Remembering the impossible possibility: Kierkegaard and human capital

Abstract

Kierkegaard is classified as an existentialist. The irony of course is if he were authentically existential, then he would escape any categorisation. Rather than reading Kierkegaard as yet one more item on the shelves of the history of philosophy, why not read him as though he were relevant to our lives? Our argument is that modern capitalism has taken a subjective turn, and therefore reading Kierkegaard is as timely as ever. This isn’t a matter of constructing a politics out his texts but applying it to our lives. The modern subjective form of capital is human capital as was already diagnosed by Foucault in his prophetic lectures on bio-politics. At the heart of human capital is the ideology of the subject as a form of investment. We want to show how Kierkegaard’s own account of subjectivity resists this appropriation of the self by capital through a new ontology of subjectivity. At the heart of this ontology is a reversal of Aristotle. It is not the actual that determines the possible, but the possible the actual.

Keywords:

• Kierkegaard
• human capital
• Aristotle
• potentiality
• actuality
• Tronti
• Adorno
• Aubenque

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Kierkegaard (2009, p. 358).

2. ‘Grandezza di Hegel avercela raccontata per come era. Marx ha fatto bene a prendere coscienza, su questa base, delle leggi di movimento del capitalismo. Ma per andare oltre di esso, invece che partire da Hegel, forse era meglio partire da Kierkegaard’. [It was the greatness of Hegel to have told it like it was. On this basis, Marx was right to become aware of the laws of movement of capitalism. But to go beyond him, it was perhaps better to have started with Kierkegaard than Hegel]. Tronti (1998, p. 42).

3. Tronti (1966).

4. Adorno (1989, p. 41).

5. Adorno, Theodor, p. 42.

6. Adorno, Theodor, p. 43.

7. Schultz (1970, p. vii).

8. In the lecture of the 14 March 1979 (Foucault 2008, pp. 216–238).

9. Of course this is not the only performance in Kierkegaard's work but it is the drama that produces it. Indeed, you could argue that it is littered with such performances. The image we have in mind here is his famous analogy of the swimmer. ‘In learning to go through the motions of swimming, one can be suspended from the ceiling in a harness and then presumably describe the movements, but one is not swimming’. Kierkegaard (1983, pp. 37–38).

10. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, p. 527. Emphasis in the original.

11. Such non-pseudonymous writings, for instance, which were written for the paper The Fatherland and the subsequent publication of the tracts of The Moment, whose personal attacks on well-known individuals and the sheer virulence of their style could have been ample cause for hiding behind an assumed authorship if this had been the reason for Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. See, Kierkegaard (1998).

12. Aristotle (1977), bk. 12, 9, 1074b34–35.

13. Kierkegaard (1985, p. 37).

14. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 37.

15. Kierkegaard (1980, p. 13).

16. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, pp. 38–39.

17. Heidegger (1962, p. 494n).

18. For an excellent account of the importance of κίνησις to the whole of Kierkegaard’s work, see Carlisle (2005).

19. Aubenque (1962, pp. 448–456). For an explanation of the heterodox nature of Aubenque’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ontology, see Moreau (1963, pp. 365–371). For his own more orthodox view, see Moreau (1977, pp. 577–611).

20. For such a traditional theological reading of potentiality and actuality, see Mann (2012, pp. 400–421).

21. This again is the difference between theology and ontology. Theology is about a specific being and not the being of the world. Our difficulty is that our interpretation of Aristotle is distorted through the prism of the Scholastic reading, which is theological.

22. For a thorough explanation of the infinite in Aristotle, see Coope (2012, pp. 267–286).

23. Aristotle (1984, p. 351).

24. Aristotle (1957), bk. III, I, 201a10. This is our own translation following Aubenque’s French [l’acte de ce qui est en puissance en tant que tel], p. 454.

25. For a complete and scholarly account of Kierkegaard’s engagement with Aristotle’s modal categories, see Håvard and Waaler (2010, pp. 25–46). We find it strange that they are so obsessed with whether Kierkegaard was correct about Aristotle or not. First of all, he is not a scholar of Aristotle and never sets himself out to be, and secondly, if they had been aware of Aubenque’s work, they would have seen that his use of Aristotle’s κίνησις is not as outlandish, despite how iconoclastic that interpretation might be, as it first appears.

26. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, pp. 72–88.

27. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 79.

28. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 81.

29. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 86.

30. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 81.

31. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, p. 345.