The Single Individual in Kierkegaard: Religious or Secular? Part 1

Abstract

The critical issue that I examine in my study, which is divided into two parts, is how we are to interpret, within what Kierkegaard regards as “the present age,” his concept of the single individual when viewed in light of the hermeneutical distinction that he makes between Christianity and Christendom. Since the distinction between Christianity and Christendom is not one between the religious and the secular or between faith and reason but one between what he calls indirect (i.e., truthful) communication and direct (i.e., idolatrous) communication, we find that the single individual of the present age of modernity is at once religious and secular.

I want to thank Avron Kulak for reading a preliminary version of my study and for providing me with critical comments on it.

Notes

1. I use “man” throughout my study in the non-gendered sense of the Latin homo, as distinct from the gendered vir.

2. I make this hermeneutical perspective central to a number of my studies, including my two most recent books: Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible: From Kant to Schopenhauer and What is Modernity? Between Wagner and Nietzsche (forthcoming).

3. While it is important to recognize the significant role that the pseudonymous authors play in Kierkegaard’s works, it is even more important to acknowledge that all of his works (with the exception, perhaps, of his late, extremely polemical ones) are united in and by a common hermeneutical perspective. Scholars today tend to place so much emphasis on the first point that they often fail to account adequately for the second point. To simplify matters, I refer to Kierkegaard as the author of all of his works that I discuss.

4. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 55 and 56.

5. Macbeth 3.5.32–33, in The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).

6. St. Augustine writes in the Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, in which he summarizes his teachings on the essentials of Christianity, that God “judged it better to bring good out of evil, than not to permit any evil to exist.” St. Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, ed. Henry Paolucci (Chicago, IL: Gateway, 1961), 33. He also writes there that “evil, in so far as it is evil, is not a good; yet the fact that evil as well as good exists, is a good” (110). For otherwise, he points out, God, in his omnipotence, would not have allowed evil to exist. In “secular” terms we may say that it is solely individuals who, in good faith, acknowledge and address their sins, their failings (their bad faith), who are saved from them, i.e., liberated in and through them. It is not the flesh, which is created good, that is sinful. It is the spirit that sins when it subordinates itself to the flesh (as either the aesthetic or the ethical), when, in other words, to recall Kant, we treat our fellow humans beings not as ends in themselves but as means to our own ends. Christendom has been appallingly burdened by the dualistic opposition (deriving from Neoplatonism) between the (perfect) soul and the (evil) body and, in particular, by the concept of sexuality and yet, more particularly, of female sexuality, as being the source of all sin. In Christendom, in other words, sin has been viewed as transmitted by and through the sexual act. It is little known, by modern philosophers, that two of the greatest among them, Kant and Hegel, liberated the story of the “fall of man” from its perversion in Christendom by writing profound commentaries on it as embodying the history of infinitely free spirit. In my study Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible (see note 2) I make these two commentaries central to my account of what constitutes the values of modernity.

7. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); hereafter cited in the text.

8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B xxii.

9. In Memoriam, Stanza 56, in The Poems and Plays of Alfred Lord Tennyson (New York: The Modern Library, 1938). The Axiom of Part 4 of Spinoza’s Ethics states: “No singular thing is given in the nature of things than which another more powerful and stronger thing is not given. For, whatever thing is given, another more powerful is given by which the first thing given can be destroyed.” Spinoza, Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925), vol. 2. In other words, Spinoza describes here the state of nature in which every single individual is the enemy of every other single individual in the war of all against all and from which the democratic civil state, founded on caritas (love of neighbor), constitutes the liberation and the freedom of all.

10. In The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1953), 250. In Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), Nietzsche writes: “Zarathustra once defines, quite strictly, his task—it is mine, too—and there is no mistaking his meaning: he says Yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming even all of the past. ... ‘To redeem those who lived in the past and to turn every “it was” into a “thus I willed it”—that alone should I call redemption’” (308–9). The emphasis is in the original, as in all passages cited in my study.

11. It is interesting in this context to recall what Kant writes in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (B xxx).

12. Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); hereafter cited in the text.

13. Pt. 1, bk. 1, chap. 5.

14. Kierkegaard also writes in Philosophical Fragments that, as ordinary, historical faith is “to the first power,” so eminent faith is “to the second power” (87–88).

15. Spinoza, Ethics, Part 4, Prop. 35, scholium.