Excursions with Kierkegaard

Others, Goods, Death, and Final Faith

Edward F. Mooney

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441190345
• eBook ISBN: 9781441106032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

Noted Kierkegaard scholar Edward Mooney guides the reader through the major themes of the Danish philosopher's life and thought. Each chapter frames a striking issue, usually encapsulated in a short passage from Kierkegaard, and pursues it directly and deeply. Kierkegaard speaks to our need for self-understanding, our need to negotiate the tensions between surprisingly subtle capacities for communication and surprisingly easy descent into clichés and banality. The chapter of this book follow and re-animate Kierkegaard's brilliant and humorous discussions of death and authenticity, of the maternal and paternal in faith and self-transformations, of self-deception and obsessive judgmentalism, of love and the search for stable centers, of subjectivity as refinement of responsiveness to others, the world, and all we can value. These evocative explications aim to match his stride in tracking deep human concerns that evade academic and cultural pigeonholes. Like Hamlet, Kierkegaard gives us a "poem unlimited" that is open to endless reflection. Mooney's aim is to bring his matchless impulse and aspiration once more to life.

1

Subjectivity: Exposure, Care, and Response

For many, “Kierkegaard” is synonymous with a pair of catch phrases – words we think we understand but don’t. There is the notorious “truth is subjectivity” and then the oft-cited reference to a “passionate leap of faith.” Setting aside the popular confusions around “leaps of faith,” what is Kierkegaard promoting under the heading of subjectivity? My aim here is to bring alive its proper grip and bite against the pressure of counterfeits, and to fill in some of the cultural contexts that have made subjectivity of any sort suspect. I try a retrieval of Kierkegaard’s worthy notion, a sort of subjectivity to welcome in from the cold.

Kierkegaard’s subjectivity is a variant of an ordinary subjectivity that may go unnamed but should be familiar in the back and forth exchanges between subjects, between persons, that ravels out the weave the everyday world. It does not exclude objectivity but enables it. It is because we expose ourselves to ongoing passionate exchange with others in a mutuality of subjectivity that we come to embrace objective truths and realities. As subjectivities in pursuit of what’s real, we become initiated one by one into the protocols of objective reporting, of objective lab testing or measurement, and so on. It is only certain sorts of objectivity that Kierkegaard shuns, and only certain sorts of subjectivity that he pleads with us to embrace.¹

For Kierkegaard subjectivity is prominent in faith or in ethical judgment but it is fully evident in less contested domains as well. It is present in ordinary life as an everyday background, silently entangled in a person’s sense of agency and passivity in a nexus of relations to herself, others, and an environing world. It is caught up in the daily stream of walking and hearing, cooking and dressing, paying bills and running for the bus. It is opening ourselves, exposing ourselves, to the endless realities, aspirations, and dreams of the everyday.

This sense of subjectivity should be distinguished from the idea of a judgment that is “merely subjective” – one that is defective. In this narrow use, “subjectivity” attaches to instances of error, miscue, and mere fantasy. It then marks a person’s unfortunate distance from the real. But everyday subjectivity has a different and wider reach. It affords fortunate and flowing contact with the real.

An overview

Contact and immersion

Let’s set textbook definitions and discussions aside and start afresh with an evocation of my immersions in life. Say I read a passage from Heidegger (a philosopher, as we know, who is harsh with specifically Cartesian subjectivity). After a difficult stint with Being and Time, I’ll want to know where to shelve Heidegger’s tome, whether to loan it, whether its call to resoluteness means staying in or out of politics – and of what stripe. Answering the phone, I won’t mimic the text to chirp “Dasein here!” I’ll think of myself as someone in this town, at this address, happy or unhappy within this family and this job, disgusted or delighted by this evening’s news. There’s nothing tendentious in my thinking of myself as a self, a “me,” a subjectivity of some sort.

Perhaps at other moments I’ll succumb to reverie. I’ll picture myself walking with Dante, a soul mid-way in the journey of my life, lost in a dark wood. Or in less reverie, I’d think of myself as subject to the allure of philosophy and French cuisine and the crushing glory of Leontyne Price. Or perhaps I’d think of myself hard at work to become a successful writer. Long after the collapse of atomistic Cartesian subjectivity – an influential configuration to which I’ll return – I’ll think that Heidegger addresses me as a subjectivity in his writing, even as he avoids any picture of subjectivity as isolated, atomic consciousness – isolated from others, isolated from the world. I might find that he calls me (as a subject, from his subjectivity) to monitor technological imperialism. If I return the favor, addressing him as a receptive subjectivity, I might tag him for avoiding his implication in political realities between the wars. Yet I’d also think of him as deeply, “subjectively” concerned with the roots of Greek culture and with Hölderlin’s poems.

Subjectivity is an animated field already inhabited precisely by we who are openness to that field. Yet this reciprocal openness-tootherness – an inestimably worthy subjectivity – gets occluded by cultural regimes that slide into taking the objective deliverances of science as all that’s needed for the world (and ourselves) to be intelligible. Or such subjectivity is occluded by administrative, bureaucratic regimes that reduce selves or souls to numbers or exchangeable parts in economies of production or consumption. Or such openness gets blocked and denied by self-refuting “theory” – in disquisitions on the death of the author, of the human, of ethics, of philosophy, not to mention the long-heralded yet still lingering death of God.² Kierkegaard sets to revive lost subjectivity, and so sets out to mark limits to science and scholarship as sole paths to intelligibility of things human and personal, and to mark the error of living one’s life swallowed by the human en masse, or by mindlessly consuming fashion, gossip, or shallow opinion. I’ll bracket popular academic pronouncements of multiple deaths from the 1980s and beyond, pronouncements that have shifted recently to advocate anti-humanism.³ Whatever the virtues of these fashionable academic trends, their object should be exposing bad theories of human existence, not a frontal attack on explorations of authorship, say, or of a self’s agency or passivity at an experiential level. Why reduce persons, viable meanings and successful communications, to ghostly after-images that intellectual sophisticates urge us to set aside? As I see it, these suspicions of fraud at the root of subjectivity, whatever their kernel of insight, quickly approach over-kill. They become hyperbolic and theatrical, hiding essentials from view. Living uncritically with fashionable critique is, one needn’t point out, uncritical.

Of course, there are real-enough fissures and enigmas at the edge of self- understanding, and of shared meanings and communications. In the pages that follow I return time and again, in a Kierkegaardian vein, to these enigmas and fissures. But the bare fact of anomalies in our understandings of authorship, writing, or death is no reason to jettison these realities, or to censor our talk of them: quite the contrary. The surfacing of anomalies ought in many cases to trigger the question, how can we fruitfully live with such fracture or discordance? This is something quite other than discarding or scorning it.

There’s no way (and no need) to banish pedestrian subjectivity – the idea that we are individuals who are responsive to each other, that we are subject to each other’s help and hindrance, responsive to aesthetic, political, ethical, and personal invitations and demands. The challenge is to welcome ordinary subjectivity and to disable a specific Cartesian picture of knowledge and consciousness that distorts it. I take Kierkegaard’s role to be a fierce critique of trends converging on the weakening or elimination of pedestrian subjectivity. To have a grip on Kierkegaard’s sort of subjectivity is to acknowledge selves as caring, responsive participants in a field of reciprocal psychic and social exchange – all sorts of misfires included; it is to enter a vibrant space of conversions, of delight in marriages, of enjoyment in morning tea (sunlight streaming over the desk).

Truth and subjectivity

Kierkegaard’s improvisations on “subjectivity” will reappear from several angles in chapters ahead, but let me prepare the ground with these introductory strokes. To say that truth is subjectivity is to emphasize the worth and inescapability of personal immersion in life. The dictum is less an epistemological insight than a practical appeal, a plea that I turn away from those public distractions that take me to a no man’s land of impersonal non-existence – a place of barely conscious despair. It is a plea to return to myself, to others, and to a world, a return that with luck will expose what matters to me – as I expose myself to it.

There is a mistaken view that subjectivity, passion, concern, and immersion will always mark misalignment and distortion in our effort to attain an accurate sense of what comes to pass. This denigration of passionate immersion or subjectivity is only reinforced by the imperatives of an administrative culture that closes down the intimate and personal. Front and center are institutional imperatives: career advancement, bureaucratic progress reports, preparation of tax returns, endless “objective,” quantitative performance evaluations. Anything we’d call personal, intimate, or subjective gets buried under protocols of administration. What matters is not the pleasure I take in my kids but whether they qualify for scholarships, not devotion to classical music but whether better “time management” will save the day. Intimate, subjective space then shrinks in importance. For Kierkegaard this loss is disastrous.

The region of non-institutionalized “privacy” diminishes as it comes under attack by the public and political. All that we hesitate to own as intimate or personal gets ceded to an institutionalized “public” space and style of critique and comprehension. My subjective “feel” for my world and convictions, and my attempts to communicate my intimate immersions, insofar as they lack admission to respected modes of public articulation, lie fallow or die. They resist the coin of the academic realm. The journalism of “true confessions” and intimate scandal, replace nuanced accounts of our complex embeddedness in an intimate social world. Rather than embrace our subjectivity in resistance, we collaborate in its silencing. Rather than trace out the lineaments of ordinary subjectivity and affect, or following Kierkegaard’s ventures in this regard, we fall back on the safer ground of the “objective.” The “objectivity” that Kierkegaard finds so ridiculous and dangerous is not the world of objective news or research. It is in part what he calls “the public,” a transpersonal force that feeds on and reproduces for mass consumption reams of impersonal gossip and chatter, reminders of “what one must do” in one’s objective roles, or under administrative edicts. To absorb without reserve the objectivities of disciplinary and professional pursuits buries our more personal, private selves – our spans of pedestrian subjectivity.⁴

Closer to home, a fragmented university, especially in its pre-professional programs, serves as an impersonal training school for assimilation into wider political and economic structures. Even in graduate programs in the humanities, the professoriate is self-replicating, producing new scholars to replace departing ones. The university takes pride in the production and distribution of objective knowledge of utility to outside institutions, or as often, of utility to other academic institutions. Professors write for other professors and deans in efforts to validate each other’s merit for corporate advancement. All this has its legitimate purpose, but a cost is exacted if the intimate or personal is utterly suppressed. Excluded are central virtues of the humanities: cultivation of sensibilities, engagement in self-reflection and Socratic exploration, and husbanding poetic expression. Practices of producing and consuming data, method, and theory leave out evocations of simple things of great depth or radiance we might otherwise encounter experientially, to our betterment: quietly bringing the intricacies of my specific immersions in life to bear on my reading and viewing and teaching, letting that reading, viewing, and teaching realign my desires (and aversions) and inviting students to feel how that realignment works. Under the restrictive prompts of a preemptive and all-consuming objectivity, my writing can’t reveal what it’s like to let a poem or a philosophical meditation look into my soul, and make it come alive, or blush in shame. Yet I know that a paragraph from Emily Dickinson or Kierkegaard takes my subjectivity in earnest: I can be swept away, and called up short.

Kierkegaard refused to embark on a university career in part because he wanted knowledge that would let him come alive, that would quicken his sense of the inescapably human, and of intimate self-recognition. He wanted knowledge that would key him to dimensions in his complicated, singular existence that he should attend to (alone, and with books). A tepid interest in tracing the objective footprints of world-historical figures – their texts, and the trails of their promoters and detractors, was not enough, and existentially, irrelevant. With regard to his readers – in particular, let’s say, his regard for my reading – Kierkegaard prods me to set aside the objective world-historical and impersonal and take up with my subjectivity, even as I do this in tandem with a mentor: say, Socrates, Cervantes, Gillian Rose – or that marvelous writer, the immortal Johannes de silentio, who pens Fear and Trembling.

Wounds of subjectivity

We can illuminate subjectivity by tracing its roots to Plato’s account of Socrates, and pause with a new conception of Socratic irony. Kierkegaard loved Socrates, and averred, late in life, that his thinking was always as much Socratic as Christian.⁵ He learns from Socrates how to keep subjectivity alive, and what is at stake in doing so. It will repay us to see Socrates as someone who values subjectivity, and carries the banner of living ironically. We can clarify Kierkegaard’s praise of Socratic ironic living by drawing distinctions.

Verbal wit, ironic capability, and living ironically

A prominent philosopher and practicing psychotherapist, Jonathan Lear has written extensively on Kierkegaard’s practice and theory of irony, not to mention Kierkegaardian “subjectivity.”⁶ He takes irony to be the fundamental structure of evaluative consciousness for modern subjects. He uses Kierkegaard’s account to illuminate Socratic irony, which in turn gives us the structure of Kierkegaardian subjectivity. Briefly, there are three levels of sophistication in the play of irony. First, and least important philosophically, there is the ironic quip, or wise-crack. At the verbal level, this can be a moment where stable evaluations are rocked for an instant, as a speaker takes a jaded or tender unexpected angle on things we value or disvalue. Its jolt for an instant can destabilize our routine uptakes on gender, say, or age, ethnicity, size – on family, eating, kissing, politicians, and so forth). It can teach but it mainly entertains.

Irony can be more substantial, however. Here, in its second manifestation, it is the capacity, exercised seldom or often, to take a wry backward step that fosters critique of one or more of the parade of evaluations that weave the fabric of my life, and ...

Table of contents

• FC
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• An Invitation
• 1 Subjectivity: Exposure, Care, and Response
• 2 On Self, Others, Goods, and Final Faith
• 3 On Style and Pseudonymity
• 4 A Faith that Defies Self-Deception
• 5 On Reflexivity, Vision, and “The” Self
• 6 On Faith, the Maternal, and Postmodernism
• 7 Socratic Self-Sufficiency, Christian Dependency
• 8 On Authenticity
• 9 The Garden of Death: Faith as Interpersonal
• 10 When is Death?
• Index