Abstract
Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned anti-idealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher’s conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher’s view.
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Notes
I have discussed these bonds in “Schleiermacher in the Kierkegaardian Project: Between Socratic Ignorance and Second Immediacy” (Rogers 2016), and the current article is a continuation of the argument developed there. Here I further articulate and substantiate the problem that leads to Kierkegaard’s unexpected turn against Schleiermacher.
Schreiber’s contention is made on the basis of evidence that Kierkegaard’s copy of Schleiermacher’s magnum opus, The Christian Faith, contained a translation error that led Kierkegaard to believe that Schleiermacher himself characterizes the feeling of absolute dependence as “the first level of immediate self-consciousness,” whereas the passage in question actually communicates that the feeling of absolute dependence is “the highest level of immediate self-consciousness” (Schreiber 2011, p. 146).
I have used Schreiber’s own translation of this passage, as he argues that “det første umidd.” has wrongfully been translated “first immediacy” [det første umidd (elbarhed)] rather than “the first immediate” [det første umidd (elbare)]. Compare with Kierkegaard (1970, no. 1096).
Elsewhere Schreiber (2013) categorizes types of immediacy in Kierkegaard.
Compare with (Kierkegaard 1978, no. 5056).
Schleiermacher employs feeling of absolute dependence primarily in On Religion (1799) and has nearly replaced it with God-consciousness by the publication of the first edition of The Christian Faith (1821).
This particular point, that the height of self-consciousness is the height of God-consciousness, is precisely the point that the keystone of Schreiber’s argument brings to our attention. Schreiber argues that because Kierkegaard’s copy of the Glaubenslehre contained a translation error that characterizes the feeling of absolute dependence as “the first level of immediate self-consciousness” rather than “the highest level of immediate self-consciousness,” Kierkegaard was wrongfully persuaded to conclude that Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute dependence is—according to Schleiermacher’s own view, presumably—merely the first immediate. I argue that regardless of this mistranslation’s possible influence on Kierkegaard—that is, granting that the height of self-consciousness is indeed the height of God-consciousness—the characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion as the first immediate is indeed a de facto critique.
It is important to note that Kierkegaard was himself no stranger to religious experience. One such experience, reminiscent of Pascal’s night of fire, is recorded as follows: “There is an indescribable joy that glows all through us just as inexplicably as the apostle’s exclamation breaks forth for no apparent reason: ‘Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice.’ –Not a joy over this or that, but the soul’s full outcry ‘with tongue and mouth and from the bottom of the heart’: ‘I rejoice for my joy, by, in, with, about, over, for, and with my joy’—a heavenly refrain which, as it were, suddenly interrupts our other singing, a joy which cools and refreshes like a breath of air, a breeze from the trade winds which blow across the plains of Mamre to the everlasting mansions” (Kierkegaard 1978, no. 5324). Lowrie notes in his discussion of this entry—“which with unaccustomed precision [Kierkegaard] dated May 19, [1838] 10:30 A.M.”—that “The reference to Gen. 18:1 has a significance we should not overlook: ‘The Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day’” (Lowrie 1942, p. 124). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this connection to my attention.
Schleiermacher scholar Jacqueline Mariña proceeds from this quotation to argue that “Schleiermacher’s theory offers a generally coherent account of how it is possible that differing religious traditions are all based on the same experience of the absolute” (Mariña 2004).
Defending Schleiermacher’s experiential expressivism—the view that religious doctrine and teachings are outward expressions of inward experiences of the divine—against the criticisms of other views that attempt to explain the diversity of religious traditions, Mariña writes: “This means, then, that the foundational religious experience remains pure, that is, it us unaffected by cultural and linguistic categories. These come into play when the experience is being expressed. This is the fundamental point of difference between Schleiermacher’s model of religion and the cultural-linguistic model. On the latter view, all experience is subject to the work of consciousness and, as such, is interpreted” (Mariña 2004, p. 130).
Johannes de Silentio makes this especially clear: “Faith is not the first immediacy but a later immediacy. The first immediacy is the esthetic, and here the Hegelian philosophy certainly may very well be right. But faith is not the esthetic, or else faith has never existed because it has always existed” (Kierkegaard 1983a, p. 82).
I have in mind Bailly’s appropriation of Rilke’s eighth elegy in Le versant animal (Bailly 2011).
I have discussed the divergence between the backward-looking movement of Schleiermacher and the forward-looking movement of Kierkegaard at length in a manner that sets up and connects integrally to the current discussion (Rogers 2016).
In 1848 Kierkegaard pens a lengthy, beautiful and revelatory reflection, which echoes the religious experience cited above (footnote 9) and provides further evidence of the link between the attack on Christendom and the attack on Schleiermacher which both occur during this final period of his life (Rogers 2016). The 1838 experience occurred in close proximity both to the death of his father and to Easter; ten years later he remarks upon the inward transformation that the 1838 experience had initiated: “For now I see so clearly (again unto new joy in God, a new occasion to give thanks) that my life has been planned. My life began without spontaneity or immediacy, with a frightful melancholy, basically disturbed from earliest childhood…Then my father’s death really stopped me. I did not dare to believe that this, the fundamental wretchedness of my being, could be lifted; so I grasped the eternal blessedly assured that God is love indeed, even though I should have to suffer in this way all my life, yes, blessedly assured of this.” His admission that at this point he dared not believe that the fundamental wretchedness of his being could be lifted, but nonetheless he held fast to the thought that God is love, further substantiates my argument that de Silentio represents an early stage of the individual’s religious development (Rogers 2015). After reflecting on the broken engagement, Kierkegaard continues, “And now, now when in many ways I have been brought to the breaking point, now (since Easter, although with intermissions), a hope has awakened in my soul that it may still be God’s will to lift this elementary misery of my being. That is, I now believe in the deepest sense. Faith is spontaneity after reflection” (Kierkegaard 1978, no. 6135).
In anticipation of my next section, on first love: Judge William provides further evidence that Kierkegaard sees the backward-looking movement, against which he sets his own forward-looking movement, in connection with the tradition of German Romanticism. During his treatment of first love, which I quote throughout the latter part of the next section of this paper, Judge William references the young aesthete’s thoughts on the “pre-established harmony” of romantic lovers. He connects the truth in the aesthete’s view to truth found in the views of Goethe: “What we are speaking of here is what Goethe in the Wahlverwandtschaften has so artistically first intimated to us in the imagery of nature in order to make it real later in the world of spirit, except that Goethe endeavored to motivate this drawing power through a series of factors (perhaps in order to show the difference between the life of spirit and the life of nature)…” From here, he invokes biblical imagery of Eden: “And is it not beautiful to imagine that two beings are intended for each other! How often do we not have an urge to go beyond the historical consciousness, a longing, a homesickness for the primeval forest that lies behind us, and does not this longing acquire a double significance when it joins to itself the conception of another being whose home is also in that region? Therefore, every marriage, even the one that is entered into after sober consideration, has an urge, at least in particular moments, to imagine such a foreground” (Kierkegaard 1987, pp. 20–21). Thus with reference to the backward looking longing of Goethe, William makes an explicit connection to Eden; in the pages to follow, William references Byron (22), and further along in the discourse, he makes an admiring reference—“In one of the most brilliant stories from the Romantic school…”—to Schlegel’s Lucinde (139). In the context of Kierkegaard’s debt to Schleiermacher, Richard Crouter persuasively argues that Either/Or in its entirety mirrors Schleiermacher’s Confidential Letters Concerning Schlegel’s “Lucinde,” a response to Schlegel’s Lucinde (Crouter 2007) which utilizes a type of indirect communication.
Compare also the following passage from Works of Love: “Consequently, only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured. This security of eternity casts out all anxiety and makes love perfect, perfectly secured. In that love which has only existence, however confident it is, there is an anxiety, an anxiety about the possibility of change. Such love does not understand that this is anxiety any more than the poet does, because the anxiety is hidden, and the only expression is the flaming craving, whereby it is known that the anxiety is hidden underneath” (Kierkegaard 1995, p. 32–33). The same point is reiterated with regard to despair a few pages later: “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair. Spontaneous love can become unhappy, can reach the point of despair” (ibid., 40). Kierkegaard reflects further, “Despair is a misrelation in a person’s innermost being—no fate or event can penetrate so far and so deep; it can only make manifest that the misrelation—was there. For this reason there is only one security against despair: to undergo the change of eternity through duty’s shall. Anyone who has not undergone this change is in despair” (ibid.).
Westphal (2003) makes apparent an essential detail that others have overlooked: for Kierkegaard both faith and love are second immediacies. Situating Kierkegaard’s notion of second immediacy against the background constituted by the notion of mediated immediacy in Hegel, Westphal engages in discussions of love in Judge William’s writings to the young aesthete and in Works of Love, situating them alongside discussions of faith as a second immediacy. I have followed suit in this section.
I am quoting here from the Lowrie translation (1974, p. 18).
Cf. footnote 15.
In the conversation that follows, Climacus reiterates this point: “Just as important as the truth, and of the two even the more important one, is the mode in which the truth is accepted, and it is of slight help if one gets millions to accept the truth if by the very mode of their acceptance they are transposed into untruth” (Kierkegaard 1992, p. 247).
Kierkegaard’s signed works provide evidence that this correspondence is integral to his own understanding, not merely a view unique to his pseudonyms. See especially “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing,” (Kierkegaard 1993) in which Kierkegaard references several means that God uses to communicate indirectly (repentance, regret, erotic love, trials, and punishments, to name a few), and see also the prayer that opens For Self-Examination (Kierkegaard 1990), in which he depicts God as patiently guiding the individual into subjectivity.
The same is true for Kierkegaard himself. With reference to the mystical tradition, he writes in 1836, “May not Matthew 11:12 properly be interpreted as referring to the mystics (here I am giving this verse a wider meaning, whereby it can apply outside the sphere of theology also), who think that they have a direct relationship to God and consequently will not acknowledge that all men have only an indirect relationship (the Church—in the political domain, the state.)” (Kierkegaard 1975, no. 2794). However, his negative disposition toward the mystical tradition—inferred on the basis of his implicating the mystics as those who take the kingdom by force, causing it to suffer violence—had apparently undergone a paradigmatic shift by 1840. In this year, he writes, “As with certain bird cries, we hear a mystic only in the stillness of the night; for this reason a mystic generally does not have as much significance for his noisy contemporaries as for the listening kindred spirit in the stillness of history after the passage of time” (Kierkegaard 1975, no. 2796). It seems to me that Kierkegaard is here referring to himself as a “listening kindred spirit” who has obtained ears to hear the truth contained in outpourings of mystical fervor. It may even be the case that his own (mystical) experience, which had taken place in the interim separating these two differing appraisals (1838, cf. footnote 9), gave rise to this change in disposition—although another comment from 1840 seems to indicate that his admiration for the mystic is still highly qualified: “Mysticism does not have the patience to wait for God’s revelation” (Kierkegaard 1975, no. 2795). At any rate, by 1850, Kierkegaard apparently holds the mystic in very high esteem: “The system begins with “nothing”; the mystic always ends with “nothing.” The latter is the divine nothing, just as Socrates’ ignorance was devout fear of God, the ignorance with which he did not begin but ended, or which he continually reached” (Kierkegaard 1975, no. 2797).
Take, for example, a line from the final chapter of The Concept of Anxiety: “However, I will not deny that whoever is educated by possibility is exposed to danger, not that of getting into bad company an going astray in various ways as are those educated by the finite, but the danger of a fall, namely, suicide” (Kierkegaard 1981, p. 158–159).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Uche Anizor and Andy Draycott for their comments on very early drafts of this essay, Garrett Bredeson and Mandel Cabrera for their comments during our discussion after I presented an early draft at the Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy in May of 2015, and Elizabeth A. Murray and an anonymous review for their feedback on this draft.
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Rogers, C.D. Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and the problem of first immediacy. Int J Philos Relig 80, 259–278 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9576-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9576-z