Kierkegaard on Evil

Published as ‘Soren Kierkegaard” in D. Hedley, C. Meister and C. Taliaferro (eds) A History of Evil Vol 4 (Routledge, London, 2018) Kierkegaard on Evil Anthony Rudd Chapter Summary: The nineteenth Century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard developed an “existential” style of philosophising which emphasised the importance of understanding ethical and religious concepts in the context of ethical and religious practice. He understood this to involve, for each of us, a necessarily first-personal reflection on the ways in which we make evaluative sense of our lives. His underlying assumption is both Christian and Platonic; we have a natural attunement to an objective and transcendent Good, which we cannot help desiring, but also are deeply inclined to flee from. Kierkegaard distinguishes a variety of “aesthetic”, “ethical” and “religious” ways of life. In the aesthetic life, one tries to evade evaluating one’s actions as good or evil. In the ethical, the struggle for goodness over evil is taken on as a humanly possible (as well as mandatory) task. In the religious, one is confronted by one’s inability to live properly for the good by one’s own power, and by the need to choose between opening oneself to divine grace, or shutting oneself off from the good in “demonic” self-enclosure. I: Introduction Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) was a Danish philosopher and religious writer. Generally neglected in his lifetime, he came to have a considerable impact on 20th century thought, and his work continues to be at the centre of lively debates in both the Anglo-American and the Continental philosophical traditions. He has often been described as “the father of existentialism” and, although simplistic, this label does draw attention to Kierkegaard’s central concern to think “existentially”. That is, to consider philosophical and theological questions from the standpoint, not of a detached intellectual spectator, but of a passionate, engaged subject focused on the (necessarily first-personal) question: “how should I live?” His great philosophical hero was Socrates, and he saw himself as a Socratic gadfly for his times. But he also saw his intellectual vocation in specifically Christian terms; his aim, ultimately, was to rescue Christian categories from the realm of pious cliché and restore them to their proper role of confronting individuals with the existential challenge of the gospel. Kierkegaard’s writings can be divided into two broad groups, the “pseudonymous” and the signed. The latter are for the most part direct religious or ethico-religious discourses, written in a quasi-sermonic style. The former – which appeared under a variety of bizarre latinate names – cover a remarkable range of philosophical, theological and literary themes. In most of these works, the “pseudonym” is not simply a false name for Kierkegaard, but designates a fictional character invented by Kierkegaard to be the author of the work in question. This device enabled him to explore issues from a variety of perspectives which he did not himself necessarily share and which, in some cases, he clearly repudiated. Kierkegaard uses this technique to consider three main ways or “stages” of life which he calls the “aesthetic”, the “ethical” and the “religious”, though there are also further distinctions and sub-divisions. Rather than directly confronting his readers with his own point of view, Kierkegaard encourages them to see themselves in the characters he creates, and to be provoked to self-examination by seeing the limits of those characters’ perspectives. The problem of evil is a pervasive theme in Kierkegaard’s writings. He makes a characteristic point of not becoming sidetracked – as he saw it – into speculation about the origin or ultimate purpose of evil. Instead he focuses on how evil is understood and experienced from different perspectives, and on the adequacy or otherwise of those perspectives in dealing with the reality of evil. In what follows I will give an overview of some of his very rich and complex musings on the human experience and understanding of evil, using the headings of the three “stages of life” – aesthetic, ethical and religious. II: Evil from an Aesthetic Point of View What Kierkegaard calls the “aesthetic” way of life is not, as one might suppose, one essentially directed to the enjoyment or art or beauty (though some ‘aesthetic” lives may take that form). It is, fundamentally, life lived without a decisive commitment to ethical values. The basic normative categories for an aesthete (for no one on Kierkegaard’s view lives without some normative categories) will be, for instance, the pleasant and the unpleasant, or the interesting and the boring. There are many types of aesthetic life. Kierkegaard’s fullest portrayal of an aesthete is that of a highly reflective and refined young man known simply as “A”. In Kierkegaard’s first major pseudonymous work, Either /Or, we see A as he expresses (or conceals) himself in the assemblage of essays, notes and journal entries that make up Volume 1; and then as he appears to his older acquaintance, Judge William, who is the author of the letters to A, urging him to take up an ethical attitude to life, that make up Volume 2. “A” is far too sophisticated to find satisfaction in the simple, unselfconscious hedonism of a Don Juan - which he can only enjoy vicariously, through Mozart’s opera – or in the busy routines of the bourgeoisie that he satirizes. What he lives for is not pleasure, let alone “success”, but “the interesting”. One might think that an aesthete would have little or nothing to say on the topic of evil; for an aesthete, as I noted above, is someone who does not evaluate his or her life in terms of good and evil at all. So Judge William says that he isn’t trying to get “A” to choose good over evil, but to “bring you to the point where this choice truly has meaning for you.” (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: II, 168). And the Judge continues, “the question is under what qualifications one will view all existence, and personally live…for the aesthetical is not evil, but the indifferent.” (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: II, 169). The Hongs’ translations of Kierkegaard, from which I am quoting here, use “esthetic” for aesthetic” etc. I have silently corrected them back to “aesthetic”, etc throughout. But, although aesthetes do not think in terms of whether their actions or desires are good or evil, they still cannot help evaluating them in some way. “Good” and “evil” then, can be thought of as referring either more narrowly, to specifically ethical qualities (and their opposites), or more broadly, to whatever qualities one evaluates positively or negatively. Since “A”’s basic term of positive evaluation is “the interesting”, this means that, for him, evil (in the broad sense) essentially takes the form of boredom. In an essay called ‘Rotation of Crops’, he writes “boredom is the root of all evil”. This might seem a fairly trivial account of evil. But behind it lurks a deeply serious perception, brought out in his startling claim that “boredom is the demonic pantheism” (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: I, 290). What can this mean? I think “A”’s vision here is of a world without value: one where nothing is intrinsically good (or evil); where nothing is, therefore, intrinsically more worth doing than anything else; where, therefore, there is (ultimately) no point to anything, no meaning in anything. And if life is in this sense meaningless, then it is, ultimately, boring. “A” is not then referring to the moments of tedium that came and go in all lives, but to the sense of a void at the heart of being that renders all actions equally pointless: Marry and you will regret it. Do not marry and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way…. Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself and you will also regret it. Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way…This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life. (Kierkegaard, 1843a/1987: I, 38) “A” goes on to suggest (using the example of Nero) that the perception of this void, and the attempt to blot out that paralyzing vision by throwing oneself into action – any action –is at the root of much at least of what we would call moral evil. This claim has a real plausibility. Interestingly, Camus suggests that Caligula’s crazy and arbitrary tyranny stemmed from his perception of the absurdity of existence; though in this case, to his willingness to dwell in that absurdity rather than to try and escape it. See Camus (1984). ”A”’s nihilistic vision has, of course, been reiterated by modern intellectuals from Schopenhauer to Sartre, Beckett and beyond. But “A”’s response to it – or the response he tries to muster to it –is more like that of postmodernism. If below the surface of life there is nothing but void, then, instead of agonising over our situation, we should learn to skim lightly over the surface, amusing ourselves with the ephemeral and pointless, celebrating them (briefly) for being just that. Hence he recommends that we abandon hope (which ties us to expectations of the future) and memory (which ties us to a sense of a significant past); avoid friendship, marriage, career – in short all the “ground projects” or commitments that we would normally think of as giving life meaning. But for “A”, there is no meaning they can have, and they serve to tie us down, make it impossible for us to “knock about according to whim”, (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: I, 297) finding amusement in ever new things. “Arbitrariness”, “A” advises us, Is the whole secret. It is popularly believed that there is no art to being arbitrary, and yet it takes profound study to be arbitrary in such a way that a person does not run wild in it but himself has pleasure in it. ….One sees the middle of a play; one reads the third section of a book. One thereby has enjoyment quite different from what the author so kindly intended. (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: I, 299) One distracts oneself from the meaninglessness of life by mocking and upturning the pathetic attempts to create a false impression of meaning. A somewhat different strategy is adopted by Johnanes the Seducer, the protagonist of the concluding item in Vol 1 of Either/Or, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ (who may himself be a fictional character created by “A”). He is not primarily a sensualist, but someone dedicated to manipulating those around him so as to create piquant and aesthetically pleasing situations. He does not delight in arbitrariness, but in the carrying through of elaborate schemes of seduction. In so doing, he ignores any ethical considerations, but seems to hold himself to standards of aesthetic appropriateness. He regards himself as an artist, and the people around him are his raw material. But his cold-blooded manipulativeness would have to be judged ethically as evil. For from an ethical perspective, the refusal to judge in terms of good and evil cannot simply be considered as “neutrality” but as itself evil. The ethical cannot consider itself to be simply one option amongst others; a way to think about one’s life if that is what happens to appeal. (That would be an aesthetic way to think about ethics, not an ethical one.) So the aesthete must be considered by an ethicist, not as innocently outside, or ignorant of, the ethical, but as deliberately defiant of it. This is something that the aesthete is likely to be protectively self-deceived about. But to the extent that someone consciously considers ethical standards, and then refuses to live in accordance with them, that person is within the ethical sphere, however unhappily. II. Evil From an Ethical Perspective Judge William, as we have already seen, defines the ethical way of life as one based on the commitment to evaluating in terms of the distinction between good and evil. The fundamental, the overriding goal of an ethical life is not the pleasant or the interesting, but the good. This certainly does not mean that aesthetic concerns are given no weight in the ethical life; the Judge in fact argues at some length that the ethical life is in the end actually more pleasant, more interesting than the aesthetic. There is a strong Aristotelian element in the Judge’s ethical thinking, a concern to present the ethical life as one of fulfillment, in which the potentialities of ones being are properly realised. However, although the ethical is, in general, a better way to get even the goods that the aesthete values, it cannot simply be a means to those ends. The ethical good takes up those lesser goods into a richer notion of fulfillment, and, at times, the lesser goods may have to be sacrificed for the sake of the ethical good. Given this account, one might suppose that the ethical is primarily the sphere of conflict between the good and the evil, the struggle to do good. In fact, we get little sense of this in Judge William, who mostly presents the ethical as an achieved state of living in the light of the good. As we noted above, he says he is writing in order to bring “A” to the point of seeing the choice between good and evil as significant for him. And he continues: “As soon as a person can be brought to stand at the crossroads in such a way that there is no way out for him except to choose, he will choose the right thing.” (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: II, 169) There is, therefore, a great optimism in the Judge’s position. If one really sees what the good is, if one is faced with a stark choice between good and evil, one will choose the good. This is really a version of what Kierkegaard in a later work called the “Socratic” view: that sin is ignorance and that one who really appreciates the good for what it is, will inevitably be drawn to it. (See Kierkegaard 1849/1980: 87-96) Consistently, then, the Judge rejects the Kantian notion of radical evil, and with it – although he is a respectable churchgoer - the Christian notion of original sin. (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: II, 174, 175) Hence the Judge’s main aim is to push “A” into making a decisive choice; to snap him out of his habits of evasion and procrastination. From the Judge’s perspective, A is not looking at the Good clearly enough because, at some level of consciousness, he knows that it will impose claims on him that he is frightened of. So he makes a point of not getting those claims clearly in his vision. But of course, he needs to avoid consciously recognising that this is what he is doing; hence, his real problem is self-deception. See John Davenport’s discussion of “A”s state as one of “aesthetic bad faith”: Davenport 2001, 92-7. In a sense then, the Judge does not really deal with the question of evil. And, indeed, it would certainly seem excessive to describe “A” as evil (though the term could well be applied to Johannes the Seducer.) “A”’s problem, from the Judge’s perspective, is not that he is wicked or depraved, but that he is frittering his life and his talents away. He refuses to get a stable job, marry, settle down; by so doing, he refuses to enter into the network of meaningful social and personal relationships and projects that would give his life a sense of purpose and direction, and give him a clear identity, a clear sense of self. For, Judge William insists, it is only with the decisive choice to live in the light of the Good that it becomes possible to make the serious binding commitments that gives one’s life a shape. And it is in making that decisive choice that one, in a sense, first really becomes a self; not in the sense of making up ones character and personality ex nihilo, but in the sense of consciously taking responsibility for shaping one’s character in the light of a binding conception of the good: The self has not existed before, because it came into existence through the choice, and yet it has existed, for it was indeed ‘himself’...The choice here makes two dialectical movements simultaneously - that which is chosen does not exist and comes into existence through the choice - and that which is chosen exists, otherwise it was not a choice… If what I chose did not exist...then I did not choose - then I created. But I do not create myself - I choose myself. (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: II, 215) The Judge does consider the possibility that one might become a self by consciously willing to commit to certain goals or projects and to shape one’s life around their pursuit - but without being directed by any overriding sense of the good. The Judge imagines a young Romantic saying “’I have a natural capacity to be a Don Juan, a Faust, a robber chief; I will now train this natural capacity, for aesthetic earnestness demands that I become something specific.’” (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: II, 225) However, as the examples suggest, he is not constrained in the choice of such a project by any ethical considerations. But if these projects are not being undertaken because they are good, but simply because I happen to have (for now) a talent, or a predilection for them, then they cannot found a stable sense of self; for I would have no reason not to repudiate them in favour of some other project should my desires happen to change. Against such “aesthetic earnestness” the Judge sternly insists that “if he finds more of evil in him than of good, this still does not mean that it is the evil that is to advance, but it means that it is the evil that is to recede and the good that is to advance.” (Kierkegaard 1843a/1987: II, 226) Here, again, we have a hint that the ethical life may be a hard struggle against an evil deeply rooted in the would-be ethical person. But the overall tone of the Judge’s work is positive and optimistic. (Many critics have found the Judge, for all his ethical passion and psychological insight, more than a little complacent.) If “A” can pull himself together and choose the good, then a happy life of both ethical fulfillment and aesthetic pleasure stands before him. For the Judge, the real enemy of the ethical life is not our tendency to evil, but a certain existential laziness, a failure of willpower to seriously embrace the good and the meaningful projects that the choice of the good makes possible. But this is an assumption that Kierkegaard himself will go on to call into doubt. III. Anxiety, Sin and the Demonic; Problems on the Frontier of Ethics and Religion. That things are not quite as straightforward as the Judge would like to think is already suggested in Either/Or, the final item in which is a sermon by a pastor friend of the Judge, on the theme that “In relation to God, we are always in the wrong.” Neither of these two elements – God, and our always being in the wrong – really plays a role in Judge William’s thinking. It is true that the Judge’s ethics is not an explicitly atheistic one. But although he refers to God quite frequently, he seems to treat Him as merely underwriting a moral scheme that is essentially complete without Him. But while many of us may seem to be doing quite well morally when judged against the conventional ethical standards of our society (Hegelian sittlickheit), things may look less impressive when we are judged against the absolute standard that God represents. This worry, that we may, after all, be “radically evil” – i.e. held to absolute standards, which are genuinely binding on us but which we are unable to live up to - is pursued by Kierkegaard in a number of works, both signed and pseudonymous, that followed Either/Or. I shall focus in this section on Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety. Fear and Trembling is an extended meditation on the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. Its pseudonymous author, Johannes de silentio, uses the story to argue that ethics, committed as it is to universality, cannot make sense of the idea that there could be supra or even apparently anti-ethical obligations arising from an individual’s personal relationship with God. But what I want to concentrate on here is the long and apparently digressive final section of the book (“Problema III”) where Johannes does introduce the concepts of sin and the demonic. These appear as posing a further problem for a purely ethical view. “An ethics that ignores sin is a completely futile discipline, but if it affirms sin, then it has eo ipso exceeded itself.” (Kierkegaard 1843b/1983: 98-9). Ethics has to assume that those who are subject to its laws are capable of obeying them. For “it is a contradiction on the part of the universal to want to demand itself from a person who lacks the sine qua non [indispensable condition]”. (Kierkegaard 1843b/1983: 98). Johannes does not venture into the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which none of us can (without the assistance of divine grace) live up to the standards of the ethical. He considers instead certain exceptional characters (Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III, Sarah in the Biblical story of Sarah and Tobias, Faust) who somehow find themselves unable to fit into the comfortable social networks celebrated by Judge William. Natures such as Gloucester’s cannot be saved by mediating them into an idea of society. Ethics actually only makes sport of them…Natures such as these are basically in the paradox, and they are by no means more imperfect than other people, except that they are either lost in the demonic paradox or saved in the divine paradox. (Kierkegaard 1843b/1983:106) Johannes uses “demonic” in two senses. In one sense “The demonic, for which the individual himself has no guilt, has its beginning in his originally being set outside the universal by nature or by a historical situation.” (Kierkegaard 1843b/1983:106). (Such as Gloucester’s deformity.) In the other sense, the demonic refers to the choice by which someone such as Gloucester responds to his social alienation by taking revenge on society. If a “demonic” (in the first sense) person refuses the temptation to become demonic in the second sense, then he or she, unable to fit into society, can only be saved by embracing the “divine paradox”. This means bypassing “the universal” and becoming “the single individual [who] stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.” (Kierkegaard 1843b/1983: 111). A similar issue is raised in the case of an individual who has become guilty; according to Johannes, “when the single individual by his guilt has come outside the universal, he can return only by virtue of having come as the single individual into an absolute relation to the absolute.” (Kierkegaard 1843b/1983: 98). Ordinary social morality – and law - may allow transgressors to make some sort of restitution and return to the world of ordinary social relations. But if we take ethics not just as a useful practical means of ensuring social stability, but as something fundamental – and as categorically obligating – things become more difficult. We need to consider, not just the commission of this or that bad act, but the character of the agent who performs those acts. As Kant and Aristotle would agree, if I do bad things, it is because there is something bad about me. In Kant’s terms, I have adopted a maxim to set the moral law aside when it suits me. (Kant, 1794/1960: 31-2) But if my experience of the moral life leaves me with the realisation that there is a radical evil present in me, then, unless there is something more than just morality to turn to, I will fall into despair. As Luther had always insisted, morality (“the law”) only brings me to the knowledge that I cannot perform what I nonetheless must acknowledge as unavoidable requirements. These themes are explored more fully in The Concept of Anxiety, published the year after Fear and Trembling. It is also a pseudonymous work, but the pseudonym “Vigilius Haufniensis” does seem to function more as a pseudonym in the usual sense – a mask for Kierkegaard – than as a fictitious character with a distinct point of view of his own. The notion of original – or “hereditary” - sin becomes central in this work. Vigilius, like Johannes de silentio, notes that “Sin…belongs to ethics only insofar as upon this concept it is shipwrecked”. (Kierkegaard 1844/1980:17-18). He spells this out further: “In the struggle to actualize the task of ethics, sin shows itself not as something accidental to the accidental individual, but as something that withdraws deeper and deeper as a deeper and deeper presupposition.” (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 19) It is, moreover, “a presupposition that goes beyond the individual.” (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 19) The inability to succeed comfortably in the ethical life, which had been presented in Fear and Trembling as an “accidental” fact about some individuals such as Gloucester, now appears as universally true of humanity. And someone like Judge William, who ignores or denies that truth, stands accused of self-deception. Only theology – “dogmatics” - can make sense of our paradoxical situation and offer us any hope of transcending it. But even dogmatics doesn’t really explain original sin, which remains a mystery; it can at best “explain it by presupposing it”. (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 20) Once sin is presupposed, a “second ethics” becomes possible, which “can deal with [sin’s] manifestations” but cannot explain its “coming into existence”. (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 21) Any attempt to explain sin intellectually would turn it into something to be studied objectively, and thus its reality would slip through the objective inquirer’s fingers. One only grasps the reality of sin first-personally, as something one needs, oneself, to struggle against. When sin is treated in a place other than its own…the concept is altered and thereby the mood that properly corresponds to the correct concept is also disturbed….Sin does not properly belong in any science, but it is the subject of the sermon, in which the single individual speaks as the single individual to the single individual. (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 14, 16) The closest “science” can come to understanding sin is when psychology Which was for Kierkegaard and his contemporaries a philosophical discipline and certainly not the alleged natural science which operates under the same name now. investigates what it is about the constitution of human nature that makes sin possible. This does not explain sin itself, for Vigilius is careful to note that “wanting to make the possibility of sin its actuality is revolting to ethics”. (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 22). Nonetheless, “This abiding something out of which sin constantly arises, not by necessity…but by freedom – this abiding something, this predisposing presupposition, sin’s real possibility, is a subject of interest for psychology.” (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 21) The “something” in question is anxiety; which is itself the obscure recognition of my freedom – and the fact that I could use that freedom to turn to what is evil as well as what is good. Vigilius is careful to distinguish anxiety from fear; fear refers “to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility” (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 42). Anxiety is the recognition that my being is not simply something fixed and determinate; it is (to some extent) up to me what I become. But this sense of possibility is not just the sense that I have an array of morally neutral options open to me; it is the recognition that I have the possibility of both good and evil open to me. This is true even in a state of innocence, when one doesn’t have a clearly articulate notion of what good and evil are. So even Adam before the Fall had the obscure, unformulated sense that his choices could be for better or worse. “[A]nxiety is the dizziness of freedom…in anxiety there is the selfish infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a choice but ensnaringly disquiets with its sweet anxiousness.” (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 61) This anxiety does not, Vigilius reiterates, explain sin – nothing can do that – but sets the scene for its emergence. “Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment, everything is changed and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty.” (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 61) But anxiety persists once innocence has been lost, although it now has a more determinate sense of its object as the possibility of choosing either good or evil. (See Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 111-12). Vigilius analyses two forms of this more determinate anxiety. The first is, understandably enough, anxiety about evil: “No matter how far an individual has sunk, he can sink still deeper, and this ‘can’ is the object of anxiety.” (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 113). The second is anxiety about the good, and in this connection Vigilius takes up Johannes de silentio’s term, “the demonic”. The demonic is anxiety about the good. In innocence, freedom was not posited as freedom; its possibility was anxiety in the individual. In the demonic, the relation is reversed. Freedom is posited as unfreedom, because freedom is lost. Here again, freedom’s possibility is anxiety…The demonic is unfreedom that wants to close itself off. This, however, is and remains an impossibility. It always retains a relation…and anxiety at once manifests itself in the moment of contact [with the good.] (Kierkegaard 1844/1980: 123) In innocence, the explicit notion of evil is lacking and so is the notion of good as something to be chosen against evil. Therefore the concept of freedom as the power to choose between good and evil is lacking also. But the demonic nature is one which, having chosen evil, wants to shut itself off from the possibility of the good, to simply relax into a despairing consciousness of itself as evil through and through. The demonic is the desire to think of oneself as no longer free to choose the good. In this way, one hopes to escape from the inner conflict between good and evil, the sense that one can, however painfully, still struggle towards the good. (As an exhausted traveler, lost in the snow, may feel it much easier to stay curled up and freeze to death, rather than make the agonizing effort to stand up and struggle towards safety.) But, according to Vigilius, freedom, and the sense for the good, never can be lost. The demoniac is in a state of self-deception; the anxiety he or she feels when confronted with the possibility of goodness is an awareness, kept deliberately inchoate, of what he or she is repressing; the continuing real possibility of turning to the good. IV: Sin and Evil in Kierkegaard’s Later Works This understanding of evil as a willed (though often unconscious) defiance of the good which we do all at some level recognize, is pervasively present in Kierkegaard’s later works. In an important non-pseudonymous text, Purity of Heart, This is the title by which the work has come to be widely known. More precisely it is; ‘An Occasional Discourse: On the Occasion of a Confession, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing’ and is the first part of a longer work, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. (Kierkegaard 1847/1993) he writes: “just as a person, despite all his defiance, does not have the power to tear himself away completely from the good, because it is the stronger, he also does not even have the power to will it completely.” (Kierkegaard 1847/1993: 33) This lies behind the main concern of Purity of Heart; the critique of “double-mindedness”. Someone who wills what is evil; or who wills the good only to the extent that it does not interfere with his or her happiness; or who wills the good for the sake of a reward or through fear of punishment; all these characters are internally divided, since none of them can escape a longing, however deeply they may have buried it, for the good in its purity. And so all of them (all of us) must, to some extent, desire to will the good without qualification and for its own sake; There is nothing theoretically contradictory about the state of affairs in which someone desires to will the Good “without qualification” but has that desire only “to some extent”. This is a logically possible state of affairs, and very often an actual one, for it is possible to have a desire do what is unqualifiedly good, even at the cost of one’s own happiness, or even if one is punished rather than rewarded for doing so; and still allow that desire to be overpowered by one’s will to personal happiness But to be such a person is to be in a practically contradictory (double-minded) state of mind. and this must conflict with their (our) opposing desire to deny the good, or to embrace it only with qualification. Someone who wills to do good only insofar as it doesn’t interfere with his or her personal happiness is internally divided, since this person cannot avoid also desiring to do what is good whether or not it is compatible with his or her personal happiness. Only the person whose will is to do what is good whatever the consequences, can avoid this double-mindedness. One strategy Kierkegaard considers for avoiding this conclusion is akin to what Judge William called “earnest” aestheticism. This is the attempt to unify one’s life by choosing one overriding goal, one thing to will – but without regard to the distinction between good and evil. Kierkegaard imagines a proto-Nietzschean character saying “’Without willing one thing, a person’s life becomes wretched mediocrity and misery. He must will one thing, regardless of whether it is good or evil; he must will one thing – therein lies a person’s greatness.’” (Kierkegaard 1847/1993: 31-2) Kierkegaard responds that however desperately he seems to will one thing, such a person is nevertheless double-minded….There is a power that constrains him; he cannot tear himself loose from it; indeed, he cannot even quite will it….if you were to meet him in what he himself would call a weak moment (alas, what you might call a better moment) when his dizziness had passed for a moment and he felt an anguished longing for the good…then you would discover that he had two wills, and his anguished double-mindedness. (Kierkegaard 1847/1993: 32-3) So if one subordinates the good to one’s happiness, one will be divided, since one can never wholly cease to desire the good absolutely. But, it might seem, the opposite problem also arises; for someone who was committed without qualification to the Good would remain internally conflicted insofar as he or she retained a desire for the personal happiness which might have to be sacrificed for the sake of the Good. Perhaps this problem could be solved – at a heavy cost - if we were to say that the person who is truly committed to the Good will simply renounce any desire for personal happiness; but Kierkegaard is not advocating a Stoicism of this sort. For Kierkegaard’s view of Stoicism, see Furtak 2010. For him, the single-minded or pure-hearted person will continue to desire personal happiness, but that desire will not have any motivational force when it comes into conflict with doing the good. The person fully committed to the good may regret the circumstances which forced him or her to choose between happiness and the good, but will feel neither hesitation nor ambivalence in opting for the good. (It should perhaps be said that Kierkegaard does not suggest that many people manage to live up to this demanding standard; and he certainly wanted to avoid giving anyone the impression that he did so personally.) Kierkegaard sums up his understanding of sin and evil in a rigorous and compressed form in one of his last major works, The Sickness Unto Death. This is technically a pseudonymous work, being ascribed to ‘Anti-Climacus’. But the pseudonym was only added to the work just prior to publication, about a year after Kierkegaard had originally written it. Its use apparently reflected Kierkegaard’s sense that he did not personally live up to the rigorous Christian ideals presented in the book, but represented no disagreement with those ideals. There he defines the self as a synthesis of polarities – or, rather, as a continual activity of synthesising the elements of those polarities: finitude and infinitude; temporality and eternity; necessity and possibility. One can say that the first element in each pair stands for our limitations and the second for our capacity to transcend those limitations. But both elements are needed if we are to be fully selves. As it stands, few, if any, of us are. Full selfhood then is an ideal, a telos to be realized. “Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.” (Kierkegaard 1849/1980: 13). One might put the point a little less dramatically by saying that we are selves only up to a certain point. But to become fully a self is not simply a natural developmental process. Each of us has a responsibility at any moment to be a self, and our failure to be selves is not a fate imposed on us from outside, but a culpable failure on our part to will selfhood deeply enough. We do all engage in the activity of synthesising the polarities, but half-heartedly or inadequately; we give more weight to one factor that the other, and as a result become unbalanced. See Kierkegaard’s psychologically astute sketches of what happens when e.g. possibility outstrips necessity or vice versa – Kierkegaard 1849/1980: 29-42 Furthermore, the human self “has been established by another [i.e. God]” and is therefore “a derived, established relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another.” (Kierkegaard 1849/1980: 13-14) The misrelation to oneself arises from a misrelation to God and can only in the end be healed by a transformation in the relation to God. “The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.” (Kierkegaard 1849/1980: 14). Hence the failure to be fully a self can come about in two ways – either by recognizing the need to establish ones selfhood through relating to God, but not willing that strongly enough; or through trying to will to be a self on one’s own terms, without relation to God. In either case, though, the state of inner misrelation, the disequilibrium between the elements (of finitude/infinitude etc) noted above is, considered psychologically, despair; and, considered theologically, sin. For a more detailed overview of Kierkegaard’s account of the self, see Rudd 2012: 38-49. Sin – and the visible evil that the sinner may (but needn’t necessarily) do to others in the outer world – is ultimately an internal disharmony. It can only be resolved by the self as a whole relating to God, who is the Good to which each self (or potential self) is teleologically directed; and for which it has, therefore (as we saw above) an obscure but ineradicable longing. The self can only unify itself by relating itself properly to God as its final end. This view has deep roots, not only in Christianity but in the Platonic tradition. For a reading of Kierkegaard as (in key aspects) a Platonist, see Rudd 2012: 43-7, 75-6, 141-6, 164-7, 170, 172-3 (And of course in the very rich and extensive tradition of Christian Platonism.) Despite this, and despite his own deep admiration for Socrates, Kierkegaard makes a nuanced but stern critique of what he calls “the Socratic definition of sin”, according to which no one who really knows the good can act against it, and that therefore, “sin is ignorance”. (Kierkegaard 1849/1980: 87). Kierkegaard points out that “if sin is ignorance, then sin really does not exist, for sin is indeed consciousness.” (Kierkegaard, 1849/1980: 89). What Socrates failed to understand was the role of “will, defiance” in evil-doing. “The intellectuality of the Greeks was too happy, too naïve, too aesthetic, too ironic, too witty – too sinful – to grasp that anyone could knowingly not do the good or knowingly, knowing what is right, do wrong.” (Kierkegaard 1849/1980: 90). Against the Greek view (or his version of it I argue elsewhere that Plato did not hold that evil was simply a matter of ignorance – see Rudd 2012: 50.) Kierkegaard insists that, even if it is in a sense true that sin is ignorance, that ignorance is itself a willed state. Hence, sinfulness resides “in a person’s efforts to obscure his knowing.” (Kierkegaard, 1849/1980: 88) We all have a knowledge of the Good, but we are frightened by the demands that it makes on us, and so we act to repress that knowledge. His investigation of this theme makes Kierkegaard one of the major modern pioneers of the psychology of the unconscious – though for him we tend, not to repress the good altogether, but to keep our knowledge of the good and what it demands just out of focus, or to obscure it with less demanding simulacra: If willing does not agree with what is known (i.e. the demands made by the good in this situation] then it does not necessarily follow that willing goes ahead and does the opposite…rather, willing allows some time to elapse, an interim called: “We shall look at it tomorrow.” During all this, knowing becomes more and more obscure and the lower nature gains the upper hand more and more; for, alas, the good must be done immediately, as soon as it is known…And when knowing has become duly obscured, knowing and willing can better understand one another; eventually they agree completely, for now knowing has come over to the side of willing…(Kierkegaard 1849/1980: 94). The Christian view of sin, he concludes, is one that the (fallen) human mind finds too offensive to grasp. Hence it is not something that can be worked out philosophically or empirically: “man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right.” (Kierkegaard, 1849/1980: 95). This unwillingness to do what we know is right is itself grounded in our unwillingness to be as we know we should be. That is the root of human evil; and it remains ultimately mysterious. It can be articulated theologically, in the doctrine of original sin. But – as the Concept of Anxiety had noted – this doctrine describes our situation to us, without really explaining it. And this is as it should be; for the correct attitude to sin and evil is to struggle against it, not to stand back and look for explanations of how it came to be. Further Reading Beabout, G. 1996. Freedom and its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair. Marquette University Press. Davenport, J. & Rudd, A. (eds) 2001. Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. Open Court, Chicago Evans, C. S. 2009. Kierkegaard: an Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Furtack, R. 2005. Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN Giles, J. (ed) 2000. Kierkegaard on Freedom. Palgrave, Basingstoke Lippitt, J. 2003. Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’. Routledge Hannay, A & Marino, G. (eds) 1998. The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kierkegaard, S. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans H. and E. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. Kosch, M. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard. Oxford University Press, Oxford Mooney, E. 1996. Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard's Moral-Religious Psychology From Either/Or to Sickness Unto Death. Routledge, London. Perkins, R (ed) 1985. International Kierkegaard Commentary Vol 8: "The Concept of Anxiety” (Mercer University Press, Macon GA. Perkins, R (ed) 2003. International Kierkegaard Commentary Vol 19: "The Sickness Unto Death” (Mercer University Press, Macon GA. Rudd, A. 1993. Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Tanner, J. 1992. Anxiety in Eden: a Kierkegaardian reading of ‘Paradise Lost’. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Related Essays References That Will be Consolidated into One Bibliography at the End of Volume III Camus, A. (1984) Caligula, in his Caligula and Other Plays. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. Davenport, J. 2001. ‘The Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Choice Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical; A Response to MacIntyre’, in Davenport, J. & Rudd, A. (eds) Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. Open Court, Chicago Furtak, R. 2010. ‘The Stoics: Kierkegaard on the Passion for Apathy’ in J. Stewart and K. Nun (eds) Kierkegaard and the Greek World: Aristotle and Other Greek Authors (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol 2, Tome II. Ashgate, London.) Kant, I. 1794/1960. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans T. Greene and H. Hudson. Harper and Row. New York Kierkegaard, S. 1843a/1987. Either/Or: a Fragment of Life, trans H. and E. Hong, 2 volumes, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. --1843b/1983. Fear and Trembling, trans H. and E. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. --1844/1980. The Concept of Anxiety, trans R. Thompte, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. --1847/1993. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans H. and E. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. --1849/1980. The Sickness Unto Death, trans H. and E. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. Rudd, A, 2012. Self, Value and Narrative: a Kierkegaardian Approach. Oxford University Press, Oxford. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 12