Abstract
In PF Kierkegaard argues that necessity is irreconcilable with temporality. In fact, he argues for something more, that only freedom is reconcilable with temporality and such freedom cannot coexist with necessity. What is more, just as with necessity and freedom, the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal cannot coexist either. And yet, in The Concept of Anxiety (hereafter CA) and The Sickness Unto Death (hereafter SUD), Kierkegaard argues that the human ‘Self’ is an active union of all the above pairs. 1 What is even more perplexing is the fact that Kierkegaard published PF on 13 June 1844 and CA on 17 June 1844. This sharpens the tension between the two seemingly contradictory positions even further, and the purpose of this chapter is to understand how Kierkegaard is able to understand the relation between necessity and freedom in such opposed ways.
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Notes
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, translated by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Anthony Rudd stresses the fact that for Kierkegaard: ‘Abstract thinking is perfectly legitimate, so long as it does not forget that it is abstract and mistake its abstractions for realities.’ Anthony Rudd, ‘Speculation and Despair: Metaphysical and Existential Perspectives on Kierkegaard’, Kierkegaard and Freedom, edited by James Giles, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 32.
John Milbank also stresses Kierkegaard’s opposition to the ‘reality’ of logical necessity. He thus states that: ‘[N]ecessary logical sequences and determinate sets of categories are but formalized and arbitrary abstractions (respectively), from an endless fictioning of possibilities which renders any attempted self-critique of reason, any attempt to know how we know, and thereby to acquire a standard to measure authentic knowledge — genuinely grasped objectivity — coterminously infinite.’ John Milbank, ‘The Sublime in Kierkegaard’, HeyJ XXXVII (1996), p. 302.
G M. Smith, ‘Kierkegaard from the Point of View of the Political’, History of European Ideas 31 (2005), p. 39.
C. Stephen Evans also argues in favour of the above-mentioned connection between the becoming of the self and history: ‘There is no question that the emphasis of Kierkegaard’s writings is on selfhood as an achievement, something I must strive to become... [T]hrough choice the ethical individual can acquire an identity, can become someone who is capable of enduring and having a history.’ C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self, (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2006), p. 265.
Harry S. Broudy, ‘Kierkegaard’s Levels of Existence’, Philosophy and Phenom-enological Research, Vol. 1, No. 3, (March 1941), p. 302.
Libuse Lukas Miller makes an interesting remark regarding sin and freedom in human beings: ‘The task Kierkegaard set himself, then, was to define and describe that property or attribute of human nature, of the human psychological structure, out of which sin could appear as the “qualitative leap”, that is to say, not by a casual necessity, as if the sin were already inherent or immanent in the antecedent condition, but by a sort of “bad” freedom, or free “fall”, so that the sin appears as the new or emergent quality, not predictable and not determined in terms of the antecedent condition alone.’ Libuse Lucas Miller, In Search of the Self, (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), p. 230.
Michelle Kosch also points out that Kierkegaard wants to argue against the necessity or universality of sin: ‘The central claim of the introduction [to CA ]... looks like a claim to the effect that the necessity or universality of sin undermines the validity of ethical standpoint... Ethic points to ideality as a task and assumes that every man possesses the requisite conditions. Thus ethic develops a contradiction.’ Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 160.
Edward F. Mooney also points out how Kierkegaard understands the ‘transformation’ of an individual to a human self: ‘If persons are selves, then perhaps self is something that develops through stages — a common thread, winding through, and thereby linking transformations.’ Edward F. Mooney, Selves in Discord and Resolve, (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 91.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 53.
Being and Nothingness, 53–55, where Sartre compares the Kierkegaardian concept of anxiety to the Heideggerian concept of anxiety and he takes the side of Kierkegaard. Edward Harris refers to this ‘freedom’ as ‘Freedom [that] can be interpreted as an expression for “self-activation”’ Harris abstracts three theses, in Kierkegaard’s view of the potentials for self-disclosing. The second and the third one are the most important for my argument: ‘Thesis (ii): self-activation is a potential for self-disclosing.... Thesis (iii): self-creation is a potential for self-disclosing. What is important to clarify is exactly that human self is created (thus can be created) through this freedom to act. Self-activation is the actualisation of our freedom of will and self-creation is the choices we make.’ self-disclosing’ then can be understood in this context as the possibility human beings have to freely actualise part of their potentiality. When we make choices that we will to make, we freely ‘disclose’ our potentiality by making it historical actuality. Edward Harris, Man’s Ontological Predicament, (Uppsala, Stockholm, Sweden: LiberTryck, 1984), p. 32.
Herman Diem refers not to ‘historical self’ but to the ‘individual ego’: ‘For Kierkegaard its object is the individual ego, which must be set free for effective action based on its own private existence.’ Herman Diem, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence, translated by Harold Knight, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1959), p. 41.
George J. Stack holds a similar position when he states that: ‘By coming to know the actual self as far as this is possible, one accepts responsibility for what one has been.’ George J. Stack, ‘Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence’, Ethics, Vol. 83, No. 2, (January 1973), p. 109.
James Collins, ‘Faith and Reflection in Kierkegaard’, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 37, No. 1 (January 1957), p. 13.
For a similar approach see: Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Soren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology, (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 123
Harvey Albert Smit, Kierkegaard’s Pilgrimage of Man, (Netherlands: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1965), p. 165.
Kierkegaard argues that we, human beings, do not possess the power to forgive our sins with our will. What we can do, however, is to freely choose to believe that God can. Simon D. Podmore argues that we can freely choose to believe and thus to accept the ‘gift of forgiveness’. See: Simon D. Podmore, ‘The Holy and Wholly Other: Kierkegaard on the Alterity of God’, HeyJ LII (2012), pp. 9–23.
Simon D. Podmore, ‘Kierkegaard as Physician of the Soul: On Self-Forgiveness and Despair’, Journal of Psychology and Theology, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 174–185.
Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
Ussher argues that: ‘It is evident that we cannot live with the Existentialist universe: for it omits all of our non-rational intuitions except the single one of Dread.’ Arland Ussher, Journey Through Dread, (London: Darwen Finlayson, Ltd., 1955) p. 148.
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Patios, G. (2014). The Structure of the Kierkegaardian ‘Self’. In: Kierkegaard on the Philosophy of History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383280_4
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