Abstract
Is it possible to come to know oneself? Is it possible to overcome the difficulties on one’s own? ‘If self-knowledge is about moral goodness, isn’t there social conditions of its possibility? If so, isn’t your understanding of self-knowledge thereby rejected, for in that case self-knowledge isn’t only (or even primarily) my own business? And if we use the concept of responsibility: it is society that has, at least partly, made me into who I am, hasn’t it, and doesn’t this mean that the responsibility for who I am is never entirely mine?’ Kierkegaard in particular is sometimes criticized in this way, criticized for having a naive idea about the individual1 and her relation to society.2 Being oneself is impossible and there is no such thing as being oneself, it is said; an individual is who she is through society. In particular, language is stressed: my way of thinking about myself is linguistic through and through, and language is not mine but a social phenomenon. The ways of expression handed down to me through society determine what I am, and am not, able to think. Consequently, it is naive to lay a heavy stress on one’s own standpoints and one’s own responsibility for these. Slavoj Žižek writes:
The subject can exonerate himself from responsibility with regard to the symbolic network of tradition which overdetermines his speech; he is justified in claiming: ‘I am not the true author of my statements, since I merely repeat the performative patterns I grew up into — it is the big Other which effectively speaks through me’.3
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Notes
(cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed: En ligefrem Meddelelse, Rapport til Historien, in Bladartikler, der staar i Forhold til “Forfatterskabet”; Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed; Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1964), 18:153).)
See Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 281.
See also Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, in vol. 4 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), § 99
Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, vol. 2, Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft, 6th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 177
Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 153.
Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 93.
However, this interlocutor is not made up, but mainly based on a paper by John Christman (‘Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom’, Ethics 101 (1991): 343–59).
Kierkegaard (Afsluttende uvidenska-belig Efterskrift, 2 vols, Samlede Værker 9–10 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1963), 1:162–3) makes fun of the idea of such criteria by telling a story about a man saying ‘the earth is round’ every time a ball he has put in the tail of his coat bumps him.
Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 195–6.
(See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan der Weise: Ein dramatisches Gedicht in fünf Aufzügen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 101 (my translation)) The ironical meaning of this saying, when read in the context of the play, should however be noted.
For this issue, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit; On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), above all §§ 27, 52, 81, 94, 105, 138, 143, 160, 476.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Wie weit schreibt Sprache das Denken vor?’, in Hermeneutik II, Gesammelte Werke 2 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1986), 206 (my translation).
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 112.
Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 197.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18.
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15.
Robert Kurz, Blutige Vernunft: Essays zur emanzipatorischen Kritik der kapitalistischen Moderne und ihrer westlichen Wert e (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2004), 221 (my translation).
Compare Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 13th ed. (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1914), 7 (my translation): ‘The idea of the future, full of an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fertile than the future itself, and it is therefore one finds more charm in hope than in possession, in dream than in reality.’
Bertolt Brecht, Die Mutter (1933), in vol. 3 of Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 265 (my translation).
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 235–6.
See Karl Marx, ‘Lohn, Preis und Profit’, in vol. 16 of Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), 148; and Marx, Das Kapital, 185, 246–7.)
Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 14.
Martin Buber, Das Problem des Menschen, 7th ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007), 167 (my translation).
See also Martin Buber, Das dialogische Prinzip, 12th ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2012), e.g. pp. 18–19, 41, 121, 276.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004), 127.
Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, in vol. 13 of Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1961), 9 (my translation).
Which, of course, does not mean that what meaning it has for us is a matter of course. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 157–8: ‘Nowhere is the dictum that “every history is a history of the present” more true than in the case of the French Revolution: its historiographical reception has always closely mirrored the twists and turns of political struggles.’
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, in vol. 42 of Marx Engels Werke, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 2005), 127 (my translation).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, in vol. 3 of Marx Engels Werke, 4th ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1969), 26–7 (my translation).
Compare Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, in vol. 8 of Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1960), 115 (my translation): ‘Human beings make their own history, but they do not make it out of free parts, not under circumstances that they have chosen themselves but under circumstances that are immediately found, given and handed down.’
Anselm Jappe, Die Abenteuer der Ware: Für eine neue Wertkritik (Münster: Unrast, 2005), 181 (my translation).
Max Weber, ‘Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 7th ed. ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1988), 167
and Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Werkausgabe 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959), 176.
For this distinction, see Sören Stenlund, Language and Philosophical Problems (London: Routledge, 1990), e.g. pp. 67–8.
For an interesting discussion of this and of what it takes to come to understand what they are talking about, see Jakob Meløe, ‘Words and Object’, in Wittgenstein and Contemporary Theories of Language, ed. Paul Henry and Arild Utaker (Bergen: The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, 1992), 109–41.
See Hugo Strandberg, Escaping My Responsibility: Investigations into the Nature of Morality (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), in particular Chapter 2.
An example of this is to be found in Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, ed. Helmuth Nürnberger (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995).
For this paragraph, see Elizabeth Wolgast, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and Organizations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
See H. C. Andersen, ‘Kejserens nye klæder’, in Samlede Eventyr og Historier (Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 2012), 81.
Brecht’s famous line — ‘Food comes first, after that morality’ (Die Dreigroschenoper (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 69 (my translation)) — is often understood too literally, and remorse for what I have done during times of distress would then make no sense.
(Bertolt Brecht, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder: Eine Chronik aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), scene 11).
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Strandberg, H. (2015). The Individual and Society. In: Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137538222_7
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