This sceptical question can only occur from within the
pursuit of truth itself: even if it appears as necessarily unanswerable, it
must first be formulated, and so brought within what is sayable. If it is to
raise the possibility that all our saying of beings may be illusory, it not
only presupposes that at least something can be said, but that that something
has a particular form, namely, that it is a possibility that we have no contact
with truth at all.
The very formulation of this possibility involves our
understanding a notion of truth in terms of which we can see that, in relation
to it, the proposal is indeed a possibility. For Plato, the truth of the whole
is understood as already and always existing to which our intellect may, if it
comes to understand the truth, correspond. Understood in this abstract way, it
appears possible to raise the question whether we could know there was such
truth at all, and if there were whether we could come adequately into relation
to it. There always remain the possibilities that there isn’t or that we
couldn’t. But since the formulation of such sceptical questions must use the
notion of truth, they can be defused if we can show that that notion precludes
these possibilities. The abstract notion of truth precisely abstracts it from
our saying and thinking, whilst it is only there that it has any sense: it is
what we say and think that is true or not. Truth has to be understood in terms
of our thought: what it means, we might say, has to be determined by its role
there. The sceptic depends on that meaning in formulating his question, whilst
attempting at the same time to question the viability of thinking in its
entirety. Replaced within the context which gives it its sense, ‘truth’, Hegel
says, is seen as the end of thought. It is revealed where thought attains its
telos, which is something to be determined by thinking itself. The truth is not
something external to thought to which it may correspond and which would allow
the possibility of the sceptical question, but is rather the immanent goal
thought is itself directed towards and in terms of which it overcomes
inadequate formulations in a progressive realization of what that goal is.
Thought here really does recollect the truth, since it is its own, whilst
Platonic recollection presupposes an adequacy of the intellect to the truth
which must simply be accepted. For Plato, the possibility of the truth we
non-philosophically assume lies in the intelligibility of the world, in its
being ‘thought-like’, which is constituted by its ‘participation’ in the ideas,
so that things are within the world only as instantiations of ideas. Truth
concerning the ideas lies in an adequation between our thinking and these fully
knowable objects, just as truth about the world lies in the correspondence
between our thought and the things in the world which the ideas make possible.
But as recollection, the apprehension of the former assumes that the truth we
non-philosophically suppose is actual, something we cannot assume if our
inquiry is into the possibility of truth itself. For what could show that our
philosophical thought is true, rather than merely drawing out the
presuppositions of a thinking about the world we nonphilosophically take to be
so? We need to demonstrate the impossibility of such a doubt, which we can only
do if the notion of truth itself precludes it. And that is possible only if the
question of the possibility of the truth we assume nonphilosophically is at the
same time that of the notion of truth itself. The truth we assume must, that
is, be shown to be inadequate in its own terms, so that reflection compels us
towards the revelation of the notion of truth itself.
The intelligibility of
reality as we non-philosophically take it to be is not a matter of the harmony
between thought and reality for Hegel but a moment in a unitary dynamic which
reveals what is ‘true’ only in the progressive emergence of the notion of truth
itself.
Kierkegaard and modern continental philosophy In its
immediate form, thought is consciousness, within which truth is understood as a
correspondence between itself and an independent and indifferent reality. But
truth is what is known, and in attempting to articulate what it is that it
knows, consciousness in the successive forms of sense-certainty, perception of
stable things, and the understanding of forces and laws, comes to understand
that its object is not an ‘in itself but a ‘for us’. It comes to the
realization that in order to relate to the given as given, it must use itself,
its own forms of objectivity. Were reality absolutely indifferent,
consciousness could have no contact with it. Nature is the Concept externalized,
that is, it is for thought, it is ‘something posited’. Thus, sense-certainty
claims to know the tree immediately. But what it claims to know, the tree here,
is only qua tree, and so in its difference from other things, and only here as
opposed to there, and now as opposed to other times. And what it claims to know
only is such for a perceiving subject, which is itself a universal. Comparison
of sense-certainty’s own criterion of knowledge, immediacy, with what it claims
to know results in a new understanding both of the object known and of what
‘knowledge’ and so ‘truth’ is. What is known is thus revealed as an object for
a perceiving subject. But, again, what the perceiving subject claims to know
is, qua object, unavailable to perception, since this can only know properties
and not the object of which they are properties. What is known thus appears now
as the object of understanding, an inner reality which underlies the
appearances senseperception can apprehend. Initially this is understood as
force which produces the appearances, but this fails to explain the effects,
being simply whatever accounts for them. The object of knowledge appears,
therefore, as law, a necessary relation between appearances which constitutes
them as the appearances of an object, and which as the organizing principle of
appearances requires a consonant conception of subjectivity as transcendental.
Thus in pursuing the truth, consciousness becomes self-consciousness, coming to
have itself as its object. Self-consciousness initially emerges in the
momentary mutual realization of freedom from finitude, the given, in the
risking of life in the struggle to the death of the heroes of Greek epic. Such
freedom, in its essential opposition to the given, obtains a universality in
the form of life of the master and slave, within which the slave, in constant fear of death,
encounters the limit of human finitude, and, in knowing it, goes beyond: ‘Man
as spirit knows its limit, and in this passes beyond the limit.’
And in moulding materials to his master’s demands, he comes
to know himself as essentially other than external nature. This individual
knowing of one’s freedom over against nature, both external and human, becomes
concrete in the Stoic way of life, and expresses its essential negativity in
being actualized merely in freeing oneself from care about worldly things, in a
conquest of one’s own nature. But self-consciousness as thought is directed
towards truth, and truth is of a unity. The desire for truth aspires to a unity
transcending the division of Stoic consciousness. This desire for a state in
which we should be both free and whole emerges in the unhappy consciousness of
the post-Roman world. Since freedom is still freedom from nature, such a unity
is not to be attained in our natural existence, but only in a state beyond this
life, in relation to which our earthly existence is as nothing. The desire for
truth now takes the form of Reason, in which the individual selfhood defines
itself, not in opposition to a given human nature, but as its positive
appropriation. As theoretical reason, it expresses itself in natural science,
‘observing’ a given world, but overcoming its givenness with the ambition to
conquer it completely in a total knowledge, an ideal frustrated by the
irreducible irrationality of contingency. As practical reason, it attempts, not
to master in thought a given world, but to transform the given human world in
its own image. That image, in so far as it is an ideal, something to be held
before thought in its transforming activity, is of a universal individuality.
But such universality, in the light of the particularity of the given
individual’s desires, remains abstract, leading to no concrete and binding laws
on all. The self must understand itself, not in terms of individual selfhood,
but rather in terms of a concrete unity of individuals, a concrete
self-conscious universality. Man’s desire for truth initially reveals himself
to himself as Spirit in the unreflective unity of a people, defining itself
over against others. But as an explicit unity of all, it is manifested in its
abstract form in the legal community of the Roman Empire. As no content derives
from such an abstract unity, the emperor has total power to determine the
rights of individuals.
The content of the unity is Kierkegaard and modern
continental philosophy arbitrary, deriving from the given particularity of the
emperor. The ethical unity of the constituent peoples is destroyed, but this
reveals, in the Stoic consciousness, the freedom of individuals from any given
social form. Such free individuals must now create a community in their own
image, the Christian community which despises the world and looks towards
fulfilment of its true nature in the Kingdom of God beyond this life, whilst
the actual community of this world is created by individuals in the image of
their given individual desires for power and wealth. Such determination by
one’s given nature is overcome in the negative freedom of the early
Enlightenment, in which the self understands itself as free of any given social
form and, in its aspiration for unity, conceives of everything given as
material, to do with as it will. The French Revolution shows that this absolute
freedom, which as a form of Spirit, is universal and must express itself in
collective activity, can, being divorced from any concrete content, only
manifest itself in the community of destruction, of the past order and then of
itself. Man as Spirit must develop a social order which unites its freedom from
the given with the given: to produce a community of free individuals. In Kant’s
philosophy, the self understands its unity with humanity as a whole through the
conception of duty, the submission of a given human nature to the demands of
universality. Yet here the universal of humanity is opposed to the
particularity of the individual: being defined in opposition to nature, man is
divided from himself, and the ultimate goal of an ethical commonwealth in which
nature and duty would be one remains always and only as an ideal. The conflict
between ideality and reality is overcome in the unity of the post-Kantian
conscience, in which the abstract Kantian unity of mankind becomes a concrete
community of individuals, acting in particular circumstances in the light of
their consciences. Yet such a community is inevitably characterized by
conflict, the consciences of different individuals determining different
courses of action. And since anything can be considered good, there can be no
certainty, either for others or for the individual himself, that he follows the
dictates of conscience rather than his individual desires. The ‘we’ of humanity
can only obtain a concrete form which satisfies the desire for truth, and so
unity, in a community of free individuals. The apprehension of this Hegel finds
manifest in the rationality of the bureaucratic state.
But although this apprehension is present, it is so as moral
certainty, a certainty of contemporary action. It does not understand its own
necessity: that it is the truth. It could do so only by rising above the given,
present as the material for universalizing action, to see the essential unity
of the given and humanity’s nature as universalizing reason, in an absolutely
free activity of self-knowing. Such an activity knows nature as for humanity’s
self-knowing, and knows the various forms of human life as stages in man’s
coming to know himself: it sees the unity of the finite natural and human world
as constituted in the universalizing activity of humanity which attains its own
appropriate form, as thought, in knowing itself. This absolute knowing is God:
‘God is spirit, the activity of pure knowing.’ The individual, in raising
himself to knowing the essential unity of what is, can become, although only in
such knowing, divine: ‘humanity is immortal only through cognitive knowledge’.
Yet what God is is known only in the absolute knowing which is philosophy.
Religion and philosophy both have the same object, ‘reason in principle’, but
it is known as what it is only by the highest form of cognitive activity, where
the rationality of the world finds its appropriate form of articulation, in
rational thought. Religion apprehends the unity of the world, but it does so
only in an incompletely rational form of thinking, representation, in which it
is conceived as something external: ‘faith expresses the absolute objectivity
that the content has for me’; The content…has and retains the form of an
externality over against me. I make it mine, [but] I am not [contained] in it,
nor identical with it.’
Christianity is the ‘absolute religion’ for there ‘God
has made known what he is; there he is manifest’: God reveals himself in a man.
The ‘unity of divine and human nature comes to consciousness for humanity in
such a way that a human being appears to consciousness as God, and God appears
to it as a human being.’ Since religion is the manifesting of God, it finds its
fulfilment, its truth, in the rational articulation of that manifestation, in
knowing what God is. Christianity itself reveals this as its end, for its
doctrines proclaim that ‘we should know God cognitively, God’s nature and
essence and should esteem his cognition above all else’. But that rational
knowledge can only take place in philosophy: ‘philosophy is theology, and
[one’s] occupation…in philosophy…is of itself the service of God’. Kierkegaard
and modern continental philosophy The Platonic idea of the Good, the relation
of purposiveness which binds the temporal and the intelligible into a whole, is
identified by Hegel with the activity of human thought itself. The timelessly
true is the principle of rationality of the world which comes to its own
self-consciousness in human philosophical knowing. It is, therefore, both ousia
in the Platonic sense, existing ‘solely through itself and for its own sake. It
is something absolutely self-sufficient, unconditioned, independent, free as
well as being the supreme end unto itself, and, at the same time, Spirit.
Spirit is in the most complete sense. The absolute or highest being belongs to
it. But Spirit is…only in so far as it is for itself, that is, in so far as it
posits itself or brings itself forth; for it is only as activity…in this
activity it is knowing. The rationality of the world is both substance, an
intellectually apprehensible order which ‘is’ in a more than merely temporal
sense, and subject, for it is essentially a thinking which must come to know
itself. Reality becomes self-transparent in man’s absolute knowing.
And there man attains true selfconsciousness, finding within
himself the ground which can justify his cognitive, practical and political
activities, for these represent the concrete manifestations of Spirit’s
universalizing activity which are for its own self-knowledge. And man can, in
absolute knowing, become self-conscious Spirit. For Plato and Hegel, man,
characterized by thought, must act and think in accordance with truth. Truths
about what is in the world depend on the latter’s intelligibility, and the
truth of this intelligibility is first to be formulated either in terms of the
ideas of what is in the world, or in the characterization of the nature of the
objects of sense experience and understanding. But the truth about the
intelligibility of the world requires further that of the harmony between the
things of the world and the ideas, or of the principle of reality which makes
the objects of sense experience and understanding aspects of reality. The truth
is ultimately of the whole, and the truth of any part lies in its place there.
Man, however, is not merely a being apprehended by thought because its nature
is intelligible, but rather the thinking being through whom all other beings
become known in their intelligibility, and this is possible only through
knowing the whole.
Man’s truth, his determination in terms of the whole, is,
thus, to apprehend the truth of reality, or to be its principle through which
reality knows itself. Hence, the activity of philosophy constitutes the
fulfilment of human life. For both Plato and Hegel, man’s highest form of
activity is philosophical knowing in which the ground, in terms of which all
other forms of knowledge and truth can be understood, is discovered as at one
with man himself. For Plato, this ground is the idea of the Good, of the
purposiveness which binds together all that can be said to be and which provides
us with the notions of a final truth and unchanging being. The philosophical
life appears as the highest because it fulfils man’s nature, his distinction
from all else in the whole of being. The divinity within man lies in his
intelligence, his capacity to participate in the timeless in its appropriate
form, as intelligible, and so reveal the purposiveness which binds the temporal
and timeless together. For Hegel, this purposiveness becomes the activity of
unifying thought itself, which reveals external nature as for the
universalizing activity of man’s scientific knowing, and man’s own as to be
imprinted with the image of man as such a universalizing being, and so as
self-determining. Man, as the being who is capable of knowing his end and
acting accordingly, knows his nature as such only in the activity which brings
this capacity to fulfilment. And that can take place only in absolute knowing,
when external and human nature have been revealed as they are through the
coming to self consciousness of the organizing activity of reason. Man does not
just possess a divine element, but can in such knowing become God as the
ultimate ground of all being, self-conscious Spirit.
Referring to Hegel,
Kierkegaard remarks in his Journals that ‘Philosophy is the purely human view
of the world, the human standpoint’ which tends ‘toward a recognition of
Christianity’s harmony with the universally human consciousness’. It leads,
that is, towards an identification of the human with the divine, a process
which has its roots in the Platonic conception of a divine element in man’s
nature. Hegel’s thought, for Kierkegaard, is the culmination of this tradition
of philosophy, within which the nature of that human project becomes
Kierkegaard and modern continental philosophy transparent, for there the human
being thinking ‘the system of the universe’ becomes divine. In such thinking he
becomes one with self-conscious Spirit. And that is God. Kierkegaard,
notoriously, found Hegel comic, ‘someone who is really tested in life, who in
his need resorts to thought, will find Hegel comical despite all his
greatness’. This comedy results from the incompatibility between the sort of
question which our existence is for us and how that question is conceived by
metaphysics. Metaphysics seeks to answer the question, by providing a ground, a
determination of the nature of man, as embodied intelligence, or as Spirit,
universalizing unifying activity, through which a concrete form of human life
can be justified as life’s end, its meaning and purpose. The argument to this
ground takes the form of locating the human in relation to the whole, the truth
of truth. Thought of the whole, as Hegel emphasizes, precludes appeal to
presuppositions, and so must have the form of recollection of what is implicit
in thought. The problem of existence as part of this general project appears as
an intellectual one, to be resolved by thought revealing what is implicit in
existence. This is why metaphysics assumes ‘that if only the truth is brought
to light, its appropriation is a relatively unimportant matter, something which
follows as a matter of course’.
I shall be concerned throughout this work with the
ramifications of Kierkegaard’s critique of this understanding of the problem of
human existence. However, that critique begins with his insistence that it is
just this matter of appropriation which poses for us the question of the truth
of existence: ‘The inquiring, speculating and knowing subject…raises a question
of truth, but he does not raise the question of a subjective truth, the truth
of appropriation and assimilation.’ The truth which metaphysics seeks is to be
revealed through reflection, and having been apprehended is then to be lived.
But to say this is immediately to mark a difference between the categories
appropriate within reflective thought and those concerning our relation to it
through which it becomes part of our life. Whereas the metaphysical project
attempts to determine life’s measure through situating the human in relation to
the whole of being, Kierkegaard emphasizes that such thought as a human
activity itself is part of life. Life’s measure would be what can give meaning
to life as a whole. The question then arises as to whether what must for its
own significance be situated by the individual in relation to this whole can
itself reveal the truth of life. ‘If a man occupies himself all his life
through with logic, he would nevertheless not become logic: he must therefore
himself exist in different categories.’ These categories are those of ‘subjectivity’,
the relation of the individual to her own activities and relationships and so
forth which issues from the relation she has to her life as a whole. If an
individual occupies herself with logic, we may ask not merely what results
ensue but how she involves herself with it. This question initially prompts an
account of the sort of commitment she has to the activity. But this in turn
raises a question about that relation itself: is it of the right kind? The
individual must relate herself to this activity as she must to any activity or
relationship or to anything which occurs to her. Is her form of relationship,
then, appropriate for a being subject to such a necessity throughout her life?
The individual has a conception of her life as a whole, that she has a life to
lead, and the question as to the truth of existence relates to this, through
which an appropriate relation to activities and relationships within life can
be determined.
But for the individual, her life as a whole cannot be
present: ‘life constitutes the task. To be finished with life before life has
finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.’ One cannot,
therefore, relate to one’s life as a whole in terms of a result or fulfilment,
for this is to treat life as a task which can be completed, even if this is
conceived as an ideal. But this is precisely what metaphysics does,
understanding life’s task as the achievement of knowledge of the whole or as
the end of the process whereby the whole achieves explicit rationality: ‘objective
thought translates everything into results, subjective thought puts everything
into process and omits results—for as an existing individual he is constantly
in process of coming to be’. Metaphysics in construing life as having an
immanent goal fails to recognize that the wholeness of life from the point of
view of the living, the existing individual cannot be so conceived. Its view is
a result of seeing the question of human life ‘objectively’, a relation which
we as living beings may take up in relation to past human existence, as when we
concern ourselves with the objective truth about historical events, but which
we cannot take up in relation to our own. ‘Hegel…does Kierkegaard and modern
continental philosophy not understand history from the point of view of
becoming, but with the illusion attached to pastness understands it from the
point of view of a finality that excludes all becoming.’ The metaphysical
project treats human life in the mode of pastness and only so can it think of
it in terms of a final result. But whereas it makes sense to relate to the past
in terms of disinterested inquiry and so in terms of the objective truth, such
a relation is only possible for a being who has a quite different relation to
her or his own life. Whenever a particular existence has been relegated to the
past, it is complete, has acquired finality, and is in so far subject to a
systematic apprehension…but for whom is it so subject? Anyone who is himself an
existing individual cannot gain this finality outside existence which
corresponds to the eternity into which the past has entered. His historical
inquiry is an activity he engages with and to which he relates: but this latter
relation cannot be one of the ‘disinterested’ inquiry through which he
addresses the objects of his research, but one we can only understand in
‘subjective’ categories. That is, we must understand such a relation in terms
of life as it is related to by the one who is living it and not in terms of the
relation of a living being to a life which is not her or his own.
The comedy of the System, Kierkegaard says, is that it
forgets that philosophy has to be written by human beings who have necessarily
a different kind of relation to their own lives than they can have to anything
else: ‘The only reality to which an existing individual may have a relation
that is more than cognitive is his own reality.’ How, then, are we to
understand existence when it is seen ‘subjectively’, that is, when it is a
matter of an individual regarding her or his own life? Kierkegaard’s answer to
this is: as ‘becoming’. Whereas objectively life is regarded as if it were in
the past, completed and so surveyable by the contemplative gaze of the
philosopher, subjectively life is not completable, since one is not done with
it until it is done with one. From the existing individual’s viewpoint, her own
life appears as ‘constantly in process of becoming’, without an achievable or
ideal end. To live, therefore, consistently in terms of this subjective view,
‘it is essential that every trace of an objective issue should be eliminated’ and so all trace of living as if
such goals could give significance to one’s existence as a whole.
To do otherwise is not simply an error of the metaphysical
interpretation of life, but characterizes human beings’ relations to their
lives generally, in ways I shall note in the next chapter: ‘It is enough to
bring a sensuous man to despair, for one always feels a need to have something
finished and complete.’ But to live clearsightedly in terms of the subjective
view, to live as an existing individual, is to live one’s life as constantly in
process of becoming, and so not towards a goal. Whereas objectively, one’s
future is seen in the ‘illusion attached to pastness’ as if it were directed
towards an end surveyable from the present and so closed, subjectively the
future is open. For the living individual, her future is not already mapped
out, tending towards an end: ‘The incessant becoming generates the uncertainty
of earthly life, where everything is uncertain.’ To live related to the
essential openness of the future alters too the character of the past. To be so
related is to ‘strive infinitely’ so that one’s concrete activities are not
dependent upon the realization of some finite goal for their significance. As
no finite goal can have such ultimate significance, the past, whether of
achievement or its lack, can have no such significance either, but is merely
the base from which one’s present striving into the openness of the future takes
place. The present, then, is where the past is taken over as one’s own and so
in relation to the absolute openness of one’s future. We shall see what this
means more concretely for Kierkegaard later. His critique of metaphysics rests,
then, on the contrast between the objective conception of life, where it is
seen as if it were already in the past and so complete and surveyable at least
in principle, and the subjective, that way one’s life is seen from within it,
from the point of view of the one who has to live it. And it might appear that
Kierkegaard analyses the difference in purely temporal terms. Life as
‘becoming’ involves, as ‘constant striving’, the non-ending taking over of
one’s past into an open future, whereas life objectively conceived is at best
progress towards a predetermined future.
But it has to be emphasized that Kierkegaard’s understanding
of these temporal notions is religious or ethico-religious: ‘all essential
knowledge is essentially related to existence. Only ethical and ethico-religious
knowledge has an essential relationship to the existence of the knower.’ That
is, for Kierkegaard, the individual who truly lives as ‘becoming’ relates
Kierkegaard and modern continental philosophy to the future as open only in so
far as this relation is one to the Infinite or God, and his ‘constant striving’
constitutes therefore a relation to God, an offering up of his life to the
Deity. So that he remarks in the Journals: ‘To be contemporary with oneself
(therefore neither in the future of fear, or of expectation nor in the past)…is…the
God relationship.’ A present within which one takes over one’s past in relation
to the open future is only possible as such a God relation since ‘the Deity…is
present as soon as the uncertainty of all things is thought infinitely’: that
is, the future is only truly open through one’s relation to God. And
Kierkegaard is far from believing, therefore, that life does not have a telos.
One who lives his life as always becoming is, because this requires a relation
to God, directed towards the end bestowed by God, an ‘eternal happiness’,
although this is, unlike the end understood by the objective views of life,
unattainable through our own efforts and so does not close off the horizon of
the future. I shall discuss these notions in greater detail later. But mustn’t
the suspicion immediately arise here that Kierkegaard is involved in
reinstating precisely those ‘objective’ concepts he has shown to be
incompatible with the subjective standpoint? Life does not have an end within
it, but is now said to have one beyond it. And in that case, life is surely
part of an order which is determinate and fixed, even if, unlike the order of
metaphysics, it is one we cannot apprehend: ‘Reality itself is a system for God;
but it cannot be a system for an existing spirit. System and finality
correspond to one another, but existence is precisely the opposite of
finality.’ But given Kierkegaard’s critique of the objectivity of metaphysical
conceptions, why should the existing individual who understands his existence
as constant becoming without a finite end believe in an infinite one,
guaranteed by the author of an order beyond our comprehension? Isn’t this
religious construction a last vestige of the hold of objective thinking?
Mightn’t we hope to move to a properly existential understanding of existence
freed of the metaphysical notions of a determined end within a given order?
Certainly Heidegger did.
 - Michael Weston&via=stc_network)
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