era of juridfication was also the era
of a return to Aristotle, both Plato and Aristotle had rather different assumption about the
state, and its laws, which are seen as much more something that comes about inevitably
from the nature of humanity, and much more part of uncodified custom than is possible for
the medievals and the moderns.
!
Building on that Medieval shift, modern thinkers about politics, the state and law,
starting with Machiavelli, are conscious that the state varies over history, that it is a
construction of human will, that it serves political interests separate from the people as a
whole, that it requires a kind of distinctive authority that it puts into an ambiguous relation
with the laws it institutes. The need for a sovereign power above normal law, and the
historical variations in kinds of state, can be found in Grotius’ account of law, which is itself
tied up with his version of Protestant covenant theology, explained in On the Truth of the
Christian Religion inter alia, as we can see when he brings Biblical covenants into his
jurisprudential and political theory throughout The Rights of War and Peace (2005).
!
Grotius can be seen as at the beginning of a contract theory tradition, which tries to
root government in a primal pre-state contract between citizens, and between citizens and
rulers, ‘civil society being instituted for the preservation of peace, there immediately arises
a superior right in the state over us and ours, so far as it is necessary for that end’ (Grotius
2005, 338). That tradition both restrains governmental power with reference to its
answerability through contract, and makes government the necessary force behind law
and its application. The possible confusion of law and government, inherent in any
discussion of the origins of government and law, that is the possibility that law becomes no
more than an instrument of governmental power, is resisted by contract theorists who are
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all concerned with defining the sovereign power, but also with ways of incorporating the
power to enforce law into the law making activity, which makes that confusion inevitable.
Hobbes provides the most stark example because he is arguing there is no right to resist
the sovereign; and therefore there is no right to prevent the sovereign from behaving as
the arbitrary source of law which might change at any moment. The point of the existence
of a sovereign for Hobbes (1996) is to uphold laws generally understood to be just, but it is
not surprising that vulgar representations of Hobbes can overlook this. Locke (1960)
appears to correct this, but we are still left with a ‘federative’ power in Locke which is the
power to use unrestrained force outside the political community in war, and which is
necessary to the security of the law making aspect of government. That power can
overwhelm the legislature when must must in some respect depend on that power.
!
These are ways in which the particularity of force, and the possibility of its complete
dominion cannot be excluded from law and politics, something discussed by Montaigne
(2003, 1000) and Pascal (1966, 46) with regard to the ‘mystic foundations of law’.
Montaigne introduces the idea in the last essay of the Essays, III.13 ‘Of Experience (2003,
992-1045) and it is followed up by Pascal in the section on ‘Wretchedness’ in Pensées I.3
(1966, 44-50).
!
The problem in the early modern period was largely expressed as the difficulty of
harmonising acts of sovereignty with natural law, that is law which all reasoning and well
intentioned humans can agree on, and do agree on, through history, and across different
societies. The role of dictators and kings becomes a major concern for republicans like
Machiavelli and Rousseau, who see that the role of the tyrant, or dictator, cannot be
completely excluded from a political system, and whatever benefits in terms of laws, public
goods and liberties that we hope for from political authority. In recent years, at least in
Normative Theory, the style of political theory which stems from Analytic philosophy, the
problem has become what principles of state and government can be agreed upon as
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
rational and just by a well meaning group of thoughtful humans. The famous example here
is that of Rawls’s veil of ignorance in section XXIV of A Theory of Justice (1999, 118-130).
No one since Rawls has proposed another version of the imaginary founding moment of
the political system, but the underlying aim of Rawls of finding principles that everyone
must rationally accept is definitive of that way of doing political theory. Questions of power
and violence in politics, the role of governments that suspend, or completely overthrow
normal legality and restraints, the conflict between the particularity of government and the
universality of basic principles, are all missing from political thought of this kind. The
issues that Kierkegaard raises with the Tarquinius Superbus and Lucius Junius Brutus
references are simply not present in that kind of normative theory
!
For placing Kierkegaard in a political theory tradition outside that kind of rationalist
normativism, a good starting point is Carl Schmitt. He provides the most direct reference
to Kierkegaard in a major work of political theory but this also has a disturbing aspect.
Schmitt was an authoritarian conservative legal and political theorist, who joined the Nazi
Party when it came to power in Germany, and had earlier indicated sympathy for Italian
Fascism, and anti-liberal forms of conservatism, brings Kierkegaard into his 1919 book
Political Theology (1985a), where he provides an account of the emergence of liberal
political theory from Protestant religious thought, and from versions of Catholicism which
are not very orthodox.
!
It is there that Schmitt refers to, and quotes from, Kierkegaard’s Repetition
[Gjentagelsen, 1843], at the end of the chapter on ‘The Definition of Sovereignty’, using his
own idiosyncratic German version of Kierkegaard’s words:
A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in
theological reflection in the nineteenth century stated: “The exception explains
the general and itself. And if no one wants to study the general correctly, one
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only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more
clearly than does the general. Endless talk about the general becomes boring;
there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot
be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not
thought about with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception
on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.
(Schmitt 1988, 15)
The same quotation from Kierkegaard as it appears in the standard Princeton University
Press translation :
[T]he exception explains the universal and himself, and if one really wants to
study the universal, one needs to look around for a legitimate exception; he
discloses everything far more clearly than the universal itself. [...] Eventually
one grows weary of the incessant chatter about the universal and the universal
repeated to the point of the most boring insipidity. There are exceptions. If they
cannot be explained, then the universal cannot be explained either. Generally,
the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the universal not with passion
but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, however, thinks the
universal with intense passion.
(Kierkegaard 1983, 227)
The context in Kierkegaard’s text is that this is the last part of Repetition, a letter from
Constantin Constantinius which concludes the story of the poet who abandons his fiancée,
wishing to give her the impression that he has wandering desires in order to ease the blow
for her. The underlying point is to explore the possibility of repetition, as a forward
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movement in life, where a moment of transcendence recurs. The poet fails at that project,
which would have required him to accept the possibility of unifying love for the woman
concerned with his sense of self, which is close to that of Kierkegaard himself, as
described above. Clearly no political point is made, and there is no evidence from this
passage, or the book as a whole, that Kierkegaard would have associated himself with any
aspects of Schmitt’s thought. However, if we put Kierkegaard’s thought in Repetiton in a
political context, we should think about the ways in which there might be moments in
politics which unify all the parts of the political community, and all the ways of experiencing
politics. Moments which can be repeated to give politics a purpose and unity. That might
be a moment of revolution, or of the institution of a new political system, or that is what
Kierkegaard’s most explicit discussion of politics in A Literary Review [En literair
Anmeldelse, 1846] (Two Ages, Kierkegaard 1978) would lead us to expect.
!
We could also think about this passage, and Repetition as a whole, as an
exploration of individual agency and responsibility. It does not offer a clear political
direction for the individual and if there is a political lesson, it is that the individual cannot be
reduced to collective goals. The individual is shown to have great difficulty in reaching a
desirable form of ethical-subjectivity, but the failures and the struggles are shown to be the
most important things about human life. The tradition of Christian spiritual biography, and
narratives of spiritual development, is itself challenged in Kierkegaard’s exploration of the
nature of subjectivity. If we see Repetition in terms of spiritual progress, it is in what can
be learned from the failures of development, and the failures of intersubjective
communication, failures which flow from our status as subjective individuals. These issues
have political aspects, as politics rests on the possibility of communicating political ideas, a
possibility which Kierkegaard shows to be a constant struggle with non-communication
and failures of language. There is a apolitical element to that, but also an emergent
political perspective concerned with a condition for ethically valid politics, that it should not
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rest on a perfectly shared and understood collective vision. Politics must take account of
the opacity and differentiation of individuals, with all the paradoxes of communicating
subjective states of mind. That is the paradoxes which appear throughout Kierkegaard,
but are particularly the subject matter of Philosophical Fragments [Philosophiske Smuler,
1844] (1985b) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript [Affslutende uvidenskabelig
Efterskrift, 1846] (1992a). That means that even a very individualistic political movement
will be constrained and highly imperfect in relation to ethical reality. We can at least draw
from that an impulse to resist the most top down conformist homogenising directive forms
of politics.
!
Schmitt’s own purpose in quoting Kierkegaard here is to defend his ‘decisionistic’
idea of the ‘exception’ in sovereignty, which is the idea that the sovereign is the one who
decides in a state of exception, revealing where sovereignty lies behind the obfuscation of
positive law. This may be a defence of political dictatorship or a critique of liberalism for
removing the theological and natural law limitations on political sovereignty. This text
publised just after World War One may or may not be relevant to Schmitt’s career in the
German National Socialist Workers’ Party from 1933 to 1936, and his ambitions to be the
‘Crown Jurist’ of the regime, since intervening books (2004, 2008) do not discuss
decisionism, and refer more to legal orders preceding liberal parliamentarianism, both
historically and conceptually. In general, his adherence to the Nazi system is more an
extension of previous traditionalist authoritarian beliefs, than a complete belief in Nazi
doctrine. The most radical members of the regime, particularly in the SS, recognised this
in 1936, driving him out of his leadership role among Nazi jurists. Political Theology
dates from a time when Schmitt was at his relatively speaking most liberal democratic
phase, before he joined the march of hard core conservatives in Weimar Germany in the
direction of increasing enmity to the liberal democratic constitution, and towards support
for totalitarianism. !
17
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
We are left with the situation in which the most important moment of discussion of
Kierkegaard in political theory is in a text by someone who was never less than sceptical
about the claims of democratic political institutions, and of positive law created by
parliamentary means, to represent the most just ordering of human society. In interpreting
Schmitt, as noted above there is some debate about how far the decisionism of 1919
represents his later thought, which emphasises natural legal order and nomos, rather than
dramatic moments of sovereignty revealing itself in its fullest possible force. However,
since Schmitt’s work of the 1960s includes Theory of the Partisan (2007), which gives a
central role to forms of war, and national resistance, that go beyond the laws of war and
the agency of the state, it is clear that at all times Schmitt is concerned with the exceptions
to law and constitutionalism. So perhaps we should look at Schmitt’s development as one
of oscillation between decisionistic and legal ordering phases.
!
This does not mean that an interest in Schmitt means condoning authoritarian
ideologies. Political thinkers with a serious interest in Schmitt include left leaning
democrats like Derrida (Politics of Friendship, 1997, Chapter 5) and classical liberals like
Hayek (1944, 59; 1960, 182; 1960, 385; 1960, 423; 1960; 425; 1973, 71; 1973, 139; 1973,
161-162; 1974, 144; 1976, 167; 1976, 191; 1979, 125; 1979, 139; 1979, 194-195 ). These
thinkers certainly reject the authoritarian moments in Schmitt, while taking him seriously as
a thinker about what law and politics are, and with insights which are valuable to those
who are not anti-democratic or anti-liberal in position. Further discussion of Schmitt with
regard to indirect, or implicit, connections with Kierkegaard can be found in Ryan’s ‘Carl
Schmitt: Zones of Exception and Appropriation’ (in Stewart 2011)
!
Those aspects of the state we have looked at as connected with Kierkegaard’s
reference to Tarquinius Superbus means that not only can there be a tyrant denying
republican liberty, or a dictator defending republican liberty against a collapse of the
republic, but that there is something about the state itself that is beyond limits and controls.
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Law relies on state enforcement, and that enforcer role of the state has the potential to be
tıurned against law, against anyone under the state, or just not in control of the very apex
of the state. That is all part of what comes out of applying the relation of God or the
absolute or absolute subjectivity in ethics, to the relation of state to laws in politics, as part
of ethics.
!
We can see the state in this dangerous way, because as Kierkegaard emphasises
modern societies lose the centrality of polity and ethnicity, in which the people and the
state seem to be one, and that unity is itself at one with religion, customs, and history.
Social resentments are contained within that natural seeming political community, since
everything can be addressed by that community. The Preface to Fear and Trembling
starts with the suggestion that everything in the world of ideas can be had cheaply in a
sale; and that everyone tries to move too quickly to the idea of doubting everything (1983,
5). The Ancient Greeks ‘assumed [doubting] to be a task for a whole lifetime, because
proficiency in doubting is not acquired in days and weeks’ (1983, 6). Here, as elsewhere,
Kierkegaard signifies that the Pagan Ancient Greek world has aspects that Christian
modernity would benefit from reviving. Christian modernity itself suffers from exclusion of
Pagan antiquity, though Christianity is what gives the highest truths round the absolute
relation of the self with the absolute, the absolute aspect of the self. Despite the superior
nature of Christian thinking it needs the addition, and challenge, of antique Pagan thought
to be complete. This should lead us to think that antique republicanism is not alien to
Kierkegaard’s thought, just as his emphasis on the individual should lead us to the same
conclusion about modern liberalism. We can better say that the Christian worldview allows
understanding of the nature of sovereignty and force, and requires antique republicanism
to keep that sovereignty connected fully with subjective experience.
!
The implicit concern of Kierkegaard with dictatorship and tyranny within the heart of
lawful government is matched by a concern that modern societies require a mobilisation
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
around revolutionary enthusiasm to be recognisable as societies. That is combined with
the necessity of everyday non-interest of most people in politics. What Christianity
provides in the individual aspect of ethics, an enthusiasm for love which counters affective
particularism and banal self-interest, is provided at the political level by the idea of
revolution. The Tarquinius Superbus type of tyrant provides the disturbing underside of
such an ideal, the unification of society around one will, the passion of one individual. The
republican reaction to Tarquinius Superbus is an early revolutionary enthusiasm which
turns that tyrannical unification into a counter movement of popular passion for liberty.
!
The period of these debates about ancient republicanism and modern liberty,
includes the time of a great awakening of German language philosophy, aesthetics, and
literature across movements of Enlightenment, Idealism and Romanticism, with which
Kierkegaard was very familiar. German was the only modern language, other than Danish,
which Kierkegaard read, so that he knew Shakespeare through the Ludwig Tieck-August
Wilhelm Schlegel translation, that is the translation undertaken by two prominent literary
thinkers within German Romanticism. As we have already seen, Kierkegaard was familiar
with the work of Hamann. In addition, Kierkegaard refers to Lessing, Jacobi, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, and Solger, directly or
indirectly, in his writings. Working out all the connections is a daunting, and maybe
impossible task, so we will not even try here, but we can at least look at how debates
about liberty enter the German thought of that time. The German writers build on Locke,
and on subsequent French and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including Montesquieu,
Rousseau, Smith, Hume and Ferguson, so referring to those usually known as classical
liberals, but also those such as Rousseau, who were concerned with liberty and individual
rights, within a framework less favourable to commerce and uncapped accumulation of
property.
20
!
Kierkegaard and Political Community
Generally speaking the German Idealists aim to put the claims of these thinkers
about liberty, law, property, sovereignty, government, political economy, and civil society,
on an a priori foundation, which shows the necessity of all these concepts and the of the
connections between them.
Paradoxes of the form outlined by Montaigne and Pascal,
and which were particularly echoed by Rousseau, are recognised by Kant, Fichte and
Hegel, who try to show that institutions of government exist in a tension between pure right
and actual force, and that they are still legitimate, within appropriate constraints. We can
most readily return to the discussion above of of Tarquinius and Brutus, by looking at
Fichte, with reference to his discussion of ‘right within a commonwealth’ in Foundations of
Natural Right:
That the will of a certain number of human beings, at some point in time,
actually becomes harmonious, and expresses itself or gets declared as such. —
The task here is to show that the required concurrence does not take place of
itself, but rather is based on an express act of all, an act that takes place in the
sensible world and is perceptible at some point in time and is made possible
only through free self-determination.
(Fichte 2000, 135).
We can see this passage as a summary of what Rousseau was doing in the idea of the
social contract, and what previous contractualists like Hobbes, Locke and Pufendorf were
already trying to to. What is distinctive in Fichte’s approach though in relation to those
earlier thinkers is the discussion on the absolute moment of that will formation, and what
flows from it in law and in violence.
That this will be established as the steadfast and enduring will of all, a will that
each person — just as certainly as he has expressed this will in the present
moment — will recognise as his own so long as he lives in this place. In every
previous investigation it was always necessary to assume that such willing for
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
the entire future is present in a single moment, that such willing for all future life
occurs all at once. Here, for the first time, this proposition is asserted with
justification.
!
Because the present will is established as valid for all time, the
common will that is now expressed becomes law.
[...]
This common will must be equipped with a power — and indeed a superior
power, in the face of which any individual’s power would be infinitely small —
that will enable it to look after itself and its preservation by means of coercive
force: the state authority. This authority Includes two elements: the right to
judge, and the right to execute the judgements it has made.
(135)
Everything Fichte says here clearly builds on Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau.
What is distinctive is the emphasis on the absoluteness of will, its command over time, and
the basic division between law and the force of punishment. The command sustained over
time, and the basic division between law and force, strongly corresponds with
Kierkegaard’s vision of subjectivity, when it has a absolute relation with the absolute, and
his vision of the absolute, which is a philosophical term for God. The experience of the
properly formed subjectivity is one of overcoming the split between the eternal and the
momentary aspects of time, as is most clear in Philosophical Fragments and in the
discussion of tragedy in Either/Or [Enten-Eller, 1843]. The point of Fear and Trembling,
as we have seen is that ethics must be seen as subordinate to subjectivity and the
absolute. Fichte’s political philosophy gives us a version of that. Ethics, in the aspect of
law, rests on the joining together of individual wills in a single wills that both has the power
to make laws that endure over time, and to use force against those who disobey law. Both
law and force are tied up with the power of an absolute will, which can be understood both
as constraining itself, that is as making laws, and as assuming a potential for absolute
22
Kierkegaard and Political Community
violence. The contingency of violence and the universality of law are both necessary parts
of the will which is both the expression of, and the condition for a political community.
!
The themes we looked at above in Fichte can be taken back to Kant: unsocial
sociability and antagonism within society under the Fourth Proposition of ‘Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (Kant 1970, 44-45); the prohibition on
rebellion against a sovereign legislative power in the Conclusion of ‘On the Common
Saying “This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice”’ II (Kant 1970, 81);
the second article of ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant 1970, 102-105) which discusses the tension
between the natural right of states and the desirability of treaties of peace; the ‘terroristic
conception of human history’ in ‘The Contest of Faculties’ (Kant 1970, 179); the discussion
of the French Revolution in sections 6 and 7 of ‘The Contest of Faculties’ (1970, 182-185);
the discussion of the relation between autocracy and republicanism in section of ‘The
Contest of Faculties’ (1970, 186-187); the discussion of the nature of the ruler, sovereign
law maker or supreme commander and the punishment or outlawing of those who rebel
against sovereignty in the ‘General Remark’ to § 49 of The Metaphysics of Morals (Kant
1996a, 460-478/6:318-6:337).
!
We can also take these themes forward to Hegel: the account of the beginning of
human history and institutions as a struggle to the death, and a resulting master bonded
labour relationship in the Phenomenology of Spirit B.IV.A (Hegel 1977, 104-119); the
description of the end of classical Greek antiquity as the destruction of ethical substance
by the conflict between different forms of law in Phenomenology C.(BB).VI.b. (Hegel 1977,
279-289); the philosophical discussion in the Phenomenology C.(BB).VI.B.III, of the
French Revolution referring to the tendency of the pursuit of universal freedom to result in
terror (Hegel 1977, 355-363); the Philosophy of Right 3.3.A.II discussion of the state at war
with other other states, and its rights to command citizens to face death in war (Hegel
1991, 359-366).
23
!
Kierkegaard and Political Community
Moving outside the line of High German Idealism to the related work of Wilhelm von
Humboldt during that time. It is hisThe Limits of State Action that has the most obvious
direct effect on later liberal political theory, since is given importance by John Stuart Mill in
On Liberty (1991). The end of Chapter IV and the beginning of Chapter V are particularly
relevant to our purpose. The end of Chapter IV is a discussion of the claim that monarchy
is the sovereign political institution most compatible with freedom, largely because
monarchy is something pre-political.
The idea of a chief ruler arises only, as was said earlier, from the deep-felt
necessity for some military leader and umpire of disputes. Now one general or
umpire is unquestionably the best solution. Concern that the person selected
may ultimately become a master is unknown to the man who is truly free; he
does not even dream of such a possibility; he does not believe anyone would
have the power to subvert his liberty, nor that any free man would wish to be a
master; indeed, the desire for domination, the insensibility to the beauty of
freedom, show that a man is in love with slavery, merely not wishing to be a
slave himself, and so it is that as the science of morals originated in crime and
theology in heresy, so politics sprang into existence with servitude.
(Humboldt 1993, 40).
So what Humboldt argues is that monarchy originates in a time when humans are so free
that they cannot even conceive of a threat to that freedom. Since there is an obvious need
for one person to be the supreme judge, and for one person to be the supreme
commander of the military, in this innocent stage of human development, one person is
selected to fill both those roles, with no thought of the possible danger from one person
gathering such power. The power of the king is something natural, preceding politics
which is only the reaction to domination. There maybe something consciously playful
about Humboldt’s fiction of human social origins here, but it is a fiction which expresses
the ideals he thins we should try to follow in politics. Those ideals are that the best thing
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
politics can do is abolish itself in favour of natural and spontaneous relations between
humans, and if that is not possible politics should at least minimise itself.
!
This could be taken to anticipate, in part, the anti-political side of later Marxism and
free market libertarianism; it also gives us insight into the apolitical aspect of Kierkegaard.
Not because it’s likely that Kierkegaard read this book, which not published as a whole
until 1852, after Humboldt’s death. Parts of it were published as journal articles in 1792,
but there is no reason to believe that Kierkegaard was familiar with them.
Humboldt’s
point was not to defend monarchy as it was in his time, that is why the book as a whole
was only published after his death. The argument was that the functions and powers of
the state as it existed, republican or monarchical, should be radically reduced. The basis
of this is the belief that all politics represents a violence of some kind on the individual, a
loss of individual freedom, which is not reduced by reference to contracts or protecting the
good of the people, as in Cicero’s phrase ‘salus populi suprema lex’ (the safety of the
people is the supreme law). That phrase is often quoted by early modern political thinkers,
and Hume takes it (1985, 489) as the basis of politics superior to either contractualism, or
the absolute power of monarchs in ‘Of Passive Obedience’. The Humboldtian impulse
which resists all these political forms for the unpolitical birth of the first political institution,
kingship on a voluntary basis, gives us insight into why Kierkegaard with his extremely
marked respect for the particularity of the individual, and the subjectivity of each individual,
leans towards monarchy. It also suggests how Kierkegaard may see violence and
injustice in all politics, as in the directly referred to royal violence of Tarquinius Supberbus,
and the indirectly invoked republican violence of Lucius Junius Brutus against his sons.
!
The beginning of Chapter Five brings us to what many would consider a dark side
of Humboldt’s political thought, the ethical glorification of war:
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
[W]ar seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of
human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and
more from the scene. It is the fearful extremity through which all that active
courage—all that endurance and fortitude—are steeled and tested, which
afterwards achieve such varied results in the ordinary conduct of life, and which
alone give it that strength and diversity, without which facility is weakness, and
unity is inanity.
(Humboldt 1993, 41)
War for Humboldt is rather more preferable as an aid to human liberty than politics, which
just seem grotesque, but brings up a real issue about liberty. What is liberty without the
willingness to face death to defend it, and what context is there to test that but war? As
Humboldt suggests, war does rely on and develop faculties of courage and endurance,
which we want to see in a free people. Kierkegaard does not anywhere discuss the
merits, or demerits of war, but he is concerned with death, with how we face death, which
is why he wrote Sickness unto Death [Sygdommen til Døden, 1849].
!
Kierkegaard is certainly concerned with death and the attempt to overcome death,
which from his Christian point of view is part of the struggle with sin, because it is the
original sin which led humans to face death. Obedience to God also means that we have
to contemplate the possibility of taking the lives of others, if God so commands. As the
sermon which finishes Either/Or, the ‘Utimatum’ suggests, we cannot question God’s acts
in bringing mass death in some passages of the Bible. That is the central problem of Fear
and Trembling, applied to a father commanded to kill his own son.
The problem for
ethics, including politics, is that it cannot deal with these issues, without going beyond the
terms of ethics strictly speaking. There is no ethical term which can explain why we
should obey God, which in part means obeying our own subjectivity in its absolute relation
with the absolute; and there is no ethical term which explains why we should follow ethical
laws, leaving us to refer to our power of choice, which means our subjectivity, and that is
26
Kierkegaard and Political Community
real subjectivity in its absolute relation with the absolute. War has the same function within
ethics as politics, inescapable but disruptive as part of politics. Killing people in war is
necessary to defend the political community, or at least the willingness to carry out such
acts, but can never be justified by justificatory political concepts alone. Principled pacifism
is one reaction to that, it is a reaction which necessarily reduces the scope of politics, of
the decisions the political community makes, and fits best with anti-political moral
absolutism.
!
What unifies all these discussions of law, sovereignty, the state and war, is an
interest in the moments where consensus and consent breaks down, or has not even
appeared yet. Laws conflict, individuals confront each other outside the context of
established laws and institutions, individuals refuse to accept the authority of established
laws and institutions, revolutionary governments try to implement ideals, law following
people observe revolutions in other countries that try to implement their own values, states
take it upon themselves to go to war and therefore oblige citizens to sacrifice themselves
in war. These are all moments where the idea that the state, political institutions, and laws
are based on rationality, consent and on social consensus come under strain. Kant,
Fichte, Humboldt, and Hegel are all concerned to give the state, political institutions and
laws normative foundations. Unlike what goes on in ‘normative theory’, i.e. Analytic
political philosophy now, they feel obliged to deal with the difficult moments, with the
moments where individuals are faced with the naked capacity for arbitrary violence at the
heart of the state, or the arbitrary violence of individuals who have different norms. There
is a recognition in Kant, Fichte, Humboldt and Hegel, shared by Kierkegaard, that the
norms at the basis of the political community are never completely consensual, are never
completely consented to by those are under that state. That is why Kierkegaard can make
such a powerful analogy between the arbitrary violence of a king, and the arbitrary
violence of God, or the individual who takes individuality, and the subjectivity of the distinct
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
individual seriously. There is no law, or norms, of any kind without the moment of choice,
that is arbitrariness; and without the capacity to defend and enforce those choices, that is
the necessary possibility of violence.
!
Returning to the quotation at the head of the chapter, Kierkegaard accepts the
supremacy of existing political order, though it is significant that he feels the need to
distinguish himself from those most radically in opposition to the government. Presumably
Kierkegaard found that his devotion to the single individual over conformity to existing
ethical standards made him of interest to radical opponents of government. He did have
that kind of effect in Denmark and his funeral is a good example. Kierkegaard who claims
devotion to established order refused the services of an established church priest, during
his death struggle. The funeral service was attended by those who wished to make an
oppositional gesture, including his nephew, who made a speech protesting at the
involvement of the established church. Kierkegaard rejected the transformation of his
thought into opposition, but was himself well known for criticism of the established church,
including two succeeding primates of the Danish national church (Mynster and
Martensen). The criticism of the crowd is one way in which Kierkegaard separates himself
from organised radical politics. That raises the question of how far we can take
Kierkegaard as apolitical conservative and how far as the radical creator of a form of
individualism and anti-conformism which must be corrosive in relation to any religious and
political order. Kierkegaard accepts order but has an unsettling sense of the violence
which inhere in the preservation of order. That is something he is conscious of in
monarchical authority (Tarquin) and the republican order (Brutus), even if it did originate in
revolt against an older order. The hope he expresses in Point of View for an establishment
devoted to promoting good can have a very radical outcome. Any government is open to
criticism on the grounds that public good is sacrificed to the private benefits of people şn
government, individuals close to the government, and parts of society from which the
28
Kierkegaard and Political Community
government seeks support. Kierkegaard wishes to be associated with political
conformism, but his view of the single individual, his understanding of the dark side of
power, and his questioning of authority all point towards a politics of radical individualistic
non-conformism.
29
Kierkegaard and Political Community
Chapter Two
Previous Perspectives on Kierkegaard and Politics
Concluding Unscientific Postscript [Afslutende uvidenskabelig Esterskrift,
1846]
Preface [Forord]
[I]f he names his author, perhaps even with admiration, as the one to whom
he is indebted—for what was misused—then he is exceedingly bothersome.
Therefore, dialectically understood, the negative is not an intervention, but
only the positive. How strange! Just as that freedom-loving nation of North
Americans has invented the most cruel punishment, silence, so a liberal and
open-minded age has invented the most illiberal chicaneries—torchlight
processions at night, acclamation three times a day, a triple hip-hip-hurrah for
the great ones, and similar lesser chicaneries for humble folk. The principle
of sociality is precisely illiberal.
(1992, 8/VII.viii)
Views differ about the connection between ethics and politics, but even the supposed
immoralists of political thought, most famously Machiavelli, see political action as properly
serving ethical purposes, even if coming into conflict with particular ethical concerns at
times; and further see political action at its most successful as carried out by agents who
have some ethical qualities, even if not all. Most will surely agree that a writer who has
nothing to say about ethical philosophy, will have nothing to say about political philosophy.
While no one has said that Kierkegaard has nothing to say about ethics, there is an
influential tendency to downplay his ethical concerns, in comparison with his religious
thought, and his thought about the self as a religious agent. Let us give this view fair
representation with an excerpt from the writing of a philosopher who has done much
admirable work on Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard in relation to German Idealism.
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
It seems to me mistaken to read Fear and Trembling as aimed at articulating the
shortcomings of the ethical standpoint in a way convincing to an inhabitant of
that standpoint. Instead, we should read it as aimed primarily at articulating the
constraint imposed by a life of faith, and so presupposing, rather than arguing
for, a religious standpoint. A description of faith and the life of faith will include
an account of the place in that life of the ethical demands of citizenship and
family as well as whatever demands arise out of practical rationality in general.
But that the claims of citizenship, family and perhaps practical rationality itself
have a scope that is limited by the claims of religious faith, if these turn out to be
in conflict, is not argued for but presupposed in Fear and Trembling; likewise,
that the ethical standpoint is subordinate to the religious figures among the
book's presuppositions, not the points it aims to establish. But that sends us
back to the drawing board, so far as the criticism of the ethical standpoint goes.
(Kosch 2006a, 160)
These comments on Fear and Trembling are confirmed by Kosch in Kierkegaard’s
Ethicist’ (2006b) and ‘What Abraham Couldn’t Say’ (2008). A broadly similar view about
the place of religion and the place of ethics in Kierkegaard can be found in John Lippitt’s
‘What neither Abraham Nor Johannes de Silentio could Say: a reply to Michelle
Kosch’ (2008), and in his book, Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (2003). Since the
argument for a political reading of Kierkegaard has begun above with Fear and Trembling
[Frygt og Bæven, 1843], a response to the Kosch and Lippitt view is necessary, with
regard to how to read Fear and Trembling and how to read Kierkegaard in general.
!
The religious ideas in Kierkegaard in no way exclude other important issues.
That
Fear and Trembling is a book which justifies Abraham’s faith in God to the extent that he is
willing to kill his son, in no way excludes the possibility that the book has much to say
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
about ethics. Even on Kosch’s account, Kierkegaard’s ‘religious’ writings refer to the self
and the conduct of the self in relation to God and to other humans. These are ethical
themes, and do not stop being ethical themes because faith is also at issue. Why should
we even wish to impose such very schematic distinctions between the themes in
Kierkegaard? Kosch strongly implies that people who disagree with her are simply not
very competent readers of Kierkegaard, general philosophers with a view about
Kierkegaard rather than genuine specialists. The response to that must be that many
specialists are mistaken to presume that a book about faith, about what is beyond ethics,
cannot also be about ethics. It is difficult to talk about what is beyond ethics without
discussing the ethics it is beyond, and indeed Kierkegaard has rather a lot to say directly
about ethics in Fear and Trembling, for a book in which he supposedly was not concerned
with ethics. What he has to say about faith inevitably raises ethical concerns about the
general attitude to life and human community of the ‘knight of faith’ [Troens Ridder], and
how the knight of faith deals with the ethical implications of the need to recognise that God
may command us to do something extremely unethical. It is, in the end, simply against the
spirit, in which Kierkegaard wrote, to deal in such a stye of formal rigidity in dividing up
parts of philosophy from each other.
!
On these questions a good balance is struck by Anthony Rudd in Kierkegaard and
the Limits of the Ethical (1993), where he takes as a basic assumption the interpenetration
of themes in Kierkegaard’s writings (20-21), and also assumes that as his title implies,
looking at what is at at the limits of the ethical is important to philosophical ethics, and is a
major issue in Kierkegaard. There are other aspects of Rudd’s book which are in broad
agreement with what is argued here, particularly the suggestion that Two Ages is not a
complete condemnation of the democratic age (129). Not everything in Rudd’s writing on
Kierkegaard is so sympathetic from the point of view of the present book, however.
Different assumptions are made here about how far we can think of Kierkegaard as having
32
Kierkegaard and Political Community
a theory of the self which can be used outside the religious context, and how far we can
think of William in Either/Or II [Enter-Ellen, 1843] as close to Kierkegaard’s own point of
view (see also ‘Reason and Ethics’ in Davenport and Rudd 2001). We will return to
William in Chapter Five below.
!
A big issue in thinking about Kierkegaard on politics is his attitude to democratic
tendencies of his own time, particularly with regard to the 1848 constitutional revolution in
Denmark. Too many commentators on Kierkegaard mistake scepticism and reserve about
democracy for rejection, as in Jon Stewart’s preface to Kierkegaard’s Influence on SocialPolitical Thought (Stewart 2011). It is true that the default assumption about Kierkegaard’s
political attitudes has been that he was both apolitical and conservative, and this is broadly
correct. There are reasons to qualify that claim though. The harshness of Kierkegaard’s
conservatism has been exaggerated, and the liberal side understated. That is we should
see Kierkegaard more as a liberal or a constitutional conservative, and less as a
reactionary ultra-conservative monarchist absolutist. The apolitical side should not be
confused with the claim that Kierkegaard’s writings have nothing important to say about
politics. The apolitical way of reading Kierkegaard is most obviously linked with a
conservative reading, but has also been lined with a moralistic anti-political leftism, which
shows how difficult it is to stop talking about politics in Kierkegaard. What is being argued
for here is a weak version of apolitical and conservative Kierkegaard, looking at the
political implications of his work and the liberal side of the conservatism, and arguing that
he makes some meaningful contributions in those directions. There are also other political
interpretations which capture some aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought, even if they are not
convincing in relation to Kierkegaard’s thought as a whole, and do contain evidence for
political richness of his work.
!
A good example of the very conservative, even reactionary, reading of Kierkegaard
can be found in Robert Perkins’ ‘Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Bourgeois State’ (1984).
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Some similar points are made in Bruce Kirmmse’s ‘Kierkegaard and MacIntyre’ (in
Davenport and Rudd, 2001). Perkins quotes from Two Ages [En Literair Anmeldelse,
1846], and elsewhere to establish, correctly to some degree, Kierkegaard’s criticism of
bourgeois liberalism. What Perkins focuses on is a lack of absolute foundations to
bourgeois politics, though that that is also a positive claim from the point of view of the
liberal, who is trying to define the political rules of a society where there are different
values. There is inevitably always a resulting tension between the pluralist goal of
liberalism and the need to have a starting point, which is supplied by utilitarianism,
deliberative reflection on norms, natural law, or something which is presented as prepolitical, as far as that is possible. Recognising that is not the same as the rejection of
liberalism, since we could consider such efforts of liberal thinkers as the best that come be
done in a world of plural values. Certainly attempts at radical alternatives from the
authoritarian right, Marxist left, and allied phenomena have tended to be folded back into
liberalism. Looking at Perkins’ argument he does not explain what Kierkegaard’s
alternative to liberalism is, nor does he he provide any evidence of longing for a lost
paradise of monarchical absolutism. Perkins thinks of Kierkegaard as thinking in a
Hegelian way about the inevitability of the unfolding of new political forms over history.
Rather strangely Perkins interprets Hegel as mourning the loss of Periclean Athens, which
has some truth to it, but then every moment in Hegel’s arguments about history and
politics is a loss of some unity, never to be regained. Clearly Hegel thinks Periclean
Athens lacks advantages which result from Roman law, Christianity, Protestant
Christianity, civil society and other outcomes of the movement of history since the time of
Pericles. As Perkins notes, Kierkegaard was displeased by the fate of Socrates under
Athenian democracy, but then so are all modern liberals. Anyway, like Hegel, Kierkegaard
sees that modern liberalism has some origins in Christianity, and his own views of
subjectivity and individuality cannot be understood without the model of liberalism,
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
however much Kierkegaard may sometimes write as if he is just returning to the Bible In
addition, the fact is he does not always write like that.
!
In defence of the Kierkegaard as reactionary thesis, Kierkegaard did write this in
1850, in the Appendix to On My Point of View as a Writer [Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed
1851], about the 1848 constitutional revolution in Denmark:
In the year 1848 the threads of sagacity broke; the shriek that announces chaos
was heard. “It was the year 1848; it was a step forward.” Well, yes, if
“government” is achieved for which not a single new official is needed or the
dismissal of any older official, but perhaps an internal transformation in the
direction of becoming steadfast by fearing God. Certainly the mistake from
above was that on the whole the strength throughout the government from top
to bottom was essentially secular sagacity, which essentially is precisely the
lack of strength. The fault from below was to want to do away with all
government. The punishment, since the mode of the sin is always the mode of
the punishment, the punishment is: that which comes to be most bitterly missed
is precisely——government. Never as in our century have any generation and
the individuals within it (the ruler and those ruled, the superiors and the
subordinates, the teachers and those taught, etc.) been so emancipated as now
from all the inconvenience, if you will, of something standing and necessarily
standing unconditionally firm. Never have “opinions” (the most diverse and in
the most various spheres), in freedom, equality, and fraternity,” felt so
unconstrained and so blissfully happy with the free pass “to a certain degree”;
never will a generation so deeply come to sense that what it and every
individual in it needs is something is that something stands, and must stand
unconditionally firm, needs what the deity, divine love in love, invented——the
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
unconditional, for which humankind, sagacious to its own corruption in selfadmiration substituted this much-admired “to a certain degree”.
(Kierkegaard 1998, 19/XIII 508)
This is quoted at length because it is a prime support for the Kierkegaard as extreme
reactionary position and it could be taken as an arch-reactionary blast in response to the
limited liberal revolution of 1848 (Kirmmse 1995). We might also notice the reactionary
demands that Kierkegaard does not make, even in that context. He does not demand that
the reforms be abolished or regret that force was not used against peaceful
demonstrators. What he does point point out is that those who demand an end to
government regret the lack of government when that wish is granted. That could be taken
more as an ironic comment about anarchism, than as a condemnation of liberal
constitutional revolution. There is a case though for extending his remarks to a the liberal
attitude to government, that it should only exist, and only ever act, by full and explicit
consent. That is an interesting kind of reduction ad absurdum critique of liberalism. The
moment of 1848 in Europe, when there was a wave of liberal and national uprisings,
incorporates minarchist and anarchist inclined versions of liberalism, like Frédérick Bastiat
and Gustave de Molinari, as well as Marx and Engels with their goal of stateless
communism. However, it also included believers in the continuity of institutions like Alex is
de Tocqueville, who regarded government and political wisdom as essential to liberty and
property. It was apparent by 1848 that major countries, such as Britain and the American
Republic (which commentators like Tocqueville could see was on an ascending path as a
world power) could exist and thrive with liberal representative constitutions. We should
give some credit to Kierkegaard’s capacity for dialectic and irony. Surely we do not think
his remarks on Socrates and Athens, to the disadvantage of Athenian democracy mean
that he literally believed the Athenian state was collapsing at the time of the trial of
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Socrates. It kept going as a more or less independent state for a few more centuries,
though coming under great Macedonian and then Roman influence.
!
We should also note that what follows on from this passage in the immediately
following text, and in later discussion (1998, 69-69), is the contrast of the ‘single
individual’ (den Enkelte) against the ‘crowd’ [Mængde]. This is a distinction very amenable
to liberal thought, and to all theories of democracy which seek to incorporate institutional
restraints on temporary majorities, that is all liberal democratic theory. Should we see
Kierkegaard as the arch-reactionary condemning any shift to liberal democracy, or as the
fastidious liberal democratic appalled by the mob? The answer must be somewhere in
between (Tilley 2009a, Tlley 2009b), since Kierkegaard never tells us to revive absolute
monarchy. He does note with some acerbity that people want a monarchy lacking
substance, but he does not predict social disorder as a result, and if he was threatening
such an outcome, we would have to wonder how that could be reconciled with the ‘single
individual’ (den Enkelte), who definitely doe not look like the passively loyal subject of an
absolute monarch. He ends the appendix quoted above by declaring, “the single
individual must personally relate himself to the unconditional. This is what I do to the best
of my ability and with maximum effort and much sacrifice have fought for, fighting against
tyranny, also the tyranny of the numerical” (1998, 20). Words which could have come from
the authors of the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, or J.S. Mill. All of these people were
concerned with the dangers posed by irresponsible majorities in a system or
representative government. The danger of a majority acting against liberty was a major
concern of the Federalist Papers, which Tocqueville expands into a discussion of the
‘tyranny of the majority’, a phrase also used by Mill.
!
An advocates of apolitical Kierkegaard, Bertel Nygaard (2009) has mentioned that
that Kierkegaard’s critique of the public resembles that of Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill,
but with an ‘anti- political content’ (311). How anti-political is Kierkegaard when his thought
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
parallels that of two of the major advocates of liberal politics, both of whom spent time as
politicians? Clearly Kierkegaard was not political in the sense that Tocqueville and Mill
were, but if his thought contains Tocquevillian and Millian implications, maybe we should
be concerned wit the political implications of Kierkegaard’s writings as a whole, as well as
how he may draw on political thought in his writing. As Nygaard also points out, Hegelian
philosophy permeates Danish political writing up to 1848. Kierkegaard’s critical
engagement with Hegel is bound to have political implications. It is necessary to look at
what conservatism meant in Kierkegaard’s time. Looking at Nygaard it is a mixture of
preserving absolute monarchy with cautious National Liberal demands for
constitutionalism and representative government. The monarchy, itself, had already set up
regional assemblies, and had conceded the principle of representative government, but
was slow to put it into practice, until pushed into doing so by the revolutionary
demonstrations of 1848. The monarchy was absolutist in principle until 1848, but
moderate in practice and had leanings towards economic liberalisation, in moves from
state control of the economy, to a more free market situation. The monarchy also
implemented a land reform program which dispersed ownership very widely, leaving
Denmark with what is still an unusually broad distribution of land. So Kierkegaard’s loyalty
to existing institutions suggest a mixture of indifferentism and adherence to moderate
reform rather than arch reactionary conservatism, or mystic-elitist disdain for the vulgarity
of politics. Nygaard himself points out in another text, that it is possible to draw political
conclusions from the mixture of theory of agency and anti-politics in Kierkegaard (2011,
429). Even Nygaard himself suggests two political interpretations of Kierkegaard: when he
suggests that Kierkegaard’s social and political ideas are very close to those of Johan
Ludwig Heiberg, with regard to criticising liberals for putting abstraction before natural
development (428); and when he suggests a comparison with the radical anti-statist
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Frederik Dreier (430), though Dreier was maybe more of an anarcho-socialist than is
apparent in Nygaard’s remarks, which tend to imply a free market liberal.
!
The elevation of natural development above political abstraction above politics
certainly fits with conservatism, as it appears in Burke and in Hegel. Edmund Burke refers
to politics as having a basis in nature in many places in Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1968, 117). The idea of natural development can be found in Hegel in a
particularly striking way in the ‘Preface‘ to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), where it
refers to all human culture and knowledge. Not everyone takes Hegel as a conservative,
but what some people take as social democracy in Hegel might be better taken as
conservatism with corporatist and paternalist welfarist elements. That model of nature in
relation to politics can also be found in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s The Limits of State Action
(1993). Humboldt was a friend of Hegel, but his position is that of a radical limitation of the
state to nightwatchman functions in contradiction with conservative monarchism, and with
Hegel’s view of the social function of the state. He finds a natural basis for politics as often
as Burke (Humboldt 1993, 13 etc); and he advocates the merits of free interaction
between individuals in comparison to state enforced cooperation. We should also mention
Hans-Georg Gadamer here. His master work of philosophical hermeneutics, Truth and
Method (1989) is not directly concerned with politics, but has been taken up as source of
conservative thinking, certainly by centre-right European politicians, and does directly
concern itself with the value of tradition. It does belong to a philosophical line of descent
from Kierkegaard, through Gadamer’s philosophical inspiration Martin Heidegger.
!
However, Heidegger’s direct references to Kierkegaard are sparse, do not directly
concern politics, and the political interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy is a deeply
fraught area, partly due to his connections with the Nazi party when it was in power, and
his connections with ultra-conservative thought in Germany before then. Therefore we will
not consider the issue any further, and will just say that the study of influence of Heidegger
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
on political thought may contribute to a exhaustively complete and detailed appreciation of
Kierkegaard’s contribution in the area. Comparable comments can be made about
Kierkegaard’s affect on the type of Marxism put forward by Theodor Adorno and Walter
Benjamin, both of whom read Kierkegaard with deep engagement, but who did not bring
him directly, into their work on the cultural and philosophical aspects of politics.
Kierkegaard’s use in ultra-conservative political theory has been dealt with through
Schmitt, and we will have cause to return to him. We will consider his use in radical left
theory through Matuštik a couple of paragraphs from here, we will return briefly to
Benjamin later.
!
There are questions about the boundaries between conservatism and this kind of
liberalism, particularly as in recent years conservatism has tended to co-opt classical
liberal and libertarian themes. However, there is still a distinction to be made now, and in
the time of Humboldt and Kierkegaard, between small government arguments based on
the preservation of tradition; and small government arguments based on unshackling
individuals and communities from enforced traditions and moral codes. The former is
conservative, the latter is liberal, as in the distinction now between Roger Scruton (2001)
and Chandran Kukathas (2003), or in the twentieth century between Carl Schmitt (1996)
and Friedrich Hayek (1944, 1960). As we have seen Schmitt is often seen as a
authoritarian, even totalitarian thinker, rather than a constitutional conservative, but Paul
Gottfried, a notable ‘paleocon’ (i.e. American style small government conservative
traditionalist) has argued for the latter understanding (Gottfried 1990).
!
Another version of anti- or a-political Kierkegaard suggests that he be taken outside
all political categories in a perpetual confrontation of political abstraction by concrete
individuality, as in Matuštik’s ‘Radical Existential Praxis: Or Why the Individual defines
Liberal, Communitarian and Postmodern Categories’, and is the general tendency of the
book in which that essay appears, and of which Matuštik is the co-editor, Kierkegaard in
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Post/Modernity (1995). Matuštik had presented this view at greater length in Postnational
Identity (1993) where there is general theory of existential critique beyond political
categories. Matuštik’s argument gives a more left leaning version of the a-political version
of Kierkegaard, in which an a-political position is associated with a radical critique of
power. His image of liberalism is one of possessive individualism, and therefore one of
narrow minded self-interest which could be taken as an inadequate account of liberalism in
any version.
!
Backhouse’s Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism (2011) follows on from
Matuštik, in the basic commitment to a a political moral absolutist reading of Kierkegaard
on egalitarian lines, though in Backhouse’s case with an emphasis on a religiously
oriented communitarianism around the neighbour. Backhouse is scholarly and argues
carefully in his account of Kierkegaard, religion and Danish nationalism, but in regards to
egalitarianism moves from ethical egalitarianism to all forms of egalitarianism so implicitly
bringing in egalitarian liberal approaches (in sense associated with John Rawls). This is
more by implication than direct argument, and Backhouse does not provide evidence in a
generally carefully sourced book for a social and economic egalitarianism in Kierkegaard.
It must be said that the overall thrust is with regard to Kierkegaard’s criticisms of
nationalism, which is very accurate with regard to religion. However, Kierkegaard is more
of an agent of Danish national-cultural identity than Backhouse concedes, not just with
regard to the way Kierkegaard is taken, but Kierkegaard’s own development of literary
Danish, and his frequent references to Danish culture, modern and archaic. Backhouse
assumes that a communitarian way of thinking can be universalistic, but Kierkegaard
himself notes problems with that.
!
The various versions of liberalism try to combine individual rights with public welfare
and a social structure in which individuals can be connected with each other, without fear
of a zero sum game in which any kind of community represents absolute loss for some,
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and absolute gain for others. Liberal individualism only works on the basis of mutual
concern between humans which can assume perfectionist and self-sacrificing forms. The
account of economic exchange in Smith or of political life in Tocqueville only works on the
assumption that humans are concerned with more than pure material acquisition. Smith
puts forward sympathy as a value foundation, not selfishness, in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1982); Tocqueville criticises individualism offering the passion for voluntary
association as a a foundation in Part II of Volume Two of Democracy in America
(Tocqueville, 1966). So the place of Christian love, of absolute love for the neighbour in
Kierkegaard, or respect for the concrete uniqueness of any individual does not contradict
liberalism. The respect for the individual, however expressed, must at the very least be
compatible with individualism, and ethical absolutism, as a possibility, is necessary to
liberal theory in its explanations of how individuals freely connect.
!
Alison Assister’s Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory (2009) suggests
contexts for thinking of Kierkegaard as a political theorist, but the discussion of context
overwhelms the discussion of Kierkegaard, as does the commitment to recent egalitarian
theory. The main thrust is to show how Kierkegaard might provide an alternative to a
Rawlsian style of political theory, which tries to identify the basic principles of justice that
rational people can accept. Assister looks at how this way of thinking can be taken back to
John Locke, and compares it with alternatives which she goes back further to Aristotle.
Those alternative include the ethics of care, virtue ethics, and psychological work on the
situational nature of ethical choices, which is taken in the direction of communitarianism in
political theory. Something like an ethics of care is followed by Angier as an interpretation
of Kierkegaard in ethical terms, which he takes as an alternative to doctrines of individual
power and sovereignty (2006, 139-144). At least a part of his argument for the mutual
dependency of humans refers to Kierkegaard’s limitations on human sovereignty in
relation to God, so there is an unannounced secularisation of Kierkegaard’s argument.
42
!
Kierkegaard and Political Community
We should note that interest in the ethics of care, virtue ethics, and psychological
accounts of situational ethics, is quite possible for advocates of classical liberalism and
libertarianism, as can be seen in Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues (2006).
Kierkegaard only makes intermittent appearances, and there is very limited consideration
of the most obvious context, that is German Idealism and Romanticism. Some terms are
used in ways which need more justification, such as the description of Rawls as a classical
liberal, and Rawls is the focus for the discussion of classical liberalism.
!
Normally classical liberalism is a term restricted to the founding texts of liberalism
from John Locke to John Stuart Mill, in addition to which classical liberalism is usually
regarded as a limited government free market way of thinking, distinct from ‘liberalism’ as
the word is most often used now (particularly in the United States), that is to refer to an
emphasis on limiting economic inequality, and on faith in the capacity of government
actions in the economic and social spheres. This comes out of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s. The thinking behind this goes back to the Progressive
Era from the 1890s to the 1920s, most associated in philosophy with John Dewey (1989).
Dewey’s own thinking was rooted in late Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Hegelianism
(2010). The link between Hegel and a current of liberalism favourably disposed to an
expanding state, and which wished to compromise with socialism, can be taken back to
the British philosopher T.H. Green (2002). Though Rawls is not connected with this kind of
Hegelianism, his view of liberalism as egalitarian liberalism, which Assister takes as
classical liberalism, is rooted in that partly Hegel inspired emergence of interventionist
liberalism, also known as new liberalism and social liberalism.
!
Hegel himself has come to be identified with communitarianism in political theory,
particularly since Charles Taylor’s book Hegel (1975), which is itself a variation of
egalitarian liberalism that tries to give it a less individualistic basis, a more communal
ethical basis. Rawls, and even more some of his followers (Freeman 2001), may regard
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
egalitarian liberalism as the best current interpretation of classical liberalism, but a more
widespread view is that classical liberalism is now expressed though various strands of
libertarianism, taken to be something distinct from egalitarian liberalism. Libertarianism is
best know to philosophers through Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), which is
partly a response to Rawls, and through subsequent work by Jan Narveson (2001),
Chandran Kukathas (2003) and others. The classical liberal label is mostly associated
with the work of the economist and political thinker Friedrich Hayek from the 1930s
onwards (1944, 1960), and more recent work in political philosophy in line with Hayek’s
wish to revive classical liberalism such as Gerald Gaus (2010), David Schmidtz (2010),
and John Tomasi (2012). Generally speaking,when classical liberalism and libertarianism
are contrasted, libertarianism is taken to refer to a minarchist or anarchist view, while
classical liberalism allows for both a state, and for public goods provided by the state
beyond national defence and police. There is no clear universally accepted boundary
between egalitarian liberalism, classical liberalism and libertarianism, but we will use the
terms from now on as defined here, as being the most widely recognisable way of dealing
with these terms.
!
While it is fine for Assister, and others, to put Kierkegaard in the context of
egalitarian liberal and communitarian political thought, her account of liberalism and
communitarianism, and the relation between them risks causing confusion, and certainly
does not deal with Kierkegaard in much detail. Since Kierkegaard partly defined himself
against Hegel, we need to be very careful about connecting Kierkegaard with
communitarianism, which is very tied up with Hegel, and is often a variation on egalitarian
liberalism. Communitarianism can take on a more conservative and less egalitarian
aspect, as in the work of Alasdair McIntyre (1985), more though its other best known
advocates, Michael Sandel (1982) and Charles Taylor (1992), are egalitarian liberal in
inclination.
44
!
Kierkegaard and Political Community
At their worst, communitarian interpretations of Kierkegaard rest on the assumption
that a religiously oriented thinker must be a communitarian; and at their worst egalitarian,
liberal interpretations of Kierkegaard project the sympathy that most current political
theorists have for egalitarian liberalism onto thinkers of the past. This does not match with
the thinking of the ethically individualistic and institutionally conservative Kierkegaard. His
mixture of institutional conservatism, individualism and scepticism gives him much in
common with David Hume, for example, though their attitudes to religion were highly
divergent. Despite Rawls and Freeman, most still find Hume closer to libertarianism,
classical liberalism, or conservatism tinged by those positions, rather than egalitarian
liberalism. The latter camp includes Hayek and the editor of the most recent edition of
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, Eugene F. Miller. Hume’s political thought spread
out across Book III Part 2 of A Treatise of Human Nature (2000), sections III and IV of An
Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (in Hume 1975), and Part II of Essays Moral,
Political and Literary (1985) argues for progress through gradual evolution of laws, morals
and institutions, along with moderation regarding political principles, and benevolence for
others.
!
The communitarian reading can be linked with an ethical reading of Kierkegaard as
a virtue theorist, continuing the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas with regard to moral
character, dispositions and judgements. The reading of Kierkegaard’s ethics in these
terms is very necessary, because his own writing is so concerned with moral personality,
actions and reasons of particular individuals. However, we should not draw the conclusion
that Kierkegaard is a political communitarian, because he is a virtue theorist of a sort,
perhaps. It is widely, though not universally, accepted that Nietzsche can be seen as a
virtue theorist, as can be seen in Swanton’s notable contribution, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic
View (2003), which occasionally brings in Kierkegaard as well. However, the view that
Nietzsche is a communitarian is not so popular. Interpreting Nietzsche politically itself is a
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
very difficult area, but the normal suggestions are that he is a classical liberal, an ultraconservative believer in great elites, or apolitical. None of these obviously fits with
communitarianism. The relationship between the thought of Kierkegaard and that of
Nietzsche is itself a difficult area, but it is at least reasonable to suggest that they have an
interest in moral personality which connects with virtue ethics, but do not believe in the
kind of stability and continuity of character assumed in Aristotle and Aquinas. Or that
stability could only be the result of great struggle in Kierkegaard, and then still conditioned
by the paradoxes of human existence.
!
It is certainly more difficult to move from virtue ethics to communitarianism, if the
virtue ethics in question assumes that personal character is changeable and conditioned
by uncertainties of identity. MacIntyre himself continues to distance his version of virtue
ethics plus communitarianism from Kierkegaard even after consideration of an impressive
range of arguments putting Kierkegaard in the same camp as MacIntyre in Kierkegaard
After MacIntyre (Davenport and Rudd, 2001). We can see why there should be a
distinction, in In Works of Love IIA, Kierkegaard makes a clear distinction between
Christian love and what comes from habit, habit is even said to be the enemy of love
(Kierkegaard 1995, 36-37),something we will discuss further in Chapter VII. Kierkegaard
After MacIntyre sticks to MacIntyre’s version of virtue ethics, looking to Kierkegaard as a
source of corrections and complementary arguments in relation to MacIntyre’s ethics and
does not go into the political theory issues, leaving the gap which considered here. That
consideration challenges reduction to ethics in Kierkegaard, because both God and
political power challenges the priority of consensual ethical laws.
!
The difficulties of interpreting texts is considered by Kierkegaard in the quotation at
the head of this chapter. Our desire to interpret the texts of the past is an imposition on
their authors. We have troubled them in claiming to be influenced by them, so dragging
the author into positions not held by that author. Commentary is a kind of attack on the
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
texts of the best, even a theft of their meaning. Kierkegaard suggests a political context
for this in a sardonic reference to the use of solitary imprisonment as a punishment in the
United States. He suggests this is part of the chicanery of claims that America is the land
of liberty, and of liberalism in general. Political thought which claims to put individuality at
the centre in fact regards individuality as a punishment. Readers of Foucault’ Discipline
and Punish (1977), may see a foreshadowing in Kierkegaard’s concern with the link
between individualism and state coercion through the prison system. Our interpretation of
an author, our debt to that book, is broken by the resistance of the author to the imposition
of meanings. Sociability is a condition of knowledge; unsociability is the penalty for
unrestrained sociability in writing. The question is raised that the forms of punishment in a
liberal constitutional state may enforce individuality, so that individuality is encouraged
while it is also excluded as something that is imposed on deviants. Kierkegaard’s vision of
the ‘individual self’ may be a challenge to those forms of liberty, or at least a questioning of
the purity of liberty. Just as no political institutions, laws, or national culture can be in full
accordance with Christian precepts, none can be in complete accordance with the
flourishing of the single individual. We will show how that is the case in the chapters below
with regard to the national nature of politics, the historically changing understanding of
liberty, the difficulties of relating actual law and ethics with Christian love, the tragic nature
of political communities, and the inevitable irony of political communication.
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
3. Kierkegaard and the Danish Political Community
Stages on Life’s Way [Stadier paa Livets Vej, 1845]
‘Letter to the Reader from Frater Taciturnus’ [Skrivelse til Læseren fra
Frater Taciturnus]
‘A Concluding Word’ [Slutningsord]
Some of my countrymen no doubt think that Copenhagen is a boring
town and small. To me, on the contrary, Copenhagen, refreshed by the
sea on which it lies and without being able even in winter to surrender
the recollection of beech forests, seems to me to be the most fortunate
place of residence I could wish. It is large enough to be a fair sized city,
small enough so that there can be no market price [Torvepriis] on
people. The statistical consolation they have in Paris over so and so
many superlative people, cannot intrude disturbingly and churn the
individual [Enkelte] into a froth so that life has no meaning, his sabbath
no comfort, his festival days no joy, because everything slips away into
emptiness or surfeit.
(Kierkegaard 1988, 487/VI 452-453)
Kierkegaard did not suggest that the Danish political developments of his time, in the
direction of liberal constitutionalism, offered a paradigm for the ages, however, he did not
reject these developments, and within his largely apolitical approach he does offer more in
the way of approval than rejection of developments. He had much to say that was critical
of modernity, but that is different from rejection of political developments to cope with
modernity. Particularly when we consider that the modernity he criticises is something he
recognises as a product of Christianity. His well known aspersions on the bourgeois world,
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
such as his Fear and Trembling [Frygt og Bæven, 1843] ‘Preliminary Expectoration’
reference to ‘all the bourgeois philistinism I see in life’ (1983, 38/III 89) should not lead us
to forget that he sees the possibility of a knight of the infinite [Uendelighedens Ridder] in
such a man (39/III 90). That could be the knight of infinite resignation [Ridderne af den
uendelige Resignation] rather than the knight of faith [Troens Ridder], but the apparent
bourgeois philistine certainly can be a knight of faith, and the suggestion is that the knight
of faith is more of an apparent bourgeois philistine than the more aristocratic knight of the
infinite (39) . The individualisation of bourgeois society is not an impediment to faith for
Kierkegaard, and is a product of Christianity, of its universalisation of ethical recognition.
Whatever political reaction we may have to bourgeois capitalism, it certainly at the very
least pays tribute to moral equality through the laws in bourgeois liberal states, and the
political theory of its defenders.
!
The comparison between Kierkegaard and Tocqueville has been made before
(Ferguson 2003, 126; Jegstrup 1995, 427), though very briefly, and it is very appropriate
with regard to a mixture of sympathy and criticism for the growth of liberal democracy,
along with the context of its broad political and general public culture. There is some
resemblance between the grandson of a Jutland peasant and the heir to a Normandy
countship in their respect for democratic spirit, though it never seems to be fully
internalised.
!
Like Tocqueville, Kierkegaard lived through the European ‘Springtime of the
Peoples’ in 1848, which Tocqueville discussed himself in Recollections (1970). Various
liberal, democratic and national causes converged at this time with varying results, but in
revolutions which left a permanent mark in that there was no going back from the political
power of liberalism, democracy and nationalism, even if they were held down for a while.
Socialist and communist ideas also had an impact, particularly expressed in the June Days
in France, and in the publication by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of The Communist
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Manifesto. Marx analysed the 1848 Springtime and its aftermath in France, The Class
Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.
!
The Springtime of the Peoples did not have such a notable socialist aspect in
Denmark, and also did not suffer the failure experienced by French republicans and
liberals, as unfolding events led Louis Napoleon Bonaparte coming to power as President,
and then instituting the Second Empire as Napoleon III. That was the end of Tocqueville’s
political career, and French liberalism never really recovered, as a notable coherent
political force or stream of political thought, though broadly liberal principles provided the
basis for the Third Republic after the fall of Napoleon III in 1870. Denmark made an
apparently radical move from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy with a broad
electoral base, and started to become Denmark as we know it know, a stable consensual
democracy, in which there has always been at least one party in the national assembly
defining itself as liberal. This process began for the whole of Scandinavia after the end of
the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The events of that period killed off the
claims of both Denmark and Sweden to be major European powers. Sweden lost Finland
to Russia, but was compensated with Norway, which was forcibly extracted from its union
with Denmark. These big changes did not have the traumatic consequences that might be
expected. Norway’s autonomy was respected during its union with Sweden, which it left
peacefully in 1905. Denmark did not suffer from revanchist nationalist obsessions, despite
conflict with Prussia-Germany over Schleswig-Holstein. While there was an absolute
monarchy until 1848, in practice from the late eighteenth century kings ruled consensually
with regard to public opinion. There were stresses over the relation between crown and
national assembly, and armed conflict in relation to the border with Prussia-Germany , but
nothing to undermine the existence of a pluralistic law governed polity with representative
institutions. The period since 1784, when the future Frederik VI became Regent, has been
one of constitutional government in Denmark, with peaceful transitions between
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governments expect for Nazi occupation during World War II. The unique achievement of
the Danish people in helping most Jews to escape to Sweden during the Nazi occupation
is surely a tribute to the consensual civic culture emerging in Kierkegaard’s time. It would
be wrong to say that Denmark’s record on democracy, individual rights, state power,
racism and anti-semitism has been perfect at any time, but it would be hard to think of a
country which has been clearly better in all these respects during the period under
discussion.
!
The most obvious downside to Danish civic culture is an element of inward looking
conformism, in which consensus rests on nearly everyone having the same religion,
language and ethnicity, though recent immigration is weakening the appearance of
sameness. That sense of comfortable village complacency, and underlying intolerance of
the outside, was certainly experienced by Kierkegaard during the Corsair Affair of 1846
(Kierkegaard 1992b) when a dispute with a satirical magazine led to children mocking him
in the street. This reinforced his suspicion that the modern world followed low values, as
in the suggestion in the Preface to Fear and Trembling that ideas are on sale at a bargain
price (1983, 6). However, we should not take such remarks too far. As has been noted
already, the world that Kierkegaard criticises is one he acknowledges to be a product of
Christianity, in the form of compromise between Christianity and worldliness; and from
Kierkegaard’s point of view, the average values of every age are under challenge from
Christianity
!
There were reformist and reactionary periods in the progress towards democracy,
and its institutionalisation, in Kierkegaard’s lifetime and later. Frederik VI who started off
as a reformer was later seen as a reactionary, his successor Christian VIII recognised the
principle of constitutional monarchy, but procrastinated through the whole of his reign in
the application of that principle. Nevertheless, the time of Frederik VI and Christian VIII
saw the abolition of serfdom, a land reform program which led to Denmark becoming the
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European country with the broadest distribution of land ownership, erosion of economic
monopolies, regional representative assemblies, and other measures to establish equal
rights of citizens.
!
We can see the successful development of liberal democracy and a culture of civic
values, which Kierkegaard did not eulogise, but when he did refer to it, he did so in terms
of a cautious welcome, as we see in ‘Armed Neutrality’ [Den væbnede Neutralitat, 1849]:
[M]y view is that the essentially Christian, unchanged, at times may need by way
of new modifications to secure itself against the new, the new nonsense that is
now in vogue. Let me clarify this relation by reference to another circumstance. In
the far, far distant past, in times more simple than these, it was of course also the
custom to draw up legal documents, contracts, etc. But if we take such a contract
from olden times and compare it with a contract of the same kind from 1848, we
certainly find the latter considerably modified. We must not, however, be in a hurry
to say that this one is therefore better than the former, ironically it might turn out
that it is still a question whether it would not have been better that all these
modifications have become necessary. But since those simple times there have
been so many rogues and swindlers that modifications have become necessary.
(Kierkegaard 1998, 131-132/X B107 291)
This is the most minimal and indirect possible endorsement of a liberal constitution.
Kierkegaard does not even refer to the 1849 constitution in this text finished on the
nineteenth of May 1849 (Kierkegaard 1998, xxv), just before the constitution was signed
by the King on the fifth of June. Frederick VII conceded that the monarchy would become
limited by a constitution in February 1848, and the 1849 constitution was the results of the
deliberations of a constitutional assembly appointed afterwards. Maybe it is mere
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coincidence that Kierkegaard wrote about contracts days before the Constitution came into
force, but it is a particularly propitious coincidence if so. The idea that the state and its
laws is based on contract goes back to Hobbes, who was referring to a covenant to
establish the sovereign, itself following up on Grotius, and we can keep going back in the
history of philosophy and political thought to find precedents. We can take from this
passage in Kierkegaard, the idea that political contracts have to be revised to adapt to the
imperfect nature of humans. The first contract may have been the best one, but it had to
be surpassed to adapt to deceptive and dishonest behaviour. Change is inevitable and
law, therefore presumably constitutions, both become better and worse over time. Better
because more resistant to dishonest, but worse because lacking in the original simplicity.
Extrapolating further, early constitutions may give power to kings, but their simplicity must
later give way to the complexity of a contract, or constitution, designed by representative
institutions. Kierkegaard’s liking for original simplicity connects him with both the
monarchism of Humboldt and the republicanism of Montesquieu and Rousseau. As we
have already seen, in The Limits of State Action (1993, 39-40), Humboldt states a
preference for the simplicity of royal government, the choice of early free people which
avoids the multitude of demands for state action which follow from other governmental
regimes, as the monarchy clearly only serves in the functions of army commander and
chief judge. For Montesquieu, simple democratic republics in which there is little
inequality, and laws are indistinguishable from customs, have an elevated role, though that
is certainly not the end of his discussion of liberty (The Spirit of the Laws, Part 1). For
Rousseau, the ideal republic will be simple, poor and equal, and laws will be accepted as
part of customs (Social Contract, II.12). Rousseau accepts that modern state are mostly
larger in territory, and more complex in function. Hume had argued that the original
contract completely disappears in history, so we are constrained by general respect for
laws and political institutions and the recognition that they are generally beneficial (‘Of the
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Original Contract’ in Hume 1987). Applying Kierkegaard’s argument in context, we can say
that political systems which have more laws and more representation are worse than pure
kingship, but necessary as more functional in the face of human limitations.
!
However, mitigated and indirect Kierkegaard’s endorsement of the new constitution
is, we can argue for his profound role in his promotion of the value of the individual.
Kierkegaard tries to address everyone with the challenge to develop individuality, to see
that it contains more than mere adherence to law and ethical codes as they exist. The
individual has an absolute relation with the absolute. Ethics must refer to subjectivity. This
awareness of value as stemming from the individuality that all possess has many parallels
in the progress of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Kierkegaard maybe does more than
any of those thinkers to draw our attention to what it is to be an individual, recognising the
limitation of philosophical concepts in capturing that value. He brings together the literary
and philosophical aspects of this concern for the individual. Though Kierkegaard presents
is thinking as the outcome of original Christianity, this concern for the nature of the
individual, even the individual who lacks any commitment to faith, goes beyond earlier
Christian thought. Kierkegaard’s determination to decouple religion from the state is
evidence of this. He does not call for the outright separation of church and state, but his
scepticism about the state church, and its bishops, in Denmark brings him close in
practice. Kierkegaard does not do anything to draw our attention to anything new he is
doing in religious thought, always presenting himself as an advocate of Christian thought
as such. The complete lack of interest in state enforced religion, and in state led nationalreligious identity, puts him on the side of Enlightenment liberalism, against the most
conservative ways of thinking about religion and politics.
!
Kierkegaard had a rival as a writer influential on religion in Denmark of that time,
Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (Dyce 2010), and Grundtvig was also a significant part
of the politics of the time (Chapter 3 in Backhouse 2011). N.F.S. Grundtvig became a
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titular bishop, after many conflicts with the state church, and was at least like Kierkegaard
in willingness to break with mainstream views. He argued for a form of communalist and
populist religion, around the idea of the ‘living word’ of Christian communities since Gospel
times, as superior to Biblical study and theology. There are parallels with Protestant
revival movements of the time in other countries, which emphasised the emotional and
communal aspects of religion, and which contributed to emergent democratic culture. Like
Kierkegaard, Grundtvig studied German philosophy, but did not engage in the kind of
philosophical work that Kierkegaard produced, turning instead to the study of Danish
history and culture, including extended work on Norse mythology, along with writings
concerned with education, and with popularised forms of religious philosophy and
theology. Grudtvig was also politically active, leading to spells in both lower and upper
houses of the Danish parliament; and was associated with the development of democracy
in this way as well as through his religious work. The politics and study of Norse culture
came together in an emphasis on Danish identity, in which he thought that the Christian
history of Denmark should be understood through old Norse identity and literature, as a
higher repetition, and as a transcending interpretation of it. He brought a form of
moderate nationalism into Christianity in thought, and into the everyday life of the church,
particularly through the success of his own hymns. Kierkegaard’s own father was an
adherent of the movement. Though Kierkegaard thought that Christianity should be
brought to uneducated people in their own terms, the populist emotive aspects of
Grundtvig’s ‘living word’ are distinct from Kierkegaard’s own emphasis on the single
individual, and on the struggle to deal with the apparent paradoxes of Christianity. The
emphasis on Danish-Norse history was too nationalist and too far from transcendent
religious concerns for Kierkegaard’s approach. Kierkegaard was consistently sceptical in
his approach to grand claims, and despite clichés about Kierkegaard the irrationalist, he
was far too rational in his approach to think that Christianity could rest on emotional
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enthusiasm, and he was far too universalist in his Christianity to wish to make national
references a major part of the church.
!
Grundtvig is best known now in Denmark, and internationally, for his influence on
the Danish folk high school movement, which is a form of adult education, closely linked in
its origins with the elevation of the rural population and political democratisation. We can
see a continuity with the land reforms of the monarchy and the abolition of serfdom before
the 1849 constitution, as well as with the process of constitutional reform, in a broad
movement of political change in Denmark. Grundtvig only made one failed attempt to set
up such a school, but his followers were inspired by his ideas to do so, and these schools
are still widespread in Denmark. Grundtvig and his followers considered this to be the
ideal way that Grundtvig’s ideas about education, the living word and popular religion
could be put into practice. Previously uneducated Christians could discuss religion and
become more knowledgeable about it, through these schools.
!
Grundtvig, and his followers, are like an opposite pole in Danish culture to that of
Kierkegaard, communalist and populist rather than individualistic and sceptical.
Grundtvig’s position looks very close to communitarianism in political theory. If we
contrast Grundtvig and Kierkegaard we might find another reason to be sceptical about
communitarian interpretations of Kierkegaard, though Backhouse’s important work (2011)
on Kierkegaard and religious nationalism, leads him to a communitarian and egalitarian
interpretation, based on the ideal of the neighbour. Following Backhouse, we can at least
say that Kierkegaard’s thought may have a communitarian aspect, but not based on
national community, or any form of exclusive community identity. Once we lose the means
to identify a community and its traditions in a particularistic way, communitarianism is
losing part of its purpose, which is to root individuals in specific identified communities.
!
What Backhouse overlooks as well is how much Kierkegaard develops Danish
identity. This partly arises from what is made internationally of Kierkegaard and his status
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as the most world famous Danish thinker. Within Denmark, it is more Grundtvig who is the
national icon though. Anyway, Kierkegaard is an icon of a stereotypical understanding of
Danish identity, and more broadly Scandinavian identity with regard to inwardness and
melancholia. Beyond that Kierkegaard lived in a time when Danish was emerging from
the shadow of German as a language of scholarship and high culture. Until the early
nineteenth century Latin was still the language of university dissertations, and Kierkegaard
had to get special permission to write his thesis The Concept of Irony [Om Begrebet Ironi,
1841] in Danish rather than Latin. So we can at least say that Kierkegaard was a cultural
nationalist in that instance, and overall had mild inclinations in that direction. Backhouse
assumes the innate violence of nationalism to universalist ethics, and love of the
neighbour. This is not Kierkegaard’s explicit point of view, though he certainly wishes to
make a distinction between political and religious commitments. Nevertheless his work is
full of references to Denmark of the time, and he regularly refers to Norse mythology. We
should see Kierkegaard as combining mild cultural nationalism, an ambiguous interest in
modern liberal democracy, a concern with tensions between antique and modern forms of
citizenship, and universalist Christianity.
!
His constant attacks on Hegel, and Danish Hegelians, certainly has an air of Danish
resistance to the synthesising systematising philosopher from the large neighbouring
country, and Hegel’s followers within Denmark, as is confirmed by this remark in the first
part of Repetition [Gjentagelsen, 1843]: ‘The Greek explanation of the theory of being and
nothing, the explanation of “the moment,” “non-being,” etc. Trumps Hegel.
“Mediation” [Mediation] is a foreign word; repetition [Gjentagelse] is a good Danish word,
and I congratulate the Danish language on a philosophical term’. (Kierkegaard 1983, 148/
III 189). The oddity here is that Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Constantantin Constantius,
refers to the English ‘mediation’ rather than the German ‘Vermittlung’, the word used by
Hegel. This is certainly not Kierkegard’s mistake, and it is not likely to be Constantinius’
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mistake, as he is shown to share Kierkegaard’s philosophical culture, quoting Hamann in
German in the following paragraph. Kierkegaard did not provide a Danish translation for
that quotation, the same applies to the quotation from Hamann at the beginning of Fear
and Trembling, so he expected his readers to know German. The best explanation is that
Kierkegaard wanted to fleeting illustrate the multilingual nature of the movement of
philosophical concepts. Therefore Kierkegaard resists a completely nationalistic view of
philosophy, including the kind of combined nationalism and humanism discussed by
Derrida In ‘Onto-theology of national humanism’ (2007). Kierkegaard is perhaps making
an ironic comment on Fichte’s philosophical and educational nationalism in Addresses to
the German Nation (2008). That is he is acknowledging, but also qualifying, the relation
between philosophical language and national culture. Kierkegaard suggests both the
trans-national multi-lingual nature of philosophy, and the value of using philosophical terms
from your own language. He is implicitly putting himself forward as a necessary Danish
voice in philosophy, within the Greek and German texts he accepts as the core of
philosophy, so there is a suggestion of the value of being at the margin or in the between
place, which has ethical and political overtones. The individual should be at the centre,
that is individuals in their dissimilarity, and so should the variety of national-cultural
approaches should be appreciated.
!
Fichte and Hegel’s country, Germany, was at that time fragmented between various
states, but most importantly Prussia which had designs on the Danish King’s territories in
Schleswig-Holstein. Territories which were joined with Denmark proper as royal
possessions, not through unified statehood. Kierkegaard does not take up anti-Prussian
Danish nationalist positions, but he does build up Denmark, if indirectly, as a distinct
cultural nation with its own political institutions. He never demands the abolition of state
boundaries or national identities, and is very conscious of the way that ancient Greek
polities had some advantages in providing a sense of ethnic belonging, and shared
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concerns between individuals within a political community. The quotation at the head of
this chapter confirms that sense of mild Danish nationalism, cultural rather than concerned
with prestige in the political struggle between states. The idea of the small in between city
and state as particularly valuable comes up in that quotation, harmonising with the
suggestion above that some of the criticism of Hegel conveys such a message. It also
harmonises with the element of nostalgia for the ancient city state in Kierkegaard. The
population of Copenhagen at that time was about 100 000 which puts it in line with the
population of Periclean Athens, including lands in Attica. Kierkegaard does not put a
political meaning on this, rather concentrating on the social aspect in which both
individuality and social rituals are not eroded by the incoherence and pressures of the
changing mass in big cities. The social and cultural points are intertwined with a sense of
contact of nature and continuity of life in the memory of the individual. Paris, the world city
of the time, is represented as the polar opposite, in terms which are familiar throughout
history in reference to the wickedness of the great city. There are many ways in which
Kierkegaard’s writings are embedded in the Copenhagen and Denmark of his time. There
are many reference to particular streets and places in Copenhagen, most notably the Deer
park. There are rides out into the county, walks round art galleries, middle class homes,
fragments of Norse mythology and everyday life in Copenhagen. Judges, priests, and
writers, all appear giving different perspectives on the social life of the time. Kierkegaard’s
writing is a memorial to the Denmark of his time, and no other body of great philosophical
writing, since Plato has been so embedded in the rhythms and experiences of the society
that produced it. Future chapters will explore Kierkegaard’s sense that the politics and
society of Christian modernity lacks some advantages of the antique polity. Running
through that is the sense that Copenhagen, and Denmark as a whole, might be the ideal
city and nation for some form of reconciliation.
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Chapter Four
Communities of Liberty
The Concept of Anxiety [Begrebet Angest , 1844], ‘Introduction’
As all ancient knowledge and speculation was based on the presupposition that
thought has reality, so all ancient ethics was based on the presupposition that
virtue [Dyden] can be realised. Sin’s scepticism [Skepsis] is altogether foreign
to paganism. Sin is for the ethical consciousness what error is for the
knowledge of it—the particular exception that proves nothing.
(1980a,19/IV 292)
The Concept of Anxiety, II
Anxiety in a later individual is more reflective as a consequence of his
participation in the history of the race—something that can be compared with
habit [Vane] , which is something of a second nature [den anden Natur], not a
new quality but simply a quantitative progression—because anxiety has now
entered into the world with a new significance. Sin entered in anxiety, but sin in
turn brought anxiety along with it (53/IV 324)
The distinction between antique and modern is in large part one of distinction between
Pagan and Christian worlds in Kierkegaard. This may seem perverse since Christianity
goes back to the first century, to the time of the first two Roman Emperors, Augustus and
Tiberius, it became the religion of the Empire in the late fourth century, still in antiquity by
any definition, which ended any time from the late fifth century fall of the Roman Empire in
the west to the Arab-Islamic conquest of large parts of the Roman Empire in the east, that
is Byzantium (de Ste. Croix, 1989), during the late seventh century.
!
A similar distinction is made by Hegel between Classical and Romantic art, since in
his argument Romantic art is art which is conditioned by the Christian distinction between
sensory and transcendent worlds, discussed in the Aesthetics (Hegel 1975), Part II,
Section III, Introduction ‘Of the Romantic in General’ (particularly 1975 Vol. I, 521).
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Kierkegaard clearly recognises there have many transformations since the emergence of
Christianity to give us the modern world as we know it. We can also look at Arendt’s
Love and Saint Augustine (1996) for an account of how early Christian philosophy marks a
transition to a greater sense of universality and equality for humans. That did not mean
equality of civic rights or regard for universal human rights, but it did mean taking humanity
as one.
!
Augustine was not the first major Christian philosophy, but he is the most relevant to
those philosophers to Kierkegaard’s writings and is in general the most influential of early
Christian philosophers. We can particularly see Augustinian influence in the assumptions
of Works of Love [Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, 1847], The Concept of Anxiety and The
Sickness Unto Death [Sygdommen til Døden, 1849]. Augustine’s view of the universality,
and the foundational nature, of God’s love is to be found in The City of God (1984) and
The Confessions (1991). Also important for the background to the reading of Kierkegaard
is the discussions to be found in, ‘On the Free Choice of the Will’, ‘On Grace and Free
Choice’ and ‘On Reprimand and Grace’ (in Augustine 2010), of how free will is reduced by
the sin of Adam and can become stronger than it was for Adam through Christ. That is
Adam had free will to avoid sin, which he lost because of the fall, an event that enslaved
him to desire. That fall shows he was capable of choosing sin. Grace, which comes from
Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, enables us to rise above sin, to never choose sin. The
enslavement to sin makes the best form of government, republican, difficult to achieve on
earth, because the best form of government requires a community above sin. That is
what Augustine takes from a Cicero style of condemnation of the corruption of the Roman
Republic after the fall of Carthage in Book III, Chapter XXI of The City of God. Only the
city of God, in the other world which transcends this world, can have perfect government.
Plato described the best form of government as an idea, rather than a government which
has been seen, nevertheless his ideal republic, or polity, can be described, could exist
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somewhere and is echoed in Plato’s preferred states of that time (Crete, Sparta and
Egypt).
!
Kierkegaard discusses how melancholy, anxiety and psychological sickness are
connected with the Fall, in a way which is not directly political but keeps touching on the
political. Like Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (in Kant 1996)
account of radical evil, the fall is an event which is always with us in out capacity to choose
evil, or at least not choose in a way that excludes interest, or desire. The idea of radical
evil is take up and reinterpreted by Fichte in The System of Ethics (2005, particularly
189-191) and Schelling in Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human
Freedom (2006). Kierkegaard is drawing on a deep engagement by the German Idealist
with evil as weakness of will, and subjective self-concern. For Kierkegaard, fear of such a
bad choice pushes us towards anxiety.
!
If we take that part of Kierkegaard’s thinking into the political context, then we can
say that politics includes the problem that the political sovereign could choose wrongly,
and that problem increases in 1848 when there is the beginning of democracy.
Democracy means a weakening of institutions, in the sense that institutions become
dependent on changeable popular will, inclined to changeability, particularly in swings
between prudence and revolution. That swing is equivalent to the swing between
everyday life and absolute commitment to Christianity. That is confirmed by the way that
Samuel Fleischacker uses Kierkegaard’s example in Concluding Unscientific Postscript
[Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 1846] of the Christian’s choice between a pleasant
visit to the deer park and going to church. The deer park is Dyrehaven a well known park
with forest and deers in Copenhagen. Unfortunately this is translated loosely by Hong and
Hong (Kierkegaard 1992, 472- 481) as ‘amusement park’, losing the context of
Copenhagen’s geography, which is often emphasised by Kierkegaard. Hannay use ‘deer
park‘ in his translation (Kierkegaard 2009, 396-403) more literally, and preferably in
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showing how Kierkegaard’s writing connects with the life of his city. Hong and Hong’s
choice in Concluding Unscientific Postscript is particularly describing in that other volumes
of the Princeton University Press Writings of Kierkegaard, which they directed and largely
translated, mostly does translate Dyrehaven as Deer Park. The frequent references to it
by Kierkegaard reinforce the extent to which his writing is embedded in a Copenhagen and
Danish context. Fleischacker mentions the Deer Park dilemma in the context of concepts
of political liberty, in A Third Concept of Liberty (1999, 100). Fleischacker discusses
Kierkegaard with reference to the need to present the theoretical through the particular;
and with reference to the difficulty of a Christian in enjoying a visit to the Deer park, given
the way that the religious person is concerned with the absolute, and keeping to it.
!
The intermediate processes of the systemisation of law, and the fixing of the
universality of sovereignty, slowly build own the Augustinian understanding of grace, law
and sin. We can also think of Augustinian concerns about the duality of the will, torn
between the sin of ordinary desires and the freedom from sin offered by grace, as part of
the background to early modern contract theory. As noted above contractualism has
origins in the covenant theology of Grotius. Political contract theory can seen as partly a
way to find grace, as far as is possible, in worldly political arrangements. The moment of
contract formation, and references to that contract, are moments of political grace, when
individual wills are freed from the constraints of self-centred sinful nature. Rousseau’s
corresponding language of general will and particular will is itself a renewal of terms used
in the theological reflections of Pascal, and the metaphysical theology of Malebranche. In
that case, the concerns with evil and freedom (including ‘radical evil’) in Kant, Fichte,
Schelling and Hegel, are in part concerns with the capacity for humans to make political
judgements independent of sinfully self-directed will. Going beyond the German Idealists,
Tocqueville provides a point of union between a Fleischacker type concern with judgement
capacities, the Augustinian self/will, and Kierkegaard’s concern with the dual impulse of
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democracy and constitutionalism. There is an argument for looking at Tocqueville that way
in Mitchell’s ‘The Augustinian Self’, Chapter Two of his book The Fragility of Freedom:
Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (1995), which even includes
reference to Kierkegaard (51).
!
The Augustinian view sets up a distinction between kinds of freedom which
reappears in the classical liberal distinction between liberty of the ancients and liberty of
the moderns, or positive welfare and negative liberty; and the German Idealist distinction
between following moral law and following moral perfection beyond the law. The freedom
from grace in Augustine is equivalent to the flourishing of the human individual in a
properly run city-state, as explained by Plato an Aristotle; or the freedom which comes
from the soul governed by reason. The latter is also be found in Plato and Aristotle, but it
is in the Stoics that individual freedom absorbs political freedom into private life. That is a
reading of the history of political and ethical concepts associated with Foucault, but it fits
with earlier understanding, including hat of Kierkegaard as we shall see.
!
As we ha have seen, in Augustine, grace is necessary to that pure freedom which is
to follow law and self-restraint, and so cannot be pursued in the politics of this world or the
everyday ethics of this life. Kierkegaard’s contribution to this tradition of thinking about
freedom, law, and grace, is then at least an indirect contribution to politics. Augustinian
thought leads in the direction of assumptions about politics, in which it is defined as a
limited enterprise, compared with the hopes of antique republicanism. Limitation on the
role of the sphere of political will formation gives more weight to what is outside the
political process shaping it, such as law and a depoliticised autocratic state sovereignty
seen as necessary to restrain sinful human nature. The state becomes more what
coerces individuals with the fear of breaking the law in comparison to the republican
assumption that the state, when working as it should, is a form of self-government. Long
experience of ‘Empire’, that is the Roman Republic after Caesar and Augustus instituted
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an autocratic form of government; without formally declaring the end of Republic, and the
beginning of Empire. Over time the figure we know retrospectively as ‘Emperor’ became
less and less the first citizen (Princeps) of a state which retained the forms of
republicanism, and more an absolute king who openly regarded legacy republican forms
as decorative rather than substantive. The ‘Emperor’, from the death of Caesar onwards,
was usually given divine status after death. The Emperor in life, in later stages of the
Empire, was like a living god who was remote from mortals. Christianisation turned the
Emperor into God’s representative on Earth, and therefore a Christ like figure.
!
Kierkegaard lives through the death of the last version of the Caesar-Christ idea of
government by one person, and sees the king become a pure symbol, as politics loses the
foundation of monarchial absolutism. Kierkegaard refers to the revolutionary spirit which
gives the equivalent of royal substance to democratic politics, because it is another way of
referring to absolute sovereignty, but which always exist in interaction with pragmatism. It
is the human psychology which Kierkegaard describes as sickness to death, and anxiety,
which makes a stable political foundation, or an absolute choice, impossible. This is made
clear in his discussion of modern tragedy. The reading of tragedy is also dependent on a
version of the Augustinian legacy, a sense that the human individual is outside law, that
sovereignty lacks a foundation in law in any enduring sense. A view of modern tragedy
famously developed by a reader of Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of
German Tragic Drama (1985).
!
There is no modern equivalent of the antique reabsorption of the individual into the
ethnic-political community, there is the individual confronted with the futility of the purely
human world. A world in which God is the missing God as Lucien Goldmann says in his
analysis of modern tragedy (1976), drawing on Pascal. It is this world in which God is
thought of as missing from his own creation that explains how seventeenth century political
theory turns theological notions of covenant and general will into political concepts, so that
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politics both marks the absence of God, but tries to find equivalents for his agreements
with worshippers and with the kingship of God.
!
The role of Christianity in defining modernity creates an intersection between history
unfolding over time and the transcendental experience of the divine, beyond time, which
characterises Christianity. So to understand modernity, and what kind of subjectivity there
is in modernity, we need to take account of Kierkegaard’s view of what Christianity is, and
his related views of psychology, and of moral agency. Christianity refers to a split between
the finitude of earthly human experience and the infinitude of the world beyond, like the
distinction Hegel notes when discussing the Classical and the Romantic in art. Once way
Kierkegaard has of dealing with this is that he favours synthesis as one way of talking
about the human individual as a combination of finite and infinite. That is how he sets up
The Sickness unto Death (1980a, 13). There is an implicit contrast with Hegelian
mediation, as is confirmed when we look at Kierkegaard’s criticisms of Hegel across the
book of three years earlier, Concluding Unscientific Postscript [Affsluttende uvidenskabelig
Efterskrift, 1846] . What is particularly relevant to the discussion of the human individual is
the beginning of the discussion of pathos (387-409/VII 335-355), where Kierkegaard
denounces what he takes to be the Hegelian idea that opposites can co-exist in mediation.
Kierkegaard prefers the idea of a jump over a ‘chasmic abyss’ (1992a, 409/VII 355).
!
The identification of true Christianity refers to a process of emergence in
Kierkegaard’s attitude to human nature. This can be clarified in relation to Religiousness
A and Religiousness B in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1992a, 555-561/VII 484VII490). Religiousness B requires Religiousness A, though it cannot be reduced to
Religiousness A, and Religiousness A cannot be reduced to it. In Religiousness B, the
human individual accepts its nullity before God. The Religiousness A already has the
individual accept the superiority of God, without accepting the need for self-abnegation.
The difference between the two kinds of religiousness is between pathos and dialectic, so
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between an emotional state and a form or reasoning, in both cases dealing with what is in
psychology before we get onto discussing God. We can describe human nature without
God, but not without reference to the need for an end (1992a, 394/VII 341). This can be
experienced in a relative way, as what gives ends to areas of human experience, but they
only make complete sense with regard to the absolute end. This is explained with
reference to history in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Division 2B, §§ 2 & 3
(Kierkegaard 1992a, 574-581/VII 500-507), in a discussion of the dialectical following on
from a discussion of pathos. The dialectic arises in the contrast between the content of
Christianity and historical facts, so that the question of the historical truth of Christianity is
distinguished from questions of faith. So historical humanity is distinguished from
individual fate, but this also establishes an attitude to history with political overtones. That
is an attitude of defending individuality from the anonymity of history, making the existence
of the individual in the mostly particular terms, a major concern. An attitude which puts the
individual at the centre in such a strong way is compatible with various political positions,
but at the very least it does bring into question any attempt to see unified ethical and
political communitarianism, or any perspective in which the collective or the communal is
raised above the individual. Kierkegaard was a persistent critic of the great communitarian
Hegel, and of any attempt to make the individual primarily an agent formed by social
ethics. As with his attitude to antique republicanism, we might see a melancholic
awareness of the impossibility of pure community. The emphasis in Kierkegaard on conflict
and paradox is more suited though to a philosophy of political contestation than one of
pre-political ethical harmony.
!
A deep part of the way in which Kierkegaard engages with political thought is
through the nature of modernity, in particular the world of the moderns in contrast with, and
in evolution from the world of the ancients. That relationship is at the heart of political
thought from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1748 to Mill’s Considerations on
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Representative Government in 1861. We can trace this back further to Machiavelli’s
comment in the Preface to Book I of The Discourses (2003, 98) on how laws are gathered
together in his time, laws which the ancients had originated but not looked at
systematically. Though we really see that gathering becoming properly systematic a bit
later than Machiavelli in Grotius, who unifies knowledge of the history of law, history of
literature, and political history in a system of universal jurisprudence. He explains this
project in the very first paragraph of ‘The Preliminary Discourse’ to The Rights of War and
Peace
The Civil Law, whether that of the Romans, or of any other People, many have
undertaken, either to explain by Commentaries, or to draw up into short
Abridgements: But that Law, which is common to many Nations or Rulers of
Nations, whether derived from Nature, or instituted by Divine Commands, or
introduced by Custom and tacit Consent, few have touched upon, and none
hitherto treated of universally and methodically; tho’ it is the Interest of Mankind
that it should be done.
(Grotius 2005, 75)
Then in Hobbes, there is an attack on antique notions of liberty, as confusing forms of
government with differences in law and liberty, and even worse leading to subversion of
sovereignty for the illusion of political liberty, as can be see in chapters XXI and XLVI of
Leviathan (Hobbes 1996). These are three possible beginnings to modern political theory,
and all make a distinction between the present and antiquity.
!
When we arrive at the classical liberals from Locke onwards, the issue is how far
the republican liberty of Rome and of the Ancient Greek cities could be, and should be,
reduplicated in the modern world. Sometimes reference is made to the Jewish states of
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the Hebrew Bible, as in John Locke’s discussion in Essay on Civil Government (in Locke
1960), Chapter 25, and as the main topic of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise
(2007). The antique republics rested on direct participation in government and in law
making: the aristocracy in senatorial bodies and the people as a whole in city assemblies.
Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (in Mill 1991) acknowledges the
impossibility of return to the antique ideal of participatory democracy, while expressing
admiration for the original effort in Chapter III. The idea of collective government and
legislation by the aristocracy remained more plausible in Mill’s time, but not in its original
form, certainly not in the larger states; and it was clear that government in the modern
world had to be responsive to the whole people, even where most did not have full political
rights. As Tocqueville suggested, in the ‘Introduction’ to Democracy in America (1966) a
growing spirt of equality since the Middle Ages was shaping modern politics. The other
issue was the role of commercial society and associations outside the state. Ancient
republics engaged in commerce: Athens, Rome and Carthage were all famous for it.
However, these republics had a form of unity of associations, in which everything could still
be seen as centred around the national community, and its political institutions, in a deep
identity which was believed to come from divine and natural forces. There are all kinds of
qualification that could be made about such simple statements, but the texts of ancient
political thought, such as those of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero, suggest that
ancient peoples assumed the normality of those forms of identity, and were disturbed by
their erosion, which seemed against natural and divine forces.
!
Kierkegaard does briefly deal directly with the issue of the relation between antique
and modern politics. Two Ages [En literair Anmeldelse, 1846] contains one of
Kierkegaard’s main ventures into political thought. Kierkegaard is concerned with the
difference between the revolutionary and the reflective, through its appearance in a novel.
This intersects with a concern regarding the difference between antiquity and modernity, to
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be found in his thoughts about ancient and modern drama. This is part of Kierkegaard’s
general examination of subjectivity with regard to the aesthetic, the ethical and the
religious; the particular, the universal and the ethical. In this context, the theme is
developed in Two Ages of the need to combine prudence and infinite enthusiasm, going
back to Socrates.
!
The political working out of this is most clear inTwo Ages is where Kierkegaard is
concerned with the difference between the revolutionary and the reflective. On the
revolutionary side:
The age of revolution is essentially passionate and therefore has immediacy.
It’s immediacy, however, is not the first immediacy, and in the highest sense it is
not the final immediacy either; it is an immediacy of reaction and to that extent
is provisional. This is crucial with respect to the constancy of this passion. In
life it may well be that multiplicity remains true to itself until the end, but seen in
the context of the idea it must end with the single individual’s [Enkelte]
becoming untrue to himself, because it is a provisional idea. From the
standpoint of the idea, a person finds definitive rest only in the highest idea,
which is the religious, but it may well be that many remain true to themselves in
the provisional all their lives. The immediacy of the age of revolution is a
restoring of natural relationships in contrast to a fossilised formalism which by
having lost the originality of the ethical, has become a dessicated ruin, a
narrow-hearted custom and practice. Simply as reaction it can be transformed
by one single deviation into untruth, which in an accidental way accentuates the
polemical as would be the case if the point were reached that erotic love is
erotic love only when it is adultery.
(Kierkegaard 1978, 65/VIII 61-62)
Revolution is passion, and that is not a bad thing at all for Kierkegaard. However, it is not
the best kind of reaction because it is reactive and provisional. As such it is an unstable
passion which ends up to the equivalent place of a passion for love which sees adultery as
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the best form of love. Revolution is like irony, which we will discuss fully in the last chapter
of this book. As we will see, Kierkegaard thinks that irony detached form any foundation
becomes pure negativity associated with a subjectivity lacking any grasp of itself. In the
erotic sphere such an attitude is the road to betrayal, so in politics Kierkegaard thinks that
the passion of revolution will betray any position it has just been supporting.
!
On the reflective side:
The single individual [den Enkelte] (however well-intentioned many of them are,
however much energy they might have if they could ever come to use it) has not
fomented enough passion in himself to tear himself out of the web of refection
and the seductive ambiguity of reflection. The environment, the contemporary
age, has neither events nor integrated passion but in a negative unity creates a
reflective opposition that toys for a moment with the unreal prospect and then
resorts to the brilliant equivocation that the smartest thing has been done, after
all, by doing nothing. Vis inertiæ is at the bottom of the age’s tergiversation,
and every passive do-nothing congratulates himself on being the original
inventor—and becomes ever more clever.
(69/VIII 65-66)
In modern politics, reflection and passion are complicit, in a way that weakens them both.
The revolutionary passion becomes lost in the endless possibilities of reflection. That
endlessness does not lead to an absolute, or an infinite, of the kind we find in God, or as a
possibility of human consciousness. The product is nothingness, inactivity and inertia.
That is the lack of the kinesis Kierkegaard argues for in Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
which will be discussed in the final chapter, and which is the move from abstraction to
action, possibility to actuality.
!
These comments are directed agains the political sphere, but do still leave some
room for a positive attitude to politics, even if Kierkegaard does not wish to explore that
possibility. Since we are living in a world where there is politics and we have to make
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choices about laws, governments and the institutions which make them real, by implication
we should be seeking ways of combining reflection and passion to make them both
stronger, so that we can have political passion without betrayal and refection without
inaction.
!
The contrast between those two poles of politics is developed through its
appearance in a novel, and the review of that novel The literary context particularly brings
out the social context, in contrast with the more individual psychological development in
The Concept of Anxiety and Sickness unto Death . Here we should also refer to
Kierkegaard’s thought about tragedy, since his psychological and historical analyses
intertwine in ‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama’, and
tragedy is often concerned with kings, that is with figures of political power. That is
something to be investigated in Chapter VI below.
!
We have seen the brief, but significant, use that Samuel Fleischacker makes of
Kierkegaard in A Third Concept of Liberty (1999). We should examine the broader
context of his arguments in that book. Fleischacker discusses Kierkegaard with reference
to the need for moral discourse to present the theoretical through the particular (204); and
with reference to the difficulty of a Christian in visiting the Deer park, given the way that the
religious person is concerned with the absolute, and keeping to it. Both these issues
appear in Two Ages with regard to the relation between prudence and the absolute.
Though, Fleischacker draws attention to a tension, he lacks Kierkegaard’s sense of the
paradox, of the force of conflict and the necessity of that conflict. Fleischacker’s account
draws on Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgement, but is less engaged with literature than
Kierkegaard, and in general Fleischacker is dismissive of any strongly aesthetic point of
view, or any deeply subjective point of view. He offers a way of bridging liberty as freedom
from external constraint, and liberty as self-mastery, through a third concept of phronetic
mastery, leaning towards prudence over enthusiasm.
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
That harmonising third term is not in the spirit of Kierkegaard, as for him it is
opposition, and living through that opposition subjectively which is important. He
demonstrates the nature of the modern public, along with its attitudes to ethics and politics
with a deep unifying argument, in the terms of paradox. The problem Kierkegaard
identifies at the basis of any understanding of the political world, or any understanding of
the public domain, is one of equality, excellence and envy. In antiquity, the excellence of a
relative few apparently undermining inevitably stimulates envy, dealt with both though
comic drama and through ritualised exclusion, as in the Athenian institution of ostracism.
The view of ostracism that Kierkegaard refers to is not shared by all commentators on
Ancient Athens, including the classic enthusiast for Athenian democracy, George Grote,
and the more recent enthusiast Donald Kagan (1991). Related notable general defences
of the Athenian model can be found in Finley (1985) and Glotz (1965).
!
For Kierkegaard, the reflective prudential side of the present age obscures
contradiction: ‘The present age is essentially a sensible age, devoid of passion, and
therefore it has nullified the principle of contradiction’ (1978, 97/VIII 90). The problem
Kierkegaard identifies at the basis of any understanding of the political world, or any
understanding of the public domain, is one of equality, excellence and envy: ‘Ultimately the
tension of reflection establishes itself as a principle, and just as enthusiasm is the unifying
principle in a passionate age, so envy becomes the negatively unifying principle in a
passionless and very reflective age’ (1978, 81/VIII 76). In antiquity, the excellence of a
relative few apparently undermining inevitably stimulates envy, dealt with both though
comic drama and through ritualised exclusion, as in the Athenian institution of ostracism,
‘in Greece ostracism was an expression of envy, a kind of balancing self-defence against
excellence (82/VIII 77). In dealing with this issue, Kierkegaard draws on a strong theme in
eighteenth century political and social thought, that is the theme of amour-propre
Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. He does not quote Rousseau, and may not have
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paid much attention to Rousseau in general, but there is evidence of a continuity of
themes. Kierkegaard also anticipates Nietzsche’s historical-fictional account of
ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, along with Rawls’ analysis of envy in
sections 80 ad 81 of A Theory of Justice (1999, 464-474). These are very different
discussions. Rousseau is concerned with what he sees as the destructive effect of
comparing ourselves competitively with others in our imagination, and imagining how
others rank us in that competition. Nietzsche focuses on the frustration of the powerless
who cannot find immediate revenge against those with power who have harmed them, a
frustration which leads to the buildup of ressentiment, in a way which compasses envy,
desire for revenge, and angry introspection on suffering. Rawls takes envy as a marker of
unjustified inequality, as income inequalities which do not serve the purpose of generating
increased wealth which benefits the poorest through market process, lead to the justified
anger which Rawls labels as envy. Envy was something the ancients recognised as a very
strong force amongst mortals, heroes and gods. The antique understanding of envy is
less introspective and articulated though. That greater articulation of envy in Christian
modernity is what Kierkegaard is getting at, when he refers to the lack of an equivalent to
ostracism in the modern world.
!
Antique ostracism still allows the community to be shaped by the excellence of the
few, because it emphasises that excellence in a negative way, so resisting the emptiness
of formal equality of individuals gathered in an aggregate. In the modern world,
Kierkegaard finds an alternation between the revolutionary reshaping of society though
form, passion and immediacy; and a reflective emptying out of form, passion and
immediacy so that we have only formalism, prudentialism, and reflection. A public has
emerged which cannot accept excellence, and insists on the superiority of majority opinion
to any form of excellence. Associations are experienced as negative limits, since the
public is a pure aggregate which cannot form itself in associations of a positive kind (1978
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106). Kierkegaard’s response includes a commitment to the role of literature in giving
shape to the chaos of the times, and for maintaining enthusiasm behind the mask of
prudence. Kierkegaard suggests that monarchy rejected in revolution, can only be
accepted in the modern world through the reduction of its real role (1978 81, 90-94). He
is seeking antique substance and excellence, along with the form and passion of
revolution, in oder to transform modern reflectiveness, through concrete institutions, and
rules, which recognise individuality. It is because Kierkegaard contrasts modern
pragmatism with antique republicanism, that we should resist seeing him as a conservative
monarchist absolutist. The loss of the antique vision cannot be simply negative for
Kierkegaard, since he sees it as connected with the Christian distinction between the
religious and the worldly, as suggested in Either/Or I [Enter-Ellen, 1843] (1987a, 61).
What fits Kierkegaard’s preconceptions is a politics, connected with an aesthetics, which
draws us to the absolute through social forms that do not substitute for the absolute, or
obliterate the individual. These are the ways we encounter subjectivity and the problems
of communication. Kierkegaard puts the tension between collective attempts to change
rules and passivity before existing rules at the centre of modernity. What he largely argues
for is an inner subjective reaction, which overcomes that split in the absolute relation of the
self with itself. It has political and social significance though, because he does shape his
argument with reference to that context. We could say that Kierkegaard leads us to seek
both rule following and engaged subjective transformation of rules, and to put that forward
as the social and political question of the modern age.
!
Kierkegaard’s response includes a commitment to the role of literature in giving
shape to the chaos of the times, and for maintaining enthusiasm behind the mask of
prudence. Kierkegaard suggests that monarchy rejected in revolution, can only be
accepted in the modern world through its reduction to mere symbol. He is seeking antique
substance and excellence, along with the form and passion of revolution, in order to
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transform modern reflectiveness, through concrete institutions, and rules, which recognise
individuality. The loss of the antique vision cannot be simply negative for Kierkegaard,
since he sees it as connected with the Christian distinction between the religious and the
worldly. What fits Kierkegaard’s preconceptions is a politics, connected with an aesthetics,
which draws us to the absolute through social forms that do not substitute for the absolute,
or obliterate the individual. These are the ways we encounter subjectivity and the
problems of communication.
!
When Aristotle refers to politics he is using the word polis (πόλῖς), which refers to a
city as well as the stated formed by the people of a city. Related words like politikos
(πολῖτἴκός), which refers to citizenship and belonging to a state community, do have a
primarily legal political meaning, but at all times Aristotle is resting on the assumption that
political community and human community are the same thing for those who live as
humans should live. The issue of how to understand Aristotle on these issues itself
becomes an issue of the relation between modern and ancient politics. Hannah Arendt,
for example, argues in The Human Condition (1998) that the modern understanding of
Aristotle (Arendt 1998, 23) is skewed by Seneca’s and then Aquinas’ use of the Latin
socialis to translate πολιτικον (politikon, the adjectival form of politikos). In that case
modernity begins with the Roman appropriation of Greek culture and politics. The
difference between Greek and Roman politics and society was established as a major
issue in Hegel, and was carried on through Arendt, Foucault’s understanding of antique
ethics and politics, Pettit’s (1997) defence of Neo-Roman republicanism against Athenian
republicanism and so on.
!
The distinction between Roman and Athenian republicanism is assumed, in the
accounts of Pettit and Skinner, paralleling a well established distinction between
republicanism and civic humanism, is that between political institutions which prevent
domination and political institutions based on participation. The Athenian republican, or
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civic humanist model, presumes that the good of human flourishing centrally includes
political participation. The Roman republican, or non-mastery, model presumes that basic
human values are best preserved and advanced in a system which includes political
participation, but is more oriented to institutional balances, legal procedure and
constitutional limits than decision making through participation. Fleischacker seems to fit
in here on the Roman side, and like Pettit he has an idea of liberty which is adds to the
entrenched distinction between negative and positive liberty.
!
In considering what Kant has to say on positive and negative freedom, we are
entering into a complex series of oppositions and comparisons in eighteenth and
nineteenth century political thought between: positive and negative liberty; antique and
modern liberty. The discussion is best known to readers of recent political theory through
Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (in Berlin 1969), which itself has
spawned a more recent search for something between the two concepts, most notably in
Pettit’s Republicanism (1997) and Fleischacker’s A Third Concept of Liberty (1999). Berlin
defines negative liberty as freedom from interference, largely with the state in mind, and
positive liberty as self-mastery. A threat to negative liberty arises where the state is too
extreme in promoting positive liberty, using its power to make everyone fit into some vision
of humanity’s ends. For Pettit, the two concepts of liberty do not exhaust all important
aspects of liberty, and he claims that there is a third kind which he calls non-domination.
He claims that this is the essential aspect of Roman Republicanism, and major
expressions of Republicanism since. Though the idea of non-domination is presented as a
concept of political liberty, it largely serves as a foundation for the kind of egalitarian liberal
measures founded by Rawls, and those influenced by Rawls. Pettit to some degree
repeats the gesture Rawls himself made in Political Liberalism (2005) towards rooting
political theory in institutions and the political sphere, rather than in reflections on justice.
As with Rawls, though, politics in Pettit largely refers to justice, institutional procedures,
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and reflective reason. There is no equivalent to the Kierkegaardian emphasis on
subjectivity.
!
Fleischacker is closer to the spirit of Kieregaard. He defines the third concept,
which like Pettit he considers to be closer to negative liberty than positive liberty, as the
capacity for judgement in the political sphere. Unlike Pettit, he seeks a middle way
between Rawlsian liberalism and libertarianism, emphasising autonomy from a top down
state. Fleischacker explains the third concept with reference to Aristotelian phronesis,
Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy in Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Kant’s aesthetic
judgements in Critique of the Power of Judgement. The overall point is to promote
individual intellectual activity and moral responsibility, so that political judgements are
based on well developed ideas about the common good and about liberty. Some kind of
self-discipline is emphasised by Fleischacker in the third concept, which is oriented
towards the individual but directs the individual towards the political sphere. Like Pettit,
Fleischacker is wary of the strongest forms of participatory republicanism, or civic
humanism, where activity in politics is held to be part of the good life and of a viable
political community. So both Pettit and Fleischacker revive republicanism, or antique
liberty, but avoid its strongest forms. In doing so, they become even more advocate of the
liberty of the moderns than Benjamin Constant who advanced a distinction between the
liberty of the moderns and the liberty of the ancients, to the advantage of the moderns, but
still expressed respect for Athenian republicanism. For Pettit, Athenian republicanism, as
opposed to ‘Neo-Roman’ republicanism, and as advocated by Arendt is one of the main
enemies.
!
Though Kierkegaard does not advocate republicanism, civc humanism or Athenian
democracy, as political programs, the Berlin style of wariness about positive liberty and of
ancient republicanism, does not really fit his thought either. Kierkegaard is concerned with
the loss of antique polity and the persistence of the ideal of revolutionary oneness. A
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surrogate for God, which cannot replace God, but which shares with the understanding of
God a grasp of the absolute.
!
The relation between Kierkegaard’s philosophy and the political thought of the
German thinkers who were his contemporaries, or his immediate predecessors, is not
given to us directly by Kierkegaard who had very little to say of what they wrote on politics.
Nevertheless, we know that Kierkegaard was deeply engaged with the philosophical and
aesthetic context of that political thought, and we can loo at the narrow and broad political
references in his texts. In this way, we can see his relationship with discussions of antique
and modern political life, as in the passage below from the Introduction to Humboldt’s The
Limits of State Action.
As to those limitations of freedom, however, which do not so much affect the
State as the individuals who compose it, we are led to notice a vast difference
between ancient and modern governments. The ancients devoted their
attention more exclusively to the harmonious development of the individual
man, as man; the moderns are chiefly solicitous about his comfort, his
prosperity, his productiveness. The former looked to virtue; the latter seek for
happiness. And hence it follows that the restrictions imposed on freedom in the
ancient states were, in some important respects, more oppressive and
dangerous than those which characterise our times. For they directly attacked
that inner life of the soul, in which the individuality of human beings essentially
consists; and hence all the ancient nations betray a character of uniformity,
which is not so much due to their want of higher refinement and more limited
intercommunication, as to the systematic communal education of their youth
(almost universal among them), and the deliberately established communal life
of the citizens. But, from another point of view, these ancient institutions
preserved and heightened the vigorous activity of the individual man. The very
desire, which they had always before them, to train up temperate and energetic
citizens gave a higher impulse to their whole spirit and character. (Humboldt
1993, 7)
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Humboldt did not publish the whole of this book in his own lifetime, only journal excerpts.
It was published in its entirety in 1854, nineteen years after Humboldt’s death, and one
year before the death of Kierkegaard. There is no reason to believe that Kierkegaard read
Humboldt’s political work, but both Kierkegaard and Humboldt draw on the same
interpretations of antiquity present in German Enlightenment, Idealism and Romanticism.
The passage from Humboldt perfectly captures the ambiguity of classical liberal attitudes
towards antique politics, which is paralleled in ambiguities of Kierkegaard towards the
antique and the modern. For Humboldt, the intrusiveness of the state in antiquity was
more extreme than that of modernity, since it was concerned with the soul. This also
encouraged a strong unified individuality, in which energies and the whole personality are
focused on one goal. That capacity for focus on the final goal connects with Kierkegaard’s
emphasis on the absolute. The modern world contains a greater form of the absolute
because of the interconnectedness of people, and the variety of situations which are
possible. Individuals are not constrained by state intrusion into the soul. However, the
state’s concern with the positive welfare of individuals through interventions in the
economy, the expansion of the state, and transfers of money to the poorest, threatens
diversity and individual strength of character.
!
Humboldt’s account of the drift towards positive welfare, in the economic sphere of
the modern world, fits with Kierkegaard’s view of the anonymity of the modern world, its
commercial orientation, and the role of envy. Positive welfare is demanded by those who
envy the rich, if we think about Humboldt and Kierkegaard in conjunction. Kierkegaard
does not address questions of social welfare and the state’s role. From his point of view,
the biggest issues is that we should not become turned away from the mission of
individuality which is also the mission of Christianity. We can at least say for Kierkegaard
that positive welfare, as described by Humboldt, would be a distraction from the questions
of subjectivity and the unique individual. Christianity has both provided a goal for
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subjectivity and undermined its more intermediate forms of satisfaction in the political
community. So Christianity creates the danger that subjectivity will be distracted by
positive welfare as a solution to individual suffering from social ills. Any good form of
politics,if such a thing is possible must promote the individual focused on the gaols of
individuality. The modern tendency to demand the weakening, and even dissolutions of
institutions of political authority both worries Kierkegaard and is accepted as inevitable.
This encapsulates an ambiguity about the antique model, in which the state whether
monarchical or republican gives substance to the community.
!
We should see here a model for looking at the ethical-political sphere. We should
not aim for a mediation of opposing forces in that sphere, but an unsteady synthesis and a
need to pass over an abyss between opposites in order to get from the more relative to
more absolute point of view. This aspect should lead us to question any idea of
Kierkegaard as a communitarian, certainly if communitarianism means the harmonious
integration of all perspectives in the ethical-political sphere. Kierkegaard’s position is more
that of agonism, which might be refer to an agon between different forms of community,
and there is element of that in MacIntryre, in recent communitarian theory. Nevertheless,
the distinction Kierkegaard makes between Christian community and the state undermines
any idea that Christian community can be the basis of the ethical-political community. The
ethical-political community is relative to the absolute of Christian community, but the latter
community cannot be manifested in worldly communities. It’s not just that the City of Man
cannot be as perfect as the City of God, but that the City of Man rests on different
premisses. As Augustine suggests, the City of Man rests on an innate imperfection of
human nature, that the will deviates from law. In the City of God, the will cannot deviate
from law. We can examine the City of Man from the point of view of the City of God, in so
much as we are concerned with perfecting law, and the individual’s devotion to law in the
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City of Man. The City of Man is deeply different in that it is characterised by that lack of
perfection, sinfulness.
!
Bringing Augustinian terms into the eighteenth century, we can see them repeated
in Kant’s distinction between negative and positive freedom in Groundwork of The
Metaphysics of Morals, in ‘Transition from metaphysics of morals to critique of pure
practical reason’ . That distinction is the distinction between mere freedom from necessity
and what comes from freedom of the will. Freedom in Kant comes from respect for
rationality, which includes ethical law, and which rests on the autonomy of a rational
subject. His sense of ethics and perfection is clearly related to Christian precepts. These
ideas in Kant can be more fully comprehended if we think about radical evil in Religion
within the Bounds of Mere Reason, and the different formulations of the categorical
imperative in the earlier section of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ‘Transition
from a popular moral philosophy to a metaphysics of morals’. The earlier sections of the
Groundwork refer only to negative freedom. However, the elaboration of the idea of a
categorical imperative The most famous version of the categorical imperative is the first
one, referring to a criterion for ethical action, in which we do not act in a way that we could
not universally will, ‘act only in accordance with the maxim through which you can at the
same time will that it become a universal law (73/4:421).. The other three formulations
refer to humanity, ‘act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person
of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’ (80/4:429),
rational beings, ‘the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal
law’ (81/4:431), and the kingdom of ends, ‘what makes him fit to be a member of a
possible kingdom of ends’ (85/4:435). As Kant elaborates on the categorical imperative it
moves from formal criterion of action to considering the highest purposes of humanity.
That progress foreshadows the Section III discussion of negative and positive freedom,
and of the possibility of a categorical imperative (100-101/4:453-4:455). Radical evil is
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relevant here because it looks like what it is we have to struggle against in order to be at a
stage of positive freedom or or membership of the kingdom of ends. Kant’s sense of
ethics and of freedom is guided by ideas of grace, or complete obedience to law, and unity
with it It is the positive freedom which makes us capable of legislating for ourselves.
Positive freedom is where we can make judgements referring to causes and effects in a
sensible world where free will has effects. This is distinguished from capacity for
judgements of natural causality and judgements of free will (94-95/4: 446-448). That is
where Kant is close to a Hegelian mediation or a Kierkegaardian synthesis.
!
Morality contains right and virtue, that is legal and political concepts, as well as
concepts of individual action in Kant. That can be seen in the structure of the Metaphysics
of Morals. The idea of a kingdom of ends conditions Kant’s understanding of politics as
can be seen in ideas like that of perpetual peace, or republic as a thing in itself.
Kierkegaard’s thought makes distinctions parallel to Kant with regard to the ideal republic
and the constraints of republicanism. The individual who makes the synthesis of the finite
and the infinite more than an unstable union, or who overcomes anxiety about the use of
free will, is in a state similar to that of an individual ready to be in the kingdom of ends, and
who have cognitions of positive freedom. Many have wished to take those aspects of Kant
in an egalitarian, communitarian, or Marxist socialist direction. All this despite the evident
preference of Kant in his political thought for what we know refer to as classical liberalism,
or libertarianism. The basis for that egalitarian-communitarian-socialist interpretation of
Kant is his references to a world of completely achieved right, freedom and mutual
recognition of individuals as ends. With Kierkegaard we get strong ideas about why such
an achievement is not possible, because of the impossibility of such forms of the ideal
becoming manifest in the human world of imperfect subjectivity. Death may allow for
perfect equality, and according to Works of Love, that equality exists in the moral sphere,
but we have to strive for it, in ways that make egalitarian, communitarian, and socialist
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hopes doomed to failure, because the structure is ideal not real. The ethical-political
sphere can only be understood in the oppositions, alternations, and unstable syntheses
between pragmatism and revolutionary unity, modern individualism and antique
republicanism.
!
What the quotations from The Concept of Anxiety at the head of this chapter show
is the way that religious and psychological discussion in Kierkegaard leads into ethics and
history. Other aspects of the historical existence of humanity are explored with regard to
witnessing and contemporaneity in Philosophical Fragments [Philosophiske Smuler, 1844]
(1985a). The notion of sin, itself, and the related notion of anxiety, themselves rest on
time, the time in which will can be exercised in the wrong way. The idea of sin already
contains the idea of history, and so already contains the idea of human habits built up over
time, and the Aristotelian notion of ethics, as virtues developed through habits. Ethics
depends on free will and is a historical phenomenon. Kierkegaard’s development of
religious ideas leads into discussions of free will, personality, and ethics as historically
situated. On that basis we can say that freedom ideas of freedom and ideas of ethics vary
in history. Nineteenth century European revolutions are expressions of these underlying
aspects of the historical existence of humanity.
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5. Ethical and Legal Community
‘“The Single Individual”: Two “Notes” Concerning My Work as an Author’
To honour every individual human being, unconditionally every human being,
this is the truth and is to fear God and to love the neighbour; but ethicallyreligiously to recognise “the crowd” as the authority with regard to the truth is
to deny God and cannot possibly be loving the neighbour. The neighbour is
the absolutely true expression for human equality. If everyone in truth loved
the neighbour as himself, then perfect human equality would be achieved
unconditionally. Everyone who in truth loves the neighbour expresses human
equality unconditionally; everyone who, even if he confesses, as I do, that his
striving is weak and imperfect, is still aware that the task is to love the
neighbour; he is also aware of what human equality is. But I have never read
in Holy Scripture this commandment: You shall love the crowd, to say nothing
of: ethically-religiously you are to recognise the crowd as the authority with
regard to the truth, is the way to acquire tangible power, the way to all kinds
of temporal and worldly advantage—it is also untruth, since the crowd is
untruth.
(Kierkegaard 1998, 110/XIII 597).
In Either/Or [Enter-Ellen, 1843], the letters of the representative of the ‘ethical’ point of
view, Judge William, are expressed in terms which draw on Aristotle, Fichte and Hegel.
This is followed up in Stages on Life’s Way [Stadier paa Livets Vei, 1845], where William
appears as a character at the end of ‘“In Vino Veritas”’ and is the most likely author of the
following section ‘Some Reflections on Marriage In Answer to Objections by a Married
Man’, within the fictional world created by Either/Or an Stages on Life’s
Way.
!
William sincerely claims to be Christian but in a manner that exists in opposition to
Kierkegaard’s paradoxical and scandalous individualist understanding of Christianity. In
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Works of Love [Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, 1847] there an implicit contrast expounded
between Christian love and pagan friendship (Kierkegaard 1995, 45-55). We see here
how Works of Love carries on the concerns of Two Ages (Tilley 2007b), in the contrast
between antique density of social relations and their modern abstraction.
!
Friendship is a social relation that is inherently related to antique ethics and
republicanism. of the kind discussed by Aristotle’s in Books VIII and IX of the
Nicomachean Ethics, or going back further the paradigmatic friendship between Achilles
and Patroclus in The Illiad. There is a political aspect identified by Aristotle in the Politics
(1932) II.i: ‘We think that friendship is the greatest of blessings for the state’ (1932,
81/1262b). A tyrant may use destruction of friendship between citizens, and distance from
his own friends, in order to avoid threats to his power. That is the first way of maintaining
tyranny in Politics V.ix. Cicero condemns the tyrant in On the Republic II.xxv-xxvi as
someone lacking in community and society with other humans. Lucius Junius Brutus is
mentioned as the private citizen who showed there is no such thing as a merely private
citizen in his struggle against tyrant Tarquinius Superbus, for the common good. Cicero
does not address friendship directly, but he did place value on friendship, as we know from
his text On Friendship. By implication a republic is a political community of friends, of
individuals connected by more than accident of being in the same place at the same time.
!
Those references to antique ethical and political thought establish, by way of
comparison, that the ethics of an individual identified with a bounded community, and its
social obligations are inadequate for Kierkegaard, since he advocates the Christian love of
the neighbour, that is all humans. That means the justification of humanity as political
animal is eroded, and the understanding of politics must be understood through conflict
between individuality and external order.
!
Kierkegaard makes three direct reference to Aristotle in Fear and Trembling [Frygt
og Bæven, 1843] (1983, 83; 84; 89), otherwise Kierkegaard’s contrast between ethics of
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antiquity and Christian subjectivity is built up more indirectly, much of it through
considerations of German Idealism There are some direct references to Hegel in Fear and
Trembling [Frygt og Bæven, 1843], which are important with regard to the aesthetic-ethical
basis of politics in Kierkegaard.
!
Significantly the first reference to Hegel is to his major work of political philosophy,
The Philosophy of Right (1991), which is also a work on ethics, jurisprudence and social
philosophy. This initial reference to Hegel is in the opening of ‘Problema I’, which is
quoted below at length. The context is Kierkegaard’s argument that Abraham’s willingness
to sacrifice Isaac at God’s command in Genesis 22 is a willingness to commit murder and
is against ethics, but must be justified for a Christian. In that case the Christian must
recognise something beyond universal ethics as the end, or τέλος (telos), of the human
individual. There is a strong part of Hegelian ethics and politics which aims to preserve
something of the presumed antique unity of individual and political community, and that
comes out in this quotation, in the suspicion of isolated individuality. That isolated
individuality is something that both Hegel and Kierkegaard regard connected with
Christianity.
The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone,
which from another angle means that it applies at all times. It rests immanent in
itself, has nothing outside itself that is its τέλος [telos], but it itself the τέλος for
everything outside itself, and when the ethical has absorbed this into itself, it
goes not further. The single individual [den Enkelte], sensately and physically
qualified in immediacy, is the individual who has his τέλος in the universal, and
it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, to annul his singularity
[Enkelthed] in order to become the universal. As soon as the single individual
asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by
acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal. Every time
the single individual [Enkelte], after having entered the universal feels an
impulse to assert himself as the single individual [Enkelte], he is in a spiritual
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trial, from which he can work himself only by repentantly surrendering as the
single individual in the universal. If this is the highest than can be said of man
and his existence [Tilværelse], then the ethical is of the same nature as a
person’s eternal salvation, which is his τέλος forevermore and at all times,
since it would be a contradiction for this to be capable of being surrendered
(that is, teleologically suspended), because as soon as this is suspended it is
relinquished, whereas that which is suspended is not relinquished but is
preserved in the higher, which is τέλος.
!
If this is the case, then Hegel is right in “The Good and Conscience,”
where he qualifies man only as the individual [den Enkelte] and considers this
form of qualification as a a “moral form of evil” (see especially The Philosophy
of Right [Retsphilosophie]), which must be annulled in the teleology of the moral
[Sædeliges] in such a way that the single individual [den Enkelte] who remains
in that stage either sins or is immersed in spiritual trial.
(Kierkegaard 1983, 54/III 104-105)
Hong and Hong surprisingly use ‘moral’ when talking about Hegel’s teleology, though
Kierkegaard is using ‘Sædeliges’ instead of ‘Etik’ or ‘Moral’. A Danish-English dictionary
translates ‘Sædeliges’ as ‘moral’ but in context, Kierkegaard uses this word to refer to
Sittlichkeit in Hegel, that is ethical life, the ethical, in social standards as opposed to
individual morality. Hanny uses ‘ethical life’ in his translation (1985, 83) and includes a
footnote to explain the Hegel reference, though his own use of Sittliche rather than
Sittlichkeit when referring to ‘ethical life’ is surprising. Evans and Walsh use ‘moral’ in their
translation (2006, 47), but do footnotes ‘Sædliges’. However, their is no explanation of
why that would matter in the context of reading Hegel.
!
The use of τέλος when referring to ends suggests that Kierkegaard is directing our
attention to Ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle, as one of Aristotle’s key ideas
is that ‘end’ is most important aspect of causality, and that study of human action is
focused on ethics and politics. Further in Aristotle’s Politics I, it is famously stated that
man is a political animal; and in Nicomachean Ethics I, he argues that the highest part of
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ethics is politics, though it is also true that he sometimes refers to a life of pure
philosophical contemplation as the highest end of human life.
!
Kierkegaard engages in considerable historical ambiguity when he refers to ethics
as τέλος along with its universality. The insistence on universality is a reference to the
way Kant, Fichte, and Hegel understand ethics. Of course this is not exactly the same, but
for Kierkegaard’s purposes at this point it is appropriate to bring together the Kantian,
Fichtean, and Hegelian and Aristotelian understanding of ethics, to define the paradoxical
Christian response in distinction from all of them. The reference to ‘moral evil’ in Hegel
refers to the way that Hegel thinks of a purely individual grasp of ethics as dangerous, as
risking the elevation of individual will into moral law. Instead Hegel argues that ethics in its
highest form emerges through ethical forms of living (Sittlichkeit), which include the family,
civil society, and the state. Hegel’s political theory includes the idea that the state takes us
away from the of a solipsistic view of moral law. In general forms of ethical life makes
ethics applicable to the individual in a way he thinks is lacking in Kant, because Kant
confronts pure individuality in its particularity with purely universal law. According to
Kierkegaard, the paradoxes of Christianity require us to recognise that God can command
us to acts which are evil by the standards or ethical law, including the civil law of the
state . There is no incitement to break laws, but there an insistence that we must place
God above laws. That means placing the really individual individual [den Enkelte] above
law, since God is what is known through subjectivity’s absolute relation with the absolute.
God’s relation with law corresponds in structure both with: the individual’s relation to law
and the state as executive power in relation to law. Kierkegaard is concerned with the
‘teleological suspension’ of the ethical in Fear and Trembling, which means that we should
have faith that God will not require us to do evil, even though we must obey such a
command. The greatness of Abraham is that he continued to have that faith, even after
receiving such a command from God. The implication in political thought is that the law
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should be obeyed but that the individual is prior to law, that law serves the flourishing of
individuality, the existence of the strongest form of the individual, and that this has not
been recognised in the ethics of Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. In addition to the
potentially disturbing thought that the relation of subjectivity to the absolute (that is
religious conscience) might lead to suspending law, there is the maybe even disturbing
thought that the state is what may legitimately do the same thing. This is not something
that Kierkegaard ever states directly, but it as an unavoidable implication of what he says
about the absolute nature of the properly constituted state in Two Ages [En literair
Anmeldelse, 1846] and the suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling, in relation to
Agamemnon, Tarquinius Superbus and Lucius Junius Brutus, as well as Abraham.
!
Kierkegaard certainly does not offer a program to rival Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, of
social ethics, jurisprudence and political theory. He takes a mocking attitude to claims for
such a system, through his general criticisms of philosophical system, particularly with
regard Hegel, and more ambiguously through the literary device of William in Either/Or II,
along with Stages on Life’s Way. William is a Judge (or Assessor [Assessoren]) and can
be taken as a representative of the Danish upper middle classes, and of the mentality of
the state bureaucracy. A judge makes a convenient figure for a philosophical and literary
discussion of what ideas underly state laws and action, speaking for the state but also
open to the dangers of the state. The judge is a bureaucratic functionary of the state, but
also provides a restraint on state power by applying legal limits to its actions. Judges are
sometimes notable as writers on jurisprudence and broader connected issues. Twentieth
and Twentieth First century examples include major theorists like, Hans Kelsen, Patrick
Devlin, and Richard Posner. Earlier examples include Francis Bacon, Michel de
Montaigne, and Montesquieu, along with the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers Henry
Home (Lord Kames) and James Burnett (Lord Monboddo). The English novelist Henry
Fielding was a London magistrate. Cicero combined legal advocacy with his political,
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literary and philosophical activities. Many political figures since antiquity have been
connected with law, which Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, saw as a particularly
important institution in democracy, as a substitute for the older aristocracy, preventing
‘tyranny of the majority’ (Tocqueville 1966, Volume One, Part 2, Chapter VIII). In
assessing Judge William, we should also bear in mind literary representations of judges
and court processes. The most notable by general standards are: Dickens’ Bleak House,
written during Kierkegaard’s lifetime; Melville’s Billy Budd written during the1880s; Kafka’s
1920s novel, The Trial. Kafka was himself deeply interested in Kierkegaard, so we can
see that Kierkegaard’s own way of understanding ethics, and law, embedded in literary
works, or at least as part of what is embedded. Kierkegaard’s Judge William does not
bear comparison with the judge-thinkers and writers above, though Kierkegaard definitely
bears comparison with Dickens, Budd and Kafka, along with the philosophers listed above.
It is important to think of Judge William in that context because he is a writer, of letters full
of philosophical and cultural knowledge, even though with an undertone of parody and
hints at a lack of self-knowledge.
!
We can see William showing his philosophical interests in Either/Or, II: The Balance
between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality’:
How did Aristotle conceive of friendship? Did he not make it the point of
departure for his entire ethical view of life, for with friendship, he says, the
concepts of what is just [Retsbegrebet] are so expanded that they all amount to
the same thing. So he bases the concept of justice on the idea of friendship. In
a certain sense, the, his category is superior to the modern one, which bases
justice upon duty, the abstract-categorical; he bases it upon the social. From
this it is easy to see that for him the idea of the state becomes the highest, but
this, in turn, is the imperfection of his category.
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!
I shall not, however, make so bold as to enter into such investigations
as the relation between the Aristotelian and the Kantian views of the ethical. I
mentioned Aristotle only to remind you that he, too, realised that friendship
contributes to a person’s ethical achieving of actuality.
The person who views friendship ethically sees it, then, as a duty.
(Kierkegaard, 1987: 322/II 288-289)
William goes on to discuss the ethical individual as someone with the actual and the ideal
combined within. William uses the language of Aristotle in suggesting that an individual
contains a potential which means that the individual changes whole staying the same
individual, and containing the potentiality as well as the actuality. What William draws from
this is further discussion of how the ethical individual becomes a civil and social individual
containing a variety of habits, passions and desires in a harmonious self. William’s
account evidently refers to Nicomachean Ethics VIII and IX.
!
The context is that William is writing to a younger friend who appears to be the
implied author, referred to as ‘A’ in the Preface, of most of Either/Or I, where an aesthetic
subjective view of life is presented in a series of literary fragments on philosophical and
aesthetic topics. William links friendship with a positive life view, as opposed to ‘A’s
isolated and critical position. William thinks of this as like the life of the devil, who
legendarily laughs alone, as he imagines that ‘A’ does. Kierkegaard seems something
demonic in the aesthetic life, but also something necessary in that demonic moment. As
William himself acknowledges, despair is necessary to become a real Christian with a real
ethical individuality, and despair has always been linked with evil in Christian tradition.
!
The sort of extreme individuation that William sees as necessary some of the time
might is in tension with some of his comments directed against ‘A’s loneliness, though
William typically does not note this tension and is completely lacking in Kierkegaard’s
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capacity for a dialectical examination of the relations between concepts, along with the
contradictions within and between contradictions. We should see that Kierkegaard’s
position is that there is no escape between extreme tension in our ethical self between the
subjective aspect of ethics, which connects it with the aesthetic, and the universal aspect.
Also for Kierkegaard, the religious sphere, or stage, is very distinct from the ethical sphere,
or stage, so that any attempt to grasp absolute (God) through the universality of ethics will
fail. William is engaged in this inevitable failure.
!
William comments on the difference between Aristotle’s view of friendship as
ethically important and Kant’s view of ethics as abstract duty and again there is faşlure to
see how strong the tension is between the two positions. He seems to wish to combine
the two views, which would lead in the direction of Fichte (Kosch 2006b) and of Hegel.
Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (2000) and its sequel The System of Ethics (2005),
try to continue Kant’s ethics, but in ways which are much concerned with practice, and with
more consideration of deep psychological drives. Hegel tried to reconcile the ethical life of
Ancient Greek philosophy with a modern world in which ethics and law seem remote from
the individual in both the Philosophy of Right and Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel does
see, more than William, that there is an opposition between the abstraction of law and the
particularity of the individual, which makes it impossible to achieve a final harmonisation,
though Hegel tries to provide a systematic account of the best possible attempt at
harmonisation in the age in which he is living . Kierkegaard criticises Hegel’s solution for
undermining the particularity of the individual, but there is some affinity in their wish to find
concrete ways in which law can have some reality for individuals.
!
William’s letters deal both with; friendship, the friendship for the man to whom the
letters are addressed; and with love, the love between him and his wife. Both stand in
contrast to Christian love, as explored by Kierkegaard in Works of Love [Kjerlighedens
Gjerninger, 1847], which is love of the neighbour, that is love for all. William’s
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understanding of marital love argues for its compatibility with romantic love, and that
marital love over time is the only way that love can be properly understood as opposed to
the romantic attitude of the Young Man. There is a political dimension in some of this, in
that Nero (184-188/II 167-171) appears in the second letter, along with a mention of
Caligula as an example of the individual who cannot deal with love, as a relation of
equality, and has an aesthetic attitude. Nero is one of the more standard examples of
tyranny from antiquity, and was the oppressor of the philosopher Seneca who was forced
to commit suicide due to Nero’s paranoid anger. Seneca is only second to Socrates as the
example of the philosopher martyred to political power. The Nero reference in Either/Or II
connects back to a brief reference in Either/Or I to Pelagianism (137/I 211) in the section
on Scribe’s play The First Love. The point is that the aesthete is an autocrat in the same
way that a Pelagian believes that the human individual can command grace. Pelagius
was the antagonist of Augustine who argued that grace comes from individual human will,
as well as the will of God. Kierkegaard develops the view that the tyrant is unable to
understand grace from God, and therefore Christian love, because he is unable to accept
anything above his own will. In this instance at least, Kierkegaard is implicitly a critic of
absolute monarchy, as worse than the more republican understanding of the role of the
state leader. This is the sense in which Plato and Seneca were republicans, and both
influenced early modern republicanism, because they believed that the monarch must be
restrained by law and morality above his will.
!
As we have seen, friendship is a part of antique republicanism, and of some
republican influenced early modern thinking like that of Montaigne in relation to Etienne de
la Boétie (author of Discourse on Voluntary Servitude). Montaigne is monarchist on the
more explicit level, but implicitly republican in his attitude to the defects of the French
monarchy and its laws, and to the absolute requirements of friendship, even against the
state . In Either/Or II, William’s attitude to friendship is remote from a political role, but is
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suggestive of a modern civil society where there are remnants of antique republican
virtues. William is educated and sincere, but he is not an imaginative or deep thinker, and
there is a lot implied by his thoughts which his thoughts cannot incorporate. Friendship,
martial love, modern civil society, and Christian love are not compatible to the degree that
he assumes. He refers to the necessity of choice of the aut/aut (either/or), when
addressing the young man, but he does not see all aspects of choice. He tells the young
man to choose the ethical over the aesthetic, in a way that assumes that Christianity will
be adequately captured in the process. His understanding of depth of love over time, does
not extend to repetition, that is the topic explored in Repetition [Gjentagelsen, 1843] and
Concluding Unscientific Postscript [Afflutende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 1846] . William
thinks that the individual should accept universality, should find a station or duty (a very
Fichtean view), and should accept the duty to marry. All of these conflict with
Kierkegaard’s view of the relation between individual and social norms. William criticises
the mystic for separating himself from society, and while Kierkegaard was no mystic, the
ways in which William criticises the mystic cannot be his own view, since it is clear that
Kierkegaard thinks we should be ready to separate ourselves from social bonds and
worldly concerns, and that a fully believing Christian is someone who at least makes some
gesture in that direction. William criticises Aristotle for putting the state at the highest level,
but his ‘letters‘ do accept the idea that the individual is defined by rules which ultimately
refer to the state. Marriage, which William thinks is a universal duty, is defined by civil
laws even where religious ceremonies are standard, and William himself is one of judges
who interprets civil laws, that is those laws which originate in the state.
!
Civil law is an impersonal relation apparently distant from love. Kierkegaard
demonstrates intriguing ambiguity about this though when he has William act as the voice
of law and of Christian ethics in Either/Or. Kierkegaard leaves a lot to the reader to
decide. There is no clear message from Kierkegaard about whether William is a adequate
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and apt defender of Christian love. We do not have the voice of his wife to explain how
she experiences their marriage. The overall effect of the Judge’s letters is to suggest
someone who understands Christianity in the abstract, but now how to make it alive, how
to live it from moment to moment. He is certainly not concerned with challenging law, and
the authority of the courts, from the point of view of love, and faith. It is true that
Kierkegaard would also surely wish to recognise that law is part of the highest ends of the
social individual and that views about law and laws, about how it can serve the highest
ends, will lead to some encounter with the state and with politics, but as we have seen
Kierkegaard finds conflict between these elements.
!
The figure of Judge William is an indication of how we can try sincerely to do this
but still get it wrong. He has no grasp of the tension around the existence of the state, and
its role in imposing ethics, as far as ethics is encoded in law. Tension between ethics and
the individuals relation with the absolute, along with tension between ethics and the nonethical force of the state, is present in many places in Kierkegaard, but is lacking in
Williams two discourses.
!
We can see in the sermon ‘Ultimatum’ by a country priest, that William appends to
his second letter, the religious point of view that William understands but not fully enough.
That text emphasises that’s God must be loved unconditionally and that such extreme
unethical actions, as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, cannot be questioned. The
priest, himself, though should not be confused with Kierkegaard. The life of a country
priest is one that Kierkegaard could have had as the beginning of a career in the church
but chose not to. Nevertheless we can think of ‘Ultimatum’ as in agreement with
Kierkegaard’s views, but those views are expressed through mimicry of someone of lesser
literary and philosophical education, and with less interest in the paradoxes of Christianity,
and of how paradoxes arise at the limits of thought. For Kierkegaard, amongst other
paradoxes, Christianity brings a universal message which can only by explained by
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individual humans, so that universality is explained from an irreducibly subjective point of
view. The Christian viewpoint is even more than universal, since is absolute and that
increases the paradoxical nature of the subjective communication of it.
!
There are texts where Kierkegaard does engage in ‘direct communication’ with
regard to the message of Christianity, and puts the message of ‘Ultimatum’ into something
closer to his own philosophical writing. The most substantial text of this kind is Works of
Love, though in comparison with his other religious discourses, it is much more concerned
with the philosophical issues of selfhood, love and the neighbour for their own sake. One
passage contains a precise account of one of the things which should lead us to question
any automatic identification of Kierkegaard with Judge William, or with any form of
Aristotelian ethics.
Spontaneous [umiddelbar] love can be changed from itself, it can be
changed over the years as is frequently seen. The love loses its ardor, its
joy, its desire, its originality, its freshness. Just as the river that sprang out of
the rocks is dissipated further down in the sluggishness of the dead waters,
so also love is dissipated in the lukewarmness and indifference of habit
[Vanen]. Alas, of all enemies [Fjender], habit [Vanen] is perhaps the most
cunning, and above all it is cunning enough never to let itself be seen,
because the person who sees the habit is saved from the habit [Vanen].
(1995, 36/IX 39)
Habit is something we should break from in love, with the suggestion that romantic love
fades, but Christian love endures. Reference above to the exception and to God’s
command to Abraham fit here. Habit does not allow us to recognise the exception.
Aristotle views ethics as something that grows with the habits of living in a community. We
can improve them through reflection, but we do not break with them. There may be
moments where Aristotle is aware of limits to that understanding of ethics, as in The
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Poetics, when he considers the disruptions of normality, the discoveries and the reversals
of fortune, which are the consequence of bad luck and lapses of judgement in tragedy. It
is quite fitting then that Kierkegaard did discuss tragedy, even if only as a small proportion
of his total writing, since it is the way that habit is not the foundation that is important for
Kierkegaard. Habit is something we have to break through to get to the real self, the real
moral agent. In that case the real agent in politics, that self that has political responsibility
must have the same status of emerging where habit is interrupted. Where there is habit
there is non-conscious decision making, so conscious decision making becomes more
apparent when habit breaks down.
!
Habit is something we can equate with the crowd in the quotation used as an
epigram at the head of this chapter. Love must be for the neighbour as distinct from the
crowd. The reference to the neighbour stands in for all of humanity and includes the idea
of rising above dissimilarity [Forskjelligheden] between individuals (Kierkegaard 1995, 88/
IX 87). In that passage Kierkegaard suggests that Christianity does not want to eliminate
dissimilarity but does want to make it something loosely worn. The similarity between
humans is what we love when we love the neighbour, and that similarity comes from
eternity, which means God and also maybe suggests that we will not be distinct from each
other in the next life. That leaves dissimilarity between individuals as something that
characterises temporal life only, which form the point of view of political thought, and
ethical thought in general, is very adequate there is an air of incipient paradox in may of
these comments that Kierkegaard does not choose to investigate with his general
dialectical passion. The tension between respect for humanity in its universal aspect, and
respect for the differences between human individuals is a inevitable problem for political
and ethical thought. Even if Kierkegaard does not make much directly of the paradox, it is
powerfully present, as we can see when Derrida picks up on it in ‘Whom to Give to
(Knowing Not to Know)’ in The Gift of Death (1995).
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That small proportion of Kierkegaard’s writing which refers to tragedy is where he
does deal, implicitly, with the tension between Single Individual and the Neighbour. That is
necessary from the political point of view to deal with the rights which belong to all, and
what rights a particular individual has in a particular context. The activity of a judge is that
of deciding how to apply general laws to particular cases. The activity of a politician is to
decide on the policies of government within the universalistic state, that is universalistic in
relation to the individuals that fall under the scope of that state. The activity of a political
leader is to bring together the anonymous general good and what is good for individuals
for who identify with, and react against, that leader. Rousseau thought of this in terms of
the distinction between general will and particular will, and furthermore in terms of a
necessary distinction between the will of all who may not be focused on the common good,
and the general will, which does have such a focus. As we have seen, Kierkegaard wants
to see those people in power who are devoted to the common good, and his thinking there
parallels with his thinking about love. Tragedy shows how gaps open in all these
attempted acts of harmonisation.
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6. Tragic Community
Fear and Trembling [Frygt og Bæven, 1843]
‘Problema III’
In Greek tragedy, the hiddenness [Skjultheden] (and as a result of it the
recognition[Gjenkjendelsen]) is an epic remnant based on fate in which the
dramatic action vanishes and in which it has its dark, mysterious source
[Udspring]. Because of this [deraf kommer det], a Greek tragedy has an
effect similar to that [en græsk Tragedie frembringer, har en Lighed med
Intrykket] of a marble statue, which lacks the potency of the eye [Øiets].
Greek tragedy is blind. Therefore it takes a certain abstraction if one is to be
influenced by it properly. A son murders his father, but not until later does he
realise it was his father. A sister is going to sacrifice her brother, but realises
it at the crucial moment [Øieblik]. Our reflecting age is not very concerned
with this kind of tragedy. Modern drama has abandoned destiny [Skjebnen],
has dramatically emancipated itself [sig], is sighted [seende], gazes [skuer]
inward into itself [sig selv], absorbs destiny [Skjebnen] in its dramatic
consciousness. Hiddenness [Skjultheden] and disclosure, then, are the
hero’s free act [Gjerning], for which he is responsible.
(Kierkegaard 1983, 84/III 132)
Repetition belongs to the modern world, as Kierkegaard suggests in Repetition
[Gjentagelsen, 1843], linking modernity with the origins of Christianity (1983,149). That is
he opposes repetition to knowledge as recollection for the Ancient Greeks. Knowledge as
recollection is itself a reference to Plato’s Meno. He refers to recollection as to the Greek
ethnical world, which as we have seen refers to the sense in antiquity that individuality,
religion, ethics, and culture belonged to the life of a city, in which citizens are united by
shared ancestry (real or imagined). Recollection or repetition are necessary to prevent the
collapse of life into incoherence. Recollection looks at existence as past, while repetition
with actuality as what exists now. Repetition is the interest of metaphysics, the basis of
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ethics, and is the condition for dogmatics (system of religious beliefs). The ethical aspect
of repetition must be what is referred to as second ethics in the Introduction to The
Concept of Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844), where it appears as the kind of ethics that
relies on dogmatics and can deal with sin (1980, 21/III 293).
!
As we have seen an ambiguity about the relation between the emergence of
Christianity and the emergence of modernity is a key aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought on
subjectivity and modernity. There is ambiguity because the modern does not appear all at
once in Christianity. Tragedy of the modern kind belongs to the sixteenth century. Maybe
Kierkegaard means that modernity depends on that Christian moment. Certainly his
writings on tragedy and on opera suggest that he believes that aesthetic production, since
the sixteenth century, is premised on Christian separation between the ideal and the
observable world, which has precedents in Hegel’s account of Romantic, that is Christian,
art. Kierkegaard’s account of tragedy also suggests, in a rather Hegelian way, the
weakening of ethical substance in modern tragedy and the greater isolation of the
individual. The significance of the relationship between sympathy and tragedy is
confirmed in Either/Or, Part One (‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama’):
Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must
turn the single individual [den Enkelte] over to himself completely in such a way
that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator. Consequently his guilt is
sin, his pain repentance, but thereby the tragic is cancelled. Furthermore,
suffering tragedy in the stricter sense has essentially lost its tragic interest, for
the power that is the source of the suffering has lost its meaning, and the
spectator shouts: Help yourself, and heaven will help you—in other words, the
spectator has lost compassion, but in a subjective and also in an objective
sense compassion is the authentic expression of the tragic.
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(Kierkegaard 1987a, 149/I126-127)
The decline of tragedy rests on the decline of the substantial categories of family and
state, which are taken from Hegel’s own writing on tragedy, which are embedded in
Hegel’s own lengthy discussions of ethics, law, and the state. These concepts in
Kierkegaard and Hegel refer back to Aristotelian assumptions about the naturalness of
political and social community. Kierkegaard’s conception of antiquity could be labelled
Aristotelian-Hegelian. The replacement of the tragic hero by the knight of faith rests on the
decay of the Aristotelian-Hegelian concepts. The criticism of Hegel in Kierkegaard is partly
on the basis that Hegelian assumptions about substantial ethical categories do no rise
above the Greek point of view, and so are not ‘Christian’. From the philosophical point of
view, ‘Christianity’ can be replaced by inwardly gasped truth, the uniquely individual point
of view necessary before the law.
!
Christianity, as Hegel suggested, is associated with a Romantic separation between
subjectivity and absolute spirituality, as defined in the ‘Introduction’ to ‘The Romantic Arts’
in Part III, Section III of the Aesthetics (Hegel 1975, 792-796). In Kierkegaard, that
Christianity exists in the world of modernity, ‘our age’, in which remorse replaces pain and
guilt replaces sin. The public drama of pain and guilt is replaced in the Christian world by
inwardness and the subjective (‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama’):
In modern times, the pain is greater. One could say of Greek tragedy that it is a
fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The wrath of the gods is
terrible, but still the pain is not as great as in modern tragedy, where the hero
suffers his total guilt, is transparent to himself in his suffering of his guilt. It is
appropriate at this point to show, as with tragic guilt, which sorrow is true
aesthetic sorrow and which is true aesthetic pain. The most bitter pain is
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obviously repentance, but repentance has ethical, not aesthetic, reality. It is the
most bitter pain because it has the complete transparency of the total guilt, but
precisely because of this transparency it does not interest aesthetically.
Repentance has a holiness that eclipses the aesthetic. It does not want to be
seen, least of all by a spectator, and requires an altogether different kind of selfactivity.
(Kierkegaard 1987a, 148-149/I 126)
This builds on Hegel whose Aesthetics discussion of tragedy suggests that, ‘[m]odern
tragedy adopts into its own sphere from the start the principle of subjectivity’ (1975, 1223),
but unlike Kierkegaard Hegel finds that modern subjectivity can be substantive,
‘Shakespeare [...] gives us in contrast to this portrayal of vacillating characters inwardly
divided among themselves, the finest examples of firm and consistent characters who
come to ruin simply because of this decisive adherence to themselves and their
aims’ (Hegel 1975, 1229-1230). For Kierkegaard, it is the vacillating divided aspect of
characters that defines modernity. The nature of Christian modernity makes the idea that
subjectivity can become substantive through conflict with law, as in tragedy, or conforming
with law as in Kierkegaard’s own creation of Judge William, absurd.
!
Tragedy in its original Greek form is highly political, as always concerned with the
fate of kings, and therefore with the nature of kings. Modern tragedy still contains that
aspect in the seventeenth century, but English plays like Shakespeare’s Othello and
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus start to bring heroes into tragedy who are not figures of political
power. The transition from royal figures to average people is completed in the nineteenth
century when tragedy is identified as a form with Büchner and Ibsen, who may deal with
political issues and with power, but not with princes. The modern tragedy that Kierkegaard
pays most attention to is Don Giovanni, which deals with issues of demonic character and
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sexual obsession absent from the original tragedies. The Don is recognisably descended
from Greek heroes in their most rebellious and obsessive side, but none are defined by
self-centred obsession. Kierkegaard’s concern with the Don and with Judge William in
Either/Or is suggestive of a breakup of the ethical-political sphere into obsessive lust for
power, expressed through sexual obsession, and a pedantic unimaginative belief in
existing laws and institutions. If we apply the explicit concern of Two Ages, with the
contrast between revolutionary absolutism and average pragmatism, to the contrast
between the Don and the Judge, we can say that we live in age of contrast between the
absolutism of power as force, and the regularity of social ethics. There is a demonic
egotistical side to politics and an ethical-legal . In this context it is worth going back to
Tarqunius Superbus, our starting point. He had a son, Sextus Tarquinius, who raped
Lucretia, wife of the aristocrat Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, himself a friend of Brutus, the
leader of the revolt against Tarquinius. Brutus and Collatinus served together as the first
consuls of Rome after the overthrow of Tarquinius Superbus. In these legendary events of
the foundation of the Roman Republic, we can see the link between a predatory aristocrat
and politics. Don Giovanni is an avatar of Sextus Tarquinius in the eighteenth century.
Judge William is perhaps a nineteenth century avatar of Aristotle or Cicero, in an ironic
manner.
!
We see above how Kierkegaard explains the transition from Pagan antiquity to
Christian modernity. There is a distinct undertone of nostalgia for antiquity, at least as far
as secular life is concerned, and an affirmative explanation of the affect of Christianity on
literary form. What is gained is the pain of guilt and repentance in modern tragedy, which
has something ethical that impedes aesthetic sorrow. The reference to the ethical is itself
only a partial distancing from antiquity, since Kierkegaard recognises that there is an
adequate conception of ethics in antiquity. Christianity enables a fuller development of
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ethics, which is also a negation, through a deepening of subjectivity and the way it exists
in absolute relation with the absolute.
!
Kierkegaard’s element of nostalgia, for the antique unities of individuality with
ethical, substance strongly parallels a political sense that emerges in Enlightenment
discussions of liberty and republicanism. The sense that antiquity, more Rome (or
sometimes Sparta) than Athens, but applicable to the Athenian democratic polity, allowed a
form of development of the individual as communal and political, as virtuous in the defence
of collective liberty, lacking in modern liberty. Modern liberty was welcomed as allowing
greater variety of individuality and relations between individuals, that is in the flourishing of
civil society, but with a sense of loss of the kind of individual strength cultivated in antiquity.
Vico, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Humboldt, Constant and Hegel
are all relevant here, though considerable differences between them must be
acknowledged. It’s better to see Kierkegaard as sharing the ambivalence about the value
of pre-Christian antiquity in secular life, than to assume that he ranks Christian modernity
more highly in all respects. One fundamental point concerning Christianity for Kierkegaard
is that its institutionalisation, in a modernity stretching back to the late Roman Empire, is
inevitably a betrayal and that modern Christian communities exist on that foundation.
There is a double issue: Christianity undermines the ways in which the ancients could
define themselves through membership of an ethnic community; the political
institutionalisation of Christianity betrays the Christian insight into the single individual [den
Enkelte] and subjectivity.
!
Kierkegaard has other thoughts about the nature of modernity, in ways which are
most directly concerned with aesthetic form, but also have political aspects in the
preceding section of Either/Or I, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic’,
which focuses on Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The ‘Immediate Erotic Stages’ is much
longer and more concerned with general aesthetic categories and hierarchies. The work it
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is most concerned with is not directly concerned with politics, though there are some clear
political overtones. Don Giovanni is the aristocrat who seduces and rapes women of all
classes, but is set up as particularly in conflict with the engagement between two
commoners, Zerlina and Masetto. Their happy marriage ceremony closes the opera after
the more famous scene in which the stone statue of the Commendatore, an aristocrat
murdered by the Don while trying to rape his daughter, sends the Don to hell. The dark
and cruel aristocracy sends punishment and destroys itself, descending to its satanic
place before the common people express joy.
!
So in the Either/Or I discussion of the perfect work of art, one theme is the defeat of
aristocratic power and satanic willfulness, by a spirit of democratic community, though only
after a dark supernatural revenge on the aristocracy by the aristocracy. The story of the
movement from feuding barons to early modern state sovereignty is a familiar aspect of
simplified European history. The Either/Or I account of the Don is ambiguous, since
disapproval is accompanied by respect, and that is because the Don’s personality
dominates the opera, just as the Overture dominates its musical development. The
exploration and assertion of subjectivity, and of the concrete particularity of the individual is
a deep commitment for Kierkegaard. The Don’s relentless seductions are even
grotesquely equivalent to Cristian love in their inclusion of all women, something
emphasised in the most famous aria, Leporello’s ‘Catalogue Aria’.
!
Thinking about Kierkegaard’s political assumption, what he says In Kierkegaard’s
account, the relation of the Don and his servant Leporello itself has elements of
democracy challenging aristocracy. Kierkegaard puts this in the context of the way that
the Middle Ages places before its own consciousness an individual as representative of
‘the idea’ (a general idea, a general type), and then places another individual alongside
him in relation to him. The relation is usually comical and is one in which one individual
makes up for the other’s extreme qualities. These couples include: the king and the fool,
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Faust and Wagner, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Don Juan and Leporello. The story
of Don Giovani comes from the Medieval Spanish story of Don Juan. The duality,
particularly that between the Don and Loporello, is something the emerges in the Middle
Ages, in Kierkegaard’s analysis as the conflict between the flesh and the spirit within
Christianity becomes a subject of reflection. That is why Medieval culture created
personified forms of both forces, according to Kierkegaard. In this duality, kingship and
aristocracy are challenged by the people, by a representative of the democratic mass.
Though the point of the dualities is partly to mock the less aristocratic one, the democratic
voice gets its own heroism. The strongest example is the role of Sancho Panza in Don
Quixote.
!
Kierkegaard’s implicit account of the transition between the aristocratic and the
democratic, is one which prefers the democratic to the aristocratic , but also sees them as
belonging with each other, as incomplete without the other. Despite the lack of
enthusiasm for constitutional revolution in Kierkegaard, the democratic age has a
structurally superior position, because that is the political equivalent to the spiritual
meaning of Christianity. The polis appears in Kierkegaard as appealing to the people as a
whole in its foundation, and the universality of Christianity is emphasised particularly with
regard to love. The equalisation of humans as separate from God, spills over into political
thought, even if Christianity has often been part of power, and of the subordination of
humans in unfree labour. Christianity adds universality to the polis, but also at the same
time weakens the passionate focus of the polis on itself. Once that focus is lost,
democracy cannot be connected with the complete social, legal, cultural, institutional, and
religious identity at its origin. That loss is tied up with the advance of Christianity, and the
suggestion that the individual person finds itself at a universal and abstract level. God
replaces the polis. Moments of repetition unify the individualism of Christian modernity
with the intense republicanism of the polis..
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There is an implicit reference to political repetition in Two Ages, and that is
dependent on the loss of the Greek polis with with its sense of individual embedment in
strong communities of family, state, and pagan religion. It is significant that in the Preface
to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard refers to the crime of lack of civic duty in Athens,
using the Ancient Greek word, άπραγμοσύνε (1984, 5), which confirms the claim that
Kierkegaard suggests Christianity belongs to a world, or shapes a world, in which the
ancient sense of belonging to the political community has disappeared.
!
It is significant that in the Preface to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard
refers to the crime of lack of civic duty in Athens, using the Ancient Greek word,
άπραγμοσύνε1. To some degree, Kierkegaard suggests that Christianity belongs to a
world, or shapes a world, in which the ancient sense of belonging to the political
community has disappeared. The context in Philosophical Fragments is that Kierkegaard,
using the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus writes a preface which suggests that the text
is a very minor contribution to the discussions of the time. Kierkegaard/Climacus
compares himself with Diogenes (of Sinop presumably), according to a story in which
while the citizens of Corinth prepare for an attack by Philip of Macedon, Diogenes moves
the tub around, in which he lived so as to avoid being the only lazy person in the city. In
this case Kierkegaard undermines the importance of what he writes by suggesting that it is
just a gesture so that he can seem to participate in the great discussions on the time, while
setting up a discussion about the limits of communication and understanding, with regard
to the paradoxes which appear in fully developed philosophy, and which are necessary to
Christianity, in Kierkegaard’s view. The irony is such that Kierkegaard is claiming that the
text is superior to discussions of his time. So the crime of άπραγμοσύνε is committed
more in a claim to superiority than in a withdrawal from the public duties of citizenship.
1
Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984): 5.
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That suggests another way of understanding Kierkegaard’s attitude to the political part of
ethics. !
!
!
!
!
The story about Diogenes is rich in political and historical implications. We cannot
be sure which, if any, Kierkegaard is thinking, but that is no barrier to exploring those
implications, as part of the impact of Kierkegaard’s text. The attack by Philip on Corinth is
part of the Macedonian monarchy’s destruction of the real independence of the Greek
polities, the self-governing city states, with their various experiments in
republicanism,including the democracy of Athens. Diogenes’ flippant response suggests a
separation between philosophy and the political life of the city. We can put this in the
context of the movement from republicanism and political speech in philosophy to
acquiescence in the unrestrained power of the Roman Emperors, and inner directed
conversation in philosophy. Philip is the symbol of anti-republican tyranny for many in
antiquity. The great public speaker of Athenian democracy, Demosthenes, attacked Philip
in the speeches known as Philippics; Cicero attacked Julius Caesar’s follower Mark
Anthony as a tyrant during his rule of Rome after Caesar’s death, in speeches named the
Philippics in honour of Demosthenes. The Romans intervened in Greece on the side of
the cities against Macedonia, in the course of which hostages came to Rome as
guarantors of the loyalty of the cities to Rome, including Polybius. That is Polybius author
of Histories which include an explanation and defence of the political institutions of the
Roman Republic. This Polybian republicanism is an antecedent of Cicero’s own
republican writings. So far, we might see Diogenes as being on the other side of those
who care about republicanism, and the Cynic school of which Diogenes is the founder, is
generally considered to be very unpolitical. We should also consider the legendary story
of the meeting between Diogenes and the son of Philip, Alexander the Great. Supposedly
Alexander asked what he could do for Diogenes, and Diogenes told him the mighty king
and conqueror to get out of his sun. This in not incompatible with the non-political
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interpretation of Cynic philosophy, but it dopes suggest a strong element in Cynicism of
defiance of rulers and power, which is very compatible with republicanism. The philosophy
of Hellenist, that is the Greek world from the time of Alexander, and Imperial Roman
antiquity is less political than during the Golden Age of Athens or the Roman Republic, but
it is still about restraint on power, about a republican spirit within a monarchical political
system. Among the Stoics of Imperial Rome, Seneca came into conflict with Nero;
Epictetus mocks the idea that the friend of Caesar can be happy; Marcus Aurelius was one
of the Emperors who could be accepted as good by republican standards, and who saw
his power as limited by considerations of justice. We can, like Foucault (as discussed
above), see Seneca’s version of Stoicism as part of a movement to a less political world,
but also see like Foucault the submerged political themes, and also remember that
Hobbes listed Seneca as one of those antique republicans dangerous to sovereignty in
Behometh, part I. The movement from self government as government of others to Stoic
and then Christian inner discipline according to Foucault is even anticipated by
Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, ‘Preliminary Expectoration’ (1983, 48/III 98), where
there is discussion of the self-censor (sin egen Censor) as higher than the position of
Censor in the Roman Republic.
!
The quotation from Fear and Trembling at the head of this chapter draws attention
to reflection as part of modern tragedy. That corresponds with Kierkegaard’s view of love
in Either/Or round a contrast between the immediacy or passion of erotic love, and the
reflective nature of marriage. It also corresponds with Kierkegaard’s view of politics in Two
Ages, in the contrast between the reflective pragmatism of everyday politics and the
immediate passion of revolution. Again, despite Kierkegaard’s Christian point of view, the
more ethically admirable side of the opposition between immediacy and reflection is
immediacy, though reflection is a product of Christianity, of the way that modernity
emerges from the Christian insertion in the ancient world. The value judgements in
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Kierkegaard are not as straight forward as the elevation of the first term in each pair over
the second term. They only exist in interaction with each other, and the struggle to
become a Christian in Kierkegaard’s definition, is an integration. It is significant that in
every field of though, Kierkegaard does see the first, more antique terms, as necessary to
a complete point of view: A Kierkegaardian political thought must recognise an ‘ethnic’
aspect to politics, though revised with regard to the universality that is present in
Christianity. So a Kierkegaardian politics seeks an integration of ancient polity and
modern civll society under a representative state. Kierkegaard refers to the blindness of
Greek tragedy in relation to some dark source for the tales of killing family members
accidentally, or near killing in tragedy. The suggestion is that human sacrifice is the hidden
theme of tragedy, and not always so hidden if we consider Iphigenia in Aulis. The killing of
unwanted new born babies was very normal in the antique world, and that forms the basis
of Oedipus the King and Ion. The acts of the heroes of ancient tragedy are destiny
because individuals at that understood their actions as part of an ethnic belonging beyond
individual choice. Refection in the modern world means that tragedy is no longer blind, but
lacks the perfection of form of both ancient tragedy and ancient sculpture. If the modern
reflective seeing world is free from ethnicity, it lacks focus, and it lacks appreciation of dark
truths at the heart of human culture. Dark truths which are connected with two aspects of
Christianity: the depths of human sin, which Kierkegaard describes with reference to
anxiety; the willingness to obey divine commands which conflict with universal ethical
standards. That brings us back to the first chapter and the need for political thought to
acknowledge to force commanded by sovereignty.
!
The gap between relativity and the absolute, which is partly grasped through the
contrast between immediacy and reflection is the basis irony. In its essence, irony is
concerned with the absolute, but then incorporates any situation of difference between a
more relative point of view and a more universal point of view. In that sense the tragic gap
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between individual and the social order, is an aspect of irony. Any thought about politics
must share the structure of irony, since politics is centrally concerned with immediacy
versus revolution, consent versus the violence of sovereignty.
!
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7. Political Irony
Stages on Life’s Way [Staadier paa Livets Vei]
‘“Guilty”/”Not Guilty”’ [“Skyldig?-”Ikke-Skyldig?]
Governance [Stryrelsen] has made me captive. The idea of my existence
[Existentses] was proud; now I am crushed. I do know that. I can conceal it
from others, but I have lost the very substance of my existence [Existents], the
secure place of resort behind my deceptive appearance, lost what I shall never
regain, precisely what I myself must prevent myself from regaining, for my pride
still remains but has had to referre pedem (give ground), and now has the task,
among other things, of never forgiving myself . Only religiously can I now
become intelligible [forstaaelig] to myself before God; in relation to people
[Menneskene], misunderstanding [Misforstaaelse] is the foreign language I
speak. I wanted to have the power to be able to express myself in the universal
any time [Øieblik] I wished; now I cannot do it. [...] My idea was to structure my
life ethically in my innermost being and to conceal this inwardness in the form of
deception. Now I am forced even further back into myself; my life is religiously
structured and is so far back in inwardness that I have difficulty in making my
way to actuality [Virkelighden].
(Kierkegaard 1988, 351/VI 328-329)
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard identifies the aesthetic with possibility
and ethics with actuality, and it is irony which joins them, as is suggested in part two,
section II, chapter IV, division 2, A, § 3: ‘There are three existence-spheres: the esthetic,
the ethical, the religious. To these there is a respectively corresponding confinium: irony is
the confinium between the esthetic and the ethical; humour is the confinium between the
ethical and the religious’ (1992a, 501-502/VII 436). It is irony on the border between the
aesthetic and the ethical, which is most important for our purposes, in large part because
of the links with political romanticism, discussed above, and the focus Kierkegaard has on
irony in his thesis. Irony is the way in which aesthetic subjectivity relates to ethical
universality, and so to the political sphere within ethics. For the purposes of this book, we
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have seen that the religious can correspond with the element of the state concerned with
force, which is how we began chapter one above with reference to Tarquinius Superbus
and Abraham. Humour should fit in here, according to the typology of Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, but on the whole humour appears in Kierkegaard’s considerations
of the aesthetic as in the references to laughter in the ‘Diapsalmata’ section of Either/Or I
(1987a, 21/I 5, 34/I 18, 43 I 27). Laughter is not necessarily part of humour rather than
irony, but there is much humour in those texts of Kierkegaard concerned with the aesthetic
point of view, than his discussion of the ethical. William’s ethical letters are not notable for
humour of any kind, and we might suspect that the humour at the limits of the ethical is
best understood through the irony at the limits of the aesthetic. Kierkegaard’s claim about
the ethical point of view is partly that it incorporate aesthetic subjectivity, so some things
about the ethical maybe best understood through the aesthetic. The humour of the limits
of the ethical before the religious, is where the universality of the ethical becomes relative
in comparison to the absolute of religion, and is at this point that the ethical reveals the
aesthetic within itself.
!
In his exploration, and use, of irony Kierkegaard is partly drawing on the Romantic
Irony of the Jena Romantics. Before discussing that, ands its political aspects, we will look
at some work on Kierkegaard and irony which does not bring in the Jena Romantics. The
role of irony in establishing the ethical has been more explored in a manner that touches
on politics in Frazier’s Rorty and Kierkegaard on Moral Commitment (2006). Frazier looks
at Kierkegaard’s view of the ethical role of irony in comparison with Rorty’s political ideal of
liberal irony in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989). Rorty refers liberal irony to
twentieth century literature and literary criticism, rather than Kierkegaard or Romantic
Irony. His position is that liberalism should be modelled on the intellectual, critic, or literary
writer, who ‘redescribes’ the world, without claiming to have found the truth about the
world, who is rather conscious of the contingency of experience, which can never
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encounter absolute truths. This is a position on liberalism that Kierkegaard would have
regarded as the rejection of liberalism rather than its justification.
!
As we have seen Kierkegaard placed liberalism (including the general democratic
and constitutional movements of his time, in the interaction of contingency and the
absolute in politics, so this is not a Kierkegaardian approach, or could only be a
Kierkegaardian approach if Kierkegaard took an entirely negative view of liberalism, which
as we have seen is not the case. Frazier’s contextualisation of Rorty’s approach through
irony and ethics in Kierkegaard, brings it closer to Kierkegaard’s own thought. However,
his account lacks a Kierkegaardian sense of paradox and dialectic, the way that the
spheres or stage in Kierkegaard both belong together and negate each other. Frazier
does not take ethics and irony into politics, perhaps because Rorty’s own ‘liberal’ irony is
so lacking in political content and force. In addition, Chapter 6 of Rorty and Kierkegaard
on Moral Commitment makes rather too much of the difference of perspectives between
Kierkegaard as the direct author of The Concept of Irony, and Climacus as the
pseudonymous author of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The relation between
Kierkegaard as author and his various pseudonyms is a difficult one, which means we
should be careful about assuming that a pseudonymous author is always wrong in
comparison with a text signed by Kierkegaard. He used those pseudonyms to explain his
own position, not to create other positions. There is distancing within the pseudonymous
texts, but in the cause of showing us Kierkegaard’s thought through interaction between
voices. The best way of taking the multiple authorial signatures of Kierkegaard’s writings,
is to see them as enacting the necessary limitations of any single perspective. We should
be careful about assuming that because any of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms confesses to a
limitation in understanding, that the exposition in that name, or that of any pseudonym, is
less reliable in its overall communication than Kierkegaard’s signed attempts at exposition
of what is always beyond complete exposition: subjectivity and the absolute. The power of
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adopting a position which is not your complete position, in order to communicate your
position is the power of irony.
!
Kierkegaard builds up his view of possibility and actuality, as aspects of the
aesthetic and the ethical. What Kierkegaard suggests in Concluding Unscientific
Postscript is the value of taking all possibilities seriously as real, that is concentrating on
the Aristotelian move from possibility to reality, the movement of potentiality (Carlisle
2006). The word in English used by Aristotle is kinesis, since Kierkegaard uses the Greek
original κίνεσις pronounced similarly to the English word. Aristotle’s use of the term
concentrates on a meaning of κίνεσις which is more physicalist than Kierkegaard’s own
discussion of it as the movement from potentiality to actuality (1992a, 342/VII 296). The
context in which Kierkegaard refers to κίνεσις is of the movement from ethical abstract to
deed, and the criticism of ethical eudaemonism. It is he movement, or leap, from ethical
abstraction to action which counts, not the abstract commitment to ethics. That movement
is never at this moment, but has always happened or will happen. It evades our
awareness of the present moment, so disrupting time and presumably for Kierkegaard
directing us to eternity away from normal temporality. Abstraction is equated by
Kierkegaard with a Parmenidian world of is without change, while the act, and the
movement of κίνεσις towards it, requires time for the process of change. Κίνεσις does
not happen in an instant, but as a process. The criticism of eudaemonism, which could
extend to all antique ethics, is of the idea that the good is its own reward, which could be
taken as inherent to the antique association of ethics with living well, flourishing of life, the
good or happy life. Kierkegaard argues that eudaemonism is undermined by κίνεσις
because doubts creep into the mind during the time it takes to get from thought to deed.
!
Time and κίνεσις undermine antique ethics because the possibility of reflection,
which requires time, is the possibility of doubt about what should be done. The existence
of this kind of gap between human living and the act which conditions human living,
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undermines the idea that the rules of such acts spring emerges from living, in a largely
pre-reflective way. Antique ethics does of course allow for reflection, and its benefits, but
sees them as expressions of our nature, and the flourishing of our natural being. If we
consider this to be applicable to politics, and the ethics of Plato and Aristotle certainly does
include politics, then we can draw the following conclusions. Firstly, political acts cannot
be the pre-reflective outcome of the life of the community. Secondly, the life of the
community does not gives us political acts without deliberation and movement. Thirdly,
political acts are the result of time and deliberation. Fourthly, politics cannot be said to an
area in which we have reward in doing what is good in an immediate way. Fifthly, political
theory refers to a world of unchanging ‘is’, disrupted by the time and κίνεσις of concrete
political acts. We can see this as part of Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, since Hegel
thinks of the state as belonging to Sittlicheit, or the customary life of the community, taken
to be constituted by mores with ethical status.
!
!
Political theory does not guide political acts in any automatic and predictable way;
politics does not rest on the immediate reward of doing good. Claims which are directed
against Aristotle as well as Hegel. Politics is not part of human nature or the highest good
on Kierkegaard’s account of κίνεσις in ethics. One side of that is clearly a rejection of
politics, but the other side is that it could be taken as just a rejection of the over
idealisation of politics. Outside the highest ethical good, or immediate product of ethics,
the framework of politics may be emancipated as a sphere of non-moralistic human
practices characterised possibly by terms such as play, competition, contestation, struggle,
competition, contingency and pragmatism. Going further than that, ethics itself is
diminished by Kierkegaard as something non-ideal in relation to theory, so maybe ethics
should be characterised in the same way as politics. Kierkegaard does not give ethics as
abstract system a high status. The discussion of κίνεσις, of the interruptions between
abstraction and action, taken with the other aspects of Concluding Unscientific Postscript
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is a call to appreciate the role of subjectivity in ethics. Kierkegaard builds on the German
Idealist concern with human practice and consciousness, in looking for a more subjective
theory of ethics than Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and looks for a theory of
subjectivity which does not collapse into pure relativity and contingency.
!
These two concerns go back to The Concept of Irony. Irony itself is a not a
politically neutral term, or certainly not in the context in which Kierkegaard discusses it, the
context of the group know as the Jena Romantics or the Romantic Ironists. The
development of irony as a philosophy and aesthetic concept is intertwined with a political
commitment to republicanism, what we would now call liberalism, a term which only came
into use as a political term in the 1820s in Spain, achieving European and world usage in
the 1840s. The Concept of Irony gives a view of the value of the aesthetic and of its limits.
The aesthetic in this book is referred mostly as ‘ironic’, and sometimes as ‘Romantic’; here
the term ‘Romantic Irony’ will be used. This choice comes from the background of
German philosophy, aesthetics, and literary thought which for Kierkegaard is definitive of
modern aesthetic thought. He is picking up on Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm
Schlegel, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, Karl Solger and Ludwig Tieck commenting
particularly on Friedrich Schlegel, Solger and Tieck. A detailed account of Kierkegaard’s
relationship with the writings of the Romantic Ironists, and related figures in German
literature can be found in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries: Tome III:
Literature and Aesthetics (Stewart 2008) These aesthetic theorists wrote literature
themselves, but since it is not very well known, particularly outside Germany, it may be
helpful to point out the high value they placed on Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, and
on any literary work in which conflicting points of view, doubts about narrative reliability,
doubts about the relation between reality and imagination, and shifting perspectives, play
a large role. !
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Kierkegaard is concerned with the background to Romantic Irony in Kant’s account
of the self in the Critique of Pure Reason, and Fichte’s account of that topic in the first two
editions of the Wissenschaftslehre (usually known, but not very accurately, as Science of
Knowledge in English, ‘The Doctrine of Science’ would be more accurate). He is also
particularly concerned with is Hegel’s reaction to the Romantic Ironists and his account of
Socrates, placing great value on that account, while establishing the criticisms of Hegel he
was to continue with in later work, ‘[b]ut on the other hand, it must be said that by his onesided attack on the post-Fichtean irony he has overlooked the truth of irony, and by his
identifying all irony with this, he has done irony an injustice’ (265/XIII 339).
!
Part I is concerned with irony in Socrates, engaging with Schleiermacher’s account
(1836) as well as with Hegel and other commentators on ancient philosophy of that time.
That includes a discussion of the difference between Socrates and Plato, the difference
between Plato and Xenophon in the presentation of Socrates, and some discussion of
Aristophanes’ presentation of Socrates in The Clouds. The Concept of Irony gives a
philosophical framework for irony with regard to Socrates, and then discusses Romantic
Irony within that framework. What gives Romantic Irony a high role in The Concept of
Irony is its place in understanding subjectivity; what limits Romantic Irony in The Concept
of Irony is the need for subjectivity to reflect on what is outside itself and not just on the
contents of itself. That is the place of the aesthetic in general in Kierkegaard’s later texts.
That is also the place of liberal individualism and subjectivity, addressed by Fichte and
Hegel themselves in works of political theory.
!
There is some direct reference to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1991), with regard to
role of the individual, bringing us back to issues addressed in Chapter IV above.
Kierkegaard’s point is that Hegel does not see the full value of Socrates’ irony in relation to
the values of the Ancient Athenians, because Hegel is himself unable to see the value of
the individual as distinct from the state. His summary of Hegel on Socrates in that context
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includes the following, which begins with Hegel’s account of what the individual should be
in relation to law and the state, before moving on to what he thinks Socrates was lacking in
that respect:
Here the subject shows itself to be the deciding factor, as that which arbitrarily
determines itself within itself. But the limiting of the universal that takes place
thereby is one that the subject himself arbitrarily posits at every moment. It is
possible for this curtailment of the universal to remain fast and not be
occasional, for the universal to be acknowledged in its determinateness, only in
a total system of actuality. But this Socrates lacks. He neglected the state, but
he did not come back again to the state in a higher form in which the infinite he
negatively required is affirmed. (1989, 234).
Hegel thought that Socrates had made progress in showing the importance of the
individual in way which was lacking in the Greek states, but fails to show how that
individuality is expressed in, and constrained by, forms of ethical life, beyond the morality
which can be grasped at a purely individual level, and which lacks the substance of ethical
life.
Only in ages when the actual world is a hollow, spiritless, and unsettled
existence may the individual be permitted to flee from actuality and retreat into
his inner life. Socrates made his appearance at the time then Athenian
democracy had fallen into ruin. He evaporated the existing world and retreated
into himself in search of the right and the good. [Philosophy of Right § 138,
Addendum]
(Hegel 1991, 166-167)
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Hegel sees Socrates as part of a decadent age, the ages of Athenian democracy after
Pericles. That idea of the decadence of Athenian democracy has been influential for a
long time, and is part of the background to why the defenders of the Constitution of the
United States defined the constitution as that of a republic, rather than that of a
democracy, as can be seen in The Federalist, Paper 10 (Madison, Hamilton and Jay 1987,
126). Some have opposed the decadence of Athenian democracy claim from a Marxist, or
anti-bourgeois liberal, conception (Finley 1996; Raaflaub, Ober and Wallace 2007).
However, there are more liberal commentators like Kagan (1991) who regard Athenian
democracy under Pericles, and later leaders, as close to modern conceptions of prudent
representative government, since there were leaders who dominated government, like
Pericles, and like Thrasybulus, the restorer of Athenian democracy after the
Peloponnesian War. From Kierkegaard’s point of view, the issue is not so much the
supposed decadence of Athens after Pericles, but that Socrates might offer more than a
sense of individuality and inner morality, in opposition to the constraints of the time.
Kierkegaard argues that to understand this, requires an understanding of irony in
Socrates.
We see, therefore, how Socrates can very well be called the founder of morality
in the sense Hegel thinks of it, and that his position could still have been irony.
The good as task, when the good is understood as the infinitely negative,
corresponds to the moral, that is, the negatively free subject. The moral
individual can never actualise the good; only the positively free subject can
have the good as the infinitely positive, as his task, and fulfil it. If we wish to
include the virtue of irony which Hegel so frequently stresses, that for irony
nothing is a matter of earnestness, then this can also be claimed for the
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negatively free subject, because even the virtues he practices are not done with
earnestness, provided that—and Hegel certainly would agree with this—true
earnestness is possible only in a totality in which the subject no longer arbitrarily
decided at every moment to continue his imaginary construction but feels the
task to be something that he has not assigned himself but that has been
assigned to him. (Kierkegaard 1989, 235)
At this point Kierkegaard is engaged with the negatively good, an idea that is tied up with
political concepts of positive and negative liberty, or antique and modern liberty. It seems
unlikely that Kierkegaard directly encountered the political meaning since, the closest
expressions used in, or before Kierkegaard’s time, were positive and negative welfare in
Humboldt (1993, Chapters III and IV), ‘The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the
moderns in Constant (in 1998, also 2003, Book XVI). There is no reference to either
Constant or Humboldt’s political writings in Kierkegaard. However, we be sure he was
familiar with the related discussions of ethics in Kant, though he says a lot less directly
about Kant than he does about Hegel.
!
The significance of the ‘negatively free subject’ is that it is the individual who is free
from the constraints of the state, including the customary aspects of Athenian life which
were not clearly distinguished from state law. We can see an example of this in Pericles’
Funeral Speech, as reported by Thucydides (1972, 144-151) . Socrates can be seen as
taking that negative freedom up in a way that brought into conflict with Athenians,
unaccustomed to the idea that anyone could completely ignore communal values in their
speech. Though returning to the Pericles speech, and to Constant’s discussion, the
Athenians identified themselves, and have been identified in more recent times, as the
most free speaking of the ancient Greeks, and even of ancient peoples in general. So in
that case, Socrates takes negative freedom to a radical extent to even challenge those
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most accepting of such freedom in the ancient world. From Hegel’s point of view, that
leaves Socrates as an important moment in the development of the individual freedom, but
lacking in relation to ethics, ethical life or the good. In Kierkegaard’s account in The
Concept of Irony:
Just as Socrates by way of irony rose above the validity of the substantial life of
the state, so also family life had no validity for him. For him the state and family
were a sum of individuals, and therefore he related to the members of the state
and the family as to individuals; any other relation was unimportant to him.
(Kierkegaard 1989, 187/XIII 269)
!
Kierkegaard sees in Socrates a more successful move beyond the constraints of
ancient ethics than Hegel concedes. Socrates demonstrates an infinity already present
within individuals and in the things of the world, something more than just an inner good,
but the perfection of various qualities:
[H]e also arrived at the true, that is, the true in-and-for-itself, at the beautiful,
that is the beautiful in-and-for-itself, in general, at being-in-and-for-itself as the
being-in-and-for-itself for thought. He arrived at this and was continually
arriving at this. Therefore, he did not just moralise but on the whole let the
being-in-and-for-itself become visible in the qualifications of the manifold. He
spoke with artists about the beautiful, let the beautiful in-and-for-itself become
visible in the qualifications of the manifold. He spoke with artists about the
beautiful, let the beautiful-in-and-for-itself work itself out (via negationis) of the
qualifications of being in and which it had been hitherto. The same with the
true. [...] Socrates also shipped individuals from Reality to ideality; and the ideal
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infinity as the infinite negativity was the nothing into which he had the entire
multiplicity of reality disappear.
(Kierkegaard 1989, 235-236/XIII 311-312)
The suggestion is that Socrates comes very close to a Christian point of view, as in the
idea that the beautiful is referred to by Socrates through the way of negation, via
negationis, a major theological tradition in which God is defined through the positive
qualities that God lacks, which is all positive qualities of any kind. What Kierkegaard
discusses seems close to the ideas, or forms, in Plato. That is the metaphysical theory
that perceptible objects and qualities are copies of original ideas, or forms, of those objects
and qualities. Kierkegaard stops short of that theory, which is not present everywhere in
Plato’s texts anyway, to refer to the way that Socrates brings out what things, and the
qualities of truth and beauty, have when we think about them in themselves. That must be
distinct from what we perceive, which is where the vla negationis enters in the stripping
away of positive qualities in the search for the inner being.
!
The implication that Socrates is one step away from Christ is confirmed by a
discussion earlier in The Concept of Irony of Jews and Greeks:
Just as with the Jews, who were, after all, the chosen people, the skepticism of the
law had to pave the way, by its negativity had come to consume and cauterize, so
to speak, the natural man so that grace would not be taken in vain, so also with
the Greeks, the people who in the secular sense can certainly be called the
chosen, the happy people, whose native land was the land of harmony and
beauty, the people in whose development the purely human passed through its
qualifications the people of freedom—so also with the Greeks in their care-free
intelligible world , the silence or irony had to be the negativity that prevented
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subjectivity from being taken in vain. For just like the law, irony is a demand, and
enormous demand because it rejects reality and demands ideality. (Kierkegaard
1989, 213; XIII 292-293).
Kierkegaard implicitly refers here to various moments in which the Epistles of St Paul link
Christianity to what challenges Greeks and Jews and supersedes the distinction between
them, most famously I Corinthians I 22-24:
For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we
preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the
Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks,
Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
(King James Bible) !
Kierkegaard sees both the Jewish concern with law and the Greek concern with beauty as
forms of scepticism, which demand something more than the visible world. Ideas of law
and beauty both contain a kind of ideality which criticises reality for its lack of ideality,
which point beyond the experience of law and beauty to their most perfect possibilities.
!
The religious message has political aspects, in the sense of how politics is framed,
the deepest principles of politics. The distinction between Athenian-Greek beauty and
Jewish law is itself ambiguous since Kierkegaard himself refers to the nature of law in
Ancient Athens. Since he sees beauty as primary in Athens, we can see Athenian law as
an expression of that wish for beauty, rather than an interest in law as an abstraction. Law
is external for the Athenians, lacking in the spiritual sense it as for the Jews. Socrates’s
concern with the infinite in reality must be carrying us close to the Jews if we apply it to
law, and coming close to Christ. The understanding of law is what it is in itself, but not as
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an abstract demand on the individual. Law as God’s law after Christ is what releases the
truth of individuality. This has become an ethical-political ideal in that the Greek
understanding comes from the Athenian state, including its attitudes to laws, and Jewish
law which is evidently concerned with the nature of the Jewish state. Early modern
political thinkers like Hobbes, Locke and Spinoza were deeply concerned with the political
history of the Biblical Jews. The Socratic approach to law, and then the Judaeo-Greek
Christian approach must be one of law and the state in itself, connected with the infinite
capacities of individuality. A state that allows for the Socratic individual, which allows for
negative freedom and for the perfection of the self. That perfection had been understood
through the constraints of Athenian law and custom, but is now understood through the
infinity of the individual, and everything within the political community, and the political
community itself. That leaves us with the problem of Christian modernity, that the ideal
seems detached from observable reality, and we are constantly faced with unresolved
dualities. In politics, that is the duality between ideal political community and empirical
political community. That gives us the guide to politics , the struggle between ideal and
practical tendencies in which we seek the best resolution but always recognising that inner
tensions will destroy it. We should be looking for the best resolutions we can, so that will
be the union of empirical forms that constrain the individual and ideal forms that match the
inner search for the ideal. Politics must contain negative freedom for the individual and the
elevation of the individual.
What Socrates did with the Sophists was to give them the next moment, the
moment in which the momentarily true dissolved into nothing—in other words,
he let the infinite devour the finite. But Socrates’ irony was not turned against
only the Sophists; it was turned against he whole established order. He
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demanded ideality from all of it, and this demand was the judgement that
judged and condemned Greek culture.
(Kierkegaard 1989, 213-4/XIII 292-293)
So we see that for Kierkegaard, Socrates represents the limits of Greek culture, in which
the negative and critical aspects undermine it as a whole. That attitude as mentioned
above fits with a conservative story of decline, perhaps most interestingly expressed later
on by Nietzsche’s friend Jakob Burckhardt in his work on Greek culture (1998). The theme
of Greek versus Jew and the reconciliation of the opposites is also prominent later in the
nineteenth century, particularly in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1932). Arnold
argues for a liberalism mitigated by culture. By liberalism, he means nineteenth century
free trade principles, mingled with an interest in political and administrative reforms in the
direction of both democracy and secularism. He sees nineteenth century liberalism as
close to the moralising of ‘Hebraism’ so needing restraint, by culture which mixes the
Jewish prophetic spirt with the ‘sweetness and light’ of Hellenic thought. Culture restrains
liberalism from its worst extremes, which for Arnold means pure free trade, interest in
administrative details over the general purpose of the state, and pure secularism. Culture
seems to lean more in the Hellenic direction for Arnold, but certainly contains high moral
purpose, largely with regard to the moral educational functions of the state.
!
Kierkegaard did not directly concern himself with any of this, and we can presume
he would have been highly critical of Arnold’s desire for a mildly Christian state religion.
Nevertheless, Arnold’s idea of the opposing but mutually dependent forces of Hebraism
and Hellenism, reflect Kierkegaard’s own remarks on the oscillation in modern politics
between revolutionary idealism and everyday pragmatism. In Arnold’s case the idea is
that extremes of revolution and reaction can be avoided through seeking compromise
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between opposed positions. Arnold’s book is still read but clearly had greater influence in
his own time and shortly after.
!
Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, is partly structured around the opposition between
and final meeting between the Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom and the aesthete with a Greek
family namei Stephen Daedalus. Joyce was a reader of Kierkegaard, but that is more
obvious in Finnegans Wake than in Ulysses. There is no reason to think that Joyce took
the Greek-Jewish opposition and integration from Kierkegaard, the general assumption is
that he takes it from Arnold. There is still a continuity of interests running through
Kierkegaard, Arnold and Joyce, and Joyce’s fiction can be regarded as a return to, and
culmination of irony in the Jena Romantics or in Kierkegaard himself. His writing shifts
between points of view and cultural-historical contexts in radical ways, even within one
sentence in Finnegans Wake. Every point of view is questioned and undermined by the
others, leaving a sense of the sacral, ontological or aesthetic absolute within and behind
the shifting contingent positions.
!
Kierkegaard took a powerful piece of New Testament writing on Greek and Jew, and
anticipated later discussions of the relation between Greek and Jewish spirit in the
European political and cultural community. A rather abstract and idealised view of
opposites in European culture, but one with some value in providing a framework, and
through Arnold that interpretation became a major precursor of the fields of cultural history
and cultural studies. Returning to Kierkegaard’s own views on the matter, we have here a
continuation of the the idea that the negative critical exists in opposition to,and and in
union with, respect for law. On the level of political interpretation we have changing critical
political life in tension with the relative solidity and endurance of law.
!
The Concept of Irony is self-referential in that Kierkegaard appears to already
criticise some of what he incorporates into his own later writing, or provide a guide to how
we should see irony, and multiplication of points of view in his later writings. The limitlessly
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self-referential solipsistic aspect of Romantic Irony has a large role in Kierkegaard’s later
writings. The goal is to show the possibilities and the limits of such an approach; there is
an implicit political point which is the exploration of the possibilities and limits of liberal
individualism. Kierkegaard builds up an account of political subjectivity in that way in The
Concept of Irony.
!
A key issue in The Concept of Irony is Fichte’s position on the ‘I’ and the subjective
basis of philosophy, which has political consequences in the works on right and ethics we
have discussed above. This itself emphasises an aspect of Kant, and Fichte regarded
himself as a loyal follower of Kant. That is the ind of loyalty which means emphasising
what Fichte finds most congenial in Kant’s philosophy as the real essence, and certainly
the Romantic Ironist paid great attention to Fichte’s way of thinking about the ‘I’.
Kierkegaard offers his own account of the move that Fichte makes within Kantian
philosophy.
[T]his externality, this Ding an sich [thing in itself], constituted the weakness in
Kant’s system. Indeed, it became a question whether the I itself is not a Ding
an sich. This question was raised and answered by Fichte. He removed the
difficulty with this an sich by placing it within thought; he infinitised the I in I-I.
The producing I as the produced I. I-I is the abstract identity. By so doing he
infinitely liberated thought.
(273/XIII 345)
!
There is a strong complicity between these positions, which Kierkegaard gives form
to in his remarks on Fichte in The Concept of Irony, which demonstrate how Romantic
aestheticism arises from Kant’s transcendental ego (Part II, Introduction):
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…we are referred to the development in modern philosophy attained in Kant
and that is completed in Fichte, and more specifically again to the positions that
after Fichte sought to affirm subjectivity in its second potency. Actuality bears
out that this hangs together properly, for here again we meet irony. But since
this position is an intensified subjective consciousness, it quite naturally is
clearly and definitely conscious of irony and declares irony as its position. This
was indeed the case with Friedrich Schlegel, who sought to bring it to bear in
relation to actuality; with Tieck, who sought to bring it to bear in poetry; and with
Solger, who became aesthetically and philosophically conscious of it. Finally,
here irony also met its master in Hegel.
(CI 242)
The discussion of Fichte, which begins in the quoted text above, includes criticism but
does not abandon the Fichtean insight referred to above, with regard to the infinitised I
which is produced and producing. The main criticism he establishes in the succeeding
paragraphs is that the Romantic Ironists applied Fichte’s view of the ‘I’ in the wrong way:
‘Fichte wanted to construct the world, but he had in mind a systematic construction.
Schlegel and Tieck wanted to obtain a world’ (275/XIII 347). On Kierkegaard’s reading,
Fichte was concerned with the construction of our view of the world in consciousness and
philosophy, while the Romantic Ironists over extended the infinitised ‘I’ to the world.
!
Kierkegaard is engaged in a such a complete Romantic Ironic exercise that his own
life becomes part of the shifting perspectives of his writing, which is a conflux between
Kierkegaard as an individual outside the book, Kierkegaard’s philosophical psychology and
anthropology, the criticism of myth and the use of myth. ‘If anyone desires an excellent
picture of an ironist who by the very duality of his existence, lacked existence, I will call
attention to Asa-Loki’. (285/XIII 356-7). This sentence in itself encapsulates the conflux
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just mentioned. From the biographical point of view, there are the words of Hans
Martensen, who was on the committee for Kierkegaard’s thesis and later became a target
of Kierkegaard’s criticism of the established church: ‘S. Kierkegaard had a natural
tendency to find fault, to tear down, and to disparage—something Mephistophelian,
something in the nature of Loki’ (Kirmmse 1996, 196). The idea that he had something
demonic inside him was a view Kierkegaard himself expressed, and we can take it that
Kierkegaard would have agreed with Martensen with regard to Loki, the Nordic trickster
god, who comes into conflict with the other gods, and who is known to many through the
character of Loge in Wagner’s Ring Cycle which merges Germanic and Nordic myth.
!
We can also see here part of an ambiguous attitude to Danish-Norse national
identity on the part of Kierkegaard, leading us back to issues discussed in chapter III
above. As we have seen, it was N.F.S. Grundtvig, a major religious leader of the time, still
well known in Denmark, who attracted the attention of Kierkegaard’s father, advocated a
kind of Norse identity referring back to Pre-Christian mythology. Grundtvig’s ideas of
community and education made him an icon of Danish identity up to the present day.
Grundtvig’s communal ideas of religion were inherently objectionable to Kierkegaard’s
individualistic conception. Despite the rejection of a programmatic attempt to spread
Norse identity in Denmark, Kierkegaard does sometimes refer to Norse mythology, and we
can take it that he did place some value on Danish identity and its oldest roots, so at least
there is some small part of the his understanding Christianity in which relates its claims to
what we have in national culture. Those references to cultural and national identity should
however be guided by the highest goals of the individual.
!
The reference to the the world of myth, which Asa-Loki belongs to, leads us to an
earlier section in Part One, I, named ‘The Mythical in the Earlier Platonic Dialogues as a
Token of a More Copious Speculation’ (96-119/XIII 184-205): which includes this comment
on the status of myth, ‘if we ask what the mythical is basically, one may presumably reply
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that it is the idea in a state of alienation, the idea’s externality—i.e., its immediate
temporality and spatiality as such’ (101/XIII 189). A few sentences later after remarks on
myth in Plato’s dialogue, Kierkegaard adds this about myth: ‘The dialectical clears the
terrain of everything irrelevant and then attempts to clamber up to the idea, but since this
fails, the imagination reacts. Weary of the dialectical work, the imagination begins to
dream, and from this comes the mythical’ (101/XIII 189). After a few remarks on Hegel’s
view of myth, Kierkegaard limits myth in this way: ‘It has validity in the moment of contact
and is not brought into relation with any reflection (101-102/XIII 190). In this passage
Kierkegaard builds up the role of myth while delimiting it, partly by putting forward a view of
Hegel’s which he endorses but nevertheless strongly qualifies. Myth is less than dialectic
and reflection, but there is no escape from myth since the dialectic can never reach the
idea. However, much dialectic clears myth and imagination away, they keep coming back
as a way of referring to an idea outside dialectic. Reference to myth is the sign of a failure,
the failure to give a dialectical account of the ironist lacking existence in the duality of his
existence, and also an indication that myth must accompany philosophical reason,
dialectic, since Kierkegaard himself sometimes resorts to it.
!
In political terms, the discussion of myth, suggests that myth arises in the pre-
reflective reaction, of the individual, to moments which it finds difficult to integrate into a
broad dialectical understanding. This is a moment of failure and of creativity. It is what we
can take to be at the basis of the political hero and the sanctified political movement. In
the history of political thought we can see formulations of those mythical moments in,
Plato’s ideal state of The Republic, Rousseau’s view of the legislator (The Social Contract
II.7), the historical speculations of contract theorists from Hobbes to Rawls, the idea that
Kant has in ‘The Contest of Faculties’ of enthusiasm or universal sympathy for the
evolution of a constitution based on natural right (Kant 1970,183-184), Hegel’s view in
Philosophy of Right § 348 of the individual who expresses the substantial deed of world
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spirit (1991, 375), Cicero’s use of mythical and legendary moments of Roman history in On
the Republic, the ruler as centaur and as lion-fox in Machiavelli’s The Prince, chapter XIII,
and all typologies of political regimes since Plato have an element of mythical-abstraction.
We could also include more recent discussions by Rawls, Nozick, and others of the
imagined consensual starting point of political community, thought of as conceptual
foundation and as a beginning in time, a unification which inevitably has a touch of myth
about it.
!
We can also think of Schmitt’s suggestion in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
that politics consists of competing myths (1985, Chapter 4); and of Walter Benjamin’s
argument in ‘Critique of Violence’ for a revolutionary sovereign and divine violence, to
replace mythic violence in the foundations of laws (Benjamin 1996: 236-252). Though
both Schmitt and Benjamin were readers of Kierkeegaard, there is no direct line between
Kierkegaard and these claims, but we can see importance in the continuity of underlying
themes. We should certainly not associate Kierkegaard with the revolutionary right
inclinations of Schmitt or the revolutionary left inclinations of Benjamin, but we can say that
Kierkegaard’s interest in the extreme, in Tarquinius Superbus and Lucius Junius Brutus,
the absolutism inherent in monarchy and revolution, is the element of the political that
draws Schmitt and Benjamin. Benjamin’s doctoral thesis ‘The Concept of Criticism in
German Romanticism’ (1996, 116-200) does not cite Kierkegaard but does cover similar
ground to Kierkegaard’s own thesis, just as Schmitt addressed irony and Romanticism in
Political Romanticism (1986). In both cases, a settling of accounts with liberal
individualism in its aesthetic aspects was a necessary early step to developing anti-liberal
positions. One virtue we can see in Kierkegaard is that he takes that material and
examines its limits in order to deepen his concept of the individual, not establish a position
which is suspicious of individualism, and of liberally minded constraints on political power.
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
The section of The Concept of Irony on myth links myth with irony as both are
resting on the same conditions, the negation, abstract thinking and dialectic. Following
Hegel, Kierkegaard regards dialectic as abstract thinking at its highest, aware of the
conditions, negations and limits of ideas in thought. In this case, negation is part of
thought and all thoughts are negated, which leads us to the Socratic and the Romantic
Ironic position. Kierkegaard makes some distinction between Socratic-Platonic Irony and
the Romantic Ironic position, though the elaboration of the difference between Socrates
and Plato, the possible interpretations of Socrates, and the differences between Plato’s
own positions in different dialogues, makes the Romantic Ironic position less one that is
simply opposed to Socratic Irony.
The particular expressions of irony here are of course not in the service of the
idea, are not its messengers who collect the scattered parts into a whole; they
do not collect but scatter, and each new beginning is not an unfolding of what
went before, is not an approach to the idea, but is devoid of deeper connection
with the foregoing and devoid of any relation to the idea. (114/XIII 200).
Irony here is distinguished from the idea and from the continuity of abstract thought. As
Kierkegaard defines abstract thought properly speaking as dialectic, with reference to
Socrates as well as Hegel, it is the case for him that abstract thought necessarily contains
the myths of imagination and the discontinuities of irony. The discontinuous nature of
irony fragments history turning it into myth and literature: ‘Irony dealt with historical
actuality in the same way. In a twinkling, all history was turned into myth—poetry—legend
—fairy tale. Thus irony was free once again’ (277/XIII 349). That last quotation is a
comment on the Romantic Ironists, but is a part of Kierkegaard’s own program of
philosophical writing, which is also an exploration of the possibilities of inner imagination.
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
The Socratic critique through irony is continued in Romantic irony, but can be
undermined by the unrestrained irony of Schlegel and Tieck, the irony which destroys any
perspective from which irony itself can be presented. Looking at this in relation to
Kierkegaard’s later writings, we can see a continuity in the interest in multiple points of
view,which mutually undermine and in the investigation of subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is
not seen as fragmenting into chaotic nıthingness, or as negating itself. The capacity for
multiple points of views enacts the relation between the absolute and particularity in the
subject. There is a continuity in this way in which Kierkegaard emphasises individuality,
and which has political implications, even if that was no more than an occasional concern
for him.
!
As already mentioned above, the political meaning of The Concept of Irony can be
drawn out with reference to Carl Schmitt, who we have discussed above as a major
political theorist who took an interest in Kierkegaard. Political Romanticism (1986) takes
Friedrich Schlegel as one example of the link between aesthetic romanticism and
liberalism. Aesthetic romanticism takes individuality beyond the limits of fixed form, and is
therefore suited to the individualism and validation of freedom in liberalism. Schmitt’s
position on this is from a conservative-authoritarian point of view, and he sees it as not
only an unsatisfactory position, but as an unsustainable position. The emphasis on free
aesthetic creation results in an aesthetic political form which is to be preserved, thereby
creating the grounds and need for a conservative approach which defends the continuous
existence of that form. If political aestheticism does not have that outcome it is likely to
collapse through constant gestures of self-cancellation. Schmitt looks at the career of
Friedrich Schlegel after the Athenaeum period, his progress to becoming Friedrich von
Schlegel. The aristocratic ‘von’ results from his later service of monarchy and political
conservatism. Kierkegaard’s position is intermediate between Schmitt and the Romantic
Irony works of Schlegel. He is critical of its self-destructive tendency, but also appreciative
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of its critical and self-renewing characteristics. There is a religious element in Schmitt’s
account which is not that of Kierkegaard, as Schmitt identified liberalism with
Protestantism, and the desired conservative outcome of liberal self-undermining is
identified with Catholicism. That idea of a freezing of liberal individualism and aesthetic
invention in a political-religious institutional structure is remote from Kierkegaard’s concern
and in that respect he is certainly remote from Schmitt’s radical conservatism.
!
Schmitt concentrates on the move from republicanism to conservatism, or liberalism
to !
conservatism, but is rather schematic in he that overlooks the monarchical
conservatism of Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg), which he articulates at the same
times as Schlegel is expressing republican views.
Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments
(Fragment 213) A state only deserves to be called aristocratic when at least the
smaller mass that despotizes the larger has a republican constitution.
(Fragment 214) A perfect republic would have to be not just democratic, but
aristocratic and monarchic at the same time; to legislate justly and freely, the
educated would have to outweigh and guid the uneducated, and everything
would have to be organised into an absolute whole.
(Schlegel 1991, 46)
Novalis, Faith and Love or the King and Queen
(17) The king is the pure life principle of the state; he is exactly the same as
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
the sun in the solar system. It follows that the highest form of life in the state,
the sphere of light, first comes into being around the life principle. It is to a
greater or lesser extent buried like ore in every citizen of the state.
(Novalis 1997, 88)
We could take this as establishing Schmitt’s point in another way. Romantic liberalism is
so ambiguous, it has to incorporate its own opposite. Both Schlegel and Novalis based
politics on the individual, and in both cases there is a form of elitism. In Schlegel, the
elitism is in the predominance of the aristocratic element in a republic; in Novalis the
elitism refers to the king as source of everyone’s sense of individuality. In that case,
monarchy has a liberal or republican justification. All of this could be traced back to the
mix of formal rights and perfectionist inclinations in Kant, and we can see a continuation in
Kierkegaard.
!
The discussion of irony can be best followed up with reference to Either/Or which
can be seen as a putting into practice of the ideas on irony he had expressed a short time
before. Either/Or was published in 1843, but appears to have been written in 1842. The
Concept of Irony was presented as a Master’s thesis in 1841.
Kierkegaard’s account of
tragedy in Either/Or I, ‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern
Drama. A Venture in Fragmentary Endeavour’ suggests that ‘our age’ is like the late
Ancient Greek age, because the political bond between states dissolved spiritually ( EO I,
141). His argument is that the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible has been
weakened and destroyed now as then. We can see Kierkegaard’s age as an age of
European nations which have lost the bond of Medieval Christendom. However, ‘our age’
goes higher than the ancient Greek age, in that it is deeper in its despair (EO I, 142).
Everyone wants to rule but no one wants responsibility (EO I,142). This leaves individual
isolation which is naturally comic. The comic consists in subjectivity wanting to assert
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itself as pure form. Every isolated person becomes comic by wanting to assert his
accidental existence, against the necessity of the process of the time (EO I,142). This
gives us a way of thinking about Socrates as the first modern individual in the terms
developed by Kierkegaard. He is after all the individual who was executed for allegedly
deviating from the gods of Athens. We can see that Kierkegaard contrasts Socrates with
an unrestrained immodest individualism. In his time Socrates serves, rightly or wrong as a
model of liberal conscience, something evident in Mill’s On Liberty.
!
Kierkegaard does not follow up the political philosophy aspect of this thought, as
usual, but the consequences of doing so are significant for political thought. If tragedy in
the modern age lacks reference to family and state as substantial entities, then politics is
losing something at its centre. It is losing the state as previously understood, the political
organisation of a people which has concrete existence without reflection and deliberated
construction. The relativisation of the state, and the sense that it it exists in a relative way
can be taken back to Machiavelli and Grotius at the beginning of the modern era. As
Machiavelli says with regard to law, but which is applied to the state, in the Preface to
Book I of The Discourses, ‘the civil law is nothing but a collection of decisions, made by
Jurists of old, which the jurists of today have tabulated in orderly fashion for our
instruction‘ (Machiavelli 2002, 98). The point here is that Machiavelli defines modern
discussion of law, the state and political matters, as based on the study, collation, and
discussion of ancient texts, which is what he is about to embark upon in a commentary on
Livy. By contrast ancient law, and related political concepts, are present to actors in an
immediate unfolding way, not as an ordering of the past. Vico uses Grotius as the first
writer who directs us to knowledge about the historical existence of law and the state (Vico
1984), so we can see a double beginning to this way of thinking in Machiavelli and in
Grotius.
138
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Kierkegaard has nothing to say about any of this, and does not show signs of
interest in Machiavelli, Grotius or Vico, but these are the people who best defined the
evolution of political forms, that is within the field of the ethical evolution to which
Kierkegaard does refer. For Machiavelli, we have to struggle to create something like the
greatest republic, the ancient republic of Rome. What was a spontaneous in Roman
history is constructed by us. This awareness of the need to construct and justify what
emerged without construction and justification to the ancient peoples, Jews as well as
Greeks and Romans, is at the heart of the contractualist aspect of modern political theory
which starts with Grotius and goes through Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, Rousseau, Kant,
Rawls and Nozick. Hegel’s political thought attempts to unify substantial forms and
reflection about liberty, without resort to contractualism. From Kierkegaard’s point of view
Hegel can only do so by sacrificing human individuality. For Kierkegaard the condition of
the burden on individuality in modern politics is both a revelation of the weakness of
human character, and a revelation of its greatness. We can best understand that by going
back to the ‘psychological’ aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought. This is where Kierkegaard
addresses free will and sin, where the existence of free will itself becomes a source of fear,
and a denial of free will, which means sin because it accepts the inevitability of our sinful
nature. If there is a Kierkegaardian politics, it must be one which finds hope in the
pressure on the exposed individual in modernity, in the belief that the individual will make
something of this in all spheres including the political, even it is religion which is the
primary concern (Tilley 2007a, 2008).
!
As the epigram for this chapter suggests, the individual cannot find express itself in
public communication. That might lead us to think about the relation between
pseudonyms and direct authorship in Kierkegaard. None can capture inward subjectivity
of what Kierkegaard is trying to communicate. Irony must enter into communication, as
that must always be distanced from inwardness. The language which is not directed to
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
God must be one which is foreign to the individual using it, and a source of
misunderstanding. What the individual cannot communicate belongs to ‘governance’, that
is the power that God has over us. Governance connects with government as in political
authority, a connection which also exists in Danish as show above. Political authority does
not connect with our inner self in the same way that God does, but it is concerned with
individuality. Certainly in the modern world government is concerned with individual rights,
protecting inner conscience and so on. That must have an ironic structıre to it , if we follow
Kierkegaard’s analyses. Campaigning for, and then legislating for the individual, for the
rights held to inhere in the individual must be an ironic process. It follows that the most
developed political thought and political action must incorporate irony. It is ironic to claim
that public goods can advance individual interests.
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
Conclusion
Where should we place Kierkegaard in political theory? The most illuminating
comparisons are with those writers who deal with an existential commitment to politics and
direct experience of its phenomenal forms, or ifs ways of being in the world, either from
personal experience or style of thinking. In addition, those philosophical essayists who did
not develop a complete political theory, but who have important things to say about
government, the state and law, as part of general considerations on life and human
thought. These are the two groups of writers who draw attention to particular judgement
in political action, the difficulties of harmonising individual action, law and sovereignty;
subjectivity, political forms, and types of power. Before Kierkegaard that includes
Machiavelli (1995, 2003) among those who focused on political thought, along with
Montaigne (Essays in Montaigne 2003) and Pascal (1966) among those for whom politics
appears in a more occasional way. Since Kierkegaard, it is Tocqueville (1966, 1970),
Nietzsche (1994); Weber (1994, particularly ‘Between two Laws’ and ‘The Profession and
Vocation of Politics), Schmitt (1985a, 1985b, 1986, 1996, 2007), Arendt (1990, 1998),
Derrida (particularly in The Politics of Friendship, 1997), and Foucault, particularly in his
writings on antiquity 1985, 1986, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2011), who have contributed most
along those lines.
!
That leaves Kierkegaard open to many political interpretations and uses by thinkers
of many different persuasions. The history of his political theory reception confirms this.
One achievement of Kierkegaard in political thought is then to suggest a way of making
political judgement, of understanding the place of the human individual within political
community. His own apolitical, and even anti-political, attitudes are an advantage in
providing a point of view for interpreting the modern world, in which politics as
participation, or as any kind of direct encounter with sovereignty, seems remotes. Even in
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
a giant political unity like the Roman Empire, sovereignty had a kind of sacramental
dramatic aspects, reflected in the provinces, lacking in the modern world . We might think
here of Foucault’s account of changing forms of punishment from ritual imposition of
personalised sovereign power to a rationalised disciplinarity, in Discipline and Punish
(1991), or Weber’s account of legal-rational authority, of sovereigns operating through law.
There has been a growth of the extent of commercial and civil society, which makes the
individual and the social relations of the individual, seem remote from relations with
sovereignty and with the political community.
!
The closest amongst thinkers since the mid-twentieth century include Arendt,
MacIntyre, Fleischacker (1999) and Geuss (1996). All show some historical awareness of
changes in political community and their relation to individuality. Arendt brings out the
tension between the ideal of political participation and the consequence of routinisation of
politics. MacIntyre brings out the tension between different ways of belonging to a
community and relating to political power within it, and the difficulty of ending the resulting
conflicts. Fleischacker brings out the importance of a well developed self-relationship and
autonomy, in relation to the political community. Arendt is the closest in literary talent and
in political ambiguity. Fleischacker is closest to the egalitarian and the liberal aspects of
Kierkegaard. MacIntyre is closest to the conservative, hierarchical and traditionalist
element in Kierkegaard. Geuss brings out the element of religious passion for equality
applied to the secular sphere, in conjunction with an ambiguous sympathy for antique
ideas of private individuals finding their goals in the sphere of public affair. They express
differing views about the value of political life for the human community, corresponding to
Kierkegaard’s own ambiguity.
!
An ideal Kierkegaardian political thinker would have a passion for writing and a high
level of literary style, comparable with Franz Kafka to mention one literary author strongly
affected by Kierkegaard, and one whose writings have enigmatic religious and political
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
aspects. The protagonists in The Trial and The Castle seem to be both oppressed by
some mysterious power which could be supernatural or could be legal state institutions;
they could also be seen as guilty characters experiencing the cost of selfishness and
irresponsibility. The paradoxical nature of law and state power is suggested, it could be
unjust or the product of an incomprehensible justice. None of this is the direct expression
of claims in Kierkegaard, but there is considerable resonance with the paradoxical view
Kierkegaard takes of ethics, law and political claims.
!
Kierkegaard provides reasons for putting the individual at the centre of politics, just
as the individual is always at the centre of aesthetics, ethics and religion. The primary
concern of the individual must be orientation towards God and the absolute, as understood
through the Bible. Kierkegaard never recommends complete rejection of the world though,
so it is in the spirit of Kierkegaard to think about his ideas work in relation to politics. The
subjective nature of the individual, its capacity for self-relation and relation with the
absolute, within itself and externally, is why the individual has value. The individual is
faced with a cost of individualism, the loss of antique unities of self, state, family and
religion, in which it can find a place. Individualism taken seriously leaves the individual
without a place because of those absolute aspects of individual subjectivity. So politics
must become the best possible attempt to reconcile the absolute value of the individual
with political and social structures. Politics can be sen as itself stretched between those
opposing poles and requiring individuals to find some strength from inside; or as only justly
stemming from the basic form of human community in individual love for all other
individuals.
!
Political thought in the spirt of Kierkegaard will emphasise the difference between
antiquity and modernity, the different kinds of individual flourishing possible in those
periods, the need for a Christian influenced modern individualism to learn from antique
forms of individual belonging to a participatory polity, the tension between idealism and
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
pragmatism in politics, the tragic relation of individuals to ethics, the tragic relation of state
violence to ethically based laws, the mixture of dictatorship and consent in any possible
polity, the need for general principles to influence practice, the irony of all communication
including communication of ideas about the public good, the embedding of individual,
universal and absolute values in national culture and language. Most fundamentally
Kierkegaardian political thinking must put the single individual at the centre. For
Kierkegaard the highest goal of the single individual must be to find God according to
Christian definitions. Adapting that idea of absolute goals to secular life, we can say that a
Kierkegaard influenced political thought will see laws and political institutions that promote
the single individual who will be able to see absolute goals, above politics. Singe abstract
ideals must be tested in movement, kinesis and action for Kierkegaard, we can say that
political thought should include discussion of how individuals can put those thoughts into
practice, along with nothing the tension of passion and reflection in politics.
!
!
!
!
!
!
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Kierkegaard and Political Community
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