Controverting Kierkegaard (Selected Works of K.E. Logstrup) 0198874766, 9780198874768

Table of contents :
Cover
Controverting Kierkegaard
Copyright
Contents
Translators’ Preface
Acknowledgements
A Chronology of Løgstrup’s Life and Works
Introduction
1. Controverting Kierkegaard
2. Background and Context
2.1 Tidehverv: Luther, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Danish Protestantism
2.2 Løgstrup, Tidehverv, and Kierkegaard
3. Controverting Kierkegaard: The Main Themes of the Book
3.1 Part I The Historical Jesus, and Løgstrup’s Concepts of Ontology and Revelation
3.2 Part II Suffering
3.3 Part III The Infinite Movement and the Sovereign Expressions of Life
3.4 Part IV Nihilism and Platonism
Controverting Kierkegaard
German Foreword
Foreword
Part I. Christianity without the Historical Jesus
1. The Christian Message Is Derived from Paradoxicality, and Jesus’s Proclamation and Works Are Not Integral to Christianity
2. The Question of the Occasion for Faith According to Kierkegaard
(a) Paradoxicality Makes Pressing the Question of the Occasion for Faith
(b) The Question of the Occasion for Faith and the Attempt to Legitimize Faith
(c) The Answer to the Question of the Occasion for Faith
3. The Approximation Problem
4. An Alternative to Kierkegaard’s View
5. The Paradoxicality
6. The Interpretation of the Crucifixion
7. Following Christ
Part II. The Sacrifice
1. Suffering
(a) Christianity’s Interpretation of Suffering
(b) The Self-Imposed Martyrdom
(c) The Alternative to Kierkegaard
(d) Jaspers’ Non-Christian Version of Kierkegaard’s Specifically Christian Suffering
(e) Demand and Salvation
2. Christianity and the Naturally Generated and Culturally Formed Communities
(a) Self-Denial and Martyrdom
(b) The Extensive vs Intensive Understanding of Evil
(c) A-Cosmic Ethics of Love
(d) Suffering and Misfortune
(e) The Admission
Part III. The Movement of Infinity
1. The Infinite Movement of Resignation
2. Taking over Concrete Existence
3. The Abstract and Negative Self
4. Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Self-Enclosedness
(a) Sartre’s Le diable et le bon dieu
(b) Drama of Ideas and Drama of Characters
(c) Kierkegaard Illustrated through Sartre, Sartre Interpreted through Kierkegaard
(d) The Sovereign Expressions of Life
5. The Absolute Good
6. Conformity and the Collision between Faith in God and the Neighbour
7. The Sovereign Expressions of Life and the Question of the Freedom or Bondage of the Will
8. Taking over the Situation through the Sovereign Expressions of Life
9. How the Ethical Life of the People Is Lost, Conformism, and How the Relation of Spirit Is Doubled
10. Morality is the Provision of Substitute Motives for Substitute Actions
11. The Levelling Down of Finitude
12. Consciousness of Guilt
(a) Eternity’s Vertical Understanding of Guilt
(b) Time’s Horizontal Understanding of Guilt
13. Action and Attitude of Mind
Part IV. Nothingness
1. Knowledge as It Is Understood in Transcendental Philosophy, and Existence
2. The Synthesis between Infinity and Finitude, between Eternity and Temporality
3. The Doubling of the Relation of Spirit
4. Nothingness and Action
5. Knowledge and Reflection
Editors’ Notes
German Foreword
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Select Bibliography
Primary texts in English
Primary Texts in Danish and German
Further reading
Index

Citation preview

K. E. Løgstrup: Controverting Kierkegaard

Selected Works of K. E. Løgstrup Series editors: Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation The Ethical Demand Controverting Kierkegaard Ethical Concepts and Problems

K. E. Løgstrup Controverting Kierkegaard

Translated by Hans Fink and Kees Van Kooten Niekerk Introduced by Bjørn Rabjerg, with notes by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the Estate of K. E. Løgstrup 1971 Translation © Hans Fink and Kees van Kooten Niekerk 2023 Introduction © Bjørn Rabjerg 2023 Editorial notes © Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932499 ISBN 978–0–19–887476–8 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198874768.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents Translators’ Preface Acknowledgements A Chronology of Løgstrup’s Life and Works Introduction Bjørn Rabjerg

vii xv xvii xix

Controverting Kierkegaard

lxiii

German Foreword Foreword

Part I: Christianity without the Historical Jesus 1. The Christian Message Is Derived from Paradoxicality, and Jesus’s Proclamation and Works Are Not Integral to Christianity 2. The Question of the Occasion for Faith According to Kierkegaard a. Paradoxicality Makes Pressing the Question of the Occasion for Faith b. The Question of the Occasion for Faith and the Attempt to Legitimize Faith c. The Answer to the Question of the Occasion for Faith 3. The Approximation Problem 4. An Alternative to Kierkegaard’s View 5. The Paradoxicality 6. The Interpretation of the Crucifixion 7. Following Christ

Part II: The Sacrifice 1. Suffering a. Christianity’s Interpretation of Suffering b. The Self-Imposed Martyrdom c. The Alternative to Kierkegaard d. Jaspers’ Non-Christian Version of Kierkegaard’s Specifically Christian Suffering e. Demand and Salvation 2. Christianity and the Naturally Generated and Culturally Formed Communities a. Self-Denial and Martyrdom b. The Extensive vs Intensive Understanding of Evil c. A-Cosmic Ethics of Love d. Suffering and Misfortune e. The Admission

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1 3 3 3 4 9 11 15 21 23 26 26 26 30 31 32 35 39 39 42 43 45 47

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Part III: The Movement of Infinity 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

The Infinite Movement of Resignation Taking over Concrete Existence The Abstract and Negative Self Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Self-Enclosedness a. Sartre’s Le diable et le bon dieu b. Drama of Ideas and Drama of Characters c. Kierkegaard Illustrated through Sartre, Sartre Interpreted through Kierkegaard d. The Sovereign Expressions of Life The Absolute Good Conformity and the Collision between Faith in God and the Neighbour The Sovereign Expressions of Life and the Question of the Freedom or Bondage of the Will Taking over the Situation through the Sovereign Expressions of Life How the Ethical Life of the People Is Lost, Conformism, and How the Relation of Spirit Is Doubled Morality is the Provision of Substitute Motives for Substitute Actions The Levelling Down of Finitude Consciousness of Guilt a. Eternity’s Vertical Understanding of Guilt b. Time’s Horizontal Understanding of Guilt Action and Attitude of Mind

Part IV: Nothingness 1. Knowledge as It Is Understood in Transcendental Philosophy, and Existence 2. The Synthesis between Infinity and Finitude, between Eternity and Temporality 3. The Doubling of the Relation of Spirit 4. Nothingness and Action 5. Knowledge and Reflection

Editors’ Notes Select Bibliography Index

49 49 56 60 62 62 64 67 69 79 83 85 89 92 96 100 105 105 106 108 117 117 121 124 126 133 137 149 153

Translators’ Preface This translation is based on the edition of Opgør med Kierkegaard published by Klim, Aarhus, in 2013. Except for the correction of a few typos, the text of this edition is identical with the original edition published in 1967 by Gyldendal, Copenhagen. In the Klim edition the original references to Kierkegaard’s works have been supplemented with references to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter [Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings], a critical edition published by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997–2013). In our translation, references to Kierkegaard’s Danish works are to this edition, marked as SKS followed by the volume’s number and page number(s), for example SKS 4: 258–9. The German Foreword is a translation of Løgstrup’s foreword to a series of three books entitled Kontroverse um Kierkegaard und Grundtvig [Controversy Concerning Kierkegaard and Grundtvig], edited by Götz Harbsmeier and K. E. Løgstrup. Løgstrup’s foreword was published in the first volume of this series entitled Das Menschliche und das Christliche [Humanity and Christianity]. We were able to base our translation of Part I on a draft by Tom Angier, which has lightened our job considerably. The section that deals with ‘the sovereign expressions of life’ (Part III, 4 (d) ‘The Sovereign Expressions of Life’ to 10. ‘Morality is the Provision of Substitute Motives for Substitute Actions’) had been translated previously by Susan Dew, published in K. E. Løgstrup, Beyond the Ethical Demand. We have benefited greatly from this translation. Yet, we have not merely copied it. Whereas Dew’s translation is free and elegant, we have attempted to keep as close as possible to Løgstrup’s formulations. The main reason is that Løgstrup practised a kind of phenomenology that builds on the specific meaning of words and expressions in everyday language. This suggests that he chose his formulations with great precision, at least with regard to central concepts. Therefore, we have tried to be as consistent as possible in our use of the English words for these concepts. This has the further advantage that there is a substantial consistency in the translation of these concepts across the different volumes in the Oxford University Press series. Our attempt to keep close to Løgstrup’s formulations could easily have resulted in dubious English, were it not for a meticulous linguistic revision

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by the editors. We are greatly indebted to them for this. We are also grateful to Michael Au-Mullaney for his helpful comments on a late draft. In order to enable our translation to be checked against the original, we have included page numbers in square brackets from the new critical edition of the text in Danish: Opgør med Kierkegaard (Aarhus: Klim, 2013). We have followed the practice of the Oxford University Press edition of The Ethical Demand with regard to gendered language. That is to say, except when Løgstrup clearly refers to a man, we have used third-person plural pronouns to refer to individual human beings. As Løgstrup points out in his foreword, Opgør med Kierkegaard is an interpretation and critique of Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and offers an alternative understanding. Løgstrup underpins his interpretation with a large number of quotations from Kierkegaard’s works. We have rendered these quotations on the basis of the standard translation by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, published in Kierkegaard’s Writings in 26 volumes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979–2009). This translation is referred to as KW, followed by volume number and page number(s), for example KW 7: 56–7. References to Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are to Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 7 volumes (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967–78), by volume and page number(s) and abbreviated as JP, for example JP 1: 271–2. In some cases, we have deviated from the translation given by the Hongs, especially when we judged that their version could hamper the understanding of Løgstrup’s use of the quotation. Major deviations are explained in a note. We have also changed the quoted texts into gender neutral language. References to works by Luther in the Introduction and in the Editors’ Notes are first to D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 73 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883–2009) abbreviated as WA, and then to Luther’s Works, American edition, 55 vols. (St Louis and Philadelphia, PA: Concordia and Fortress Press, 1958–86; new series, vols. 56–75, 2009–) abbreviated as LW, by volume number and then page number. When Løgstrup quotes from a Danish text of which there is no English translation, we have just given our own translation. Sometimes he quotes from French or German sources, but then he always gives his own translation into Danish. In these cases, we have translated his translation into English, adapted it to a standard English translation if available, and noted if our translation departs significantly from it. We have followed Danish practice in capitalizing only the first letter in titles of works published in Danish after 1948, but have followed English practice in

 ’ 

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capitalizing all significant words for English titles; and in the Select Bibliography and the Index we have followed the Danish system of putting the special characters ‘æ’, ‘ø’, and ‘å’ at the end of the alphabet, so that for example ‘Luther’ is listed before ‘Løgstrup’. For some of Løgstrup’s central concepts it has been difficult to find English terms that precisely capture their meaning. Therefore, it may be useful to say something about that meaning, as we understand it, and explain why we have translated as we did. to believe/faith (at tro and tro): In a religious context, the Danish verb ‘at tro’ and the corresponding substantive ‘tro’ are the usual translations of pisteuein and pistis in the Greek New Testament. These concepts combine the epistemic notion of regarding something as true with the notion of trust in that which is regarded as true (sc. the Gospel and God/Jesus). In English, the noun pistis is normally translated as ‘faith’. However, in English ‘faith’ has no corresponding verb. This is why the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible usually translates pisteuein as ‘to believe’ (e.g. Rom 3:22). It would be natural to follow this translation and render ‘at tro’ as ‘to believe’. The question arises, however, if the specific meaning of ‘at tro’ does not risk getting lost, because ‘to believe’ is normally understood in a merely epistemic sense. To avoid this misunderstanding an alternative option could be ‘to have faith’. Yet this translation is not satisfactory, because it misses the idea of the verb ‘at tro’ as an act, not as something you have. This is important for the way it is understood in both Kierkegaard and Løgstrup. To maintain its character as an act we have decided to take over common theological usage and translate the verb ‘at tro’, when used in a clearly religious context, as ‘to believe’. Finally, we have translated ‘den troende’ (the believing person) as ‘the believer’ when we judged that the emphasis lay on the epistemic notion, and as ‘the faithful’ when we judged that the emphasis lay on the notion of trust. bourgeois/bourgeois life (spidsborger/spidsborgerlighed): The Danish terms (sometimes translated as philistine/philistinism) are clearly pejorative and express contempt for the narrowness of mind taken to be characteristic of citizens who are preoccupied with their own self-righteous conception of what is right and wrong. Spidsborgerlighed can thus be found in all social classes. compassion (barmhjertighed): Løgstrup’s use of this word is closely connected to the biblical story of The Good Samaritan, in Danish: Den

x

 ’  barmhjertige samaritaner (Luke 10:37). ‘Barmhjertighed’ is the Danish translation of Greek eleos which Luther translated as ‘Barmherzigkeit’, and which traditionally in English has been translated as ‘mercy’. However, the problem with ‘mercy’ is that it is primarily shown when sparing someone from punishment; but this does not correspond with Løgstrup’s understanding of the Samaritan story, which instead involves the desire to relieve other people’s suffering and acting accordingly. For this reason, ‘compassion’ is arguably a more suitable translation than ‘mercy’, although previously in Løgstrup literature and translations, ‘mercy’ has been used as the preferred translation, for example when translating the sovereign expression of life ‘barmhjertighed’. A worry could be that ‘compassion’ sounds too passive and thus, unlike mercy, is more of a merely emotional state; but it is of crucial importance to both the Samaritan story and to Løgstrup’s use of ‘barmhjertighed’ that action is also involved: ‘Go, and do likewise’, as Jesus replies. In this respect, Løgstrup draws a distinction between ‘medlidenhed’, which is merely passive (and so more like ‘sympathy’ or ‘fellow-feeling’), and ‘barmhjertighed’, which involves action. However, in English ‘compassion’ also usually involves acting, so a person who merely felt compassion but did not act would arguably not count as compassionate. Therefore, Løgstrup’s important distinction is captured by the use of ‘compassion’ rather than ‘mercy’, ‘pity’, or ‘sympathy’, and so is adopted here. controversion (opgør): As Bjørn Rabjerg says in his Introduction, the word opgør has a very dramatic meaning involving a showdown or face-off, but it also means something quite undramatic—or at least not terribly exciting—as a term from accounting, where it means to settle an account or a balance sheet. To have an opgør involves engaging in a controversy with someone, where the matter dealt with is to be properly settled; it involves a confrontation and is intended to ‘set the record straight’, so to speak, so the expression ‘to settle a score’ comes close. For this reason, Showdown with Kierkegaard, or Settling the Score with Kierkegaard would have been more exciting options when translating the title, as would probably Controversy with Kierkegaard. However, we have chosen to stick with Controverting Kierkegaard, mainly because it is accurate, meaning that it involves an ongoing dispute with someone where one engages in a controversy, but also because this translation has been used in the past and is thus now standard throughout the Anglophone Løgstrup literature. definitive (definitiv): With this word Løgstrup designates one of the main characteristics of the sovereign expression of life. On the one hand he

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xi

explains this term in contrast to an indeterminate (‘ubestemt’) kind of spontaneity, so it refers to a determinate content. Yet it is no accident that he uses the word ‘definitiv’ and not the word ‘bestemt’ (‘determinate’ or ‘definite’), because ‘definitiv’ designates also that the sovereign expressions of life impose a claim on us that we act in a specific way (see 72–3/99–100). Therefore, we have translated ‘definitiv’ in this context with the English counterpart ‘definitive’, referring to both the definite character of the sovereign expressions of life and the unconditionality of their claim. demand (fordring): This is one of the most central concepts for Løgstrup as can be seen from his use of it in the title of his main work Den etiske fordring. The Danish term involves someone being asked, required, demanded, claimed, or called to do something. Kierkegaard speaks of the ‘infinite demand’ (den uendelige fordring) and also of ‘love’s demand’ (kjerlighedens fordring) (see e.g. SKS 9: 189/KW 16: 189, where the Hongs have ‘love’s requirement’). Løgstrup employs the term to cover the idea that something is being demanded of you without this being a command given by someone in particular. His use of the word implies that the reason to act is taking care of the other rather than the authority of a commander. In the KW translation, ‘fordring’ is rendered as ‘requirement’, which might obscure the connection between Kierkegaard and Løgstrup at this point. In his treatment of the sovereign expressions of life, Løgstrup speaks of a ‘krav’ involved in them (72–3/99–100). ‘Krav’ could well be translated as ‘demand’, but we have translated it as ‘claim’ to maintain the verbal distinction Løgstrup makes between the ethical demand and the ‘demand’ involved in the sovereign expressions of life. expression of life (livsytring): This word can also be translated as ‘manifestation of life’ or ‘life manifestation’ (e.g. in Metaphysics II, part V). Løgstrup’s use of it has its background in Danish versions of German Lebensphilosophie. This type of philosophy stresses the non- or prerational aspects of human existence and is characterized by Herbert Schnädelbach as follows: ‘Life, in the sense of that which is always there to sustain and embrace spirit, culture, and also the individual consciousness, is the fundamental notion of life-philosophy in all its different aspects.’¹ In his doctoral dissertation, Løgstrup adopts this idea and adapts it theologically by stating that life, as God has created it, is the ¹ Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, translated by Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 142.

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 ’  pre-condition for culture. In this connection he designates culture’s different areas, including knowing, as ‘Livs-Ytringer’.² Here ‘livsytring’ is used in the wide sense of encompassing all culture insofar as it is the product of pre-cultural life. However, Løgstrup continues by focusing on the ethical content of pre-cultural life, which is revealed in Jesus’s spontaneous acts of love.³ It is this aspect of life which later determines his conception of the ‘suveræne/spontane livsytringer’. These are spontaneous other-regarding impulses or ways of conduct such as trust, sincerity, and compassion. Because ‘expression’ seems to capture the spontaneous and dynamic nature of these phenomena best, we have translated ‘livsytring’ as ‘expression of life’, thereby also following what seems to have become the standard translation in Anglophone discussions of Løgstrup’s ethics. immediate (umiddelbar): Løgstrup can use this word in the common sense of ‘direct’ or ‘without intermediary’, but often it refers for him more specifically to the property of being self-forgetfully engaged in the task at hand or the relationship with other people. In this sense ‘umiddelbar’ is a key term for Løgstrup as it is for Kierkegaard, and therefore we have translated it as ‘immediate’ as is normal in the Kierkegaard literature. In Løgstrup’s view the sovereign expressions of life belong to the sphere of immediacy. Hence, he can use ‘umiddelbar’ in connection with them too, and then the term is used in a sense close to that of ‘spontaneous’. knowing/knowledge (erkendelse): The Danish term can mean both the knowledge one possesses and the process of coming to know. In this respect it is like the English ‘cognition’; but this word is more technical sounding than ‘erkendelse’ is in Danish. We have therefore translated it by either ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing’, depending on context. Schwärmerei (sværmeri): Luther used this German term as a derogatory characterization of those evangelical movements that aimed at establishing God’s Kingdom on earth. In a Lutheran context, this term is often translated as ‘enthusiasm’ or sometimes as ‘fanaticism’, but neither term is ideal in English, so we have decided to use the German word, which is also used in English and appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, where ‘Schwärmerei’ is defined as follows: ‘Religious zeal, fanaticism, extravagant enthusiasm for a cause or a person.’ In the present work

² K. E. Løgstrup, Den erkendelsesteoretiske Konflikt, §22. For full bibliographic details, see the Select Bibliography. ³ K. E. Løgstrup, Den erkendelsesteoretiske Konflikt, §24.

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Løgstrup uses the term as the designation of an over-enthusiastic idealism that aims at establishing God’s Kingdom on earth, which he, like Luther, regards as unrealistic, because it does not take account of the wickedness and limitations of human nature. The corresponding adjective is ‘schwärmerisch’, and a ‘Schwärmer’ is a person who cherishes such idealism. taking over (overtagelse): By the expression ‘at overtage sig selv’ (to take over oneself ) Kierkegaard means relating consciously to and accepting one’s concrete, real self and its history, including its unfavourable aspects, in order to lead a responsible life on these conditions. In Part III, Chapter 8 Løgstrup uses this expression polemically against Kierkegaard, when he writes: ‘the task is not to take over existence and its conditions with the abstract and negative self, but to take over the interpersonal situation with the sovereign expressions of life’ (89/119). That is to say, one should not relate reflectively to oneself but, turned outwards towards others, one’s acts should be guided by the sovereign expressions of life. In order to maintain the verbal similarity with Kierkegaard’s expression, we have translated ‘overtagelse/at overtage’ in this context as ‘taking over/to take over’ respectively. the universal (det almene): The Danish term can mean the universal, the general, the ordinary, the public and what is common for all. In Kierkegaard, the term is used in accordance with the Hegelian understanding of ethics as the objective spirit as realized in concrete institutions like marriage and the state. Kierkegaard can thus speak about being married as ‘realisere det almene’ in the sense of realizing that which applies to everyone. We have chosen to use ‘the universal’ throughout, because this seems the best way to retain this Kierkegaardian conception.

Acknowledgements We are very grateful to the following for their helpful comments on previous versions of this translation: Alexander Altonji, Tom Angier, Michael AuMullaney, David Bugge, Svein Aage Christoffersen, and Bo Kristian Holm. We are also grateful to Simon Thornton for editorial assistance.

A Chronology of Løgstrup’s Life and Works 1905 (2 September) Born in Copenhagen, Denmark 1923–30 Studies theology at the University of Copenhagen while also following lectures on philosophy, in particular Frithiof Brandt’s series of lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 1930–35 Research visits at various universities, mainly in Germany, but also in France, Switzerland, and Austria 1932 Awarded the gold medal for his prize essay (similar to a PhD dissertation) on Max Scheler’s phenomenological approach to ethics: En fremstilling og vurdering af Max Scheler’s: ‘Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik’ [An Exposition and Evaluation of Max Scheler’s: ‘Formalism in Ethics and Material Ethics of Value’] (published 2016) 1935 Marriage to Rosemarie Pauly (1914–2005); they had five children 1936–43 Returns to Denmark. Lutheran pastor on Funen. Becomes part of the Tidehverv movement 1943 Defends his higher doctoral dissertation Den erkendelsesteoretiske Konflikt mellem den transcendentalfilosofiske Idealisme og Teologien [The Epistemological Conflict between Transcendental Idealism and Theology], which was published in 1942 (new Danish critical edition published 2011). Becomes professor of ethics and philosophy of religion at Aarhus University, Denmark 1944 Goes underground for the remainder of World War II due to his involvement in the resistance movement 1948 Earliest signs of disagreement with Tidehverv 1950 Gives a series of lectures on Kierkegaard and Heidegger at the Freie Universität Berlin, published the same year as Kierkegaards und Heideggers Existenzanalyse und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung [Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation] (Danish publication 2013) 1952 Kants filosofi I [Kant’s Philosophy I] (reprinted in 1970 as Part 1 of Kants kritik af erkendelsen og refleksionen [Kant’s Critique of Knowledge and Reflection])

xviii    ø ’     1956 1961 1965 1968 1970 1971

1972 1974

1976 1978 1981 1982 1983 1984 1984 1987 1988 1992

1995 1996 1999 2010

Den etiske fordring [The Ethical Demand] Breaks with Tidehverv (final break in 1964) Kunst og etik [Art and Ethics] Becomes a member of the Danish Academy Kants æstetik [Kant’s Aesthetics] Opgør med Kierkegaard [Controverting Kierkegaard] Kants kritik af erkendelsen og refleksionen [Kant’s Critique of Knowledge and Reflection] Etiske begreber og problemer [Ethical Concepts and Problems] published as a contribution to an anthology on ethics and Christian faith (published as a book in 1996) Norm og spontaneitet [Norm and Spontaneity] Awarded the Amalienborg Prize. This prize was inaugurated in 1972, and is awarded by the Queen of Denmark to an outstanding Danish scholar or writer Vidde og prægnans [Breadth and Concision], the first volume of the Metafysik [Metaphysics] I–IV series Metafysik IV: Skabelse og tilintetgørelse [Creation and Annihilation] Dies on 20 November in his home in Hyllested, north-east of Aarhus System og symbol [System and Symbol] Metafysik II: Kunst og erkendelse [Art and Knowledge] Metafysik III: Ophav og omgivelse [Source and Surrounding] Det uomtvistelige [What Is Incontrovertible] Solidaritet og kærlighed og andre essays [Solidarity and Love and Other Essays] Udfordringer [Challenges] Kære Hal—Kære Koste [Dear Hal—Dear Koste] (letter correspondence, reprinted and expanded in 2010 in Venskab og strid [Friendship and Strife]) Prædikener fra Sandager-Holevad [Sermons from SandagerHolevad] Martin Heidegger Prædikenen og dens Tekst [The Sermon and Its Text] Venskab og strid [Friendship and Strife] (letter correspondence)

Introduction Bjørn Rabjerg

1. Controverting Kierkegaard The Danish title of the present book, Opgør med Kierkegaard, is difficult to translate into English. The word opgør has a very dramatic meaning involving a showdown or face-off, but it also means something quite undramatic—or at least not terribly exciting—as a term from accounting, where it means to settle an account or a balance sheet. To have an opgør involves engaging in a controversy with someone, where the matter dealt with is to be properly settled; it involves a confrontation and is intended to ‘set the record straight’, so to speak, so the expression ‘to settle a score’ comes close. For this reason, Showdown with Kierkegaard, or Settling the Score with Kierkegaard would have been more exciting options when translating the title, as would probably Controversy with Kierkegaard. However, we have chosen to stick with Controverting Kierkegaard, mainly because it is accurate, meaning that it involves an ongoing dispute with someone where one engages in a controversy, but also because this translation has been used in the past and is thus now standard throughout the Anglophone Løgstrup literature. Controverting Kierkegaard (published in very late 1967 and for that reason usually dated 1968)¹ is Løgstrup’s second main work after The Ethical Demand.² Almost simultaneously (in 1968), it was published in German as Auseinandersetzung mit Kierkegaard,³ the second volume of a series of three books (1966, 1968, and 1972) under the joint title Kontroverse um Kierkegaard ¹ The book came out just before Christmas in 1967, but for technical reasons books published this late in the year were recorded as published in the following year. Therefore, Opgør med Kierkegaard is officially a 1968 release and is generally referred to as such. ² Knud Ejler Løgstrup was born in Copenhagen in 1905 and died in 1981 in his home outside Aarhus, where he had spent most of his life as Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion. For further biographical details, please consult the chronology of Løgstrup’s life on pp. xvii–xviii. It may also be useful to read the section ‘The Ethical Demand in Context’ from the ‘Introduction’ to Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand, pp. xx–xxv. ³ In his ‘Afterword’ to the Danish 2013 edition of Opgør med Kierkegaard, Svein Aage Christoffersen gives a detailed account of the differences between the Danish and the German editions. Most notable are the additions to the German edition of (1) a chapter on Rudolf Bultmann’s view on the historical

xx  und Grundtvig [Controversy Concerning Kierkegaard and Grundtvig].⁴ It is a theological work in a much more obvious way than The Ethical Demand, which becomes clear already in the first sentence where Løgstrup emphasizes that what he is interested in is ‘the general tendency and implications of his [Kierkegaard’s, BR] understanding of Christianity’ (lxvii/9).⁵ This impression is only strengthened in Part I, which deals with Løgstrup’s view on the role of ‘the historical Jesus’, which is tied to his concept of revelation. However, in Part III, Løgstrup introduces the key concept of the sovereign expressions of life (and their contrary term, our circling thoughts and emotions), which—although they do play an important theological role—can be taken as philosophical terms and thus do not have to rely on Løgstrup’s theological position. Moreover, as it turns out, Løgstrup’s thoughts concerning the historical Jesus are not without philosophical importance either, because they show how Løgstrup can make the transition from theology (revelation) to philosophy (reason) without ending up in ‘obscurantism’, as he calls it in The Ethical Demand.⁶ It is thus worth pointing out that although Løgstrup’s thoughts in the following have interesting philosophical perspectives, his controversy targets Kierkegaard’s theology, and as such it does not involve the more philosophical aspects of Kierkegaard (e.g. his critique of Hegel). However, Løgstrup does also engage with contemporary nonreligious existentialism through discussions with Sartre and Jaspers, and when taking this together with the fact that his engagement with Kierkegaard is firmly tied to contemporary Kierkegaardianism, it shows that Løgstrup’s engagement with Kierkegaard in the book is first and foremost aimed at the contemporary intellectual debates rather than at Kierkegaard himself. Jesus followed by a discussion on this; (2) texts from the ‘Polemical Epilogue’ of The Ethical Demand that had been omitted in the German 1958 translation; and (3) a new epilogue, ‘Epilog über die Existenztheologie’ [‘Epilogue on Existence Theology’], relating the book more explicitly to contemporary theological Existentialism; cf. Svein Aage Christoffersen, ‘Efterskrift’ [‘Afterword’]. When not given in the text, full bibliographical details are given in the ‘Select Bibliography’. Any abbreviations that are used are explained in the Translators’ Preface. ⁴ Løgstrup wrote a short ‘Vorwort’ [‘Foreword’] to the German edition, explaining the context to the non-Danish reader (Kontroverse um Kierkegaard und Grundtvig, Volume I: Das Menschliche und das Christliche [The Human and the Christian], Götz Harbsmeier and Knud Ejler Løgstrup (eds.) (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1966), pp. 10–11). The German foreword has been included in this translation because Løgstrup here clarifies how the book is not just a critique of Kierkegaard, but also of contemporary Existentialism, and how he sees an alliance between nihilistic tendencies in Positivism and Kierkegaardian Existentialism. The three German volumes frame the Danish theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig as an important voice against these tendencies (for more on Grundtvig, see §2.1). ⁵ Unattributed references in the text are to the present book, followed by a reference to the Danish edition. Other references to books by Løgstrup are given first to English translations where available, and then to the Danish originals. ⁶ The Ethical Demand, p. 4/Den etiske fordring, p. 10.

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We will take a closer look at the main ideas of the book below (§3), but as its background and context are both complex and important we will turn to this first.

2. Background and Context Controverting Kierkegaard is the climax of a dispute between Løgstrup and contemporary Kierkegaardianism, which had begun already twenty years before its publication; but the relationship between Løgstrup and Kierkegaard was not always one of conflict. When Løgstrup began his studies in Theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1923, Kierkegaard had only just very recently become the centre of attention. In fact, it was a publication the year before, namely the second edition of Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans in 1922, which brought Kierkegaard to the theological and philosophical centre stage (even in his native country Denmark), and therefore Barth and Kierkegaard were main topics when Løgstrup entered the university. Two people were particularly significant to the reception of Kierkegaard in the 1920s in Copenhagen, who also came to be highly influential on Løgstrup. Among the professors, the newly appointed (1921) Professor of Systematic Theology, Eduard Geismar (1871–1939), had read Kierkegaard as early as the late 1880s, and he had spent two years abroad primarily in Germany in 1897–99, where he became acquainted with Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926) and his idealistic philosophy, studying with him in Jena for a year.⁷ In 1922, the year following his appointment, Geismar travelled to Germany with the main purpose of establishing contact with those German theologians who were taking an interest in Kierkegaard, visiting Karl Barth in Göttingen and Friedrich Gogarten in Munich, both of whom were at the heart of what became known as dialectical theology and of the journal Zwischen den Zeiten [Between the Times]. Geismar soon picked up on the thoughts in Barth’s anti-idealistic theology, and from the beginning of his university career, he encouraged his students to read both Barth and Kierkegaard. His first substantial work on Kierkegaard came in 1923, Det etiske Stadium hos Søren Kierkegaard [The Ethical Stage in Søren Kierkegaard], and in 1926–28 ⁷ Put very briefly, idealism in general was conceived of as a humanism centred on the idea that human beings should and could live up to the moral ideals, and Christian idealism saw faith as a crucial tool in this cultivation of the individual person’s moral character. Eucken was a prime proponent and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908 for his contributions within idealistic philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie).

xxii  came his six-volume monograph, Søren Kierkegaard, Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed [Søren Kierkegaard: His Personal Development and His Work as an Author]. Geismar found himself in a difficult position of tension between an Eucken-inspired idealism and Barth’s anti-idealism. His Kierkegaard studies can be characterized as an attempt to mediate between the two by focusing on Works of Love and the edifying discourses rather than on the late works of Kierkegaard, which he found to be too hostile towards life in finitude, or the human as he calls it.⁸ The other important figure was a student at The Faculty of Theology. Kristoffer Olesen Larsen (1899–1964) had read Kierkegaard since he was a teenager, and in 1923 he handed in a prize dissertation manuscript under the title Søren Kierkegaards Lære om Paradoxet og denne Læres etiske Konsekvenser med særligt Hensyn til Forholdet til Hegel [Søren Kierkegaard’s Teaching on the Paradox and the Ethical Consequences of This Teaching with Special Reference to the Relationship to Hegel], for which he was awarded the gold medal.⁹ In his prize dissertation, Olesen Larsen’s Kierkegaard reading is clearly influenced by Geismar, but only a few years later, beginning in 1926 when Geismar’s first volume on Kierkegaard appeared, Olesen Larsen started to voice a severe criticism of Geismar’s more idealistic interpretation of Kierkegaard. Olesen Larsen’s critique of Geismar was part of a wider Danish theological youth uprising against idealism, and piety in general, which came to be known under the name of the journal at its centre, Tidehverv [Turn of the Times]— clearly inspired by German dialectical theology and Zwischen den Zeiten. Where Geismar had sought to connect Kierkegaard with a version of idealism, Olesen Larsen and the Tidehverv movement based their theology on a distinctly anti-idealistic reading of Kierkegaard, with the young Karl Barth as an important source of inspiration.¹⁰ As it turned out, Olesen Larsen’s critique of Geismar (which, given the tone set by the Tidehverv members, often took the form of downright ridicule) was to triumph to such an extent that Olesen ⁸ For more information on Geismar, see Jens Holger Schjørring, ‘Barth—Geismar— Tidehverv’, Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, 39 (1976), pp. 73–105; and ‘Geismar og Brunner’ [‘Geismar and Brunner’], Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, 39 (1976), pp. 166–95. ⁹ The prize dissertation was a call for students to write a dissertation on a specific topic and with a set title over a period of fourteen months. After submitting the anonymized manuscript, a committee assessed it, and the winner received the gold medal. Løgstrup won a similar prize in 1932, as discussed below. ¹⁰ ‘The young Karl Barth’ refers to Barth’s writings from the first half of the 1920s. Later on, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, major differences between Barth and Tidehverv became obvious. This led to a harsh critique by Tidehverv of Barth’s new and more dogmatic path when Barth visited Denmark in 1933, but also to an important alliance between Tidehverv and Rudolf Bultmann, who attended many of Tidehverv’s summer meetings.

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Larsen became widely perceived as the leading Kierkegaard scholar in Denmark in the 1930s through to the 1960s, and as such Geismar came out on the losing side. In fact, it could be argued that Olesen Larsen succeeded in an almost total assassination of Geismar’s character and of Geismar as an intellectual, leaving him more or less ousted after his death in 1939 and largely forgotten even today.¹¹ Therefore, Kierkegaard’s importance and impact on Danish intellectual life through most of Løgstrup’s life was intimately connected to Tidehverv and Olesen Larsen. For this reason, Olesen Larsen’s Kierkegaard-inspired theology plays a major role in Løgstrup’s controversy or showdown with Kierkegaard and thus requires a closer inspection.¹²

2.1 Tidehverv: Luther, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Danish Protestantism To start out by putting it briefly, Olesen Larsen’s reading of Kierkegaard has what Kierkegaard called the infinite qualitative difference between the human being and God as its foundation.¹³ In his Epistle to the Romans, Barth had stated that this motif was the systematic foundation of his dialectical theology,¹⁴ but to Olesen Larsen it was clear that Barth did not in fact remain committed to the absoluteness and radicality of the opposition between God’s infinity and human finitude. Therefore, Olesen Larsen’s main project was to reaffirm the absolute difference, seeing the word of God as a radical contradiction of everything human and finite.¹⁵ ¹¹ However, one of Løgstrup’s main objections, namely that Kierkegaard’s view of Christianity is hostile towards life in finitude (the purely human), probably originates in Geismar’s Kierkegaard reading and can thus be said to have lived on. ¹² Here we also need to mention the influence coming from Løgstrup’s colleague and Kierkegaard expert Johannes Sløk (1916–2001). Much like Olesen Larsen, Sløk read Kierkegaard as a theological existentialist. However, Løgstrup preferred to avoid public discussions with Sløk, and so Olesen Larsen plays a much more visible role in Løgstrup’s work, although Sløk’s reading of Kierkegaard certainly plays a role in the background. For more on Løgstrup’s disagreement with Sløk, see Christoffersen, ‘Efterskrift’ [‘Afterword’], pp. 183–4 and 187–92. ¹³ Cf. Practice in Christianity, SKS 12: 132/KW 20: 128. ¹⁴ Cf. Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, 2nd edition (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1922), p. xiii; and The Epistle to the Romans, translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 10. ¹⁵ There are clear parallels to Bultmann, which help explain why Bultmann visited Tidehverv’s summer meetings and was a popular speaker. However, Olesen Larsen and Tidehverv should not be seen as mere Bultmann disciples, as many of the central points in Tidehverv’s theology developed before they engaged with Bultmann and thus developed independently and with important differences. In a letter to Gogarten dating from 4 November 1928, Bultmann praises Olesen Larsen emphatically as a theologian and Kierkegaard scholar, referring to him as an ‘überragende Gestalt’ [‘outstanding figure’] (Hermann Götz Göckeritz, Rudolf Bultmann—Friedrich Gogarten, Briefwechsel [Correspondence] 1921–1967 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), p. 144).

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As already stated, theology in Denmark prior to the founding of Tidehverv in 1926 was at its core idealistic, the dominant theological current being Liberal Theology (or Liberal Protestantism), which put an emphasis on personal conversion and commitment to Christian faith and moral improvement, seeing Jesus as a moral ideal and faith as founded in a personal relationship with Jesus.¹⁶ As such, Liberal Theology in Denmark was based on an optimistic view on the possibilities for improvement of each person’s moral character and for culture (a term used to focus on human-made society such as political institutions and social life) to develop and grow (moral and cultural perfectionism). Another important Christian current in Denmark at the time was the Danish Christian Student Federation (Danmarks kristelige studenterforbund), which was connected to the YMCA and inspired by John Mott’s (1865–1955) World’s Student Christian Federation. Along with a third important current, the Danish Inner Mission, it was more conservative and sceptical in its view of culture than Liberal Theology, but common to all three was their focus on piety and morality as deeply rooted in Christian faith. Finally, Grundtvigianism, based on the theology of N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), was a fourth major influence. One of Grundtvig’s main points was to focus on human life here and now and see Christianity in the light of this, and thus not as mainly concerning transcendence and a hereafter. This view is encapsulated in his dictum: ‘Human first, and Christian thereafter’ (‘menneske først og kristen så’).¹⁷ Even though these currents within contemporary Christianity took themselves to be Lutheran, Tidehverv saw its attack on them as a return to a more fundamental Lutheranism. Central to the attack is the aforementioned Kierkegaardian notion of the infinite qualitative difference between God and the human, which had at least three important consequences: Firstly, to Olesen Larsen (and Tidehverv) the infinite qualitative difference was understood as a direct rejection of idealism (perfectionism) of all kinds, because it precisely emphasized the total impossibility for any human striving in trying to connect with or come closer to God. If the difference is infinite, no finite human striving or attempt at establishing a connection could succeed. In Lutheran terms, God is Majesty while we humans are sinners and we are therefore unable to rise above our nature and station. In fact, to Tidehverv, the ¹⁶ The term ‘liberal’ refers to the liberal stance taken towards many of Christianity’s dogmas, such as the virgin birth of Jesus, where liberal theology focused on ethics and the inner religious feeling instead. ¹⁷ N. F. S. Grundtvig, ‘Menneske først og Christen saa’, translated in his Selected Writings: N. F. S. Grundtvig, edited by Johannes Knudsen, Enok Mortensen, and Ernest D. Nielsen (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1976), pp. 140–1.

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very striving to rise above sin—that is, the striving for moral improvement and the ambition to grow through faith, which was so prevalent in idealistic theology—was understood as sin in its clearest form. As N. O. Jensen (Luther expert and one of the main voices in early Tidehverv) expressed it: ‘[our attempts to improve ourselves, BR] only entangle us even more deeply in sin. For indeed, real sin is the unwillingness to settle for being mere sinners before God’.¹⁸ This theological move was perceived of as a radicalization of the concept of sin. Where sin had previously been seen as gradual by the pious and moralistic Christians, something you could be entangled in to various degrees depending on your moral character and your degree of faith, it was now understood radically as the fundamental category of human existence. Here Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity—especially the concepts of neighbour love, morality, and pity—was an important inspiration for Tidehverv, and in this light they saw radical sin as radical egotism, where this egotism is something we are powerless to escape from, and where every attempt to escape from it is always already egotistically motivated. If I want to be good, then it is always already something I want; and the concern with what I want and who I want to be is always already a self-centred and self-concerned enterprise and thus deeply entangled in self-centred motivation. We find this very clearly formulated by Løgstrup in one of his early articles from 1936, ‘Enhver moralsk Tanke er en Bagtanke’ [‘Every Moral Motivation Is an Ulterior Motivation’]: Christian Ethics is purportedly a so-called ethics of attitude [sindelagsetik, BR]. [ . . . ] But in the name of morality to take an interest in one’s attitude of mind brings about a self-centredness, a pharisaism, which totally corrupts the attitude.¹⁹

Therefore, Løgstrup can conclude, ‘pharisaism is the transcendental condition of any ethics of attitude’, and so—if ethics involves being judged by our attitude, will, and intentions—human beings are powerless to do the good.²⁰ ¹⁸ N. O. Jensen ‘Retfærdiggørelse og helliggørelse hos Luther’ [‘Justification and Sanctification in Luther’], Tidehverv 8 (1936), pp. 127–36; reprinted in Luthers Gudstro [Luther’s Faith in God] (Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag, 1959), p. 93 (my translation). ¹⁹ ‘Enhver moralsk Tanke er en Bagtanke’, p. 431 (my translation). ‘Sindelagsetik’ is difficult to translate to English. It is the same word as the German ‘Gesinnungsethik’, which refers to the attitude of mind and thus the intentions of an agent in a moral situation, and so whether they have a good (i.e. a morally praiseworthy) will. However, Løgstrup’s objection (along with Tidehverv) is that the will is never good, because to (will to) take an interest in the moral praiseworthiness of one’s will or attitude of mind is by definition tantamount to being selfinterested. However, importantly, later on when Løgstrup introduces the sovereign expressions of life, he provides a way of freeing the will to actually will the good of the other person. ²⁰ ‘Enhver moralsk Tanke er en Bagtanke’, p. 432 (my translation).

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Secondly, the infinite qualitative difference and the radical conception of sin imply that also on an epistemic level we are completely cut off from God. Just as we cannot do what is good, we are unable to know what is true (i.e. to have knowledge about the highest truth, knowledge of God and God’s being). Reason, as Luther (in)famously put it, is the Devil’s whore,²¹ and thus is entirely unfit for relating to God. Knowledge and reason only concern our relative world of finite truths and ends, such as calculating your wage increase, planning how to escape back home from your in-laws in time for Champions League football, or predicting that three tablespoons of salt in a Yorkshire pudding would ruin it. Therefore, the human relation to God, that is, to absolute truths and ends, takes place in a completely different category, namely in faith. For this reason, revelation became the crucial category in Tidehverv’s Lutheran theology, because revelation is God’s word and message to us, to which we can only respond in faith (or lack of faith), as opposed to everything we ourselves can say to each other, and where we can respond through our own words and reasoning. The Christian proclamation²² is God’s Word to us revealed through Christ, and only in our hearing this message, only in our being addressed by God through his Word, do we ‘meet’ God. Here, Tidehverv’s roots in the writings of the young Karl Barth are plain to see: God is the wholly other and thus completely different from everything else. Therefore, his word sounds not from anything relatable in our finite world, but it resonates to us perpendicularly or directly from above (senkrecht von oben), from God’s radical transcendence. God’s word is alien to anything in this world, because this world is infinitely different from God and thus marked by God’s absolute absence. Indeed, the absolute nothingness of this world is a central theme in Olesen Larsen’s theological existentialism—and (as we shall see) a central theme in Løgstrup’s confrontation with both him and Kierkegaard. Thirdly, when all human striving for moral improvement through piety is both impossible (due to the infinite qualitative difference) and condemned because it is self-centred (the radical conception of sin), the task for us as human beings is to live our life in finitude faithful to the Earth (‘være jorden tro’),

²¹ WA 18: 164/LW 40: 174. ²² Which in all its vagueness (precisely what is included in ‘the Proclamation’?) became a standard phrase in both Tidehverv and for Løgstrup, cf. as examples Løgstrup’s ‘Introduction’ in The Ethical Demand and his lectures on Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and its Relation to Proclamation. The Danish word for ‘proclamation’ (forkyndelse) also means the act of preaching, that is, to proclaim the word of God. For a discussion on proclamation in Løgstrup, see Bennett, Faulkner, and Stern, ‘Indirect Communication, Authority, and Proclamation as a Normative Power: Løgstrup’s Critique of Kierkegaard’.

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which was one of the classical Tidehverv slogans.²³ Put in Lutheran terms, we must live our lives where we are and as we are, without striving beyond the earthly realm, but live our life in our calling and station (‘livet i kald og stand’), here and now. Again, the inspiration from Nietzsche is clear, for example from his critique in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the ‘Backworldsmen’ or the ‘Hinterworldly’ (‘die Hinterweltler’), namely those who cast their fancy on a world beyond this world.²⁴ Another inspiration is Kierkegaard’s final text from Either/Or: ‘Ultimatum’, the Pastor’s sermon on ‘The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong’. The upbuilding element consists precisely in that when we realize that we are never right, but always fail entirely in the (loving and forgiving) eye of God, we are set free from our striving and our worry about God’s disapproving eye, and thus set free to live ‘just as humans’, as Olesen Larsen puts it again and again in his writings. Therefore, according to Olesen Larsen, Christianity means to love the world: ‘We love the world because it is earthly, nothing but earthly, and human existence because it is human, nothing but human, and if we are to love human ideals they must be anything but divine.’²⁵ Humanly speaking, the world is a joy to live in, but Christianly speaking it is mere nothingness: ‘And yet we understand that for God, this world is nothing but dust and ashes, and the human being is a sinner through and through.’²⁶ But if this is the truth about the Christian message and our existence, that we cannot do the good and cannot improve, why then bother at all about whether we are doing the right thing or not? If God is dead then everything is permitted, as is famously said, but does Tidehverv’s theology not in fact lead to exactly the same conclusion: if God exists (in this way) is everything then permitted? Luther’s response would come in the shape of his doctrine concerning the uses of the law.²⁷ The Lutheran idea is that the law is God’s law, a ²³ Inspired by Nietzsche: ‘I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Kritische Studienausgabe, Volume 4 (München: De Gruyter 1999), p. 15/Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 6). ²⁴ Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, pp. 35–8/20–2. ²⁵ Kristoffer Olesen Larsen, 1927, ‘Et Stykke Krigspsykose’ [‘A Fragment of War Psychosis’], Tidehverv, 1 (1927), pp. 129–36; reprinted in Kristoffer Olesen Larsen, At være mennske: Udvalgte Arbejeder I, edited by Johannes Horstmann and V. Olesen Larsen (Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 1967), p. 38 (my translation). ²⁶ Kristoffer Olesen Larsen, 1927, ‘Et Stykke Krigspsykose’ [‘A Fragment of War Psychosis’], p. 38 (my translation). ²⁷ As we shall see in Part II of Controverting Kierkegaard, Løgstrup makes the claim that in fact Tidehverv (and Kierkegaard) are unable to respond to the problem of passivity. The problem is that they do not follow Luther in juxtaposing the two uses of the law, because they and Kierkegaard end up subordinating the first use to the second use: cf. 44–5/64–5.

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natural ethical law (lex naturalis) which we know because it is written in our hearts and is thus available to us through reason and conscience.²⁸ Thus, we know what is right and wrong, meaning that we know what we ought to do even though we are unable to comply due to our selfishness. We are required to love our neighbour, but our inability to actually love them does not set us free from all ethical requirements, but rather it places us under the demand that we should act as if we actually loved them.²⁹ This is why Luther distinguishes between two uses of the law:³⁰ The first use of the law (usus civilis), also called the political use of the law, is when the law is used as a cultural codification which regulates society through either fear of punishment or the benefit of rewards so that citizens act according to the law (this involves both the actual judicial laws of the legal system and social norms where perpetrators are socially ostracized, while those who live up to the standards are praised). Here, our actions are central, and the law is thus used to contain sin and to keep the wickedness at bay, so as to protect the neighbour. However, to act according to the law does not amount to fulfilling the law, because the real function of the law is spiritual, which is the second use of the law (usus theologicus). The spiritual use is focused on our spirit or attitude of mind (German: Gesinnung, Danish: sindelag), because what the law really demands is unselfish love for the neighbour. However, this is an impossibility, because while we may act as if we loved, the law cannot make us love the neighbour,³¹ and thus the law in its second use (also called its convicting use) confronts us with our own inadequacy, our sin, and serves as a guide, chastening our self-indulgence and directing us towards Christ and the Gospel.³² So, we are unable to fulfil the spirit of the law (second use), but the laws, norms, and regulations of society can make us perform the actions required by the letter of the law (first use). Thus, these three aspects of the infinite qualitative difference (namely the impossibility of both moral improvement and knowledge of God, and the need ²⁸ This is, of course, something Luther bases on Paul, cf. Rom 2:15: ‘They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them’ (New Revised Standard Version). ²⁹ Cf. Løgstrup’s position on ethics in The Ethical Demand, where the demand is a demand to love the neighbour, but as such also in a radical sense an unfulfillable demand, because the demand for love precisely shows that love is absent, which is why we ultimately, and in a radical way, fall short of what is demanded. Here we clearly see the influence from Tidehverv on Løgstrup’s position. ³⁰ Cf. WA 40.I: 479–80/LW 26: 308–9. ³¹ Again, we see how this lies in the background of Løgstrup’s work, cf. The Ethical Demand, pp. 124–6/Den etiske fordring, pp. 164–7, where the presence of the demand precisely shows us the absence of love, and where also the demand as a demand cannot bring love about, and we must therefore act merely as if we loved. Or, as Løgstrup puts it in Controverting Kierkegaard: ‘Morality is the Provision of Substitute Motives for Substitute Actions’ (96/127). ³² Yet again Luther relies on Paul, cf. Gal. 3:24: ‘Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith’ (New Revised Standard Version).

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to remain faithful to the Earth) all point in the direction of human impotence versus God’s omnipotence, which lie at the core of Tidehverv’s theology. We are powerless to do the good and to meet and know God, and the law faces us with our inability to do what is really demanded of us; by contrast, God has the power to speak to us and thus to meet us—making himself known to us. Tidehverv’s theological uprising against the prevailing understanding of Christianity in Denmark was undertaken in a highly polemical rhetoric and aimed at the most prominent and respected representatives of ‘the old’ idealistic, pious, and moralistic theologians, with Olesen Larsen’s attack on Geismar as a prime example.³³ As a result, an unknown author sarcastically coined the supposed ‘Tidehverv Credo’ as God is everything, I am nothing, and you are an idiot!

2.2 Løgstrup, Tidehverv, and Kierkegaard The journal Tidehverv surfaced in October 1926, almost precisely at the halfway point of Løgstrup’s theological studies from 1923 to 1930. He was thus at the centre of events although he was not at first part of the Tidehverv movement. On the contrary, he came from a background typical of the preTidehverv times, where idealistic Christianity heavily influenced his childhood home, and he was part of the Danish YMCA. He would later refer to this part of his life, including his childhood Christianity, as his ‘pietist phase’,³⁴ and he did not openly detach himself from Liberal Theology and YMCA-Christianity until after returning to Denmark to become a Lutheran Pastor in 1936.³⁵ However, his Prize dissertation on Max Scheler’s phenomenological ethics, written while in Strasbourg and Göttingen in 1930–32, shows quite clear signs of early Barthian influence and brings him close to Tidehverv, although he did not speak at their summer meeting until 1939 and only had his first publication in Tidehverv in 1940. Løgstrup’s position was undoubtedly a difficult one on a personal level. Geismar had done much to help him over several years and had written very highly of Løgstrup both in his evaluation of his Prize dissertation and concerning the manuscript Løgstrup submitted in his first attempt to be awarded the higher doctoral degree in 1933. Løgstrup was thus

³³ In this way, Tidehverv can be said to repeat in their own time Kierkegaard’s polemic against the complacency of Christendom in his. ³⁴ Solidaritet og kærlighed [Solidarity and Love], p. 147. ³⁵ Løgstrup spent most of the time from 1930–35 at universities in Germany, but also in France, Austria, and Switzerland.

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stuck in a tricky situation, with loyalty to Geismar on the one hand, but with clear sympathies for Tidehverv and thus the new anti-idealism on the other hand (while Løgstrup was also probably for some time unsure about his own theological position). In addition, Olesen Larsen’s rhetoric against Geismar certainly did not make it any easier for Løgstrup to switch sides. However, Geismar died in May 1939 (three months before Løgstrup’s first appearance at a Tidehverv summer meeting), and when World War II broke out, Løgstrup joined the resistance movement along with many Tidehverv sympathizers.³⁶ When he became a Professor in Aarhus in 1943, he was as much a part of Tidehverv as anyone, and the same year he famously wrote in a letter that ‘there are only very few people from whom you can learn so much just from speaking with them as you can from Olesen Larsen’.³⁷ As we can see from the course of events, Kierkegaard was progressive in the 1920s and in the following decades. Although Geismar had tried to turn Kierkegaard into an ally of idealism, Olesen Larsen had wrenched him out of Geismar’s hands and used him as a fierce weapon aimed at Geismar himself and anyone connected to his theology—and those found to be even more idealistically starry-eyed than him. However, when World War II ended, and the common enemy had been vanquished, it did not take more than a few years before the relationship between Løgstrup and Tidehverv started to show cracks. It began around 1947 and erupted in 1961, followed by an aftershock in 1964 and a culmination in 1967 with the publication of Controverting Kierkegaard, so it took a long time for it to develop. Løgstrup later wrote that the break was difficult for him, and up to a point incomprehensible, because he cared a great deal for many of the people associated with Tidehverv,³⁸ and after the culmination of the conflict they did not speak again (this included Olesen Larsen for very obvious reasons, as he died in 1964). We will take a brief look at these events, before we turn to the main parts of the book itself. ³⁶ Løgstrup had in fact been publicly critical of Hitler and the idea of a Führer from the very beginning, which led to three feature articles in the Danish newspaper Dagens Nyheder in 1936. In the first of these, The Nazi’s Philosopher (English translation by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/), he criticizes Heidegger’s faith in the notion of the need for a Führer to liberate the German people from the inauthentic existence of ‘das Man’ (being just a member of the crowd). Løgstrup’s perspective is that following a Führer is just another way of being inauthentic, of turning oneself into a part of the crowd. The feature articles are discussed and analysed at length in Hans Hauge, Bjørn Rabjerg, and Sasja E. M. Stopa, Førerskab og folkestyre [Führerhood and Democracy] (Copenhagen: Fønix, 2021). ³⁷ K. E. Løgstrup and Hal Koch, Venskab og strid [Friendship and Strife], p. 159. We also find a testimony to Løgstrup’s sympathies towards Tidehverv in the students’ annual Theological Revue in the 1940s, where Løgstrup was caricatured as Professor Tidestrup, Tide(hverv) + (Løg)strup. ³⁸ Løgstrup discusses this in a letter to the Swedish pastor Margaretha Brandby-Cöster, dated 18 July 1981 (four months before he died). The letter is kept in the Løgstrup Archive, Aarhus University.

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In 1947, Johannes Sløk submitted his higher doctoral dissertation where among many other things he emphasizes the role of the paradox in Kierkegaard and thus the total incommensurability between reason/knowledge and existence, or in Christian terms: between understanding and faith.³⁹ Løgstrup’s response (found in his opposition to Sløk’s defence) was that it is an untenable position to alienate faith and understanding completely from each other, because surely reason and knowledge must be necessary for us in an ethical existence, just as surely as Christianity and faith must involve understanding at least at a very basic level—and therefore the two cannot be completely at odds.⁴⁰ A few years later, in January 1950, Løgstrup delivered a series of lectures at the Freie Universität in Berlin on Kierkegaards und Heideggers Existenzanalyse und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung [Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation]. In these lectures, he criticizes making the idea of Kierkegaard’s incommensurability too radical, stating explicitly that to eradicate reason, knowledge, and understanding completely from Christianity will turn Christianity into mere superstition.⁴¹ Rather than removing philosophy (reasoning, understanding, and knowledge) from theology, they should be seen as relating to each other in a very important way; important enough for philosophy (namely to keep it from alienating itself from its existential basis), but entirely crucial for theology: The difference between proclamation—the Word in the broadest sense—and philosophy consists also in the fact that the proclamation is not the result of an analysis; it cannot be demonstrated; from the standpoint of philosophy, proclamation seems to be nothing but assertions. But that does not mean that the content of the proclamation is incomprehensible.⁴²

A few sentences later, he produces a key formulation, which he repeats verbatim six years afterwards in The Ethical Demand: ‘Faith without

³⁹ Johannes Sløk, Forsynstanken: et Forsøg paa en dogmatisk Begrebsbestemmelse [The Idea of Providence: An Attempt at a Dogmatic Conceptual Analysis] (Hjørring: Expres-Trykkeriets Forlag, 1947). ⁴⁰ ‘Eksistensfilosofi og Theologi’ [‘Existence Philosophy and Theology’], pp. 15 and 8 (English translation by Hans Fink and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/ resources-and-link/). ⁴¹ Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, p. 74/ Kierkegaard og Heideggers eksistensanalyse og dens forhold til forkyndelsen, p. 108. ⁴² Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, p. 74/ Kierkegaard og Heideggers eksistensanalyse og dens forhold til forkyndelsen, p. 107.

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understanding is not faith, but coercion.’⁴³ Christianity cannot be reduced to being a proclamation of a completely alien word to us from God as the wholly other, but ‘it must correspond to something in our existence’, or else become irrelevant and in the end coercive.⁴⁴ Løgstrup attended many of Tidehverv’s summer meetings through the 1950s, just as he published articles in Tidehverv, which ended up being included as parts in The Ethical Demand when it appeared in 1956. Nothing indicates a break between Tidehverv and Løgstrup at this stage, and thus the discussion took place internally in Tidehverv, rather than as a polemic between Løgstrup (as an outsider) and Olesen Larsen as Tidehverv’s representative. However, this changed at the summer meeting in 1961, when Løgstrup left immediately after he had given his talk, marching off with his wife and luggage before the meeting had ended. He felt excommunicated because his talk was treated with seeming indifference when the chair (Tidehverv’s main figure, N. I. Heje) had declared that it did not need any discussion, proceeding immediately to the next speaker, something that was entirely without precedent in Tidehverv circles. In 1964, Løgstrup returned to fire a final broadside at the summer meeting, giving a talk on ‘Two Kinds of Christianity’, where the one was a radical fideistic and nihilistic Kierkegaardianism (his description of Tidehverv’s and especially Olesen Larsen’s theology), and the other was Løgstrup’s own position. A few years later, Controverting Kierkegaard came out as a much more elaborate exposition of the same schism: Kierkegaardianism vs. Løgstrup’s own alternative. To conclude the background and contextualization of the present book, Controverting Kierkegaard obviously deals with Kierkegaard, but as we have seen, it is Kierkegaard in a specific context, namely the existentialist reception of him primarily by Olesen Larsen and the Tidehverv movement (and certainly also Sløk, although he never associated himself with Tidehverv, which could be due to the fact that Sløk and Heje disliked each other, and that Sløk didn’t want to be part of a movement). This is important to bear in mind, because it is easy to leap to Kierkegaard’s defence by trying to show that Løgstrup’s critique is eclectic and thus based on a too narrow reading and selection of Kierkegaard’s works.⁴⁵ To this we can respond that it is indeed

⁴³ The Ethical Demand, p. 4/Den etiske fordring, p. 10. ⁴⁴ The Ethical Demand, pp. 3–4/Den etiske fordring, pp. 9–10. ⁴⁵ Examples of this can be found both at the time when Controverting Kierkegaard was published (cf. Malantschuk, ‘Løgstrups Opgør med Kierkegaard’) and more recently Ferreira,

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true, but that the selection was not merely undertaken by Løgstrup but was heavily influenced by his adversaries, as it was mainly their reading he attacked. Løgstrup recognized Olesen Larsen as the leading authority on Kierkegaard (and with him also Sløk), which is probably why he refrains from using phrases such as ‘according to Olesen Larsen, Kierkegaard . . .’, and instead to a great extent reads Kierkegaard as Olesen Larsen reads him.⁴⁶ If one is looking for evidence that it is in fact Olesen Larsen and the Tidehverv movement that Løgstrup is criticizing and polemicizing against, one need look no further than the ‘Foreword’, where Løgstrup clearly states his intent. Here Løgstrup speaks of ‘those who are convinced that he [Kierkegaard, BR] is the only Church Father and read him for their own edification’, and a bit further down he draws the distinction between Kierkegaard as a genius opposed to the ‘[ . . . ] epigones, whose systems are thin and non-contradictory’. The last sentence suggests that although Løgstrup recognized Olesen Larsen as the leading authority on Kierkegaard, he remains aware of the fact that Olesen Larsen turned Kierkegaard’s thought into a kind of a system by leaving things out. But, as he states, he is not ‘interested in an internal critique’, suggesting that he does not want to engage in how one ought to read Kierkegaard and also does not want to discuss the coherence in Kierkegaard’s own ‘system’ (such as possibly the role of the pseudonyms), cf. pp. lxvii/9. In the following, I will therefore refrain from going in depth with the question of the accuracy of Løgstrup’s critique and just point out that Kierkegaard’s work is multifaceted and polyphonic and therefore interpretations can vary greatly based on where one puts the emphasis. This means that there are other possible interpretations than the one Løgstrup attacks, but the elements Løgstrup emphasizes and criticizes can be found in Kierkegaard’s work—and indeed were central to the Kierkegaardianism of his contemporaries.

Love’s Grateful Striving. Ferreira writes: ‘Kierkegaard does not, as Løgstrup suggests, make any stark or illegitimate dichotomy between earthly, material help and helping the neighbour to love God; he does not see them as mutually exclusive’, p. 81. ⁴⁶ There are, however, certain disagreements, the most important ones being Løgstrup’s accusation that Christianity according to Kierkegaard is anti-social, hostile to life in finitude, and perversely focused on suffering. Here Løgstrup’s position seems to be that Olesen Larsen does not sufficiently acknowledge the severity of the hostility to life in finitude in Kierkegaard. Another influence on Løgstrup’s critique of Kierkegaard is Knud Hansen (1898–1996). Hansen was a pastor near Løgstrup’s parish when Løgstrup was himself a pastor, and the two knew each other well. Hansen’s article ‘Søren Kierkegaards kristendomsforståelse [‘Søren Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Christianity’] (Heretica, 1 (1951), pp. 83–107) and his book Søren Kierkegaard: Ideens digter [Søren Kierkegaard: Poet of the Idea] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1954) mirror many of Løgstrup’s points of argument.

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3. Controverting Kierkegaard: The Main Themes of the Book 3.1 Part I The Historical Jesus, and Løgstrup’s Concepts of Ontology and Revelation In Løgstrup’s critique of Kierkegaard, the first main point of debate is the question concerning what Løgstrup calls ‘the occasion for faith’: ‘When the god has made himself unrecognisable in the form of a servant, this raises the question of how it is even possible that human beings arrive at the idea that the servant is the god’ (2/12).⁴⁷ Kierkegaard’s answer, according to Løgstrup, is twofold: that Jesus performed miracles and that he said of himself that he was the son of God. Focusing on the latter, Løgstrup now emphasizes that to Kierkegaard, Jesus’s claim to be the son of God is not something that can be reasoned with and thus be made into a question reason can solve for us. On the contrary, it is a paradox and thus it cannot be ‘tempered by understanding’ (4/14), which is why it must be accepted in (or rejected through lack of ) faith. In Kierkegaard, faith and understanding are each other’s opposites. When focusing on the paradox, Kierkegaard puts all the weight on what we could call the formal aspect that God became human, infinity became finite, the absolute became relative etc., and in doing so he completely disregards Jesus’s historical life, the historical Jesus:⁴⁸ his words and works (apart from the miracles and his claim to be the son of God). This is the reason why Climacus, in Philosophical Fragments, can claim that: Even if the contemporary generation had not left anything behind except these words, ‘We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the ⁴⁷ Concerning the somewhat odd phrase ‘the god’, see editorial note to Part I, note i, p. 137 below. ⁴⁸ The quest for the historical Jesus (originally associated with David Friedrich Strauss, 1808–74) consists in various approaches to establishing what can be said historically–critically about the actual historical person Jesus: did he exist? was he crucified? where was he born? etc. However, although Løgstrup clearly cites the historical Jesus as essential to Christianity, he is in fact not talking about these historical data. Instead, he is focusing on Jesus the human being and the life he lived in the (hi)story of Jesus’s life, words, and works. Therefore, when Løgstrup speaks of ‘the historical Jesus’ and how Christian faith connects with this, he is not really interested in the data. Rather, he is making the claim that not just the birth, death, and resurrection, but also the life (and words) of Jesus and the way he lived his life, is Gospel. It is what is revealed in this story (or narrative) that is essential to Christianity and the occasion for faith: history’s Jesus, rather than the historical Jesus. Interestingly, Løgstrup’s objection that Kierkegaard disregards Jesus’s historical life is found already in Geismar’s reading of Kierkegaard, cf. Geismar, Søren Kierkegaard. Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed [Søren Kierkegaard: His Personal Development and His Work as an Author], vol. 3, p. 79.

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lowly form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died’—this is more than enough. (SKS 4: 300/KW 7: 104; cited 2/12)

In other words, this paradox alone—to believe that the infinite and immortal God became human and died—is the core of Christianity, and nothing more is necessary for it to survive. But what can this statement tell us that is so important? It tells us that the life of the God-human was utterly incomprehensible, that he was infinitely misunderstood, because no misunderstanding could be greater than to be taken for a human while actually being God; and since being misunderstood is painful it also follows that being infinitely misunderstood involves infinite suffering. Løgstrup returns to suffering as a central concept in Part II, but before this he objects to Kierkegaard’s focus on paradox and misunderstanding as essential to Christianity, claiming that rather than being paradoxical, Jesus’s existence was in fact the only non-paradoxical existence. In making this claim, Løgstrup has to rely on an argument both for what it means that life is created and for what we should understand by revelation. That life is created, Løgstrup writes while referring to Descartes’ Third Meditation (11/22), means that God’s power is everywhere, both in the individual human’s power to be and in the world’s power to remain in existence. This power is not only the power to exist, but it is also the power in how it exists. As created, life and the world are created as something specific, something definite, which means that we cannot alter the fundamental structure of life. Life (or the world) has an ontological structure, and precisely because it is ontological, it eludes our grasp and power. We cannot change the ontological structure, although we can act against it. But what does Løgstrup mean by ‘ontology’, and what precisely is he referring to when speaking of this basic ontological structure in our existence? In an article from 1956,⁴⁹ Løgstrup discusses the difference between an ‘understanding of life’ and ontology: an understanding of life is historical (it comes into being as a cultural phenomenon at a certain time) and it has the human being at its centre (meaning that an understanding of life is an anthropocentric interpretation of life from a perspective where we view life and the world as our home); by contrast, ontology is an attempt to see life and the world for what it is, as

⁴⁹ ‘Eksistensteologien og dens skelnen mellem tro og verdensanskuelse’ [‘Existence Theology and Its Distinction between Faith and World-View’], pp. 44–5 (English translation by Hans Fink and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/).

xxxvi  something both alien and inaccessible, and thus an ontology is a-historical and not a cultural phenomenon. Although he does not say it in the present context, Løgstrup’s idea is that phenomenology provides the means to pierce the historical and cultural surface and thus see the phenomena for what they really are, their fundamental ontological structure (eidos, essence, or nature).⁵⁰ So, what is Løgstrup referring to when speaking of life’s (existence’s) basic ontological structure? The answer is that in Løgstrup’s view there is a power in life, but this power is not indifferent to how life is; the power in all that exists (which maintains existence) also affects how everything exists. It is not possible for us to simply choose one way of being over another way of being (e.g. to choose a life of hate over a life of love) and then simply get another kind of life, as when one chooses whether to be a mechanic over being a baker, but rather in substituting hate for love we stifle life, because life is essentially a good gift and should thus be received as such in love and gratitude.⁵¹ What is good in life belongs to its ontological structure, and evil or wickedness consists in destroying what is already good. Therefore, according to Løgstrup, there is an ontological difference between good and evil; there is an ontological ranking or hierarchy, where evil is secondary to goodness (and cannot be conceived of without goodness), not vice versa (12/23). This is what ‘creation’ means to Løgstrup: that we cannot change the basic structure of life without perverting or destroying it.⁵² This leads us to the second question: what does Løgstrup mean by ‘revelation’? In the article from 1956, Løgstrup (citing Luther) replies: For revelation means that God makes his omnipresence visible in a definite place. Beforehand, God is present everywhere. In revelation, his prior presence comes into view.⁵³

God is always already present everywhere as the power to be in everything that exists and how it exists, and an important aspect of revelation is thus that it is ⁵⁰ An example is the analysis of trust in The Ethical Demand, chapter 1. ⁵¹ While Løgstrup only touches upon this very briefly in the present work (cf. 30/46), in his later work Creation and Annihilation, he addresses theodicy and the problem of evil and suffering directly. A main theme in the book is that life cannot be seen simply as good in itself as there is annihilation (and thus suffering) built into the structure of creation. Thus, life or creation becomes more ambiguous in Løgstrup’s late work than it is here. In The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup also discusses briefly how suffering is part of human existence; cf. The Ethical Demand, pp. 104–5/Den etiske fordring, pp. 139–40. ⁵² Ole Jensen calls it ‘vulnerable invulnerability’: that life is created as something definite does not make it indestructible, but it just means that a created phenomenon cannot be manipulated without it being perverted and thus destroyed, cf. Ole Jensen, Sårbar usårlighed [Vulnerable Invulnerability] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994), p. 5. ⁵³ ‘Eksistensteologien og dens skelnen mellem tro og verdensanskuelse’ [‘Existence Theology and Its Distinction between Faith and World-View’], p. 46 (English translation by Hans Fink and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/).

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this power, the structure of created life, that is revealed. In this way, revelation in the shape of the Christian proclamation corresponds ‘to something in our existence’, as Løgstrup writes the same year in the very first sentence in The Ethical Demand. The proclamation can correspond to things we are already aware of, speaking about them in a particular way and with a particular message, but the proclamation can also correspond to something in our existence which we were completely unaware of—until the proclamation disclosed it by addressing it. It is quite conceivable that a particular proclamation is necessary for us to become alerted to it, for example, a contradiction in our existence, which we could not have been conscious of before the proclamation in question became historically available.⁵⁴

The Christian proclamation, according to Løgstrup, is not simply an otherworldly revelation, speaking of a world beyond the world (cf. Nietzsche’s critique of the Backworldsmen in §2.1 above), but it also speaks the truth concerning our existence here and now, and in doing so it draws attention to these truths or basic ontological structures in our interpersonal (interdependent) existence, shining a light on them and thus revealing them, so that they come into focus.⁵⁵ However, once they are revealed at a specific point in the course of history, they remain revealed (because they become part of our culture, for example in literature and in our philosophical and theological writings) and are thus available to our understanding of life and the world (i.e. philosophical reasoning): But once the proclamation has shown us this feature of our existence, then we are able to recognize it by ourselves without the need for the proclamation. It is also possible that we may accept this feature of our existence, while at one and the same time rejecting the proclamation itself and all that it involves.⁵⁶

⁵⁴ The Ethical Demand, p. 3/Den etiske fordring, p. 9. ⁵⁵ Here it is important to say that Løgstrup does not eliminate all eschatological elements from the Christian proclamation. Revelation also contains an eschatological message about restoration and resurrection, of eternal love and forgiveness; but as Løgstrup points out, even the eschatological content reflects back on our life, as is the case with forgiveness: ‘This is so, because in faith in forgiveness, and in the preoccupation with the neighbour’s needs that results from forgiveness, sin is broken—if it is really believed and is not merely an element of an outlook on life’ (37/55). ⁵⁶ The Ethical Demand, p. 3/Den etiske fordring, pp. 9–10. In the ‘Rejoinder’ (Art and Ethics (1961), translated in Kees van Kooten Niekerk (ed.), Beyond The Ethical Demand, pp. 1–48), Løgstrup comments on his distinction between ‘the human’ and ‘the religious’ spheres in The Ethical Demand, admitting that it is misleading. Instead, he suggests distinguishing between ‘the human’

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In opposition to a Barthian concept of revelation, where God’s word is alien to us and this world, Løgstrup’s understanding is that the Christian proclamation can make our existence visible to us (revealing its ontological structure),⁵⁷ even though we might still reject the religious message about this existence. In this way, returning to the present book, Jesus’s proclamation can be seen from both a theological and a philosophical perspective. Philosophically, he provides us with ontological insights or truth-claims (like other philosophers do, when they make claims about the structure of human reality),⁵⁸ but he also provides us with a religious message about these truths, and—Løgstrup argues in Controverting Kierkegaard—the proclamation of Jesus’s life, words, and works makes us aware of a fundamental difference between him and us. With this difference we are back where we began, namely with Løgstrup’s claim, in opposition to Kierkegaard, that Jesus was the only non-paradoxical existence. Jesus’s existence is non-paradoxical because the life he lived, as revealed to us in the Christian proclamation, is nothing but fulfilment or realization of what life truly is. Jesus lived the true human life, and he is thus the (only) true human being;⁵⁹ his life reveals the truth of existence to us, namely that life is a gift, and he lives in continuous reception of it. The paradox is that we, everyone but Jesus, somehow manage to live contrary to the power to be in everything that exists, and manage to pervert what life really is so that we manipulate life in a destruction of it. There is no conflict in Jesus’s life between the power in existence and how that power manifests itself, which is (which contains what he calls ‘a universal religiosity’) and ‘the specifically Christian’. The former has to do with our common experience of life (its ontological structures), where human reason and understanding apply and which thus ‘belong to a philosophical ethics’ (p. 11/Kunst og etik, p. 198), because here ‘theology has to do with the same reality as philosophy’ (p. 14/p. 201). The latter, however, concerns ‘something in Christianity that is not accessible to the phenomenological analysis, namely, everything that is unforeseen’ (p. 13/p. 201), that is, the eschatological content of the Christian proclamation. ⁵⁷ This is also why Løgstrup begins to call his own ethical position ontological (the first clear example is in 1960: ‘Ethik und Ontologie’ [‘Ethics and Ontology’, translated by Eric Watkins]), cf. Ethical Concepts and Problems, pp. 7–8/Etiske begreber og problemer, p. 12: ‘There is also a third basic view, which could be called ontological. The ethical demand receives its content from the fundamental condition that we live under and which we are not in a position to change, namely that the life of one person is entangled with that of the other person, and so it consists in taking care of the part of the other person’s life which as a result of this entanglement is at our mercy.’ ⁵⁸ And for this reason, Jesus can be interpreted as just another moral philosopher (although Løgstrup himself does not do so). Putting it briefly, this is because (1) Jesus’s message concerning forgiveness and his proclamation of the ethical demand raise questions about his authority (cf. 21–2/36 and The Ethical Demand pp. 177–8/Den etiske fordring, p. 234) and mission (cf. also p. 181–2/p. 239); and (2) because the way he lived raises further questions concerning who he is due to his non-paradoxical existence (13–4/25). In this way, Løgstrup can maintain that Jesus’s proclamation has philosophical content concerning its ontological claims, even though one might reject its eschatological religious message through lack of faith. ⁵⁹ This is also the title of Møller’s study of the figure of Jesus in Løgstrup’s thought, cf. Maria Louise Odgaard Møller, The True Human Being.

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why his life is non-paradoxical; but our destruction of life is paradoxical, because we seize the power for ourselves, making life our own possession rather than living in reception of it. Thus, when faced with Jesus’s life we come to the double insight that his life is the fulfilment of true life and that we ourselves fall short of leading this life; and that even when we try to fulfil it, we end up destroying it, precisely because we try.

3.2 Part II Suffering In the second part of the book, Løgstrup returns to the question concerning the role of suffering in Christianity and in Kierkegaard. As already established in the first part, Kierkegaard sees it as fundamental to Christianity that Jesus’s life was a life in misunderstanding (due to his paradoxical nature) and that this led to a life of suffering: ‘Therefore, the god-in-time had to be crucified, and that not only just at Golgotha, but from the beginning’ (21/35). Thus, according to Kierkegaard, to be a Christian (a follower of Christ) must be to seek an existence that resembles Christ as much as possible. In this connection, Løgstrup adopts the strategy (repeated many times throughout the book) of drawing a contrast between Kierkegaard and Luther:⁶⁰ whereas Kierkegaard believes that being a follower of Christ involves imitating Christ as closely as possible (imitatio Christi), Luther’s position was entirely different, seeing that what Jesus did was exceptional, something which was done at a specific point in history for our sake so that we should benefit from it and so that we do not have to do it ourselves (historical once-and-for-all significance).⁶¹

⁶⁰ Løgstrup’s practice of putting Luther and Kierkegaard at odds is aimed directly at Tidehverv and Olesen Larsen, because Tidehverv saw themselves as rooted in both Luther and Kierkegaard, whereas Løgstrup intended to show them that Kierkegaard and Luther differ fundamentally, where he would choose Luther’s side. ⁶¹ Here, an objection towards Løgstrup could be that Luther in fact embraces both options, that there is a historical once-and-for-all significance as well as an idea of imitation. However, this would be ‘imitation’ in a different sense than found in Kierkegaard, and where ‘imitation’ would seem to be a slightly misleading term, as Luther emphasizes Christ as a gift rather than as an exemplar, and because the example is not one that can be followed without the historical gift (cf. e.g. Luther: ‘Ein klein Unterricht, was man in den Evangeliis suchen und gewarten soll’ (WA 10.1, 1, 8–18)/‘A Brief Instruction What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels’ (LA 35: 113–24)). Furthermore, if we were to take up this as an objection to Løgstrup, then he could respond that his conception of the sovereign expressions of life has a very similar structure, because they too can be seen as a gift that sets us free to be like the example (Christ), which simply means to live the true life; but with the obvious difference between Løgstrup and Luther being that the sovereign expressions of life can manifest themselves in everybody, non-Christians as well as Christians. We shall return to this in the discussion of Part IV below.

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Turning to the developments in Part II, Løgstrup raises the objection that, according to Kierkegaard, being a true Christian is to seek out suffering through (1) helping others to love God (something which will inevitably be misunderstood as hatred because it involves turning them away from worldly ends, which is painful to them), just as Jesus in his own time showed his contemporaries how to love God (something which in the end led to his crucifixion), and through (2) detaching oneself from worldly ties, just as Jesus was ‘ostracized by and from the world’ and ‘attached by birth to no other human being’ (40/59).⁶² Suffering, as Kierkegaard puts it, is the ‘totality category’ (28/43) of religiosity, and ‘in suffering, religiosity begins to draw breath’ (45/66). In opposition to Kierkegaard and again citing Luther (and here also the Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren), Løgstrup claims that it is false to speak of a special kind of Christian suffering, because suffering is the same category for everyone; the only difference is that as a Christian you can take up a special interpretation (tydning) of and attitude towards suffering, an interpretation which tells us that our suffering is not an injustice, but is due to our mistreatment of life (31–2/48–9). Kierkegaard’s mistake, according to Løgstrup, is that he tackles the problem of human wickedness (our self-centredness, including our inclination to praise our own efforts and accomplishments) by laying waste to everything in existence. In order to quash our self-centredness (sin), he strikes down everything that could be an occasion for us to commit sin. In doing so, Kierkegaard adopts an extensive understanding of evil, seeing evil as a metaphysical category, namely as everything worldly and temporal (the finite world of merely relative ends). By contrast, Løgstrup puts forward what he calls an intensive understanding of evil, where evil is only attributed to human selfish nature, but therefore does not involve the whole of worldly existence. Taken extensively, evil permeates everything in human existence, but taken intensively, evil is limited to just involving our selfishness, leaving room for there to also be something good in existence, namely the fundamental ontological structures which, according to Løgstrup, in a Christian context, means the world as it was created (42/61–2).⁶³ Another aspect of Kierkegaard’s approach to suffering has to do with his understanding that to be a Christian is to be faced with the dispiriting prospect that we ourselves can accomplish nothing of real importance, that all our ⁶² For more on the suffering connected with helping the neighbour to love God, see Løgstrup’s discussion in Part 1 of the ‘Polemical Epilogue’ in The Ethical Demand (pp. 185–98/Den etiske fordring, pp. 244–61). ⁶³ Among these fundamental ontological structures are the sovereign expressions of life, cf. §3.3.

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efforts are ultimately fruitless, and that our achievements are illusory, because to be obedient to Kierkegaard’s infinite demand is to admit and express that our works amount to nothing and give all honour to God (26/41). But, Løgstrup responds, this is to deny the fact that we actually accomplish many things and that our works can have importance and significance for others. Our mistake, according to Løgstrup, is that we take credit for our accomplishments, not realizing that everything at our disposal is ‘entrusted to’ us (27/42). Thus, ethico-cultural works can have meaning and value, and hence they involve accomplishment, but they do not heighten our own moral standing in the slightest. Instead of rightly laying the blame on the self-centredness of the ego (in a denial of the meritoriousness of the self ), Kierkegaard wrongly lays blame on life in its entirety. The result is that in Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity, suffering becomes a goal for the Christian as a means to salvation. The Christian must choose to become a martyr, because suffering leads to God. Within this conception, the other person becomes a mere instrument, their hatred (caused by their misunderstood interpretation of their suffering resulting from the Christian’s attempt to help them to love God) leading to ostracization and thus to the special case of Christian suffering that is the key to establishing a relation between the Christian and God. In Løgstrup’s reading, Kierkegaard turns Christianity into law, particular biddings for the Christian to do, and by putting such emphasis on suffering he makes it the prime goal for the Christian. In doing so, he breaks this ethical law off completely from what Løgstrup terms life in ‘naturally generated and culturally formed communities’ (39/57 passim), whereby he completely disqualifies all ‘works of one’s vocation’ (36/54), that is, all efforts to help other people in their worldly life. Kierkegaard’s ethics is worldless, or acosmical, because the only thing that matters is for the self to be crushed by God’s accusation (the second use of the law), but thereby Kierkegaard disregards the importance of the first use of the law: that we should act for the sake of the other person. As Løgstrup puts it, rather than juxtaposing the two uses of the law (acknowledging them both in their own right), Kierkegaard subordinates the first use under the second use, which in effect is to disqualify it completely (43–4/62–3). The result is that Kierkegaard can provide no answer to the problem of passivity: why not just do nothing when everything we do is worthless? The best he can do is simply to offer a condemnation, or curse, of it (44/65), whereas Løgstrup can answer citing Luther: because the first use of the law is rightful in itself, as its purpose is to serve the neighbour in their worldly life.

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3.3 Part III The Infinite Movement and the Sovereign Expressions of Life This attack on Kierkegaard leads Løgstrup to Fear and Trembling and the so-called double movement of faith, which comes to serve as a focal point. In Kierkegaard, the double movement consists of two connected movements: the infinite movement of resignation and the finite movement of faith. The problem Kierkegaard addresses is this: how can faith come into a person’s life so that they might become a Christian? If we try to translate Kierkegaard’s theological question into a more philosophical framework, we could see it as the problem of how we can come to change our perspective on life in finitude from just an immediate valuation and appreciation of it as it appears to a consideration of life for what it really is; how do we change our basis for evaluation of life from its immediate (according to Kierkegaard: false) value to its real value? The answer is that we must somehow have our immediate absorption with life broken off; we must come to a point where we pull back from life in a resignation away from finitude towards infinitude (or God). Only through this conversion, where we turn away from life ‘in front of us’ towards God’s light, which shines ‘from behind us’ (so to speak, just as is the case for the prisoners in Plato’s Cave), can we come to stand in a (proper) relation with God and thus see life for what it is. This is the first part of the double movement, the infinite movement of resignation, and it stands as a precondition for the second movement, the finite movement of faith, where the person—upon receiving faith as a gift—turns back towards life, embracing finitude again in a new, second, immediacy: the immediacy of faith. The reason for this double movement is (following Løgstrup’s presentation of Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling) that there is no way for us to find anything in finitude that can point us towards God. Finitude, or worldly life, offers us only objects for our idolization: instances of relative value that we idolize and treat as absolutes, but where they ought to be treated as merely relative ends of relative value, as opposed to God, who is an absolute end of absolute value, but who is precisely not to be found in finitude.⁶⁴ As Johannes de silentio puts it: ‘in the world of time, God and humans cannot talk with each other, they have no language in common’ (SKS 4: 130/KW 6: 35; cited 49/71). In this way, the fundamental human mistake is that we misattribute the notion of the absolute.

⁶⁴ The background for Løgstrup’s critique here is Kierkegaard’s dictum from Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs: ‘But the maximum of the task is to be able simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute telos and relatively to the relative ends, or at all times to have the absolute telos with oneself ’ (SKS 7: 376/KW 12.1: 414).

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Until we have broken off from finitude, we have no proper place for it, which leads us to absolutize anything and everything, but through the double movement we gain sight of the absolute so that our perspective changes and we see finitude as relativity. To Løgstrup, this only serves to solidify what he sees as a metaphysical dualism in Kierkegaard (as expressed by Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling and by Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Everything finite or worldly is devalued as mere relativity in favour of an otherworldliness (cf. Nietzsche’s Backworldsmen), which fits the extensive understanding of evil (sin).⁶⁵ In a direct confrontation with this metaphysical dualism, Løgstrup puts forward his alternative, where life in finitude (our human existence in naturally generated and culturally formed communities) is not just understood as life in relativity, but where absolute ends are part of this life’s basic structure or ontological framework. This is where he introduces the sovereign expressions of life. Although the sovereign expressions of life were to become the new and central concept in Løgstrup’s metaphysics and ethics (along with their opposite: the circling thoughts and emotions),⁶⁶ he provides astonishingly little in terms of a comprehensive presentation and definition. He introduces them in an article in 1966,⁶⁷ but the phenomena he speaks about exist— structurally, albeit under different names—in Løgstrup’s theological and philosophical ‘system’ already in the 1930s. Therefore, if we are to fully understand what they mean and what role they play, we have to take a step backwards. As discussed in §2.2., Løgstrup departed from his childhood ‘pietist phase’ when he joined ranks with Tidehverv in the 1930s. Crucial to this theological change of position was the radicalization of the concept of sin (cf. §2.1.), where Tidehverv—and Løgstrup—saw sin as the basic existential category of human existence: the problem of human existence is that we are confined within ⁶⁵ This critique of Kierkegaardian (and Tidehverv’s) otherworldliness shows us that although they spoke of remaining faithful to the earth (cf. Olesen Larsen, §2.1 above), Løgstrup in fact finds that they fail. Tidehverv attacked idealism for otherworldliness due to its striving for improvement through piety using the radicalized conception of sin as the prime weapon. But, Løgstrup objects, when sin is understood extensively as everything within finitude, Kierkegaard and Tidehverv end up with otherworldliness yet again, just in a different shape: Tidehverv may not accept striving for perfection, but Christianity in Tidehverv’s Kierkegaardian version of it still remains firmly fixated on what lies beyond finitude. ⁶⁶ In some places, he also refers to them as obsessive thoughts and movements of emotion (Danish: tvungne tanke- og følelsesbevægelser). He seems to have never settled for one particular terminology for them, alternating instead between different variants, which could also explain why he sometimes uses inexpedient terms (cf. below pp. lvi–lvii on ‘obsessive expressions of life’). ⁶⁷ In the article ‘Sartres og Kierkegaards skildring af den dæmoniske indesluttethed’ [‘Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Inturnedness’], which is reprinted—almost verbatim, but with some important corrections—in the present work, 62–77/86–106.

xliv  ourselves; or more precisely, we confine ourselves through our self-circling egocentricity and selfishness. However, following Løgstrup, sin (or egotism) is not just an ethical category, but also an epistemic one, because through being caught up within ourselves we are also cut off from perceiving life and existence for what they really are. As Løgstrup writes in 1938: We all live in the twilight of triviality. Whatever we see and hear, we see and hear as something worn-out and trite. This is an all-encompassing understanding that we have beforehand. This understanding is not something we are conscious of, but it is like a common, unconscious way of engaging with all things.—Therefore, one cannot say that making everything trivial, worn-out, and trite is something we actually strive to do. No, the triteness dwells in our spirit and dulls the brightness of our sight, so that we see only grey. We go through life with triteness’s, with triviality’s death in us. Everything our thought touches upon withers and turns into worn-out opinions. Every colour in our sight turns dull through the triteness that dwells in our eyes. Every word we hear turns shallow, a sign without depth of meaning in the tonelessness of our ears. We hear as though through cotton wool, and we see as though through a haze, due to triteness’s death, which lingers in our spirit—no matter how sharp our bodily senses might be. Therefore, we have not just forgotten that we live in God’s creation, but we have completely eradicated any understanding of such a thing.⁶⁸

Hence, the fundamental problem of human existence is twofold, but directly interrelated: we are cut off from seeing life for what it truly is, and the thing cutting us off is our own self-absorption. However, Løgstrup’s studies of Scheler’s phenomenology (cf. Løgstrup’s 1932 prize dissertation briefly mentioned above) had turned his attention towards the difference between the (subjective) value that things have for us and the (objective or) real value of something. Rather than reducing value to being merely something subjective, a product constituted by our own desires (feelings), Scheler argues that there is a more fundamental layer to values, because they are based in an ontological structure of real value, which can be perceived by us in phenomenological acts of feeling (Fühlen).⁶⁹ Thus, according to Scheler, phenomenology can enable us

⁶⁸ ‘Guds Skabning’ [‘God’s Creation’] (my translation). ⁶⁹ Although Løgstrup praises Scheler for his phenomenological approach to values, he is highly critical of his attempt to found an ethics on phenomenology, see Bjørn Rabjerg, ‘Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s Reception of Max Scheler’s Ethics of 1932 and Beyond’, in Susan Gottlöber (ed.),

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to pierce the veil of subjectivity that clouds our perception and see at least part of existence for what it really is.⁷⁰ With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that Løgstrup chooses to focus on human emotions, as can be seen in a sermon from 1939. Although it is part of a sermon manuscript (which is reflected in the direct reference to God), the content is phenomenological and philosophical, and it is an exercise in what he later would call philosophical psychology (with reference to Gilbert Ryle and Hans Lipps):⁷¹ [ . . . ] what we call ‘emotions’, movements of the spirit, are in reality divided into two kinds, which have nothing at all in common—which are opposites in every respect. There are the movements of spirit given to us through our created humanity. Just as the eye with its sight, the ear with its hearing, just as our body [and] our understanding are given to us by God, because he happens to have created us in this particular way—in similar fashion there are also movements of the human spirit given to us by God, movements which he happens to have created and given to us. These are movements of spirit that are true in themselves: joy, sorrow, pain, love, fear, anxiety, horror, compassion. These are all movements in which we stand in a true relation to our surrounding world [ . . . ]. In these movements we are open to reality as it is. In these movements of spirit, life is laid bare for us. In these movements of spirit, life lies naked and understood as it is in truth.⁷²

Common to these emotions is that they open us up to life: to feel joy is to encounter something, which—arriving to us from outside ourselves—causes or elicits joy as a movement of our spirit. Similarly, love is something that happens to us (you ‘fall in’ love, as we say) and it depends entirely on another person; and sorrow is to have had this relationship with another person who Max Scheler in Dialogue (Cham: Springer, 2022), pp. 173–89. In the 1930s, however, Løgstrup does not yet agree with Scheler that phenomenology can achieve this insight into the real values, but he becomes more optimistic sometime in the 1940s. ⁷⁰ Where phenomenology can be viewed as a philosophical means to seeing existence for what it really is, as we have seen, Løgstrup’s conception of revelation provides a theological approach to the same problem, where the proclamation of ‘history’s Jesus’ also reveals human existence for what it truly is. From a theological perspective, Løgstrup would argue that revelation (the Christian proclamation) is to be understood as a precondition for phenomenology, cf. Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, p. 74/ Kierkegaard og Heideggers eksistensanalyse og dens forhold til forkyndelsen, pp. 99–100. ⁷¹ Cf. ‘Fænomenologi og psykologi’ [‘Phenomenology and Psychology’] (English translation by Hans Fink and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/). ⁷² ‘Gudgivne og selvlavede bevægelser i sindet’ [‘God-given and Self-made Movements of the Spirit’], Elsebeth Diderichsen and Ole Jensen (eds.), Prædikener fra Sandager-Holevad (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995), pp. 118–19 (my translation).

xlvi  then has been lost. In these emotions, there is a direction outwards or away from ourselves.⁷³ None of these emotions is caused by us, and although they are in us, we do not possess the power to produce them, but their appearance in us depends entirely on something from outside ourselves to release or elicit them in us. Furthermore, Løgstrup goes as far as to say that they are true, his point being that these emotions provide us with the experience that life is a gift (although we may not consciously reflect upon it), and that we depend on them for our zest for life; without them we would wither away.⁷⁴ Therefore, for example, there is truth in sorrow, because it shows us how we depended on someone, who was a gift and a blessing but who is now lost. After having discussed this first kind of emotions (that are in us but which are not of our own making or under our control, but are given to us), Løgstrup goes on to discuss the second kind, their opposites: But then there are the emotions and movements of spirit that we ourselves have fabricated. These self-made emotions are: disappointment, taking offence, overexhilaration, contentment, discontentment, annoyance, self-pity. These are our own artefacts. Therefore, they do not open up our spirit towards the surrounding world and our fellow human beings—but they confine us within ourselves. [ . . . ] they lure us away from life. They are lies in themselves. An insulted human being is a liar—just by feeling insulted.⁷⁵

These self-made emotions are fabricated by us, and they close us off from life, because we (obsessively) constrain ourselves in them. To feel either content or discontent is to circle around our own self, indulging ourselves in either of them; and self-pity is when our self has gradually taken hold of the openness of sorrow (which Løgstrup saw as a true emotion) and has instead displaced our attention from the one who was lost (openness) to our own state of misery ⁷³ In The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup identifies this direction outwards in love as love’s intentionality: ‘In the longing for the other person, love has an intentional structure, which because of its passion, pulls the human being with it’ (The Ethical Demand p. 111/Den etiske fordring, p. 147) and ‘[t]he purity of love is its outward directedness’ (p. 113/p. 150). ⁷⁴ These thoughts are directly tied together with central themes in The Ethical Demand, where Løgstrup sees ‘life as a gift’ as a precondition to the one-sidedness of the demand (The Ethical Demand, p. 106/Den etiske fordring, p. 141) and where trust is thought of in similar fashion as ‘true’ without which ‘our life would wither away and become stunted’ (p. 9/p. 17). In The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup discusses the problem that our zest for life is intimately linked with our selfishness, but we still have to distinguish between them, Løgstrup points out, or we end up with asceticism (p. 199/p. 263). ⁷⁵ ‘Gudgivne og selvlavede bevægelser i sindet’ [‘God-given and Self-made Movements of the Spirit’], p. 119 (my translation). The Ethical Demand provides good examples of how taking offence and feeling insulted is tantamount to lack of honesty and are ways of cutting off communication and shutting oneself off from others, cf. The Ethical Demand, pp. 11–12, n. 3 and p. 36/Den etiske fordring, p. 20, n. 3 and p. 53.

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(self-enclosedness). As Løgstrup puts it in the sermon: it ‘is no longer the lost person that our mind is open to in longing, but it is ourselves we see’.⁷⁶ In making this distinction between emotions that are true, ‘opening-up’ (revealing), and ‘God-given’, vs. those that are deceptive, self-enclosing, and self-made, we can see how the former—according to Løgstrup—are part of the ontological structure of interdependent life, whereas the latter are caused and produced by us and are ways in which we cut ourselves off from life. In this way, there is (ontological) goodness in existence, although we do not produce it, but rather destroy it through our self-centredness. This motif lies behind the chapter on ‘The Wickedness of Human Beings and the Goodness of Human Life’ in The Ethical Demand, where Løgstrup writes: To show trust and to deliver ourselves up, to entertain a natural love, is goodness. In this sense, goodness is integral to our human life though we ourselves are wicked. Both apply completely, so that there is no place for a reckoning in terms of more or less. [ . . . ]. As if trust and natural love were not given to human beings, but were a human being’s own achievements and belonged to the account of the self.⁷⁷

Here, Løgstrup puts forward what we may call his two-accounts doctrine, namely that we have to distinguish sharply between the account of the goodness of human life (the ontological account) and the account of the selfishness of the ego (the anthropological account).⁷⁸ Returning to the present work, in Controverting Kierkegaard, the sovereign expressions of life become Løgstrup’s term for what he called the true emotions in the sermon, or phenomena as he now calls them. They are part of the ontological structure of human existence, whereas their opposites (the self-made and deceptive emotions or phenomena) are not expressions of life’s (ontological) structure, but rather expressions of the structure of the (anthropological) ego, where we circle obsessively around ourselves constraining ourselves within ourselves.⁷⁹

⁷⁶ ‘Gudgivne og selvlavede bevægelser i sindet’ [‘God-given and Self-made Movements of the Spirit’], p. 120 (my translation). ⁷⁷ The Ethical Demand, p. 121/Den etiske fordring, p. 161. ⁷⁸ Cf. Ethical Problems and Concepts: ‘But there are two accounts to maintain and keep separated: the account of our given life, and the account of our ego’ (p. 18/Etiske begreber og problemer, p. 23.). ⁷⁹ Løgstrup’s conception of the circling thoughts and emotions has some similarities with the analysis of ressentiment, as found in the works of Max Scheler (and of course in Nietzsche). In Scheler’s work of 1915 Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen [The Ressentiment in the Construction of Moralities] (previous edition 1912, Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil [On Ressentiment and Moral Value Judgements]), he analyses ressentiment as an

xlviii  Both types of phenomena are emotions (or emotion-like), although Løgstrup clearly has qualms about using the same term for both: It is hardly correct to call that with which human beings enclose themselves emotions; they are rather fixated thoughts, whose paltry emotionality consists in the self forcing them to circle around itself. Kept on the ego’s leash, under its whip, these thoughts go round and round in the ego’s own ring. (70/97)

Løgstrup’s philosophical psychology has thus provided us with an analysis of human existence, where part of it reveals to us structures (or movements of spirit) that open us up to life (revealing life’s goodness), and another part turns us back upon ourselves (revealing our self-centredness). An important part of this self-centredness is that we congratulate ourselves on what is ultimately given to us, whereas we refuse to take on the guilt of what is in fact our own fabrications: Therefore, what it is important to see, is that the disclosed hypocrisy and the expressions of life which we have pointed out are not on the same level. They belong to different levels. We are guilty of everything which is an object for disclosure; it is our own degradation of our life. By contrast, none of the expressions of life, which we have brought into view, are owed to ourselves, they are given to us with our existence.⁸⁰

If the goodness of human life did not provide the sovereign expressions of life as possibilities for us, we would be left with only our own fabrications, and as a result our existence would crumble. We have now (briefly) answered the questions concerning what the sovereign expressions of life and the circling thoughts and emotions are, and where they originate from; but we have set aside the question of how the sovereign expressions of life come to fulfilment, or as Løgstrup puts it, how they are realized (Danish: realiseret).⁸¹ In many places throughout Controverting emotion or feeling that lies deeper and is more fundamental than other resentful emotions such as, for example, revenge. Where revenge has an object and can be said to find a way of exhausting itself through action directed towards its object, ressentiment does not have an object, but rather perpetually seeks new objects to be directed at; however, ressentiment cannot exhaust itself through any activity, but constantly supplies itself in a self-circling and impotent emotionality. ⁸⁰ Ethical Concepts and Problems, p. 18/Etiske begreber og problemer, p. 23; cf. below 85–6/115. ⁸¹ The Danish words ‘realisere’ and ‘realisering’ (and also ‘fuldbyrde’ and ‘fuldbyrdelse’) can give rise to misunderstanding when translated to ‘realize’ and ‘realization’, because in English ‘to realize’ can mean both an intellectual act (i.e. to understand something) and to

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Kierkegaard, Løgstrup seems to suggest that although we do not make them possible we must somehow let them be realized or choose them in the situation: If, on the other hand, they are fulfilled, because that is what everyone has been given their life for, it is up to the individual to let the definitive expression of life force its way through even in the most complicated and unfavourable situation. (75/104, italics added)

And: In fact, all that is left to the individual’s choice, decision, and freedom is either to complete the definitiveness that is already and in advance integral to the sovereign expression of life through which the individual fulfils themselves—or to fail its definitiveness. (77/105, italics added)

And yet again: Either the will lets itself be overpowered and surrenders to the expression of life, or it relies on its own efforts [ . . . ]. (86/116, italics added)

And perhaps most clearly: To resolve to show trust or compassion is to resolve to give yourself over to trust or compassion. Trust and compassion must thus be there beforehand as possibilities of life. If they are not, the resolution cannot produce them. (98/130, italics added)

These passages suggest Løgstrup’s idea to be that although we cannot bring about the sovereign expressions of life as existential possibilities ourselves, we must somehow realize them through choosing them and letting them ‘take over’ the situation. This has been labelled as the medio-passive model after the term for the ‘permissive middle’, which is the grammatical form for the category where the subject is neither fully active nor fully passive. Therefore, the medio-passive model covers ‘[ . . . ] situations in which the agent is both active and passive, in such a way that s/he participates in the action but

make something real, that is, to actualize or accomplish something. When Løgstrup here speaks of ‘realizing’ the sovereign expression of life, it means to make it real, accomplish, or consummate it.

l  without being in control of it’.⁸² It has the advantage that it provides an intelligible model for both action and blameworthiness, where we are clearly to blame for not having done what we could and should when we do not ‘give in’ to the sovereign expressions of life. However, in making room for attributing blame to the agent, the mediopassive model also makes room for the opposite: for praise, because it implies that the agent is still willing and thus active (albeit in a medio-passive way) when the sovereign expressions of life are realized. The ego has a say in letting the good happen, which means that the realization of the good is a cooperation between the ego and the sovereign expression of life, where the will is free to choose between unselfishness or selfishness, good or evil. But this interpretation seems to fit very poorly with Løgstrup’s (Lutheran) conception of both the ego and the will (his anthropological pessimism). Returning to Løgstrup’s strong stance in The Ethical Demand and his two-accounts doctrine, Løgstrup there states very clearly that there is no place for goodness in the ego, and that the will has no freedom to choose the good: To show trust and to deliver ourselves up, to entertain a natural love, is goodness. In this sense, goodness is integral to our human life though we ourselves are wicked. Both apply completely, so that there is no place for a reckoning in terms of more or less. Often such a reckoning does take place, for example when it is said that there is ‘at least some’ good in a human being! To which we can only reply, ‘No, there is not!’ When speaking of the notion that there is ‘at least some’ good in human beings, one means to subtract something from wickedness and then add it to goodness—on the individual’s own account! As if trust and natural love were not given to human beings, but were a human being’s own achievements and belonged to the account of the self. But there is nothing to subtract from human wickedness. The self brings everything under the power of its selfishness. The human will is bound in this. The demand to love, that as a demand is addressed to our will, is unfulfillable. Nor can anything be added to the goodness of human life. It is there, and is there in completeness, but beforehand—always beforehand, among other things in the realities of trust and love.⁸³

⁸² Béatrice Han-Pile, ‘Nietzsche and Amor Fati’, European Journal of Philosophy, 19 (2011), pp. 224–62, see particularly p. 233; cf. Robert Stern, The Radical Demand in Løgstrup’s Ethics, p. 322. ⁸³ The Ethical Demand, p. 121/Den etiske fordring, p. 161.

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If the ego can cooperate with the goodness of human life, then surely we ‘subtract something from [human] wickedness’, saying ‘that there is “at least some” good in a human being! To which we can only reply, “No, there is not!”’. Furthermore, Løgstrup rejects the idea that the will can freely choose between the good and the bad, because the good will seeks the good, and the bad will is unwilling to turn towards the good. If the human will is selfish and wicked it is thus unable (and unwilling) to change its course. However, as it is the self ’s own fault that it is selfish and wicked, it can still be held responsible, even though once it is wicked, it cannot take another course through its own efforts. As Løgstrup writes in The Ethical Demand: [ . . . ] what was just spoken of as being in the human being’s own ‘account’ is their will, and the radical character of guilt consists in the fact that it is the will which is selfish and wicked.⁸⁴

In a footnote following the sentence, he adds a quote from Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will, saying that a human being does not do evil against their will, as though they were taken by the scruff of the neck and dragged into it, like a thief or a footpad being dragged off against their will to punishment; but they do it of their own accord and with a ready will. (WA Abt 1, 18:634/LW 33:64)⁸⁵

So, the ego is not good, not even in the slightest, and the will is not free, but tightly bound, according to Løgstrup.⁸⁶ But could the introduction of the sovereign expressions of life maybe have changed Løgstrup’s view on the ego and the will? After all (as was originally pointed out by Ole Jensen),⁸⁷ Løgstrup is inconsistent in The Ethical Demand when he rejects the idea that love and trust are realized in our life: ‘[ . . . ] from the reality of our own lives, we only know of a natural love to which we have given our own self ’s selfish shape. ⁸⁴ The Ethical Demand, p. 122/Den etiske fordring, p. 162. ⁸⁵ Ibid. ⁸⁶ The point Løgstrup makes here about Luther’s analysis of the human will builds on an article Løgstrup wrote in 1940: ‘Viljesbegrebet i De Servo Arbitrio’ [‘On the Concept of Will in Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio’] where the central point is to promote Luther’s rejection of Erasmus’s defence of free will, because the will is selfish due to its being tied to the self. Behind Løgstrup’s anthropological pessimism and his rejection of a free will, we find Luther’s conception of sin as incurvatus in se (inturnedness upon oneself ). For a more elaborate discussion of this, see Rabjerg and Stern, ‘Freedom from the Self: Luther and Løgstrup on Sin as “Incurvatus in Se” ’. ⁸⁷ Ole Jensen, ‘ “Skabte livsmuligheder”—“suveræne livsytringer”: Bemærkninger til et grundtema hos K.E. Løgstrup’; (English translation by Ole Jensen and Robert Stern available at https:// ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/).

lii  Any other kind of love is pure speculation’, Løgstrup writes.⁸⁸ However, as Jensen points out, in other parts of the book Løgstrup actually presupposes that love and trust are sometimes realized. The goodness of human life (in the shape of trust and love) is real in, for example, the train carriage (where we trust the other person’s word unless we have reason not to) and in the relationship between parent and child when the lives of both flourish in love.⁸⁹ Still, although Løgstrup acknowledged Ole Jensen’s point and confirmed that the sovereign expressions of life do come to realization, it seems wrong to conclude that Løgstrup shifted his position with respect to the ego and the will. Firstly, it would be a very radical change in Løgstrup’s philosophy and theology, and one would expect to find clear indications of it, which we do not (as opposed to the change in Løgstrup’s ideas concerning the realization of the sovereign expressions of life, which he discusses explicitly, cf. 87–8/117–8). On the contrary, in Ethical Concepts and Problems (which was written after Controverting Kierkegaard and published in 1971), we find a whole chapter on the concept of the will, where Løgstrup collects the main thoughts from his 1940 article ‘On the Concept of Will in Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio’ (see footnote 86 above), clearly using this as an authoritative analysis of the selfishness of the ego and the bondage of the will. Secondly, in Controverting Kierkegaard we also find evidence that Løgstrup did not change his view, in spite of the contradictory formulations quoted above. In fact, there are passages where Løgstrup seems to be explicitly denying that we can choose to realize the sovereign expression of life through willing it: ‘The sovereign expression of life is there beforehand; its fulfilment takes the will by surprise’ (86/116); or stated differently, in saying that we can choose it we corrupt the sovereign expression of life by flattering ourselves and our will: Or else we corrupt the sovereign expression of life, for instance by crediting to our own account what the sovereign expression of life achieves; we rob the expression of life of its sovereignty, thereby flattering our will with it, and this is another way in which the self-enclosedness parasitizes on the sovereign expression of life, now in the form of self-righteousness. (87/116)

In one of Løgstrup’s early journals, we find a very clear formulation of the problem at the centre of Løgstrup’s anthropology, namely that we are not free, but rather the opposite: ⁸⁸ The Ethical Demand, p. 119/Den etiske fordring, p. 158. ⁸⁹ The Ethical Demand, p. 9 and p. 107/Den etiske fordring, p. 17 and p. 142. For more on this see §3.1 in the Translators’ ‘Introduction’ to The Ethical Demand, pp. xlvi–xlvii.

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Human beings are their own prisoner; this is the hopelessness of existence, because it means that we are incapable of freeing ourselves—any attempt to do so will only imprison us even further in ourselves. (Notebook XXV.3.1, p. 34)⁹⁰

Thus, we are unable to choose between being selfish (the circling thoughts and emotion) and being unselfish (the sovereign expressions of life), because we are caught like prisoners within our own ego, tied up by our will, and just as in real prisons, the key to the prison gate is on the outside, or as Løgstrup writes in the passage from the notebook: ‘We can only be freed by our fellow human beings’ (Notebook XXV.3.1, p. 34). In Controverting Kierkegaard, we find the exact same idea, only now with the inclusion of the sovereign expressions of life: Human existence is not sheer unfreedom, because the sovereign expressions of life are fulfilled; they assert themselves. If they did not, our lives together would not go as well as they do. This can only be due to the fact that we live off that which we do not owe to ourselves. This is because the sovereign expressions of life are not accomplished by the will. On the contrary, when the expression of life breaks through our self-enclosedness, it is because the expression of life, and not the will, is sovereign. (86/115)

The sovereign expressions of life assert themselves—we do not choose them; they are not accomplished by the will; they are sovereign, not our will. These formulations suggest that Løgstrup, in spite of the seemingly contradictory formulations, remains firmly committed to his anthropological pessimism. However, the introduction of the sovereign expressions of life does highlight an important aspect of Løgstrup’s evaluation of the will, because although the will cannot choose them (because the will is bound to the self and thus selfcentred), it can be freed from this bondage and thus become selfless through the sovereign expressions of life, because they pre-empt the will, taking it by surprise, as Løgstrup wrote. So, the will can be turned away from the self towards the other and thus become good, which is what happens when the sovereign expressions of life are realized. In this way, speaking with Løgstrup ⁹⁰ The notebook is available through the Løgstrup Archive, Aarhus University. For more on Løgstrup’s early theology, see David Bugge, ‘Vi kommer ikke ud af os selv: Menneskets indesluttethed og forløsningen udefra som et grundtema i den unge Løgstrups prædikener’ [‘We Do Not Come out of Ourselves: Human Inturnedness and Redemption from without as a Major Theme in the Young Løgstrup’s Sermons’], especially pp. 98–9.

liv  in the present work, the will is not wholly wicked anymore: it is wholly wicked when imprisoned by the self, but it can be freed spontaneously and become good through the realization of the sovereign expressions of life, although this release is always tied to the concrete situation and is thus only real(ized) in a passing moment.⁹¹ This of course does not explain why or how they come to realization; it just happens, as it were, taking us by surprise in pre-empting our self-absorption. As Løgstrup understands it, the self-forgetful concern for the other is the original (the created ontological) orientation of interdependent life, and it is only when this mode of existence fails that the ethical demand arises, which we can then either act upon (as a substitute motive) or fail entirely (by just following our own selfish concerns, where the other person’s best interest is disregarded completely). Therefore, it is ultimately not the question of why the sovereign expression of life prevails that is relevant, but rather its failure needs explanation. Here the reason is always us, our ego: in Løgstrup’s paradigm case of the good Samaritan, the Rabbi and the Levite were too self-concerned to help the traveller. Compassion was the spontaneous possibility, but it was stifled and never came to fruition, and here we can imagine all sorts of reasons (they were too busy, they were afraid that there might still be robbers nearby etc.). Returning now to Kierkegaard’s double movement, Løgstrup establishes an alternative position from which he criticizes Kierkegaard and Tidehverv. Kierkegaard’s point of view is based on special cases of human existence who have resigned, because life in finitude was highly problematic for them. This goes for Johannes de silentio and for Kierkegaard himself: it was their particular fates that led to the connection between Christianity, passion, and resignation (pp. 51–2/74–5). However, this is not the truth about existence and Christianity for everyone, Løgstrup objects, because for many people, existence is not problematic in the same fundamental way as it was for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard had to resign given his special fate, and therefore his fundamental problem was how to reconcile himself with life, how to perform the finite movement. But if fate hasn’t dealt you the hand of being an outsider who feels alienated, then the task is not how to return to finitude, but the task is how to avoid idolization of your own successes and achievements, which means that the task is how to perform the infinite movement. Contrary to what Kierkegaard believes, Løgstrup makes the claim that there is an infinite movement of a different kind than resignation, namely thankfulness ⁹¹ I am indebted to Michael Au-Mullaney for his comments leading to this important point.

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(54/78). Thankfulness deflates self-congratulation and self-righteousness, because it involves the recognition that we are not sovereign beings but dependent.⁹² However, in Kierkegaard’s view (as Løgstrup reads him) there is nothing in finitude to feel true thankfulness for, because everything is mere relativity, judged under the extensive understanding of sin. In this way, according to Løgstrup, Kierkegaard ignores the fact that there are phenomena of real value and meaning in existence, and through these finitude does provide us with reasons to feel thankful: the sovereign expressions of life, which set us free from our inner confinement, where we experience love, trust, compassion etc. In this way, Løgstrup’s ontological optimism can be said to balance out his anthropological pessimism. One important role played by the sovereign expressions of life is that, as Løgstrup puts it, in them ‘human beings are—without further ado— themselves’, which means that (as opposed to Kierkegaard’s view) we do not have to reflect upon ourselves to be ourselves (71–2/98). These thoughts in Løgstrup’s discussion on the sovereign expressions of life indicate that also in Løgstrup there is a division within the self (not unlike the division in Kierkegaard between ‘the negative and abstract self ’ and ‘the concrete self ’, 60–1/84–5), where the sovereign expression of life liberates us from our selfconfined self. Thus, there are two selves, or two aspects of the self: the self as confined within our own circling thoughts and emotions, and a liberated self, which is set free. When Løgstrup states that in the sovereign expressions of life we are truly ourselves, it shows us that the freed self is the true self: the self as liberated from its own bondage in self-circling reflection and emotions. It is not difficult to find a phenomenological basis for Løgstrup’s position. Anybody who has felt ‘put on the spot’ (whether on a stage, during an interrogation, or a difficult job interview) knows what it feels like to be unfree due to inhibitions, where we are stuck in our own feelings and our reflections on how we are perceived by the other person. Our own self-circling keeps us from being who we really are; but when the sovereign expression of life is realized (e.g. in trust or the openness of speech), we are set free from this inner ‘psychological’ confinement, because our attention and focus are shifted from self-orientation to an openness directed at the other person (or a common topic that engages us). When we least think of ourselves, we are truly ourselves. We can illustrate the effect of the sovereign expressions of life with an example from physics: A Van de Graaff generator accumulates high voltage power on a ⁹² This is also why Goetz in Sartre’s play is unable to feel gratitude and unable to receive anything (modtage), cf. 64–5/89–90.

lvi  metal globe. When left to itself, the current remains as a charge on the globe, trapped there (so to speak) and with no means for releasing itself. But if another conductive body comes close enough, it can draw a charge, causing a spark to fly from the globe to the foreign body, ‘releasing it’ from its confinement. In similar fashion, we human beings are caught up in our own self (our own circling thoughts and emotions) with no means for escape, but when another person comes close we are set free from our self-absorption in relating to the other person. And specific ways of thus relating are identified as specific sovereign expressions of life, for example trust, compassion, love, openness of speech etc. Finally, there is a terminological problem tied to the distinction between sovereign expressions of life and the confining and circling thoughts and emotions. One place in Controverting Kierkegaard, Løgstrup speaks as though the latter should also be called ‘expressions of life’; that is, on pp. 114/151 where he writes: ‘Our expressions of life, each in its own way, have a definitive character. Some of them are good in themselves, others bad.’ There are, however, two reasons for drawing the conclusion that Løgstrup here gets the terminology wrong: Firstly, there is the systematic reason which has been provided here, namely that given our understanding of Løgstrup’s entire project, it makes no sense to refer to the circling (or obsessive) thoughts and emotions as ‘expressions of life’, because it goes against the clear intention in his distinction between anthropology and ontology. If there are ‘evil’ expressions of life then these thoughts and emotions are not produced by the ego and hence we are not prisoners of our own selves, but rather of some mysterious outside structure in life which possesses us. Nowhere do we find anything to support this ontology in Løgstrup’s works. Secondly, there is a (slightly tedious, but important) philological argument, which I shall present very briefly: In the article from 1966 (which is reprinted almost verbatim in Controverting Kierkegaard, see footnote 67), Løgstrup writes: ‘Endnu eet om forskellen mellem de suveræne og de tvungne livsytringer: [ . . . ]’ [‘And to add one more thing about the difference between the sovereign and the obsessive expressions of life’].⁹³ However, in the same passage in the printed book, Løgstrup has made an interesting correction: ‘Endnu eet om forskellen mellem de suveræne livsytringer og de tvungne tanke- og følelsesbevægelser: [ . . . ]’ [‘And to add one more thing about the difference between the sovereign expressions of life and the obsessive movements of thought and emotion’] ⁹³ ‘Sartres og Kierkegaards skildring af den dæmoniske indesluttethed’ [‘Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Inturnedness’], p. 36.

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(71/98, italics added).⁹⁴ This correction indicates that Løgstrup deliberately changed the terminology from the quite simple (where he spoke of ‘sovereign’ vs. ‘obsessive’ expressions of life) to the more complicated distinction between sovereign expressions of life vs. ‘obsessive movements of thought and emotion’. Why would he do so? Along the lines of the principle of lectio difficilior (‘the more difficult reading is stronger’), it must be because Løgstrup consciously and explicitly did not want to refer to the latter type of feelings as ‘expressions of life’. And the fact that he made this terminological mistake at one particular place (which he then corrected) suggests that there might be other similar cases (which he missed and thus didn’t correct).

3.4 Part IV Nihilism and Platonism Coming now to the conclusion of the book, Løgstrup draws attention to what he perceives as the fundamental and underlying metaphysical conception in Kierkegaard’s view of human existence and of Christianity: Kierkegaardianism is at its core a Platonistic dualism.⁹⁵ We can try to make sense of this claim by invoking Plato’s allegory of the cave: just like the prisoner in Plato’s cave, human beings in Kierkegaard’s finitude find themselves caught up in a false world of mere appearances. In this world, we engage in competitions against each other (e.g. in jobs and sports), fancy this thing or the other etc., but all these are nothing but shadows on the wall; there is no real truth in them, the truths we seem to find are merely our own constructions (as found in Kantian transcendental idealism, where knowledge and cognition are projections of our own categories, cf. 117/154). In the finite world, there is only relativity, although we attribute absolute meaning and value to what we find there, thus idolizing phenomena in the cave or other people as our own ‘golden calf ’. We cannot help it, because as long as we face the wall, we cannot see anything else: ‘in the world of time, God and humans cannot talk with each other, they have no language in common’ (SKS 4: 130/KW 6: 35; cited 49/71). The words are Johannes de silentio’s, but they could just as well have been Plato’s: you ⁹⁴ In the original manuscript of Controverting Kierkegaard, we can see Løgstrup’s correction. He first crossed part of the sentence from the article out: ‘Endnu eet om forskellen mellem de suveræne og de tvungne livsytringer: [ . . . ]’ (‘And to add one more thing about the difference between the sovereign and the obsessive expressions of life’), and then he added new text as substitution: ‘og de tvungne tanke- og følelsesbevægelser’ (‘and the obsessive movements of thought and emotion’). ⁹⁵ As Løgstrup notes, Kierkegaard puts too much emphasis on Plato’s dualism, whereas Plato’s dualism is arguably rooted in a fundamental monism (the realms of phenomena and ideas are connected), cf. 125/165, footnote.

lviii  cannot find the ideas just by staring at the shadows in the cave, and to live a life engulfed in mere phenomena is to live a life of untruth, mistaking what is relative for what is absolute. Therefore, what is required, in Kierkegaard and in Plato, is a conversion: the prisoner must turn around to face the light and leave the cave, just as the bourgeois or the aesthetic in Kierkegaard must come to perform the infinite movement of resignation so that their immediate absorption with life is broken off (cf. §3.3). How does this conversion and infinite movement come about? Again, Løgstrup points towards a Platonic structure in Kierkegaard that could be expressed as follows: there is a longing in the prisoner in Plato, a sense of homelessness that draws them towards the eternal realm of ideas; the relative truths in the cave do not satisfy their thirst for insight, causing them to be restless and to feel the light on their back as a gentle but relentless pull or prod, inviting them to turn their eyes away from the shadows and towards the light. The same restlessness and longing are found in Kierkegaard’s view of human existence, where he identifies the human being as a synthesis with finitude (and temporality) at the one end and the infinite (and eternity) at the other: we may come into being in the relative and finite world, but it does not satisfy us; we feel the pull of eternity, and we can only respond properly through the infinite movement, where we resign from the world of relative ends and thus leave the cave. The similarities in the fundamental structure do not stop here, because once the first part of the journey (or movement) has taken place, the question for the individual arises: ‘what should I do for my people who are stuck in the cave? How best to help them?’ Kierkegaard’s answer is as simple and obvious as Plato’s: It makes no sense to go back to the cave just to help them in their own competitions and agendas or to help them with whatever problems or heartbreaks they have due to their having cast their fancy on the shadows on the walls. Firstly, these engagements are pointless (they are centred on meaningless and valueless illusions), and secondly, after having been away from the darkness and adjusted his eyes to the light, the prisoner would now be poor at all the cave activities (he would come off as the madman in Nietzsche’s famous aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, who comes bearing the light of truth in his lantern). Therefore, the only true task is to go back and help the prisoners turn around so they too can see the light and escape the cave. It will hurt their eyes, and they will probably hate him for it, but in the end it is worth it because it will make it possible for them to escape their illusory existence. Correspondingly, in Kierkegaard the only true good is to help the others love God, which can only happen through causing them to suffer while they break

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off their engagements with finitude. They will come to hate the agent who performs these works of love, for to them he or she will seem wicked and cruel, but the prophet or martyr will have to suffer this misunderstanding—just as Jesus suffered not only on the cross, but from the very beginning—in order to truly help his neighbour: ‘Christ hides his love of humans—out of love for them, and this incognito is love’s suffering’ (18/32). It does not occur to Kierkegaard that life in the cave might actually be good and meaningful, in spite of our selfish competitions, narrow interests, and lust for possession. And therefore it does not occur to him either that there might not be anything wrong with the cave as such (the extensive conception of sin/evil), but that the fault might rest solely within ourselves in our own thoughts and emotions, which disengage us from life and the others due to our self-centred existence (the intensive conception of sin/evil). Revelation, understood as the light that chases away the darkness, is therefore not a light shining outside the cave, which reveals the falseness of the shadows inside the cave (Kierkegaard and Plato); but it is a light that reveals the true meaning and values of life within the cave: ontological structures that are in place and sustain our existence together, but which we fail to see due to our self-centred attention. Revelation, as Løgstrup conceives it, reveals the fundamental structures of the goodness of human life to us, and this revelation gives us reason to be thankful for that which we do not owe to ourselves and which is not a result of our own achievements. Of course, Løgstrup admits, there are important differences. In Plato (and in Greek philosophy) the central issue is knowledge and truth (how to come to know the ideas), whereas in Christianity the central issue is sin and how to escape it. In Kierkegaardian terminology, the Greeks are taken up with thinking, whereas Christianity is all about action (cf. 126–7/ 165–6 and 130/171). However, Kierkegaard exaggerates the importance of this difference, an exaggeration that serves to conceal the underlying common structure in both, namely their idealism. As Løgstrup emphatically puts it: Through an—admittedly grandiloquent—sophistry, he tears knowing and action apart, in order to give Platonism knowing without action, and give Christianity action without knowing, both of which are sheer constructions. (130/171)

Therefore, Løgstrup claims, in spite of the differences Kierkegaard himself points out between (Kierkegaard’s version of) Christianity and Greek philosophy, ‘Christianity is conceived in the image of Platonism’ (128/168).

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In Kierkegaard’s Christianity, the earthly realm is without real meaning and truth—it is a nihil, a nothingness—and therefore the task placed upon the Christian is to escape this nothingness (to die away from it) in order to find reconciliation with God.⁹⁶ Kierkegaard would never allow for true meaning in our human life (e.g. in the shape of sovereign expressions of life), as they would overturn his dualistic system: It is a leading idea in Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity that eternity loses its significance, if this life incorporates expressions of life that are given to us in order to fulfil them in a positive and straightforward way. Eternity can only become everything for human beings who have been given this life in order to suffer it all the way through. (129/169)

According to Kierkegaard, we can only become ourselves through our relation to eternity (i.e. through our loss of eternity, cf. 125/164). To try to become a self by relating only to finitude would turn us into an ‘inhuman millipede’ (SKS 7: 162/KW 12.1: 176; cited 121/159). However, Løgstrup’s position is to emphasize the exact opposite, that only in a (proper) relation to other people in their worldly needs do we truly become ourselves, through the sovereign expressions of life. They free us from our self-centredness by opening up our eyes in what Løgstrup calls ‘a knowing that opens up the world’ (135/177), which calls us into action. Here we see how the sovereign expressions of life can be said (in a certain respect) to be Løgstrup’s equivalent of Luther’s thoughts on Christ as an exemplar (cf. the discussion of imitatio Christi above). Just as Luther can claim that Christ can be seen as an example (in a special use of the term) where the good tree bears good fruits, similarly Christ is a sort of example in Løgstrup through the sovereign expressions of life, where the compassionate and loving person bears good fruits in the shape of works of love. However, importantly, both in Luther and Løgstrup they do so through being set free as a gift of grace, not through their own choice or will or some other achievement of their own. The most important difference between Løgstrup and Luther lies in Løgstrup’s universality: that the gift of grace for Løgstrup is a ‘grace of creation’ common

⁹⁶ If this criticism of Kierkegaard sounds too harsh, it is important to remember that Løgstrup’s attack was mainly focused on the Kierkegaardian existentialism he encountered in Olesen Larsen (which he took to be an authoritative reading of Kierkegaard), and in Johannes Sløk, where Olesen Larsen again and again spoke of the nothingness of this world and God’s complete absence, cf. §2.1 above.

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to everyone, whereas Luther’s gift of grace is Christian faith and thus applies only to the Christian. In a final attack on Kierkegaard, Løgstrup goes as far as to say that in fact Kierkegaard’s position leaves him unable to account for human agency— although precisely agency is Kierkegaard’s crucial point: What is knowable must have reality. Nothingness cannot be known. The restless preoccupation of thought with the breaking through of nothingness into our existence in death, guilt, and anxiety is not knowing but endless reflection. The acknowledgement of unknowable nothingness as the fundamental condition of our existence therefore further reinforces an abyss between knowledge and reflection. And as surely as we can act only on the basis of knowledge, never on the basis of reflection, and as surely as nothingness cannot be known but gives rise only to reflection, the combination of action and negativity, of ethics and nothingness, that sustains Kierkegaard’s thinking, turns out to be illusory. (134/176)

When the world cannot provide us with knowledge because it is mere nothingness, reflection on nothingness becomes endless. Thus, reflection is a resignation from the world, a resignation into reflection, and this movement is paralysing, because in Kierkegaard’s nihilistic universe there is nothing there to end reflection and bring about action. In levelling down our interdependent existence to mere nothingness without truth, Kierkegaard has removed himself from the path of action, because only engagement with the world, where we are seized by it, can call forth meaningful action—not self-confining reflection and resignation. Nihilism is neither suited for Christianity nor for an adequate analysis of human existence. In this way, although certainly Tidehverv would deny it, Kierkegaard ends up as a Backworldsman, casting his fancy on a world beyond this world (cf. §2.1 above). The problem lies in his (Christian) Platonic dualism, which (because it is idealistic) involves a devaluation of our human existence, where value and meaning are shifted from the finite realm to the infinite, resulting in nihilism. By contrast, Løgstrup puts forward a much more monistic metaphysics (although not without eschatological content) where value and meaning are immanent rather than wholly transcendent, because there exist basic (created) ontological structures within our lives with other people where we and our life together are fulfilled. As such, Løgstrup’s philosophy and theology have a clear eudaimonistic element, although as we have seen it is still firmly rooted in a Lutheran anthropology: there is goodness in the world because of its fundamental ontological

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structure, but evil exists as a secondary (parasitic) phenomenon due to our misuse of life, where we destroy its inherent goodness through our selfish self-circling. Controverting Kierkegaard is a critique of currents in Kierkegaard concerning the understanding of Christianity and human existence, but Løgstrup’s main target is to criticize Kierkegaardianism in its contemporary form, namely theological and philosophical Existentialism. The problem with Existentialism, as Løgstrup sees it, is that it blurs our vision when it comes to the importance of interdependent human life, specifically its ontological structures such as the sovereign expressions of life, and in this way shifts our attention from these to our own (sovereign) choices and/or our inner responsibility to God. In Controverting Kierkegaard, Løgstrup mounts an assault on Existentialism that provides him with the opportunity to put forward his own view on Christianity and human existence, a view that he finds to be distinctly nonExistentialistic.⁹⁷

⁹⁷ I am very grateful to Mikael Brorson, David Bugge, Hans Fink, Anna Bank Jeppesen, Michael Au-Mullaney, Kees van Kooten Niekerk, and Robert Stern for their comments on previous versions of this text.

Controverting Kierkegaard

German Foreword

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Even as late as the middle of the last century, Danish intellectuals were living in the intellectual tradition of German idealism. This was true of Kierkegaard, and also of Grundtvig,ii literary criticism, philosophy of law, and the natural sciences, influenced as they were by natural philosophy—they all got their impetus from German idealism as well. In the course of the second half of the last century and in the early part of the present century, a change gradually took place. Under Anglo-Saxon and partly Swedish influences, empirical and positivist ways of thinking gained a foothold in Danish intellectual life. Now the Danish theologians, who work in a purely positivistic environment, but who, due to their education, are still professionally based in German theology and philosophy, consequently find themselves in a field fraught with problematic tensions. However, surprisingly the possibility presents itself to bring about a problem-free harmony with the aid of Kierkegaard. As is well-known, according to positivism and empiricism, statements such as that God has created the world and human beings, and that love is good in itself and cruelty bad, are meaningless, because they cannot be verified empirically. Instead of engaging in a comprehensive dispute with the positivists about the questions concerning the character of human existence, about the relation of human beings to nature and the world, Kierkegaardian existentialist theology is interested in fencing off one single point only. Transcendence is exaggerated theologically to such a degree that no assumptions about the universe in its immanence and the place of human beings within it are allowed to be involved in the ethicalreligious relation. Thus, faith is set in opposition to knowledge and detached from any relation to immanence. For the existentialist theologian faith is realized in ‘the moment’, in ‘the instant of the decision’ only. If the positivist will let them have this ‘instant of decision’ as the proper reality, they do not make any further claim regarding knowledge of reality. Thereby, with reference to Kierkegaard, pressing problems of our time are pushed away as irrelevant. This is reason enough for controversion. K. E. Løgstrup Spring 1966,

Foreword In controverting Kierkegaard here, I am interested in the general tendency and implications of his understanding of Christianity and not in what he has said over and above this. Along the way he has said much that he abandoned later on, and much that went against the central motives driving his thinking. I disregard all this; I leave it to those who are convinced that he is the only Church Father and read him for their own edification. I am interested in the question: What is Christianity, when understood controversially. For this reason I do not stick just to Kierkegaard either, but occasionally bring in perspectives from Jaspers and from Sartre. That I am not interested in the additional things Kierkegaard has said is related to my not being interested in an internal critique of the inner contradictions in Kierkegaard’s thinking—at least not for its own sake. He needed these contradictions in order to get said what he thought he had come to see, and it is as easy as anything to criticize them; only time and words are needed for that. As a matter of fact, contradictions often grow exuberantly in geniuses, while they are absent in epigones, whose systems are thin and non-contradictory. As what I am aiming at is a controversion concerning the understanding of Christianity, it has been important for me to ensure that the alternative to Kierkegaard, which is the basis of my critique, should constantly stand out with clarity. Even though, strictly speaking, it is available in what I have written elsewhere, I use this opportunity to develop it further.

Part I Christianity without the Historical Jesus 1. The Christian Message Is Derived from Paradoxicality, and Jesus’s Proclamation and Works Are Not Integral to Christianity [11] Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Christian message does not take its starting point from Jesus’s words and works, and the question they raise about who he was. He does not consider the development from the historical Jesus to the congregation’s faith in him. He takes his starting point, rather, from what is paradoxical, viz. that God became man, in the lowly form of a servant. Kierkegaard sticks to this without going on to Jesus’s words and works—these are without significance, they are simply omitted. What Jesus said, anyone could have said; the life he led could have been led by anyone. None of this raises the question of who he was. In Philosophical Fragments Johannes Climacus does give a partial list: Jesus was unmarried; without worldly goods or cares; he spoke about the birds of the sky and the lilies of the field; about leaving it to the dead to bury their dead; about the fox having foxholes and birds of the sky having nests, while the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head; about his refusal to be appointed judge and arbiter. And after having listed all this, Climacus asks: ‘Does he not thereby elevate himself above what is ordinarily the condition expected of human beings?’ In other words, is there not something in Jesus’s words and works and conduct of life that raises the question of who he was? No, comes the answer, which is substantiated with the argument that had there been, the godi would not actually have become human. In Climacus’s words: if a human being does not dare to express what Jesus expressed, then Jesus—that is, the god—would not have realized humanity. Jesus’s life and proclamation are not integral to Christianity. The content of the Christian message derives solely from what is paradoxical, namely, that God [12] became human. As Climacus puts it: the doctrine is the god’s presence in human form, indeed, in the lowly form of a servant (Philosophical Fragments, SKS 4: 258–9/KW 7: 56–7). But how is the doctrine derived from paradoxicality, and what does its content amount to? The god became human out of love for humankind, Controverting Kierkegaard. Translated by Hans Fink and Kees van Kooten Niekerk, Introduced by Bjørn Rabjerg, with notes by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern. Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern, Oxford University Press. © Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198874768.003.0001

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therefore he also became human in the lowly form of a servant. But people cannot recognize that the human being and the servant is the god. This is too paradoxical for them to understand. They can only misunderstand it. Paradoxicality can be met only by human misunderstanding. Climacus therefore knows from this paradoxicality that divine love—in which the god decided to become human—is a love misunderstood by its recipients, and hence is bound up with the deepest suffering. This is derived from paradoxicality, without any regard to what Jesus’s earthly life, as an historical life, consisted in apart from this. A frequently cited passage in Philosophical Fragments reads: ‘Even if the contemporary generation had not left anything behind except these words, “We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the lowly form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died”—this is more than enough’ (SKS 4: 300/KW 7: 104).

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2. The Question of the Occasion for Faith According to Kierkegaard (a) Paradoxicality Makes Pressing the Question of the Occasion for Faith When the god has made himself unrecognizable in the form of a servant, this raises the question of how it is even possible that human beings arrive at the idea that the servant is the god. The incognito of Christ is, as Anti-Climacus says, of the most profound kind, ‘the most impenetrable unrecognizability that is possible’ (Practice in [13] Christianity, SKS 12: 135/KW 20: 131). The question at stake is not what the decision to believe consists in, but how human beings can become aware at all that a decision to believe is at stake. According to Climacus, there was nothing substantive about Jesus’s earthly life that could lead human beings to the idea that Jesus might be the god, and thus confront them with a decision to believe him or not. But it goes without saying that the deeper the unrecognizability, and the more paradoxicality is insisted upon, the more pressing the question of the occasion for faith becomes. Climacus is well aware of this too, as he says: ‘The god did not, however, take the form of a servant in order to mock human beings; his aim, therefore, cannot be to walk through the world in such a way that not one single human being would come to know this.’ ‘He made himself lowly and took on the form of a servant, but he certainly did not come to live as a servant in the service of one person only, carrying out his works, without making his master or his fellow servants understand who he was’ (Philosophical Fragments, SKS 4: 258–9/KW 7: 56).

(b) The Question of the Occasion for Faith and the Attempt to Legitimize Faith The question of the occasion for faith has nothing to do with an attempt to legitimize faith. The question of the occasion for faith is the question of how to get to the point where the decision to believe orii not believe is made at all. It is the question of how, despite the god’s unrecognizability in the form of a servant, one can become aware that what matters here is taking a stand on whether or not the servant is the god. Once the question of the occasion for faith is answered, this does not entail anything about how far the decision will result in faith or lack of faith. What is called here the question of the occasion

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for faith, Climacus calls ‘being aware’ in Philosophical Fragments, and he says that even if awareness is awakened, nothing is thereby decided concerning faith: [14] ‘In other words, awareness is by no means partial towards faith, as if faith proceeds as a simple consequence of awareness . . . [On the contrary, the awareness is ambiguous], offence no less than faith can result from it’ (SKS 4: 291, 293/KW 7: 93, 96).iii Strictly speaking, therefore, we should not call it merely a question of the occasion for faith, but of the occasion for faith or lack of faith. An attempt to legitimize faith may first arise, if at all, after the question of the occasion for faith (or lack of faith) has been answered, and one has come to the point where the decision must be made. The legitimation of faith can consist, for example, in invoking reason to get oneself or others to opt for faith. The legitimation of faith is therefore an illegitimate business: one wants to relieve existence of the decision, which is its alone to make, and hand it over to reason. One finds also other attempts to legitimize faith, for example the use of historical-critical research for that purpose, which the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann rejects.

(c) The Answer to the Question of the Occasion for Faith What answer does Climacus give to the question of the occasion for faith, which is raised and insisted upon by paradoxicality? Curiously enough, he does not go into the matter in Philosophical Fragments, saying only in passing and in another context concerning the contemporary disciple, ‘that he did not see or hear the god immediately but saw a human being in a lowly form who said of himself that he was the god—in other words, he would continuously have to be reminded that this fact was based upon a contradiction’ (SKS 4: 290/KW 7: 93). Nor can there be another answer; this follows from Climacus’s presuppositions. If the unrecognizability is not to be sublated, if paradoxicality is not to be tempered by understanding, then the occasion in which human beings are placed in the decision between belief and unbelief can consist only in their awareness being drawn to the [15] unrecognizability and paradoxicality, and that can come about only if the human being of lowly form says of himself that he is the god. Only if human beings have their awareness drawn to the decision by being made aware that what must be believed is a fact that constitutes a contradiction, does the contradiction remain intact. The occasion for faith can consist, accordingly, only in Jesus’s saying of himself that he is the Son of God.

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In Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard addresses the question once more, and here he says explicitly that the occasion for faith is that Jesus said of himself that he was the Son of God, and that he worked miracles. Anti-Climacus makes the matter clear partly by the concept of a sign, and partly by the difference between direct and indirect communication. Regarding the sign, there are two things to note, he says: (1) We must distinguish between what the sign is in its immediacy, for example a post or lamp, and what its meaning is, viz. to be a navigation mark, which signifies that a sea channel runs here. The sign has its meaning by virtue of an agreement, so one must know the convention in order to understand the sign. (2) Moreover, the sign is striking in its immediate appearance. It makes one aware, and it is taken to be a sign even by those who do not know what it means (SKS 12: 129–30/KW 20: 124). Anti-Climacus uses these two characteristics to make clear what it means for the God-Man to be a sign of contradiction. As he appears immediately, Christ is ‘an individual human being, just like others, a lowly, insignificant human being’ (SKS 12: 130/KW 20: 126). But he is also a sign, that is to say, besides what he immediately is, he is something else as well, namely God. He is, though, a sign of contradiction, for between what he is immediately, namely an individual human being, and what he is as a sign, namely God, there is the greatest possible contradiction, namely a qualitative contradiction. The question arises, then, how he is [16] recognizable as a sign at all, as the contradiction is as great as can possibly be. ‘To be the individual human being or an individual human being . . . is the greatest possible distance, the infinite qualitative distance from being God, and therefore the most profound incognito.’ ‘When one is God, then to be an individual human being’ is ‘absolute unrecognizability’ (SKS 12: 132/KW 20: 127-8). So how then can anyone arrive at the idea that the individual human being is God? Is this not a matter of what AntiClimacus himself calls a ‘complete hiddenness’—being ‘the opposite of a sign’? No, so the answer goes, for the sign is striking—even for those who do not know what it means. What the sign means is never completely hidden in what it is immediately, since there is always something striking about it, which makes one aware, so that one asks whether it might be a sign and mean something. What is it that is striking, then, in Christ’s immediate life as an individual human being, which makes one aware? The answer is that there are two things: ‘The miracle . . . and a single direct statement about being God’ (SKS 12: 130–1/ KW 20: 126). Anti-Climacus next makes the matter clear by distinguishing between direct and indirect communication. Without going into detail here about Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the dialectics of communication,iv it is worth saying

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merely that only objective truths can be directly communicated, as they are inessential, since they do not concern the subject and its existence. Essential and decisive truths, and that means truths that concern the individual’s relation to eternity, can be communicated only indirectly. Direct communication in this context is simply ungodly (SKS 7: 74–5/KW 12.1: 72–5). However, the miracle and Christ’s direct statement of being God are anything but indirect communication. To this objection, Anti-Climacus answers that Christ’s direct statement that he himself is God is contradicted by his existence as an individual human being, and is made an indirect communication by the contradiction. And [17] the communication must be indirect, otherwise Christ cannot be the object of faith. Only this indirect communication presents the individual human being with a choice, and faith is a choice. Only if Christ’s being God is hidden can the individual human being be presented with a choice between faith and offence. But Christ’s existence also, therefore, makes the communication about who he is into an indirect one, by the fact that he brings the qualitative opposites—God and human being—together in his existence. If, however, the communication is indirect in the usual sense—as it should be among ordinary people, when the truth is ethico-religious—the incognito nevertheless is not the profoundest possible; rather, it requires the paradox’s contradiction between eternity and temporality. As was said earlier, therefore, the incognito can be preserved only in direct communication, which Christ’s abiding in the incognito makes into a communication that is nevertheless not direct (SKS 12: 136/KW 20: 130–1). Both the sign and the indirectness of the communication are meant to serve to highlight that it is hidden who Christ is, but at the same time that it is not completely hidden. The communication is not so indirect that it is no longer still communication. And in its immediacy, the sign makes one aware. So, despite its paradoxicality, faith has an occasion: the miracle and the one statement of being God. These explain how the individual human being comes at all to the question of whether Christ is God. Anti-Climacus’s account of the sign gives away the flaw in his understanding of Christianity. There is a peculiar feature of the sign, which characteristically enough he ignores, and that is that the relation between the sign in its appearance (immediacy) and what is signified is fortuitous, hence the person who does not know what the sign means can do nothing with it. This is not to say that—induced by its striking appearance—they cannot perfectly well arrive at the thought that it is a sign, and consequently means something. [18] But there is no immediate way from the appearance to what is signified.

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But then neither can there be any contradiction between the sign as it appears and what it signifies. For them to contradict each other, they must be able to meet; and to be able to meet, they must be on the same level—but the sign as it appears and what it signifies are not. Their relation is purely fortuitous, it must be established; it must first be agreed on, precisely because they share no common level. To illustrate his account of the contradiction that can hold between the sign as it appears and what is signified, Anti-Climacus mentions a communication which, in its combination of jest and earnestness, is a sign of contradiction. But the condition for this is indeed that the relation between jest and earnestness is much closer than that which holds between a sign as it appears and what it signifies. Jest and earnestness are both forms of expression, and are therefore from the outset on a common level, where they can meet and contradict each other in one and the same statement. What is the common level, where God and human beings meet, and where God contradicts the human? It is the life, proclamation, and works of the historical Jesus. But this common level has no place in Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity, and therefore he cannot use the account of the sign, for between the sign as it appears and its meaning this common level is lacking. For Kierkegaard human beings are not faced with the choice between offence and faith in Jesus’s message of God’s kingdom and in his assertion that his words and works contribute to bringing about the kingdom, but human beings are faced with the choice between faith and offence by the miracle and by Jesus’s own claim to be God, for only this points to the paradox and the absurdity. But why does Kierkegaard not want to acknowledge that God contradicts humanity on the common level, a level which comprises both Jesus’s message about God’s kingdom, and his own life? Is it because it would then be recognizable immediately that he was the god? Does Kierkegaard infer: [19] the divine in Jesus’s life is not recognizable immediately, ergo it is in an absolute sense unrecognizable, absurd? If so, it must be countered that no personal life can be known immediately. Interpersonal life is lived in interpretation and trust, and never has the certainty of direct sensation and perception.v But that does not make it unrecognizable or paradoxical. Or is the reason why Kierkegaard does not want to acknowledge that it is the words and works of the historical Jesus that raise the question of his person, and are what occasion faith and offence, that this would dissolve the infinite qualitative distance between God and the human? But then the infinite qualitative distance between God and the human means that God cannot be present in what a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, says and does. God is not

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the power to be in the existence of a human being and the continuance of the world. The absolutely unrecognizable and paradoxical in the god’s becoming human is then due to the fact that human existence and the world have nothing to do with God. But then revelation as paradoxicality is impossible too. Either it is possible that God makes himself known in a temporal and earthly human life, and then this can happen too in the proclamation, works, and entire conduct contained in that life; or it is impossible, and then it is also impossible under the conditions of paradoxicality and absurdity.

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3. The Approximation Problem For Kierkegaard, the reason why the historical Jesus is not integral to Christianity is that the god has become fully human only if everything which Jesus said and did—except the miracles, and his claim to be the Son of God—could just as well have been said and done by any other human being. And the reason why the historical Jesus is not integral to Christianity is not, according to Kierkegaard—as it is according to later theologiansvi—an attempt to [20] solve what we can call, for short, ‘the approximation problem’. That is to say: the knowledge we have of the events in the historical life of Jesus, what he said and did, how he lived, is only a more or less probable knowledge. Nothing is certain. As a matter of fact, historical knowledge is only ever approximate. Therefore, if the historical Jesus is integral to the Christian faith, we face the dilemma that faith depends on knowledge that is approximate. But as was said, it is not in order to remove the dilemma that Climacus leaves the historical Jesus without significance for faith, and derives the Christian message, instead, from the paradox that God became human. It is also the case, according to Climacus and Anti-Climacus, that a human can arrive at the point of decision between belief and unbelief only if Jesus said of himself that he is God—otherwise not so. Otherwise the unrecognizability is too great, the paradoxicality too absolute, for any human being to become aware at all that, faced with the fact that Jesus of Nazareth has existed, the question is all about belief or unbelief. But against this we have to say that if any knowledge is approximate, our knowledge that Jesus said of himself that he is the Son of God is of that kind. In addition, many researchers consider it highly unlikely that he ever said so. But that is to say that whether one believes that everything the Gospels have said about Jesus’s life is integral to Christianity; or whether, together with Climacus and Anti-Climacus, one believes that concerning Jesus’s life, only the facts that he said of himself that he is God and that he worked miracles are indispensably integral to Christianity—in both cases this is knowledge that is and remains approximate. And Kierkegaard would have been prey to a peculiar illusion, were he to believe he had solved the approximation problem by letting Christianity do without the historical Jesus. But, again as I said, this is not what he believed. Climacus does not even pose what is called here the approximation problem. His problem is a different one, namely that faith is ‘infinitely interested passion for one’s eternal beatitude’vii [21] (SKS 7: 59/KW 12.1: 56). Not only that, but passion is made most intense by the fact that faith’s relation to eternal beatitude is decided by its relation to something historical, which by its very

10   nature cannot become historical, namely the infinite and eternal (SKS 7: 350–1/KW 12.1: 385).viii For this reason, faith cannot be dependent on our knowledge of historical data (namely the authenticity, integrity, etc. of the books of the New Testament), since such knowledge can never be other than approximate. With that, the matter is settled for Climacus, and he does not go further to raise the problem of the relation between faith and history which arises because historical facts are and remain decisive for faith, since it is such facts to which faith relates itself. He restricts himself to saying that, even if it were proved that the books of the New Testament ‘are not authentic, are not complete’, it does not follow ‘that these authors have not existed, and above all that Christ has not existed’ (SKS 7: 37/KW 12.1: 30). Faith knows from itself that Christ has existed.

    

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4. An Alternative to Kierkegaard’s View In Jesus’s proclamation and works there is nothing manifestly divine. That God makes Jesus’s words his words, makes Jesus’s works his works, is not to be recognized immediately. Climacus’s and Anti-Climacus’s account of unrecognizability in conjunction with paradoxicality means, however, more than that. It rules out that Jesus’s proclamation and works can raise the question of who he is. It rules out that the historical Jesus can be the occasion for faith. What does the opposite view to Kierkegaard’s imply, a view according to which the historical Jesus is integral to Christianity? It implies that although the divine in Jesus’s life is not [22] to be recognized immediately, it is not therefore unrecognizable and paradoxical in the absolute sense in which it is for Kierkegaard. Why not? Because human existence and the world in which Jesus of Nazareth lived are God’s. When (to speak with Descartes, Meditation 3)ix humanity’s power to exist and the world’s power to continue are God’s power, so God’s power is everywhere, because without it there would be nothing—then it is not paradoxical in an absolute sense that God’s power in the life of an individual human being, that is, in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, is not merely present in the fact that he lives, but also in what he lives; is not merely present in the fact that he speaks and acts, but also in what he speaks and acts. There is nothing paradoxical in it—on the contrary. When God’s power is present in the fact that Jesus of Nazareth exists, it is only as a matter of course that it is present in what he lives, says, and does. How could it really be otherwise? How could it really be possible that people, with the way in which they live, would be able to rise up against the power to be in their existence? How could someone with his kind of words and works be able to defy the power that is present in the same words and works, and without which neither a single word would be said, nor a single work be done? To be sure, this is just what takes place in the life of every other human being. Indeed, but this is precisely what is paradoxical. If we assume that the power to be in everything that is, is God’s power, then this is in direct opposition to Kierkegaard’s view. The only unparadoxical life, then, is the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Everything in it is straightforward and natural. What is paradoxical is how the life everyone else lives could arise. Where, for Descartes, in the sphere of knowledge what is beyond comprehension is error, now in the sphere of existence it is evil that is incomprehensible. We can give a psychological explanation, but not an ontological one. Psychologically we live by the delusion that our power to be is our own power. The delusion does not occupy us as a thought that we have made

12   ourselves conscious of, it is too absurd for that. But it is nonetheless [23] by this delusion that we live out our life in thoughts, feelings, and acts. By this delusion we make our claims on life and on others, and become resentful, vindictive, and offended when these are not honoured. To be able to live in rebellion against our power to be, we must deny it, and we do this by imagining that the power belongs to us, that we owe it to ourselves. This is a psychological explanation. We cannot give an ontological one. It cannot be explained how we can live in such a consistent rebellion against the power to be that we deny it, and this despite the fact that even when rebelling against it, it is also the power in our rebellion—the power does not leave us, which would turn us to nothing. The paradoxical thing is that we live, not that Jesus of Nazareth lived. We do not know the power to be in our existence merely from the fact that we are, but we know it also from how we are—because that we are and how we are cannot be separated from each other. We cannot ourselves determine how we want to be—compassionate or cruel, loving or hateful—without this affecting our mere facticity. But it was said previously that the power to be is present also in our rebellion against it! Thus, we can equally only be cruel and hateful thanks to our power to merely be, and is this power then not indifferent regarding how we live? No, it is not. Although we are cruel and hateful thanks to the power to exist, as indeed these too are ways to exist, they nevertheless occur in a destruction of our existence. We cannot replace compassion with cruelty, love with hatred, and then get just another kind of life, another kind of facticity out of it, but rather we annihilate each other, we destroy our life together. We know from our simple facticity what is good and what is evil, as surely as the good preserves and promotes existence, and what is evil wrecks existence. In short, the difference between good and evil has an ontological ranking. Goodness is in our existence, that is, in our wickedness’s destruction [24] of it. Our life is never empty of goodness. This would be unthinkable, for then our wickedness would no longer have the character of destroying life. In other words, had goodness left our life, wickedness would no longer be annihilation, but we would have made a new and different kind of existence out of it. But that is impossible. Neither can we imagine what such an existence would be. But that is to say that we cannot imagine an existence in which we do not recognize what true life is. Untruth is rebellion against the truth, and it is incapable of leaving its rebellion behind and putting itself in truth’s place. Goodness is not our achievement, but is owed to the power to be, which is not indifferent to the difference between good and evil. It is true that we live in

    

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a perpetual delusion that we owe our goodness to ourselves, just as we live in the unceasing delusion that the power to be is our own and not God’s. It goes without saying that what holds for goodness holds also for truth, since truth is first of all a knowledge of what is good and what is evil. Truth is not our own achievement. But that does not mean that we know about the truth in a Socratic way, by recollection. We know it, rather, because it is just evident to us, present in our power to be. However much in our thoughts, feelings, and acts we live by taking the power to be as our own, we know very well that this is a delusion. And we know the truth from the power to be, which is present everywhere and in each moment, as certainly as it makes wickedness a destruction of existence. Through our ontological knowledge concerning the goodness and truth of our existence, which we have through our wickedness and untruth, we become acquainted with the historical life and proclamation of Jesus. In two respects he is far more realistic than any of his contemporaries, and also more realistic than any of Israel’s prophets. He is realistic in his understanding of how profound and consistent wickedness and untruth [25] are in people’s lives. What people call goodness is camouflage for wickedness, it is hypocrisy. And Jesus of Nazareth is realistic in his knowledge of what costs are attached to living out goodness and telling the truth: that it means suffering, persecution, and death. The more deeply embedded wickedness is in the lives of human beings, the greater, obviously, are the costs for the individual attached to a life of goodness, and the more wickedness is disguised hypocritically, the more surely goodness will be misunderstood. But in both respects, Jesus’s proclamation is as realistic as can be—not mysterious, not schwärmerisch. Despite this, nothing he said or did testifies to his knowing the goodness from his own wickedness’s destruction of it, the truth from his own rebellion against it. On the contrary, he speaks and acts as if goodness and truth flowed freely and unimpededly in his words and works; he considers his own words and works to be integral to the breaking through of the kingdom of God, which he proclaims. If, therefore, we compare his unparalleled realistic knowledge that the wickedness which governs the world, and which confers on goodness the condition of suffering and misunderstanding, persecution and death, and all the while wickedness disguises itself hypocritically as goodness—if we compare this with the fact that he himself speaks and acts as if it was God’s kingdom which came to humanity in his words and works, then inevitably the question arises: Who was he? Was the difference between him and his adversaries that while their hypocrisy was conventional, his was deranged? Was it a schwärmerisch view of his own mission which gave him

14   that realistic, penetrating eye for the wickedness and untruth in the life of his contemporaries? Or did God’s kingdom break through in his words and works? We cannot come to an answer by engaging in speculations about whether or not there might be something manifestly divine in Jesus’s historical life and death. For there is not. He can—[26] as far as what is manifest is concerned— be a mad Schwärmer just as well as he can be God’s speech and action. But how, then, can one come to believe that in the historical Jesus God’s kingdom has come? By a twofold pre-understanding one can come to the decision of faith. The same goodness and truth that is in the life of Jesus of Nazareth is in our life. His possibilities of life were not of another kind than ours, they were the same. With the pre-understanding of what goodness and truth are, which we recognize from our own present and existing life, we recognize them in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, together with our recognition of the difference—which is this: that while we live in destroying the possibilities of our lives, he lived in the realizing of them. Our pre-understanding is not, of course, clear and fully developed. How could it be, when the way in which we destroy goodness’s possibilities of life consists also in camouflaging our destruction of them by all means possible and impossible. We relativize the demands we are met with, defend ourselves against them with resentment, self-pity, and excuses. Our pre-understanding is first called forth, therefore, by the confrontation with Jesus’s words and works; it is clarified first by the difference between his realization and our destruction of the same possibilities of life. Because the pre-understanding is an understanding of what true existence is, faith has the character of an existential decision. The other pre-understanding, which the decision of faith—perfectly reasonably—depends on, is this: there is nothing paradoxical in the fact that the power to be in everything that is then expresses itself in how it is in one person’s life, namely how it is in the life of Jesus of Nazareth; indeed, that is what is to be expected, so that the life of Jesus of Nazareth is the only human life in which there is nothing paradoxical.

    

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5. The Paradoxicality [27] Kierkegaard does not deny that a human being has a pre-understanding of goodness and truth, and that it is with this that we understand the proclamation, life, and works of Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, Kierkegaard’s thinking does not rule out that Jesus proclaims the radical demand, and that we, with our pre-understanding of what true existence is, accept his proclamation. This, however, just has nothing to do with Christianity. Our pre-understanding of what true existence is does indeed help us to understand Jesus’s proclamation, life, and works, but this does not help us to understand that Jesus of Nazareth is the god. That is, he is the god not in virtue of what he said and did and how he lived, but he is the god in the paradoxicality, and our pre-understanding of goodness and truth does not help us to understand this. Is the belief that he is the god then devoid of understanding? Is faith for Kierkegaard a sacrificium intellectus? Does he stand for a kind of intellectual anti-intellectualism? In places, certainly, but far from always. Before I come to the understanding of the paradox in a Christian sense, let me remind the reader of Kierkegaard’s view of the paradox according to Socrates, and in Religiousness A in general. The paradox is there to uphold the infinite distance between God and the human. This is already the case with the paradox in human religiousness, of which Socrates is the representative. The eternal truth is essential, and therefore a truth about existence. But for Socrates the eternal truth itself is not paradoxical; what is paradoxical is that it relates itself to an existing person, an individual in the process of becoming. If, therefore, this existing person wants to be faithful to the character of their own existence as movement and becoming, they must realize that they can never—with objective certainty—come into possession of the eternal truth once and for all. The paradoxical in the relation of the eternal truth to the existing person expresses itself, therefore, in the fact that the existing person’s relation to the truth is ignorance. Because the eternal truth is not itself paradoxical, the recognition [28] of it is recollection. For Socrates, then, there is the constant possibility of taking oneself back into eternity in recollection. This would be tantamount, however, to taking oneself out of existence, and would now be thinking speculatively, objectively sub specie aeterni, and hence Socrates desists from it—for the sake of existence. He remains faithful to it—through ignorance, as the expression of the paradoxical relation between the eternal truth and the existing person (SKS 7: 191–2/KW 12.1: 204–6). Socrates’s ignorance is therefore a kind of piety, as it is called in The Sickness Unto Death. ‘Let us never

16   forget that it was precisely out of veneration for God that he was ignorant, that as far as it was possible for a pagan, he was on guard as a judge on the frontier between God and the human, keeping watch so that the deep gulf of qualitative difference was maintained, between God and the human, so that God and the human did not merge in some way, philosophically, poetically, etc. into one’ (SKS 11: 211/KW 19: 99). In a Christian sense, in Religiousness B, it is now not merely the relation to the truth, but the truth itself—as the composition of the eternal and temporal in the god-in-time—that is the paradox. Recollection’s possible relation to the eternal truth that lies ‘behind’ has been broken by sin; subjectivity is untruth. Now the human being encounters the truth in front of them as the absurd. In Christianity, therefore, God has come close to the human being—as close as any human being has ever managed to conceive. ‘No teaching on earth has ever really brought God and the human so close together as has Christianity.’ But neither has any teaching ever been so much opposed to being taken in vain, which would mean turning the teaching of the god-human into a teaching of the identity between God and the human being. By means of the paradox and the possibility of offence, Christianity opposes this falsification and impudence and its sublation of the qualitative difference between God and the human. These are meant to prevent the human being from making a blasphemy out of the fact that God [29] has come so close to the human being in Christ (SKS 11: 229, 236–7/KW 19: 117, 126). As was said, the idea of the paradox is occasionally an intellectual antiintellectualism. The truth must be the paradox, for only the paradox prevents the truth from becoming objective, according to Climacus. But the alternative—either the truth is objective, or else it is paradoxical—is rooted in an objective understanding of the truth. Only if the truth is conceived of as objective, which as such threatens to make subjectivity irrelevant, can this be prevented by making the truth paradoxical, and bringing about passion and effort. The necessity of intensifying subjectivity in passion and inwardness betrays the objective point of departure. ‘The expression of the objectivity’s repulsion, is the resilience and dynamometer of inwardness’ (SKS 7: 187/KW 12.1: 204–5). For, the necessity of the paradoxical character of truth drops away if the truth is God’s relation to the existing person in certain words and works. A personal relation consists only in its continual renewal, and it is sublated if it is made into something established once and for all. The intensification of existence is superfluous, it is a matter of trust and neither of passion, inwardness, enthusiasm, nor effort. If Climacus were to accept the implications of his

    

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own understanding, that one cannot by objective means ‘bring God forth . . . because God is subject’ (SKS 7: 183/KW 12.1: 199–200), and understood that the truth consists in the speech and action of the eternal subject towards the human being, then for him faith would consist in listening to, and trusting in, that speech and accepting that action, and it would be superfluous to specify perpetually that it is the existing subjectivity which is the truth; this is necessary only because Climacus presupposes that the truth is objective. His interpretation of Christian truth is, in this respect, determined by his interpretation of Socratic truth. Faith was objective ignorance [30] for Socrates, and it remains that way in Climacus’s construction of the Christian faith. Put briefly, in Climacus’s understanding of the paradoxicality of truth, faith is not faith in God in his words and works, but in this—objective and paradoxical—fact: the god-in-time. If the truth consisted in word and works, it would not demand the passion of infinity; it does so only because the truth is incommensurability between eternity and time in the god-in-time. From the nature of human existence Climacus infers the nature of Christianity. The paradox can certainly not be explained by anything else, but what can be explained—based on human existence—is that the truth about it must be paradoxical. So, the paradox must make good to human subjectivity that it is the truth. The subject itself brings the criterion of truth along with it. In contradistinction to idealism, reason has simply been replaced by existence: whatever is the truth must be so in existence’s inwardness, passion, and effort. From existence itself, because of its passionate character, it can be affirmed a priori that the truth must be refractory, otherwise the truth objectively annuls the existence whose truth it was supposed to be. Reason threatens, objectively, to make existence indifferent, which is why the truth about existence must go against reason. Christianity has therefore ‘found its perfect fit’, its paradox fits perfectly with existence in passion. ‘Subjectivity culminates in passion, Christianity is paradox; paradox and passion fit each other perfectly, and paradox perfectly fits a person situated in the extremity of existence’ (SKS 7: 210/KW 12.1: 230). ‘Faith, self-active, relates itself to the improbable and the paradox, is self-active in discovering it and in holding it fast at every moment—in order to be able to believe’ (SKS 7: 212/KW 12.1: 233). The necessity of the paradox can be explained, and that explanation constitutes the difference between the wise and the simple person. The wise person comprehends that [31] the truth must be the paradox, and that it cannot be otherwise (SKS 7: 207–8/KW 12.1: 230–1). Nonsense inhabits understanding’s domain, it cannot put up any opposition to the understanding, but is seen-through and dissolved by it. The

18   paradox lies, however, outside the understanding’s domain, understanding understands that it cannot understand it, and the Christian uses the understanding ‘to see to it that they believe against the understanding’ (SKS 7: 516/KW 12.1: 568). Also, the form of speech which corresponds to knowledge, viz. information, testifies that the truth is conceived of as objective. Climacus himself works with the categories of objectivity, despite the fact that he wishes to make clear that the truth is not objective. Both paradox, explanation, and information are objective categories: the paradox as the content of the truth, the explanation of the necessity thereof, and the information about it, which must be indirect in order to estrange the teacher from the pupil. Perhaps Kierkegaard would have gone along with this critique of Climacus. Maybe he anticipated it by drawing attention to the fact that Climacus proceeds experimentally, inferring from existence to Christianity. Anyhow, Kierkegaard’s talk of paradoxicality far from always presupposes an objective conception of the truth, and that is what is decisive. The paradoxicality does not mean that the decision of faith is blind and involves no understanding. For it is not absolute paradoxicality and absurdity which is to be believed, but rather that only the existence which is lived under the conditions of paradoxicality and absurdity is true. Which existence is this? It is the love which is necessarily misunderstood by those at whom it is aimed. Originating in paradoxicality and absurdity, love is unrecognizable. As the god is unrecognizable, so is his existence in love unrecognizable, and because it is unrecognizable, it is bound up with the deepest [32] suffering. Christ hides his love of humans—out of love for them, and this incognito is love’s suffering. Faith comes into being, therefore, by means of the understanding that no love is greater than that which is expressed in the self-denial that is required for hiding one’s love from those at whom it is aimed. But human beings have no pre-understanding of that form of existence. The goodness and truth which human beings know from the rebellion of their wickedness and untruth have nothing to do with that kind of love. The unrecognizable love corresponds to nothing in our own existence. How, then, can we become acquainted with it, aware of it? How can we even arrive at a decision about it at all? Climacus has already answered this: The god must not only bring the truth to the human being who is in untruth, but the god must also bring to the human being the condition of understanding the truth. This condition is that the god himself draws attention to the fact he is the god. The human being is faced, then, with the decision of whether they will believe it, that is to say, believe that the divine’s unrecognizability in the existence of

    

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the god-human is the unrecognizability of his love. But there is no preunderstanding of this unrecognizable love, as there is of the radical ethical demand. If a human being chooses to believe, therefore, no pre-understanding has been implied in the choice. The god alone has given the condition. Kierkegaard operates with these alternatives: either human beings, Socratically understood, have the truth in themselves in the form of ignorance; or else human beings are untruth, and that so completely, that they cannot even seek the truth (SKS 4: 222/KW 7: 13–14). But how can human beings, then, understand the truth at all—and with their own existence at that? As already mentioned, Climacus’s answer is as follows: this can happen only when human beings together with the truth are also provided with the condition for understanding it. In offence about the god-in-time, it happens that the individual human being discovers their own existence in untruth, in sin, thereby understanding the truth in the fact that the god became human. So, even though as a result, [33] Christianly understood, the truth and the condition come from outside, nonetheless the truth is understood in just as personal a way as when, Socratically understood, human beings by themselves possess the truth and the condition for understanding it in the form of ignorance. The teacher is only the occasion, ‘whoever he may be, even if he is a god, because I can discover my own untruth only by myself, because only when I discover it is it discovered, not before, even though the whole world knew it’ (SKS 4: 223/KW 7: 14). The objection cannot be levelled at Kierkegaard, therefore, that the appropriation of the truth cannot be a personal one, when human beings lack the conditions for understanding the truth, that is, do not have a pre-understanding of it. Kierkegaard has forestalled an objection of this kind with his claim that not merely the truth, but also the condition for understanding it, is given to the individual, and with his claim that as soon as the condition has been given, ‘everything is Socratic again’. Nevertheless, determination of that which is Christian, which the Socratic alternative gives rise to, I find to be untenable, for it means that human beings are not responsible for their untruth. If the condition for understanding the truth comes from outside, because the truth has nothing to do with possible ways of being that are given to human beings with their life, then the untruth in which human beings live is not guilt. This is the case only if human beings have the truth in themselves, in untruth’s permanent rebellion against it. What comes from outside is the annihilation of the untruth by the forgiveness of it. Therefore, the difference between the Socratic and the Christian does not lie in the human being’s possessing or not possessing the condition for

20   understanding the truth—from a Christian point of view human beings possess the condition too—but the difference lies in whether the human being possesses the condition in ignorance of the truth (which Socratically presupposes that the truth is a matter of knowledge), or in rebellion against the truth (which Christianly presupposes that the truth is a matter of existence). A decisive question remains. It is one thing to [34] understand the truth in the paradox that the god became human with the untruth of one’s own existence, and to understand the truth of the existence that emerges from the paradoxicality, which consists in the fact that love is necessarily misunderstood. But it is something else whether the following of this existence is also the truth of the individual’s own existence. If the latter is to be the case, despite the individual’s not being the god, not being Christ, it must be because there is no other truth than the god’s paradoxical and absurd coming in the lowly form of a servant. Any other existence is untruth. The coming of God’s kingdom does not mean that the individual, in forgiveness of their untrue life, is freed to live the life which as matter of fact has been given to them, but it means that because the individual’s own life is nothing but untruth, the only way for them to be in relation to the truth is in following the god’s life in the unrecognizability of love. Kierkegaard nuances his claim somewhat: when the human being lacks the condition to understand the truth, this is not due to the fact that the human being has been created without the condition, but that they have robbed themselves of the condition. Thereby Climacus comes close to the idea of a pre-understanding of the truth in untruth’s rebellion against it; he also says about the untruth that it is not simply outside the truth, but polemically against it—it forfeits the condition (SKS 4: 224/KW 7: 15). However, the idea which Climacus comes close to here is incompatible with the idea of paradoxicality. The truth, the condition for the understanding of which human beings have robbed themselves, can only be the truth of the life that has been given to them; it cannot however be the truth of the life that emerges from the paradoxicality. For that is the god’s life, and a truth which only comes into being for the sake of sin. So, despite the nuancing of his claim, it remains the case that, for Kierkegaard, existence in faith does not consist in being forgiven, in fulfilling the life for which the human being has been created. It consists, rather, in following the god in the suffering of unrecognizable love. Faith does not consist [35] in being given back to the given life through forgiveness, but it consists in a life beyond the human being’s created possibilities of existence and pre-understanding: it consists in the following of Christ.

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6. The Interpretation of the Crucifixion From his understanding of the god-in-time, Kierkegaard knows that the temporal conditions of eternal life are crucifixion and voluntary death, and that there are no other conditions for the Christian than following Christ in martyrdom. Kierkegaard does not know this from the historical Jesus. In Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and its proclamation, Jesus was crucified not because he proclaimed the coming of God’s kingdom; nor because he made his contemporaries understand that God’s kingdom was breaking through in his life, words, and works; nor because the coming of God’s kingdom consisted for him in God’s forgiveness now being given to everyone, without regard to their fulfilment or transgression of the law, without regard to their morality or immorality, godliness or ungodliness; nor because he proposed a conception of the law and of custom that overthrew tradition; and nor because, referring to the fact that God’s kingdom was now breaking through, he proclaimed the radical love commandment with an authority as if it was he who brought God’s kingdom and lived love. Kierkegaard does not look to Jesus’s historical life for an explanation of the fact that he was crucified in order to interpret the eternal meaning of the crucifixion on that basis. Kierkegaard starts somewhere else. He assumes that when eternity is lived in temporality, when the divine is lived in the world, it must be a life of suffering. Therefore, the god-in-time had to be crucified, and that not only just at Golgotha, but from the beginning. His whole life must have been a life of suffering, from first to last. Kierkegaard infers from the crucifixion what the life which the god-in-time lived consisted in, and he also infers from the crucifixion that the proclamation that took Christ to the cross consisted in a proclamation [36] of the crucifixion, his own and the crucifixion of every human being who, for the sake of their eternal beatitude, will take seriously their relation to eternity on the condition of temporality. Jesus’s crucifixion does not mean the same when one understands it on the basis of Jesus’s historical life, as when one, following Kierkegaard, derives the interpretation from the idea of the god-in-time. Understood on the basis of Jesus’s historical life, Jesus was crucified because he said and did what no human being is entitled to say and do. No human being is entitled to say to another human being: you must obey the commandment of radical love!x No human being is entitled to say to another human being, in his own name: in my words and deeds God’s kingdom has come to you, you are forgiven. Jesus was crucified because of the significance he attributed to his own person, and to his own words and works, for the breaking through of God’s kingdom, a

22   significance that would be blasphemy for any other person to attribute to themselves and their words and works. But then being a Christian does not consist in following Christ, where this is understood as the Christian themselves initiating a crucifixion, a martyrdom, for the sake of their eternal beatitude. Just as there are words of Jesus that according to their own sense were said once and for all,xi so too his suffering, cross, and death happened once and for all. It is not the Christian’s task to repeat his suffering. Christians live in the forgiveness that was brought about, once and for all, by Jesus of Nazareth, and which it is not up to Christians to acquire through martyrdom. In his study of Luther, H. Østergaard-Nielsenxii discusses the different ways in which other people’s works can have significance for one. Someone else’s effort and achievement—now or in the past—can have significance for me because they did it instead of me and for my benefit, so I am freed from doing it. I am not to repeat it. This is the significance that most of what has happened historically has for us, and which is its significance once and for all. [37] But the significance of the work can also be exemplary; the example is to prompt me in my life, on my terms, to live and act accordingly, albeit not in the same way. This could be called the work’s exemplary significance. Finally, the meaning of the work can be that it is to be repeated, as the repetition has the character of following. We could call this the work’s imitatio-significance (H. Østergaard-Nielsen, Scriptura sacra et viva vox: Eine Lutherstudie (Munich: Kaiser, 1957), pp. 71–3). For Luther the once-and-for-all significance is what is decisive in Christ’s works. For Kierkegaard it is the imitatio-significance that is decisive.

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7. Following Christ To be Christian is obviously not to be Christ—that would certainly be blasphemy—but it is to be the followerxiii of Christ, says Anti-Climacus in Practice in Christianity. To be Christian consists in one’s life having as great a resemblance to Christ’s life as a human being’s life can possibly have. Christ’s life here on earth is the paradigm after which the Christian should strive to shape their lives. Being contemporaneous with Christ is relating oneself to his life as he lived it here on earth. To be Christian in the world’s eyes is therefore to be an abased person, to suffer all that is evil, to be subjected to scorn and mockery, ostracized from the community and punished as a transgressor (SKS 12: 114–15/KW 20: 106). Does this mean that it is blasphemous if the Christian tries to live Christ’s life, to speak, act, and suffer as he spoke, acted, and suffered? If so, one would expect Kierkegaard to go on to specify in what respects the Christian is not called to follow Christ. But he does not do so; on the contrary, he goes on to say that the Christian’s life should have the greatest possible resemblance to [38] Christ’s life. But after what he himself has just said, is this not blasphemous? Is Kierkegaard’s claim not self-contradictory? Perhaps it will be said that, however seriously and persistently the Christian is capable of striving to shape their life after Christ’s life, the distance still is and remains infinitely large. Therefore, the Christian need not enter into speculations about in what respects they must not be Christ; their own sinfulness sees to it that they are not so in any respect. But then the claim about its being blasphemous to identify being Christian with being Christ is otiose and empty. It cannot be decided which understanding is the correct one, for Kierkegaard’s account keeps hovering between the self-contradictory and the empty; and there is a reason for this. Kierkegaard uses the reference to the human being’s sinfulness to evade the question about in what respects the Christian is not called to follow Christ, despite the fact that the question crops up in urgent ways, when Kierkegaard understands the life of Jesus with the dogmas of orthodox dogmatics, and that means—to use his own expression— as the extraordinary in an infinite sense. It is one thing to be the individual; it is something else to be the extraordinary, as Kierkegaard puts it. This must mean that it is one thing to follow Jesus’s invitation to live in the kingdom of God in which he himself lived, and the breaking through of which he proclaimed, within human relationships and communities. But it is something else to forsake these relationships and

24   communities to live the apostle’s life; the latter happens in virtue of a special revelation, Kierkegaard says, and applies only to the apostle. Kierkegaard’s distinction corresponds to Luther’s distinction between vocatio mediata and vocatio immediata.xiv If it is already the case for an apostle that his life is lived in a way that no one else would dare to live their lives, then this applies in an infinite sense to Christ. The character ascribed to Christ’s life is not ascribed to it only by his living in God’s [39] kingdom, but also by his being—as the god-human—the extraordinary in an infinite sense. Neither does Kierkegaard portray Jesus’s life, therefore, on the basis of Jesus’s own proclamation of God’s kingdom; he abstracts from this in order to portray Jesus’s life in the light of the Church’s dogmas. The character he ascribes to Jesus’s life in Practice in Christianity, and the significance he attributes to the conflicts of Jesus’s life, Kierkegaard does not derive from what we know about Jesus’s life and proclamation from the three first, so-called synoptic Gospels, but he derives it from the dogmas of pre-existence, incarnation, and atonement. This is consistent, for the Church’s dogmas are an attempt to say who Jesus is as the extraordinary in an infinite sense. What is not consistent, however, is that Kierkegaard does not distinguish between the works in which the Christian is called to follow Christ, and those in which they are not. There is only the aforementioned remark that to be Christian is not to be Christ, but nothing is said about what this means more precisely. And Kierkegaard’s elucidations suggest that he believes that to be Christian is tantamount to following Christ as the extraordinary in an infinite sense, despite the fact that it is tantamount to blasphemy to want to be Christ. Kierkegaard’s motive is clear enough. In Kierkegaard’s eyes, any specification of the claim that to be Christian is not to be Christ which suggests that it is not the task of a Christian to follow Christ, is tantamount to reducing the demand. Kierkegaard sees it as his task to make being Christian a difficult and disquieting business, thus the demand cannot be ratcheted up high enough. If it could be, it would not be infinite, absolute, unconditioned. But when the demand—as Kierkegaard has it—is made on the basis of the understanding of Christ as the extraordinary in an infinite sense, this implies that the Christian must have a nature other than the one they have, and that they must replace their [40] historically given circumstances with the circumstances of the extraordinary. When it is the life of the extraordinary in an infinite sense which makes the demand, the supernatural conditions that are integral to being the extraordinary in an infinite sense enter into the demand.

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It follows that the demand is greater and more difficult for the Christian than it is for Christ. Directed at the Christian, whose conditions are different, namely natural, whose circumstances are different, namely the civil vocation, the demand becomes of course more difficult for them to obey than for the extraordinary, because, as already mentioned, directed at the Christian it becomes a demand for another nature and for other circumstances. In contradistinction to Christ, the Christian is neither pre-existent nor incarnated. To be consistent, therefore, Kierkegaard would have had to say one of two things. Either: as they are physically-metaphysically precluded from living the life of the pre-existent and incarnated, the Christian cannot be called to follow Christ. Or: even though the Christian does not possess the conditions of pre-existence or incarnation, they are called to follow Christ; but their task is more difficult than Christ’s. But Kierkegaard evades the choice with his reference to the sinfulness of human beings. He states: ‘. . . for the individual Christian there is reserved a suffering in which not even the Godman could be tried. It is a frightful discovery to make, that truth is persecuted, but the suffering differs in relation to who it is that makes this discovery.’ Both Christ and the Christian suffer abasement and persecution. But Christ ‘eternally sure in himself, knows in his innermost being that he is the truth’, and therefore he is spared the suffering which, as far as Christians are concerned, is added further to the abasement and persecution, viz. the suffering brought about through their ignorance concerning ‘how far they themselves at every moment are in the truth’. The Christian is not the truth, but relates themselves only very imperfectly to it, and therefore they know a suffering which Christ did not know, namely the suffering in anxiety and worry for every transgression (SKS 12: 195/KW 20: 196).

Part II The Sacrifice 1. Suffering (a) Christianity’s Interpretation of Suffering [41] Is what is special to the Christian ethos a suffering which cannot be known in a purely human way?i This was Kierkegaard’s view; Christians are called to works of a kind that lie beyond the horizon of non-Christians, works that have nothing to do with what we otherwise understand by concrete ethics,ii and which give Christian suffering a depth that makes it differ from the suffering experienced by non-Christians. I think that Kierkegaard was wrong about this; there is no special Christian suffering, there is only a special Christian interpretation of the suffering any human being is exposed to, Christians and non-Christians alike. For Kierkegaard to be able to assert that the obedience to the infinite demand consists in the individual’s expressing by their existence that, over against God, they are not capable of anything and are nothing, it must at any rate appear as if the individual is capable of quite a lot and acts accordingly. If it was really the case that the individual was completely incapable, knowledge of this and its existential expression would be a matter of course, and a demand for that would be superfluous. Since it is not, it is a presupposition that the individual is capable of a great many things by means of the possibilities of expression and action which they have received with their existence, and this both culturally and ethically. However, instead of fulfilling their possibilities of expression and action in a reception of them, the individual takes them as though they owed them to themselves. And this makes a great difference when it comes to the fulfilment of them. When the possibilities of expression and action are taken as received, they are passed on and given to the neighbour. When the individual lives and [42] acts as if they themselves were the source of their possibilities of expression and action, they realize these to their own advantage, and even when the realization cannot avoid benefiting other human beings, the individual uses the realization to promote themselves. Controverting Kierkegaard. Translated by Hans Fink and Kees van Kooten Niekerk, Introduced by Bjørn Rabjerg, with notes by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern. Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern, Oxford University Press. © Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198874768.003.0002

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Understood in this way, the demand is thus not a demand to the effect that human beings shall consider as nothing what results from the realization of their possibilities of expression and action, provided they remain within the reception of them. On the contrary, human beings ought to be preoccupied with everything that can and should be achieved and treat it as significant. By contrast, the demand is a demand to the effect that the individual desists from crediting themselves with the realization and the achievement. They are not capable of anything by themselves, everything they deal with is goods which have been entrusted to them. Kierkegaard does not stop with this understanding; in addition, what the received possibilities of expression and action can achieve has to be considered as nothing. When Kierkegaard takes this further step, this happens, I suppose, because of an inference of the following kind. The more the individual is preoccupied with what is to be achieved and the more they look forward to what will be brought about by obtaining the goals of their actions, the more they are arrogantly concerned with circling around their own effort. Therefore, killing off self-centredness can only come about by cutting off the supply of nourishment which it gets from what is to be achieved. And this can be done only by considering everything that is to be achieved to be as nothing. In my judgement this inference is invalid. When there is nothing evil in being preoccupied with what the outcome of our achievements will be, this should not be considered as evil just because we take advantage of them to become evil. Sin should not be wiped out at all costs. If we were to kill even the occasion for sin, we would not be finished until we had exterminated everything and everybody. Not until we had wiped out humankind and laid waste to the world, would we have overcome the occasion for sin. So we had better stop this before it’s too late. Evil should not be fought opportunistically by removing the occasion for it. It must be at the rootiii that it should be attacked, and the root [43] of evil is that we consider ourselves the source of our possibilities for expression and action. We do not live in reception of our existence, but in claiming from it what it owes us, with the result that we live at the expense of other people’s possibilities of life and in considering the works we use our life to perform as our own accomplishment. The talk about becoming nothing and not being capable of anything can mean two things. What individuals are capable of doing to meet their neighbour’s needs and relieve their distress is to pass on that which the individuals themselves have received. The individuals do not—graciously—serve the neighbour with what they themselves have created and have a right to, but with what they themselves have been given. It is a fact and not an illusion that

28   we are capable of much. It is only an illusion that we ourselves are the source of what we are capable of doing. Kierkegaard does not stop with this understanding. In his view the individual is under the demand that they even in advance regard it as an illusion that they are capable of anything. No wonder that the obedience to the demand of becoming nothing and not being capable of anything is an ‘over-burdening of the spirit’—in Anti-Climacus’s expression.iv How could it be different when the task is to deny a fact and to pretend that the individual is not capable of anything with all that they do achieve. According to Kierkegaard the individual relates to God only in suffering; this is the ‘totality category’v of religiosity. But what does the suffering consist in; does it consist in denial of self or denial of life? If we answer that it consists in denial of self and not in denial of life, the next question that arises is whether this distinction is possible at all. I would answer: it depends upon what we are talking about. If the question is whether we are able in our existence to both affirm life and deny our ego, the answer is no. To take delight in the multifarious things life has offered and to place hope in the results of our work and the goals of our actions [44] while at the same time forgetting our ego, is something we have not been able to do. What we have received we have taken as our right, what we have achieved we have taken as our triumph; obsessed by a mania for comparison, we have turned our neighbour into our rival and enemy. We have misused our life and destroyed our neighbour’s through the cultivation of our ego in all possible ways, by self-entitlement and triumphalism, by greed for power and honour, by indifference, by hate, and by envy. Therefore, we must die. Just as it is Christianity’s interpretation of our life that it has been given to us, it is Christianity’s interpretation of our death that it awaits us because we have not been able to keep our life intact against our ego. But as it has not been possible to separate the fulfilment of life from egoism, and as we have lived our life under conditions set by egoism thereby destroying it, so that we must die, is the task not then set for us to practice dying while we are still alive? As it has not been possible to keep our life free from the grip of our egoism, is it then not demanded of us to die away from life, so that our egoism finds fewer sources for nourishment? Does not the suffering consist in our turning everything that belongs to our life and to which we cling into something that is indifferent? I consider this inference to be invalid. The task is not changed into another one by our failure and having to take death as the consequence of our failure. This does not retroactively transform the task so that it now should consist

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in forestalling our failure by making all worldly things indifferent and by preparing us for the consequences of death through practising dying while alive. The task stands before us, unchanged by our failure and death. Therefore, we must still distinguish between denial of life and denial of self. While it is true that we do not take pleasure from exercising our abilities without comparing ourselves with others and outdoing them, thereby transforming our pleasure into triumph—and while it is true that we cannot find satisfaction in achieving the goals we have set for ourselves without angling for recognition and gloating over our power—this does not mean that it is the pleasure in the realization of life, the joy in [45] the exercise of our abilities, the preoccupation with the goals of our actions, that must be renounced, but rather the comparison, the triumph, and the gloating over power. Let me formulate the problem in yet another way, in traditional theological terms. The first and second uses of the law must be kept distinct from each other.vi The law’s accusing and judging function (its second use) does not change the law’s statement of the task and the law’s demand that it be performed, its so-called civil and political function (its first use). I am willing to subscribe to Gustaf Wingren’s determination of the twofold function of the law—but with one addition and one qualification. Having spoken about the first use of the law, which compels works for the benefit of the neighbour, Wingren proceeds by speaking about the second use of the law, which demonstrates that the human will can never be in conformity with the will of God, so that a human being must die in order to enter into the kingdom of God. In connection with the gospel, the law in its second use points to another kingdom than that of the law, that is, to God’s kingdom, and it throws a new light on the human being’s death, which is not understood merely biologically (Skabelse och lagen [Creation and Law] (Lund: Gleerups, 1958), pp. 39–40, 209–11).vii My addition is: Even though because of sin there is no way to salvation except through death, this does not mean that human beings should have the task in this life to die away from life. We need not be concerned with coming to die, that is God’s business. Our business is only to accept the death to which God sentences us as the condition of our life—but not as the task of our life. And what applies to death, applies to suffering. It is fate, and when this is the fate of the individual, it is up to them to accept it—but not to seek out suffering. The problem is still the same. When sin has completely taken control of our existence so that no way leads to the kingdom of God except through an

30   acceptance of suffering and death, should we not, then, abstain from combatting suffering and death? The more so as we cannot stand up to suffering without finding it a fate that we are too good to [46] have deserved? The inference is invalid and is due to a confusion between the two uses of the law. It may be true enough that we cannot comply with the first function of the law and combat all kinds of misfortune, suffering, and death without disregarding the second function of the law. But this is not an objective necessity; it is due to our circling around ourselves.viii It is one thing to combat suffering and the conditions and institutions where it takes hold; it is another thing not to feel aggrieved about the suffering. Therefore, the two functions of the law offend, each in its own way, and they must not be confused. In its first use, the law offends in virtue of its radicality. We find it unreasonable that there are no limits to what is required of us. As for the second use of the law, we take offence by having to undergo pain and suffering while not being permitted to feel aggrieved: we take offence at not getting off more cheaply than by death. We know quite well that we have misused our life, that we have not been willing to stay in the reception of it, but, in rebellion against the creator, have taken it as though we ourselves were its source, and with the source’s right to do with it as we like; but as long as we take offence, we nevertheless think that our misuse and rebellion is judged too severely when there is no way to salvation except through death. The two uses of the law must be kept apart, and so must the offence they occasion, because there is no suffering and death which is especially Christian, no more than there is a special Christian concrete ethics; there is only a special Christian interpretation of suffering and death. And now my qualification of Wingren’s statement: There is a suffering which is inhuman, and it would be adding insult to injury if we said about it that it is a fate the miserable person has the task of accepting. It is this kind of suffering that raises the so-called theodicy problem in earnest. In the name of suffering Kierkegaard trivializes misery and escapes the theodicy problem—which speaks against his understanding of Christianity.

(b) The Self-Imposed Martyrdom [47] I return to the question of the relationship between the two uses of the law. If, with Kierkegaard, you take the content out of the first use of the law to put the content of the law’s second use into it, so that suffering becomes the

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task, two things follow. Being a task, suffering has to be sought out, which is to say that it becomes self-imposed. The other thing that happens is that Christianity is made into law. For Kierkegaard there is a special Christian suffering,ix the Christian martyrdom, and he protests expressly against its being fate. I shall briefly go through Kierkegaard’s view. Not only suffering but also sacrifice is integral to our existence as it is; time and again the individual is demanded to make a sacrifice for the sake of the neighbour. Kierkegaard knows this as well as anybody, he realizes very well that there is not only a Christian martyrdom, but also a worldly one, but he adds that the worldly martyrdom has nothing to do with the following of Christ. It is not sufficient that the sacrifice is made for the sake of the neighbour. What, then, is required? What characterizes the special Christian sacrifice? Misunderstanding does. The greatest love is the one that is connected with the deepest suffering, and the deepest suffering is being misunderstood by those who are the object of one’s love, and this in such a way that it is precisely one’s love, which, not being understood, is interpreted as hate. In the worldly martyrdom, on the other hand, the sacrifice is understood by those for the sake of whom it is made, or by those who become witnesses of it or hear about it. It is admirable that a human being forgoes the fulfilment of their expectations and sacrifices themselves, but it’s being admirable means that it does not deserve the name of self-denial in a Christian sense. Losing one’s life out of love of the neighbour is worthy of all respect; but precisely because it is respectable it has nothing to do with sacrifice in a Christian sense. Suffering, sacrifice, self-denial become Christian only by not being understood. It follows from this also that Kierkegaard has to protest against turning martyrdom into fate. He does not content himself with [48] ridiculing the Christian’s assurance that, should martyrdom come about, they would be sure to be brave enough to suffer it, but he also ridicules the idea that martyrdom is fate. He must do so, for if martyrdom is fate, it is necessary, and if it is necessary, it is understandable, and if it is understandable, there is no difference between Christian and worldly martyrdom.

(c) The Alternative to Kierkegaard The response to the Christian proclamation has sometimes been persecution, sometimes scorn and derision. Martyrdom has been the Christian’s fate. Christians have had to face the conflict that they betray their faith if they do not make the sacrifice. However, the suffering to which Christians expose

32   themselves is not more Christian than the suffering a human being meets with, when, for example, they fight against a tyranny. If one wants to distinguish between Christian and worldly martyrdom, the difference consists only in the different occasion, and the different occasion does not establish a religious ranking order between the sufferings, so that only the suffering that is due to the proclamation of Christianity is Christian, whereas succumbing in the battle against a tyrant is a misfortune that has nothing to do with a human being’s relation to God. The suffering of worldly martyrdom is just as Christian as the suffering of Christian martyrdom. Whether it is Christian is decided solely by the interpretation of the suffering and the attitude to it. The persecution or scorn and derision that Christians are subjected to because of their confession or proclamation can make them embittered and arrogant in an unchristianx way, and human beings can take the suffering inflicted on them by tyranny in a Christian way, knowing that they have not deserved a better lot because of their sin. According to Kierkegaard, the following of Christ is realized in the suffering to which you expose yourself by proclaiming the following of Christ to another person. According to Luther the following of Christ is realized in the suffering which, to use Wingren’s expression, is caused by something as un-spiritual [49] and external as for example disease and tyranny, when, knowing your misuse of your life, you abstain from taking offence at being treated unfairly (Gustaf Wingren, Luthers lära om kallelsen [Luther’s Doctrine of Creation] (Lund: Gleerups, 1942), pp. 66–7).xi

(d) Jaspers’ Non-Christian Version of Kierkegaard’s Specifically Christian Suffering Oddly enough, there is a non-Christian version of Kierkegaard’s assertion that there is a specifically Christian suffering. We find it in the form of a civic religious assertion that there exists a sacrifice which differs from all other sacrifices by its being made for the sake of transcendence. This is Jaspers’ assertion, and it offers him a religious justification for leaving the possibility of an atomic war open. He says: In the struggle for freedom a people’s will to freedom is fulfilled in sacrifice. It is better to die than to carry on like this. For the sake of what is the sacrifice made? For the sake of a dignified life? For the sake of freedom? For the sake of the people and its tradition? Indeed, but this does not suffice to explain the sacrifice. There is more to it, something which is not a goal in the world.

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The sacrifice becomes unavoidable for preserving the relation to transcendence. Not to make the sacrifice, is to betray the ground of existence. The life saved by living on is a baseless life, a life in nothingness and pretence. In a situation marked by power something happens that is incomprehensible for our rational thinking, which reckons with purposes in the world only— something that is more important than our will to live and survive. Life in the world is being put at stake in a way that cannot be comprehended in worldly terms. For human beings there is more than life. The sacrifice has a twofold aspect: leaving the world and acting in the world. But the purpose for which the sacrifice is made is never sufficient to make the sacrifice comprehensible. The eternal meaning of the sacrifice does not depend on the result. Something suprasensible and unconditional is associated with the sacrifice. [50] And then Jaspers draws the conclusion: Today the sacrifice can consist in an obliteration of humankind as a whole. There is no purpose in our world that is great enough to justify such a sacrifice. This would have to be a sacrifice for eternity. When, for the sake of freedom, we can get to the point that we have to run the risk of annihilating all life, because a preservation of life would mean a distortion of it in an inhuman unfreedom, then this is done in faith in the transcendence to which human beings relate in their freedom and in that only. Thus speaks Jaspers (Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen [The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man] (Munich: Piper, 1958), pp. 70–3, 235).xii Jaspers is right that there is an authorityxiii in the life of an individual, a meaning in it, which is not to be found in any of the goals we have set for it, but which is transcendent. Jaspers is also right that, if the situation should arise, it is the relation to the transcendent authority which alone makes the sacrifice possible and meaningful. However, he is not right that the sacrifice is made for the sake of the transcendent authority—for the sake of eternity. The sacrifice is made for the sake of temporal life, for the sake of a political cause. Our existence is, in fact, constituted in such a way that one life cannot be lived without requiring sacrifices from others. The fact that the individual’s own life becomes contemptible if they did not make the sacrifice demonstrates that it is the very constitution of existence that requires the sacrifice, rather than it being the performance of a noble volunteer. The individual’s life would no longer be worth living. Thus it is a sacrifice that is understandable, almost rational. Human beings can end up in the situation such that when they evade the sacrifice they have failed so grossly, behaved in such a cowardly and shabby way, that their failing makes their lives worthless for all time. If escaping the

34   sacrifice requires such a betrayal that the life you save becomes not worth living, it is understandable that human beings make the sacrifice, because the sacrifice that is made consists in a life that would not be worth living unless it were sacrificed. This sacrifice should not be belittled. Only when human beings make high demands on themselves, do their lives become [51] worthless by failing. Shabby and cowardly people are able to find enough pleasure in a life that was saved by betrayal. They do not suffer from self-contempt for that reason, and other people’s contempt perhaps does not bother them. However, there is also a sacrifice which a human being could have avoided very well without their life having thereby become worthless or contemptible. Often it is just this kind of sacrifice that is made in the fight for freedom. The life that is sacrificed is thus worthy enough. But what, then, is it that drives a human being to sacrifice it? That there is an authority for the individual’s life and its meaning, which is not to be found in any of the goals we have set for it, but which is transcendent. The transcendent authority for our life and its meaning makes itself felt in the sacrifice, the avoidance of which would not render the individual’s life worthless. This applies of course just as much to those who do not give transcendence a thought and perhaps consider it a religious anachronism, as it does to those who believe that there is a transcendent authority for their life. Just as it is essential that, in such a case, the sacrifice makes sense only because our life’s authority and meaning is transcendent, so it is just as essential that the sacrifice is made for the sake of life on earth and has a political meaning, where ‘political’ is taken in the broadest sense. The political cause must be worth the sacrifice. And if you ask what it is that decides whether an action’s political meaning is worth the sacrifice, the answer is: this is decided by the life that is given to us and for the sake of which we engage in politics. The meaning of the sacrifice is thus twofold, political as well as transcendent. The transcendent meaning is the meaning of the very sacrifice of life; the political meaning is the cause for the sake of which life is sacrificed. The sacrifice is that which cannot be avoided, that is to say, what leads to the sacrifice is an action that has a political meaning so essential that the action must be done even at the risk of, and perhaps even with the certainty of, losing your life through it. The sacrifice [52] is never the action’s intended meaning; it is the risk’s transcendent meaning. The action’s intended meaning is political. As I said before, the sacrifice must be worth the political goal. But it goes without saying that there is no political goal that is worth the obliteration of humankind. Sacrifice is another word for the denial of self, but by no means

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another word for the denial of life. On the contrary, sacrifice is not sacrifice, denial of self is not denial of self, if it is not fulfilled in an affirmation of life. But where is the affirmation of life in the atomic war’s obliteration of all life? There is none! And therefore the sacrifice makes no sense. Therefore, Jaspers can also only maintain that an eventual atomic war can be ethically legitimate by claiming that there is a sacrifice which is made for no other sake than the sake of eternity. But this, at a political level, is a denial of the fact that life is created. The idea of transcendence and the idea of creation have been torn apart; or rather, the idea of creation has disappeared. God is not the creator of life and the world, only the one who gives human beings the possibility to relate freely to life and the world. Being beyond the world, God has nothing to do with human beings and the world, only with human freedom. Jasper’s civil religious view of the ultimate sacrifice corresponds to Kierkegaard’s Christian view. The sacrifice that according to Kierkegaard consists in putting existence as a whole in the brackets of indifference for the sake of one’s relation to God, corresponds on Jaspers’ civil religious level to—as the last resort—the obliteration of humankind for the sake of eternity and freedom.

(e) Demand and Salvation The other thing that happens when it is asserted that there is a special Christian suffering is that Christianity is turned into law. Whether we aim at justifying ourselves through our works or not, regardless of their content, depends on whether we want to bring God’s approval down to us with them, or whether we let them go out towards the neighbour. This knowledge is part of the elementary theological learning [53] of our generation as a result of the renewed preoccupation with the Reformers. But I want to add that there are works which are already self-justifying in virtue of their very content, and these are suffering and death. What is up to us is solely to accept suffering and death as a fate which we have no right to revolt against because of sin. By contrast, we cannot make suffering and death into something demanded without making them into works through which we want to earn salvation. We see this with abundant clarity in Kierkegaard. From where does the demand get its meaning? Does it get its content from given life, and its necessity from our living the given life in the distortion and destruction of it? Does the demand exist for the sake of given life? Not for Kierkegaard. For him the demand gets its meaning from salvation. That is why

36   Kierkegaard’s demand is different from the demand in the proclamation of the historical Jesus. Jesus’s demand is radical, Kierkegaard’s cruel. It is no accident that again and again he falls into using the word ‘cruel’ when he wants to characterize Christianity and its demand. On Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity, God does not make himself the Lord for the sake of the human life he has created, he does not make his demand in order to serve human life, and he does not let the life he has created determine the content of the demand. Kierkegaard understands Christianity in such a way that the human being is faced with the demand for the sake of salvation. This explains why Kierkegaard turns the screw of the demand so much that from being radical it becomes cruel. There is no life to convey content to the demand, there is only a life to be annihilated by the demand, in order to pay for the salvation of life with the annihilation of life. Being law itself, the salvation detaches the law from created life. Law and creation end up having nothing to do with each other. But when salvation is eternal beatitude, the law that the salvation has made its own cannot become severe enough, nor cruel enough; it can only become a requirement for the annihilation of human life. The law is included in the forgiveness [54], the forgiveness has to be won, and that makes it cruel. For, if a relation is to be established between that which is acquired, the eternal beatitude, and the payment, the payment cannot be high enough. According to Kierkegaard—ever more markedly as his writing progresses— love of the neighbour comes to consist solely in helping the neighbour to love God. After the gospel has been proclaimed there is only one single action that is love of the neighbour, and that is proclaiming the gospel to them. The works of one’s vocation are disqualified. Whatever is done for the benefit and joy of the neighbour always benefits the agent, even if only by the fact that the neighbour or a third person understands those works. The revelation annuls God’s demand that we love the neighbour, which sounds out to us in the naturally generated and culturally formed relationships between one human being and another. After God’s revelation, his word no longer sounds out to us in the lex creationis of the vocation, but only in Christ. Unlike Kierkegaard, I contend that the love of the neighbour which follows from faith in the gospel is in two respects the same as the love of the neighbour, which, independently of the gospel, is required of every human being, simply due to the fact that they live and due to the fact that the neighbour has been delivered up to them. The place is the same, namely the vocation; and the works are the same, namely works with which the individual helps the neighbour.

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According to Kierkegaard, the incongruence between the kingdom of God and life on earth is not only due to sin, but also due to the fact that life on earth is a life in time and finitude, which is why the incongruence is metaphysical. Relating to the kingdom of God in life on earth can only consist in an annihilation of life on earth for the sake of the kingdom of God. Characteristically, there is no way to inform the neighbour about the kingdom of God except to make earthly life into nothing for them and to make [55] them as miserable as is humanly possible. For Kierkegaard, Christianity’s interpretation of suffering and death consists in their being reminders of the fact that, compared to the kingdom of God, everything that takes place in this life is indifferent, except suffering and death, because they are the entrance to the kingdom of God. The right relationship to what takes place in this existence—namely to relate with indifference to what is indifferent—results from a comparison of this existence with the kingdom of God, in which they are taken as two kingdoms that are incompatible in an absolute sense. It is excluded that God’s kingdom breaks through in those works of life on earth that are to the benefit of the neighbour’s life on earth. Unlike Kierkegaard, I contend that the incongruence between the kingdom of God and life on earth is due to sin only, and therefore the incongruence is neither absolute nor metaphysical. This is so, because in faith in forgiveness, and in the preoccupation with the neighbour’s needs that results from forgiveness, sin is broken—if it is really believed and is not merely an element of an outlook on life. If the gospel is accepted then the kingdom of God has broken through, hidden, momentarily, fragmentarily. The kingdom of God is incongruent with our worldly arrangements and institutions, not only because of its otherworldliness but also because of its worldliness. Since it exists only in the moment, it cannot be made into a goal. Because it can be realized only behind our backs, it cannot be worked on. According to Kierkegaard, love retains the same character of self-denial that it has in the relation to God in the relation to the beloved person, due to the false ideas about what love consists in that are entertained by the beloved. Love feeds off the other’s lack of understanding, who regards this love as hate and transforms it into suffering. Only the martyr is a Christian, and this loosens the connection between Christian love from given life. This has an abstruse consequence. When the person who is the object of Christian love misunderstands it as hate, the reason is, as we have seen, that it makes them miserable. Now, since the misery of being Christian [56] from first to last consists in being hated and persecuted, Christian love consists in helping others to be

38   hated and persecuted. By whom? By those whom they love in their turn, and who will reward their love with hate and persecution, as it consists in a love that will help them to be hated and persecuted. For if Christian love is accepted, it is at once no longer Christian, since those who accept it do not reward it with hate and persecution. If the other person has a true idea of what love is, this transforms love from self-denial into covert self-love. Therefore, in order that love shall not become natural and selfish, the person whose love is accepted by the other has to direct it to new and other people and provoke their hate and persecution. Not only is love nothing but missionary work, but its mission consists solely in the passing on of hatred of love and the persecution of love. This does not mean that for Kierkegaard it is a question of spreading the hatred and the persecution for the sake of hatred and persecution. The individual is helped to be hated and persecuted for the sake of their eternal beatitude. This is why helping them to be hated and persecuted is a work of love. It means, however, something else, which is that Kierkegaard creates a double limitation on love. Firstly, it consists only in the proclamation of Christianity, nothing else. What the proclamation thematizes—that the proclamation is the only Christian act—coincides with the proclamation as an act. But when proclamation as proclamation of itself encloses itself into itself in that way, it excludes the kingdom of God, if God’s kingdom consists in something else and more than achieving eternal beatitude through the proclamation. The next limitation of love consists in the fact that a certain manifestation of it (that it is strongly opposed to what the other wishes and expects), which is conditioned by a certain circumstance (that the other has a false idea of what [57] love is), is made the essence of love. This means that the suffering that is thematized by the proclamation coincides with the act of proclamation as suffering. For Kierkegaard, if love is to be Christian, it is conditioned by the other’s becoming your enemy, whether they are a stranger or a beloved. There is no condition of that kind in the proclamation of Jesus. The love that is integral to the kingdom of God and which arises from faith in its coming, is spontaneous and for that reason concerns the stranger and the enemy.

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2. Christianity and the Naturally Generated and Culturally Formed Communities (a) Self-Denial and Martyrdom According to Kierkegaard, to engage seriously with one’s relation to eternity in temporal life is to suffer, because sin is the given condition for eternity in temporality. However—to immediately diverge from Kierkegaard—that suffering can be of various kinds. It can be self-denial. The individual’s own sinfulness turns faith into suffering because they live in the conviction that the only thing that is worthwhile is arranging the world and their life with others with themselves as the centre. What one makes of oneself as the centre of life and the world can be all kinds of things, it depends on one’s desires, interests, aptitudes, and temperament, so that it can be things as different as a power restlessly kept up and extended, a comfort indolently defended, and it can be wealth, reputation, and many, many other things. But no matter what it is that we use our life and other people to achieve for ourselves, it is contradicted by Christianity, and therefore it is only in selfdenial that the individual can accept the Christian message as the truth of their existence. [58] This, however, does not necessarily expose a human being to hate, scorn, and persecution. Time and again the other will greet the individual’s self-denial with delight because it is to the other’s benefit, so that they cannot in any way be against it. Of course, it is best if the individual’s self-denial is hidden, so that the other does not have a shameful feeling of living at their expense, but takes the benefit as a matter of course, or even better as their unquestionable right. The New Testament, however, also speaks of being persecuted for the sake of the kingdom of God, that is, martyrdom. And this is the other way in which engaging seriously with one’s relation to eternity causes suffering. However, now sin is not one’s own but the other’s sinfulness; it is because of the other’s sinfulness that the Christian’s proclamation of the nature of Christianity is met with hatred and persecution. The suffering is different in another respect, too. The self-denial that is due to the individual’s own sinfulness is hidden; this is because they are called upon to deny themselves in the naturally generated and culturally formed communities in which the individual has their life. The self-denial is hidden within the requirement that we conduct ourselves appropriately by sticking to the facts and being rational. If self-denial is not hidden, it is a mere gesture. On

40   the other hand, martyrdom is public, because it consists in the persecution with which the Christian proclamation is met, and which is due to the sinfulness of those to whom the message is proclaimed. Kierkegaard speaks of both of the forms in which Christianity is suffering. But he speaks less and less about the hidden self-denial, until eventually he doesn’t speak of it at all. In his later writings it disappears completely. There he only speaks about the persecution, which naturally is public, and he does so in a tone that becomes more and more aggressive, in a polemic that becomes more and more violent and indignant. And once Kierkegaard has come to speak only of the public persecution, being a Christian then becomes [59] incompatible with living in naturally generated and culturally formed communities.¹ Self-denial consists solely in making sure that one exposes oneself to the persecution that is brought about by passing on the proclamation. Life in human relationships has only the negative meaning of being the life that has to be abandoned in order to live the life of a persecuted preacher outside the communities. Human beings have received their existence only in order to die away from it as a condition for receiving faith and its pledge of eternal life. Kierkegaard takes it that, because eternity is everything, finitude and the world are nothing. The individual can therefore engage seriously with their relation to eternity only if they live the life of a hated and persecuted person, for only by being hated and persecuted by the world have they turned the world into nothing through their existence, just as was done by Christ not only through his death on the cross but also through the crucifixion he suffered throughout his entire life. Kierkegaard leaves us in no doubt that it is his opinion that the following of Christ, which consists in suffering for being a Christian, annihilates life in the naturally generated and culturally formed communities, life in calling and stationxiv as it was put formerly. To clarify in what respect Christ is the example and what following Christ consists in, he says in Judge for Yourself! that Christ from the beginning, already with his birth in the world, was outside the world, ‘ostracized by and from the world’, which is to say without family, ‘attached by birth to no other human being’. He had to be without family, as he had to serve one lord only. ‘Birth itself, when the baby thereby comes to belong to a family, is a tie that immediately binds this human being in closer alliance with other human beings; an alliance with the world and what is of the world,

¹ Valter Lindstrøm has set out this shift, initially in Stadiernes teologi [The Theology of the Stages] (Lund: Gleerup, 1943), but especially in Efterföljelsens Teologi hos Sören Kierkegaard [The Theology of Imitation in Søren Kierkegaard] (Stockholm: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokförlag, 1956).

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and thus an alliance with other human beings, is what makes it so difficult to serve only [60] one master, makes it impossible if the alliance is not broken, even though love remains’ (SKS 16: 209–10/KW 21: 160–1). For Luther, the belief that Christ was not connected with another human being by birth, that he did not marry, that he had no trade, were the conditions for Christ being able to adopt the office that never ever had been and never ever would become another human being’s office, and in which no human being is called to follow him; but for Kierkegaard, precisely in these respects, Christ is our example. The flight to Egypt means that the child has no homeland, he is outside ‘the alliance that binds a people together’—and precisely in these respects, he is the example. ‘He is not bound to any woman as a husband’, and he has no trade (SKS 16: 212, 219/KW 21: 164, 170). For Kierkegaard, ties are wretched and degrading, being like the others, becoming something in the world, relating idolatrously to that which belongs to this world. And family and ties become one and the same, and so also do the people and ties, and trade and ties; they cannot be separated, neither for the example nor for the follower. The life in renunciation is living without family, homeland, and trade. The kingdom of God is not only incompatible with ties, with becoming something in the world, but the kingdom of God is already incompatible with living in a family, a people, and a trade. Kierkegaard speaks of death as the middle term that Christianity sets between natural, immediate life and the new life vitalized by the spirit, in order that human beings shall not imagine that the new life is a straightforward increase, an unmediated continuation of natural life (For SelfExamination, SKS 13: 97–8/KW 21: 74–5). It is, however, far from always easy to know whether it is the hidden self-denial or the public persecution which Kierkegaard thinks of when he speaks of dying away. But it becomes clear that he thinks of martyrdom, when that which we shall die away from besides selfishness [61] are also expressions of life such as human trust and earthly hopes, without which a life in the naturally generated and culturally formed communities cannot exist at all (SKS 13: 99/KW 21: 77–8). And the issue is heightened further when Kierkegaard starts to speak about erotic love. If the selfishness involved here is to be killed, he says, it is not sufficient that the beloved person is taken away from the person in love; no, he himself has to give her up. And this makes it twice as hard. But this, nevertheless, is what is demanded. And as if this wasn’t enough: the beloved must do everything to prevent it, implore him not to give her up. Only then is depriving oneself of the beloved dying away, killing selfishness. ‘Here you have an example (that is, if he manages to get around the sharp corner without losing his mind) of what it is to die away. Not to see one’s wish, one’s hope, fulfilled or to be deprived of

42   the desired one, the dearest one—that can be painful enough, selfishness is wounded—but it does not follow that this is dying away. No, but to have to shatter one’s fulfilled desire, to have to deprive oneself of the dearly desired one who is now one’s own: that means to wound selfishness at the root . . .’ (SKS 13: 100/KW 21: 79). In Christianity it is not cruel to be cruel, because this is the only thing that can save one from ruin.²

(b) The Extensive vs Intensive Understanding of Evil However, this means that Kierkegaard’s understanding of evil becomes extensive and not intensive. The alternative to Kierkegaard’s view is as follows: erotic love and friendship—to just focus on the two relationships to which Kierkegaard constantly returns and circles around—are granted to human beings by God. The spontaneity that is characteristic of the two relationships, and which creates and sustains them, is not evil. This [62] is the first thing that is to be said about them, and Kierkegaard does not say this, as is well-known. The next thing that is to be said about them is that we take those two spontaneous relationships into the service of our selfishness in all kinds of ways. Our self-love battens on them, parasitizes on them. Here someone will object: this is not enough, for you want to go further than this in salvaging goodness in human co-existence. This is true, this is what I am doing, for as I have already said I claim that erotic love and friendship are granted to us. To this someone will add: well, then you do not take everything in human existence to be evil. And this is true as well, I do not do that. For the evil in evil is that it feeds on goodness, annihilating it. Without goodness, there is no evil. There is the closest connection between them. This is the reason why evil is intensive. Without a sense of the close relation between evil and goodness, if evil is detached from goodness, evil will be understood extensively. And Kierkegaard’s understanding of evil is extensive when he summarily declares that erotic love and friendship are self-love. Understood as intensive, goodness is integral to the human being’s relationship to God, as a goodness God has laid down in the world and human life, and evil consists in devouring it. Understood as extensive it has two aspects only, a civil and a religious one. What is goodness in a civil sense, is wretched and degrading when seen religiously. Only evil is of religious importance. ² Cf. Knud Hansen, Revolutionær Samvittighed [Revolutionary Conscience] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1965), pp. 134–50. Here, as usual, I can fully endorse Knud Hansen’s critique of Kierkegaard’s view of Christianity.

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(c) A-Cosmic Ethics of Love Kierkegaard understands the Christian ethics of love as worldless, which, as I have already mentioned, manifests itself in the fact that he recognizes the law in its accusing function only, not in its political function. Kierkegaard states that you can relate to the unconditional demand in one of two ways: either you can want to fulfil it, or you can let yourself be humbled by it. The two relations exclude one another, for when you want to fulfil the demand, this is to avoid [63] letting yourself be humbled by it. Kierkegaard makes use of an image. The point of the demand is to function as a pair of scales, onto which the good works of a human being are put in order to be weighed and are found too light. On the pair of scales of the demand, even the best work of a human being becomes a degradation, as he puts it, and this is what the meaning of the demand is: to humble us. On the other hand, you have a wrong relation to the weight on the scales if you want to lift it, for then you are crushed by it—as you are crushed by the demand, if you want to fulfil it, and that is not its point. What Kierkegaard expresses here is the accusing and condemning use of the law, which convinces human beings that they are living in a constant revolt against God. Does Kierkegaard also know of the political use of the law? Before we answer this question, we must make clear for ourselves what it consists in. For Luther, the political use is good as such, because God wants the works done irrespective of the fact that those who do them transform them into evil works by their self-centredness and self-righteousness; for this does not necessarily make them useless for the neighbour, and God wants it to be the case that the works are done for the sake of the neighbour. The law’s political prompting and its accusation are co-ordinate functions, and this is manifest in the fact that the self-centred and self-righteous attitude with which the works are done, and which makes them into the individual’s own evil works, does not prevent them from being good works for the neighbour. For God the work is at the same time evil and good, because God attends to both the agent’s attitude and the neighbour’s benefit. God wants it to be the case that the law is used in both ways, and it does happen that the neighbour gets much benefit and pleasure from works that were performed with a wicked attitude. For those who do the work, too, it is in a sense at the same time evil and good. Because of their evil attitude, the individual knows that their action is condemned, but at the same time they know that their action is pleasing to God, because they are in the employment, the occupation, the office that God wants them to be in. Kierkegaard now states: ‘You cannot worship God with [64] good deeds, even less with crimes, and just as little by sinking into a soft-headed doze and

44   doing nothing. No, in order to worship God properly and to have the proper joy from worshipping, a human being must conduct themselves in this way: they should strive with all their might, spare themselves neither night nor day; they must accumulate, and the more the better, what people of integrity, humanly speaking, would call good works. And when they take them, and deeply humbled before God, see them transformed into something miserable and base, this is what it is to worship God—and this is a lifting up’ (SKS 16: 203/KW 21: 154). In the clause ‘what people of integrity, humanly speaking, would call good works’ there is reason to notice the words ‘humanly speaking’. The works are thus not good for God, it does not make them pleasing to God that they are to the benefit of the neighbour. But why, then, should a human being perform what honourable people call good works? In order to realize that they are merely wretched and degrading, so that God’s grace can become so much the greater. The relation to God consists in internal mental emotions, initiated by the works, and the significance of the works is merely to initiate them. The relationship to God does not include the world and the neighbour. Sin does not consist in human beings rebelling against God’s purpose in bringing humans into the world and placing them in relations with the neighbour. By contrast, what matters for Kierkegaard is that the fluctuations in the internal mental emotions in the relation to God can become as great as possible: the more good works there are, the more eager a human being has been in performing them, then the more staggering it is to have them transformed into wretched and degrading works—and the more elevating grace is. What a human being carries out in the world, in relation to the neighbour, is not integral to the individual’s relation to God, does not provide sin and grace with their content; it is outside, it is merely something civil, merely something honourable people humanly speaking call good works. For Luther the unconditional demand is at the same time a demand relating to works and to one’s attitude: for the works that they shall [65] serve the neighbour, for the attitude that it shall match this. By contrast, for Kierkegaard the unconditional demand exists only to expose the wickedness of the works, not to demand them. Kierkegaard does not recognize the political use of the law. Therefore, when all activity and endeavour is nothing for God and when the good works are evil for God, there is no reason why human beings should have to lead an active life and do good works. Kierkegaard provides no reason, just a curse. He curses the possibility of a human being saying: so why not be inactive? However, it is nothing more than a curse: ‘How terrible, how terrible, if a human being took the fact that the most honest striving is nothing for Thee as an occasion for surrendering to inactivity . . .’ (SKS 16: 216/KW 21: 167).

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For the same reason, it could be added, in Kierkegaard’s work there is given no reason either for why a human being could not just as well be active in selfchosen works. Luther gives a reason: the neighbour gets no benefit and pleasure out of the self-chosen works, these are only motivated by the wish to deserve grace. Kierkegaard gives no reason. He just states that it is a delusion: ‘The Middle Ages conceived of Christianity as directed towards action, life, transformation of existence. This is where merit lies. But it is true enough that they came up with some strange actions, in thinking that fasting in itself was Christianity, that entering the monastery, giving everything to the poor, not to mention—what we can now scarcely mention without smiling—scourging yourself, crawling on one’s knees, standing on one leg, etc., that these things were supposed to be true following. This was a delusion’ (SKS 16: 238–9/KW 21: 192).

(d) Suffering and Misfortune Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity’s incompatibility with life in the naturally generated and culturally formed communities comes to light [66] also in his sharp distinction between suffering and misfortune. Suffering is dying away from immediacy, and only this has religious significance, while misfortune has none. Climacus presents this distinction in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Misfortune is a contradiction of the immediacy that has happiness as its outlook on life. ‘Immediacy expires in misfortune’. It cannot handle misfortune, which is regarded as meaningless, it cannot handle the contradiction, because misfortune comes from the outside, it is accidental, it is fate. In misfortune as well as in fortune the individual relates to the world, and relates to it in the illusionary passion of immediacy. With suffering it is the other way round. The individual cannot relate themselves to themselves before God otherwise than in the suffering that is the inward transformation of existence; it is the very nature of their inwardness, ‘in suffering, religiosity begins to draw breath’. The suffering is anything but accidental, it does not strike from the outside, but the religious-ethical individual discovers that they are in it. Time and again misfortune and suffering are confused. This can happen because both are contradictions. It is just forgotten that misfortune is a determination in the sphere of immediacy, while suffering is a determination in the sphere of religiosity (SKS 7: 395–7/KW 12.1: 434–6). Anti-Climacus calls misfortune ordinary human sufferings and distinguishes them from the sufferings which are specifically Christian. It is

46   characteristic of ordinary human sufferings that they are unavoidable and that there is no self-contradiction in them. Human beings are struck by them and have to put up with them. They are earthly troubles and hardships; they are the loss of one’s property, the death of one’s wife, ‘sickness, financial embarrassment, cares about next year, what one is going to eat, or cares about “what one ate last year but still has not paid for”, or about not having become what one wanted to become in the world, or other calamities’. And there is no [67] selfcontradiction in them, ‘there is no self-contradiction in my wife’s dying—after all, she is mortal—no self-contradiction in my losing my possessions—after all, they are losable etc.’.xv By contrast, it is characteristic of the specifically Christian sufferings ‘that Christ and Christianity itself have brought into the world’xvi partly that they are voluntary, and partly that they—because of the self-contradiction—call forth offence and spiritual doubts. It was voluntary that the apostles left everything behind in order to follow Christ. Whereas it is not the individual’s responsibility that they suffer earthly troubles and hardships, it is on the other hand their own responsibility that they suffer the specifically Christian sufferings, because they themselves have attracted them, they themselves have exposed themselves to them by venturing and sacrificing. And then spiritual doubts and offence are there at once and say: ‘why do you want to expose yourself to this and begin such a thing—after all, you could leave it alone’.xvii And because it is integral to human nature to wish to escape suffering and do anything possible to do so, as a consequence there is something selfcontradictory in taking it on voluntarily. Anti-Climacus, too, polemicizes against the confusion, or rather the fact that ordinary human sufferings are passed off as Christian ones. ‘Unavoidable human sufferings must be endured . . . but then they are preached into being Christian sufferings, are preached together with Christ and the apostles.’ ‘. . . His Reverence becomes all mixed up. To lose everything and to give up everything become synonymous; he makes losing everything follow the paradigm of giving up everything, although the difference is infinite’ (SKS 12: 236/ KW 20: 109). However, following Christ, to suffer for his teaching, is one thing, but ‘to put up with life’s adversities with patience, etc.’ is something else, it has nothing to do with Christianity (SKS 16: 236/KW 20: 190). The major contrast that permeates Kierkegaard’s thinking is neither the contrast between good and evil, nor that between life and death, but that between fortune and suffering. [68] It is different for Luther. What Kierkegaard called misfortune, and which was a suffering not inflicted on oneself of one’s own accord, but which

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was a fate that befell one, and which was irrelevant for Kierkegaard from a Christian point of view, had a Christian relevance for Luther; it was integral to what he called the cross in the vocation.xviii

(e) The Admission Throughout his life Kierkegaard considered taking the step of living as a Christian. It is clear enough that this was not about the daily conversion in self-denial, about the cross in the vocation, but about a conversion once and for all, publicly manifest, in hate, scorn, and persecution. Taking God’s word in earnest is tantamount to taking a step once and for all. It radically transforms one’s whole existence, and there is no turning back. The existence one has built up for oneself and knows inside out is torn apart, it becomes a wasteland, it becomes death, there is nothing there for you to return to. Kierkegaard’s considerations are as close to that step, to crossing that threshold, as considerations can be; as he states in his work Judge for Yourself! they are about ‘coming so close to yourself in your understanding and knowing that all your understanding becomes action’—however without becoming action. Continually Kierkegaard shrinks back from taking the decisive step, in order instead to reflect on the step and reflect on the reflection with which he shrinks back from taking the step. God’s word is so dangerous, he says, that no one can be alone with it without interposing an illusion between themselves and the word. He only relates to Christianity as a writer of fictions. But he meant nevertheless that there was earnestness in his considerations, because of the continuous ‘admission’, ‘the humble confession’, that he is not a Christian. In every way he protects himself against the fact that someone might think that he thought of himself that he realized Christianity. [69] But this is not enough. For more is required if his reflections on how understanding and knowing one day are replaced by action are to be in earnest. If reflections about the action that consists in leaving civil life to provoke persecution are to be truthful, more than the admission, the humble confession, is required. An existential basis is required—also for the reflections that do not become more than reflections. Did Kierkegaard have that existential basis? Yes, he did, because he had not married Regine, had not become a pastor, had not realized the universal,xix the ordinary. But the idyllic life in a rectory or a university does not provide an existential basis for going along with Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and

48   making the admission. Having married your Regine, having become a pastor or a professor, if you admit that you do not live in accordance with Kierkegaard’s Christianity, your admission lacks earnestness. For you have cut yourself off from that existence by realizing the universal. Kierkegaard had not done so, and therefore there was earnestness in his reflections about following Christ. But this is lacking in the Kierkegaardian repristination that has been brought about within the national church by Tidehverv,xx that is to say, by people who have married their Regine and have become pastors and professors. Their going along with Kierkegaard and making an admission lacks an existential basis. The reason why there is earnestness in Kierkegaard’s admission and humble confession, is because for him becoming a Christian meant the same as placing himself in a situation that prevented him from realizing the human relations which he had extensively declared to be evil. Following of Christ, suffering for the Christian doctrine, places a human being outside life in marriage and friendship, about which there is nothing else to be said, except that it is selflove. For Kierkegaard, leading the wretched and degrading life he admitted he led was not the only option, and therefore his admission did not consist in the recognition that, though this was bad, there was no other option, but rather it consisted in a clear awareness that there was another option, [70] the life of persecution, which annihilated life in marriage and friendship. It goes without saying that the admission gets an extremely different character if you admit that something is not good in the awareness that it could be otherwise, or if you admit that that something is not so good, but that it cannot be otherwise. This is the difference between Kierkegaard’s admission and the theology that Tidehverv has constructed for itself on the basis of the admission.

Part III The Movement of Infinity 1. The Infinite Movement of Resignation [71] According to Kierkegaard, human beings in infinite resignation sacrifice everything they love, everything is declared lost, all joy is given up, while they love God and maintain that God is love. They do so, however, without faith. The lack of faith shows itself in that human beings cannot return to temporality. As Johannes de silentio expresses it: in the world of time, God and humans cannot talk with each other, they have no language in common (Fear and Trembling, SKS 4: 130/KW 6: 35). Therefore, should it happen that human beings receive everything back again, they will not be able to enjoy it, because in infinite resignation everything had been given up, and the resignation was their own achievement, an infinite movement in which human beings find themselves and are at peace with themselves. Those who love God reflect on themselves, it is said. The resignation is a purely philosophical movement; you do it through your own power and you achieve your eternal consciousness, which is love of God. Every time something finite becomes too great for him, Johannes de silentio starves himself in order to make the movement of resignation. Through his own power he gives up the princess and he does not become a sulking person as a result, but finds joy, peace, and rest in the pain, because his love of God is more important for him than earthly happiness (SKS 4: 143/KW 6: 48–9). Therefore, those who live preoccupied with multifarious interests do not know infinite resignation. To know that, your life must be concentrated on one single desire, so that everything depends on its fulfilment. This is because resignation consists in renouncing the fulfilment, while at the same time this remains your only desire in the renunciation. One never gives it up. It is integral to resigning infinitely, so that one has a passionate relation to that which one [72] renounces, so that one keeps the desire in one’s pain fresh. Those who are able to forget the desire have no idea of what resignation is. To forget is to escape resignation. Nor can one object to Johannes de silentio’s example of the knight who renounces the fulfilment of his love of the princess,

Controverting Kierkegaard. Translated by Hans Fink and Kees van Kooten Niekerk, Introduced by Bjørn Rabjerg, with notes by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern. Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern, Oxford University Press. © Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198874768.003.0003

50   that this was what he obviously had to do, that the difference in rank forced him to do so. Yes, it did, but it did not force him to maintain the love—after all he could have forgotten her, consoled himself with another, and thus have refrained from resigning infinitely (SKS 4: 136–40, 143–4/KW 6: 41–6, 48–50). In faith, on the other hand, human beings are willing to sacrifice everything, if that is required, but do not believe that God will require everything. They believe that which is absurd: that God, who demands everything—revokes the demand. Unlike resignation, faith is a double movement: the human beings do not restrict themselves to renouncing everything but believe to the very end that God will not demand what the believer loves with all their heart. The believers who love God reflect on God, so that, when they get everything back, they are able to enjoy it; at no moment had they given up the idea that the absurd would happen and that they would get everything again, and that this would happen even in this life. Faith is concerned with temporality. Faith is to be able to lose one’s reason, and with it the entire finite world—and win back the same finite world by virtue of the absurd. Not, however, in the sense that the prospect of winning back the finite world creates faith. If that was the case, one would cheat the infinite movement of resignation—and without this movement there is no faith. The knight of faith, as it is said a little later in Fear and Trembling, infinitely renounces his passionate love, passionately assured of the impossibility of its fulfilment—and yet at the same time believes what is absurd, namely that he shall have her (SKS 4 :140–1/KW 6: 45–7). Johannes de silentio says about himself that [73] he can easily perform the infinite movement of resignation, he is master of that art. Similarly, it is said that in infinite resignation there is a peace and rest and comfort in the pain, which reconciles one with existence. The infinite can also be discerned in the person who makes the movement of resignation, there is something alien and dignified about them (SKS 4: 129–32/KW 6: 33–8). However, de silentio cannot perform the movement of faith: ‘I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; it is for me an impossibility . . .’ (SKS 4: 129–32/ KW 6: 34). Having performed the movement of infinity he cannot perform the movement of finitude. Bu this is what faith consists in, therefore its movements cannot be seen either; the life of the person of faith is completely like the bourgeois life. Nothing in this person’s existence betrays the disparity between the infinite and the finite. Despite the pain of renouncing everything, even that which is most beloved to them in the world, the finite world tastes just as good to them as it does to someone who never knew anything higher than finitude. Infinitely resigning from everything, they grasp everything again in virtue of the absurd. Their opposition to existence is expressed at

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every moment as the most beautiful and secure harmony (SKS 4: 132–3, 135–6, 144/KW 6: 38–9, 40–1, 50). Except for the few pages where the knight of faith is described as leading the bourgeois life in an external sense, the problem of Fear and Trembling is not how human beings who lead a civic life can come to live religiously in a civic life. Johannes de silentio does not first assume that the individual leads a universal human life, then go on to ask if they have to leave this universal life in order to live religiously. It is the other way round. Johannes de silentio assumes that the individual has infinitely resigned, and then goes on to ask if they can come to live the universal life at all. Fear and Trembling deals with natures situated outside of universal life, so that they are fundamentally rooted in the paradox. Either they are lost in the demonic, or they are saved in the divine. Johannes de [74] silentio mentions two examples: Sara from the book of Tobiasi and Gloucester from Shakespeare’s Richard III. ‘Ethics actually only makes sport of them, just as it would be a taunting of Sarah for ethics to say to her: Why do you not express the universal and get married?’ Gloucester becomes a demon; being deformed he could not bear the pity he was subjected to from his childhood onwards (SKS 4: 193–4/KW 6: 103–5). Now going on to assess Kierkegaard, this amounts to there being natures whose fate it is to make the movement of infinity, they have no other way out; if they want to live passionately, this is where they have to start. And there are natures for whom the movement of infinity is in no way fate; captivated by life on earth they start far away from this movement. But then indeed the question arises whether the movement of infinity can and must mean the same for these two widely different kinds of natures. Kierkegaard seems to think so, and even if he doesn’t, many of his disciples seem to think so. But is he right? I do not think so. Grant that Johannes de silentio is correct that an individual may meet with the fate that for them there is only one thing to do, provided they take on their fate with passion: namely, resigning infinitely and keeping it secret that their work is infinite resignation. Grant also that Johannes de silentio is right that passion is required for renunciation, and that it is not everyone’s business to live passionately, but that it distinguishes the individual, so that there is something alien and dignified about them. After all, their fate renders the infinite movement of resignation natural, because, as was said above, it is the only way for the individual to live passionately and abstain from that which is easy and paltry: namely, consoling themselves. Given their fate, keeping a relation to the idea can only be accomplished through infinite resignation.

52   It is therefore the special fate that, according to Johannes de silentio, establishes the connection between passion and resignation. But then what about when a [75] human being does not have a fate of that special kind? Kierkegaard himself does not raise this question, nor do his disciples. Already Kierkegaard himself generalized infinite resignation to be the condition of faith for every believer, irrespective of their fate. But is this generalization reasonable? I do not think so. Johannes de silentio is at peace with his resignation, and this to the extent that he finds his melancholic peace and quiet and security in it. But this is due to his fate. By contrast, a human being who has not had a similar fate will never be able to be at peace with infinite resignation, they will never be able to see eye to eye with it and find peace and joy in its pain. For them there are only two possibilities. One is asceticism: they renounce life and choose unnaturalness. We can disregard this possibility; Kierkegaard tries to avoid it—although later he does so in vain. The other possibility is a life in pretence; this possibility shows that between the unique person with a special fate and everyone else things will be so different, indeed so completely at odds with one another, that everyone else can find peace and quiet, security and joy in resignation only through being dispassionate. For all these people the resignation—if it is not to consist in asceticism—will consist in the pretence of joy, the pretence of mourning, keeping an inner distance from everything, being physically present but mentally absent. Dispassionateness systematized as spiritual distraction! Kierkegaard’s own fate—no matter how you interpret it and no matter whether you emphasize his psycho-physical constitution, his relationship to his father, his upbringing, radical events in his life—made it reasonable to assume that he resigned infinitely, gave up Regine—and that he became reconciled with the pain. He was capable of eliciting positive aspects from the resignation, something which human beings who have not had a fate at all like his cannot do. Kierkegaard is proud, very proud of his resignation. And he admits that it has its purely human attraction—given that the conditions of his life [76] were as they happened to be. Because there was fate in his infinite resignation, it was not mere suffering. Kierkegaard is so at peace with infinite resignation that faith for him came to consist in being healed, which in turn consisted in gaining the real world, and that was impossible to him. Faith was faith in the absurd, and he shrank away from that. Johannes de silentio says about Sara, the girl in the book of Tobias, and for whom seven men had died in the bride’s house: ‘For what love for God it takes to be willing to let oneself be healed when from the very beginning one in all innocence has been botched, from the very beginning has

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been a damaged specimen of a human being! What ethical maturity to take upon oneself the responsibility of permitting the beloved to do something so hazardous! What humility before another person! What faith in God that she would not in the very next moment hate the man to whom she owed everything!’ (SKS 4: 193/KW 6: 104). But that faith in God for Kierkegaard, which when he wrote Fear and Trembling was to regain reality in virtue of the absurd, shows in retrospect that he clung to that resignation which he saw was the conditio sine qua non of faith. Kierkegaard’s admission that his own personal and destined condition of faith is infinite resignation is his own business—a resignation which makes his act of faith (the act of faith about which he continually repeats that he shrinks away from) a regaining of reality. However, he has no spiritual right to make it the business of another person whose fate does not make infinite resignation reasonable and who cannot elicit the least joy from it, even the tiniest amount of melancholic joy. In what Kierkegaard understands by faith, we are faced with a condition that is determined by fate; he was not attached to the joys afforded by living together with other human beings, rather he was quite fond of the movement of resignation. However, the condition for faith and Christian faith are different and must be different for [77] people who are too happy in erotic love and friendship—to stick to the relationships Kierkegaard permanently circles around—for them to become fond of the infinite movement of resignation. But how could Kierkegaard get the idea that his own, idiosyncratic, condition of faith applied to everyone? There are two reasons for this. The first is that if a human being does not know what it means to make the movement of infinity, all talk of faith will be like saying abracadabra for them. Without the movement of infinity, no faith. And since God is everything and temporality is nothing in faith’s relation to God, the only movement of infinity that comes into consideration as the condition for faith is infinite resignation. But I want to argue that this is not true. When we ask what we have to give up, Kierkegaard’s answer is: everything. And when we ask again: why everything? The answer is: because everything that exists and which we are fond of is temporal. Therefore, that which initiates the infinite movement is the fact that we live in time. Therefore, resignation should never stop, not even for a single moment, and it does not do so in Johannes de silentio’s description either. But when we have to give up everything, because everything is temporal, then the guilt that gives rise to renunciation is ontological and not ethical. As Heidegger was not the first to claim, but as can already be found in Kierkegaard,ii guilt consists in the fact

54   that we live in time. Kierkegaard’s understanding of guilt is personally conditioned by the fact that infinite resignation was straightforward for him. But this understanding of guilt cannot claim to be the understanding of guilt that applies to human beings who do not find resignation to be straightforward, let alone something in which they can find peace. Is this to say that there is faith without resignation, without renunciation? No, there is not. But what has to be renounced is that which is evil. The person of faith should not give up the temporal because they are fond of it; on the contrary, they should renounce making it into their idol. The guilt that brings about infinite resignation is evil, not temporality. Guilt is ethical, not ontological. [78] It will be objected that it makes no difference because human beings cannot love something without making it into their idol; sin does not leave anything untouched. If we come to love something temporal, we inevitably thereby forget eternity, and therefore the infinite movement of resignation is called for unceasingly, which alone can prevent the individual from making that which they are fond of into their idol. But this is not true, either. Thankfulness can do that too. Thankfulness too is an infinite movement, and one that is different from resignation. It consists in knowing that I am not entitled to what I enjoy, but that I live by that which is given to me. The infinite movement of thankfulness is incompatible with relating idolatrously to that which you love, but it is not incompatible with loving it. Of course, an infinite movement such as thankfulness is out of the question for Johannes de silentio. His fate stands in the way of that, it has made the infinite movement of resignation the only way in which he can live passionately. When it has become a human being’s fate not to cling to life, then it goes without saying that thankfulness will be a struggle. The problems with faith are not the same for the infinitely resigning human being and the happy one. For those who resign infinitely the difficulty is to make the movement of finitude after the movement of infinity. For human beings who are happy with life the difficulty is to abstain from attributing eternal significance to that which is temporal, making it into their idol. The movement that those who resign infinitely do not make is the movement of finitude. The movement that happy human beings do not make is the movement of infinity. The other reason why Kierkegaard could make his own problem with faith into everyone’s is that he did not consider what he met with and what he struggled with as being fate, but as a pre-understanding of what Christianity is. But if you are not to dictate your experiences and their problems to others, you must have a sense of what fate is, and Kierkegaard did not have that.

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Kierkegaard was not interested in political, social, and scientific problems [79]; what he concerned himself with and wrote about were highly personal problems. But that was not all. The fate that gave rise to his intellectual and emotional life was so special, the conditions of his life were so peculiar, that only a very few people would be able with justice to recognize their own fate in his. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard himself thought that his ideas and problems were everybody’s, and it is difficult for the reader to resist a thinking that is so acute, a diagnosis that is so ingenious, a style that is so fascinating, and a sarcasm that is so biting. With the violence and power of a genius he imposes questions and ideas onto human beings which are irrelevant to their fate. In Kierkegaard’s later writings the idea of faith as regaining reality disappears, and infinite resignation is transferred to the domain of faith in the shape of life as a martyr. But didn’t we agree that infinite resignation was the human being’s own achievement? Exactly, therefore faith becomes that too, Christianity becomes law, human beings have to take the initiative to martyrdom for themselves. And since Kierkegaard wouldn’t face up to the fact that his own infinite resignation was determined by his fate, he would not face up to the fact either that martyrdom was fate. Just as he turned infinite resignation into the condition of faith for everybody, he made martyrdom the life of faith for every Christian, through which martyrdom obviously becomes something self-chosen.

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2. Taking over Concrete Existence The problems regarding what Kierkegaard calls taking overiii concrete existence are widely divergent, in certain respects even opposed. Both kinds of problems are described by Kierkegaard, without him having set them against one another. [80] There are, however, very good reasons to do this. There can be circumstances in the concrete existence of an individual that are so unacceptable that they are reluctant to take over their existence, they just will not do it. The individual feels so ill at ease in their concrete existence that they resign and despair rather than take it over. Or the individual is so comfortable in their concrete existence that they are tempted to live in it immediately, so that it never even becomes a matter of taking it over at all. There is no doubt that it is the former problem which is Kierkegaard’s own, not the latter. Johannes de silentio’s description in Fear and Trembling of the individual who resigns infinitely and for whom it is impossible to return to reality is taken up by Anti-Climacus in The Sickness Unto Death. What is added is Christianity, and infinite resignation is transformed into despair. This is described in the note in The Sickness Unto Death (SKS 11: 184 note/KW: 70–1 note): ‘. . . [m]uch of that which in the world is dressed up under the name of resignation is a kind of despair: in despair to will to be your abstract self, in despair to will to make the eternal sacrifice, and thereby to be able to defy or ignore suffering in the earthly and the temporal. The dialectic of resignation is essentially this: to will to be one’s eternal self and then, when it comes to something specific in which the self suffers, not to will to be oneself, taking consolation in the thought that it will hopefully disappear in eternity and therefore feeling justified in not accepting it in temporality. Although suffering under it, the self will still not make the admission that it is part of the self that it is, the self will not in faith humble itself under it.’ In more concrete form this is described as the religious existence of a writer whose resignation is due to a fundamental defect, which makes him a writer of fiction. The fiction writer takes the idea of God into account, he is the fiction writer of religiosity. ‘He would like so very much to be himself before God.’ However, he does not want to give up his fundamental defect; he loves it. He hopes to get rid of the thorn in his fleshiv in eternity, but in temporality [81] he does not want to humiliate himself under it and take it over in faith, although God is ‘his only consolation for him in his secret anguish’.v

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When, in spite of the idea of God, he sticks to his fundamental defect, the reason is that it is thanks to it that he is a fiction writer. By using his suffering as the occasion for writing fictions and by making the suffering endurable through his fiction writing, he humbly avoids taking it over. For if he took over his concrete self with its fundamental defect and suffering, he would attain that which is universal, which would take away the ground under his existence as a fiction writer, and this both in a general and a special sense. In a general sense, because every existence as a fiction writer is sin from a Christian point of view, the sin of relating to that which is good and true through imagination instead of striving existentially to be good and true. And in a special sense, because the fundamental defect and its suffering when taken over in humility would render him a fiction writer no longer. Whether it is against or in agreement with God’s will is something he cannot become clear about. Is it against God’s will? ‘Did he actually allow himself—perhaps unconsciously—to portray God as somewhat different from what God is, a bit more like a fond father who indulges his child’s every wish far too much?’ Or is it in agreement with God’s will: ‘. . . Has he been called? Does his thorn in the flesh signify that he is to be used for the extraordinary? Before God, is it entirely in order to be the extraordinary he has become?’ (SKS 11: 191–2/KW 19: 78). Among the many forms of despair, the kind of despair being described here is a borderline case, and it is the kind of despair that comes closest to the infinite resignation of Fear and Trembling. A different kind of despair is the defiance in which individuals want to determine for themselves which kind of a concrete self they will take over, what they want to include, and what they want to exclude. And in the despair of defiance at its utmost, the desperate person does not want to be helped, because in that case they would have to admit that they were not in the right. But they insist on being in the right, they would rather be in the wrong than accept any help. Kierkegaard’s description of this kind of despair will be addressed in the next chapter. [82] When the individual by no means whatever will take over their concrete existence as it actually is, the description of it comes to consist in a description of different kinds of refusal. The problem becomes the individual’s own attitude to the conditions of their own life, and the question does not arise of how a life would come to work out if the concrete existence were nevertheless to be taken over. The question is not ‘what shall I do?’, but ‘who do I want to be?’. And Kierkegaard is right about this. Their concrete existence can repel human beings so much, they can find themselves disadvantaged to such a

58   degree, that taking it over becomes the decisive action. But this is not the only kind of action, neither is it what we usually call action. Within this complex of problems Kierkegaard concerns himself with taking over the conditions of life, and not with how the life of action that is led on the conditions that are taken over works out. But this much can be said: for those faced with the biggest problems in taking over the conditions of their life, they will not be tempted to live immediately; rather, what is an option for them is how to live in an extraordinary way. For Kierkegaard the bourgeois life was hardly a temptation, any more than the realization of the universal, without which bourgeois life is of course no temptation, as this was precisely the kind of life Kierkegaard shrank away from. But when there is nothing in concrete existence that is repellent to the individual so that they live and live immediately in it with the greatest pleasure, in what then does the taking over of it consist? The problem is briefly touched upon in Fear and Trembling in the discussion of the knight of faith, who, seen from the outside, leads the bourgeois life. Later it is described as dying away from immediacy, especially in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The problem is no longer that the individual shrinks from making the movement of finitude after having made that of infinity, but the problem is now whether the individual does not just make do with the movements of finitude. [83] The infinite abstraction, the permeation of the concrete existence with what is religious, has to happen in an internal, not an external way. The individual should not try to isolate themselves from life with other human beings and withdraw from the world, as was done in the medieval monastic movement, because that would amount to wanting to give the infinite abstraction a finite expression, to give your religious existence a worldly form, which is a contradiction. The abstraction is then no longer infinite, the religious existence no longer religious. No, the individual can and should—perhaps— live as other human beings, so that purely externally no difference can be observed. Indeed, seen from the outside, the individual should perhaps ‘seemingly be capable of everything’, of attaining their ends and achieving much (SKS 7: 421/KW 12.1: 462). In such a life, in which the individual remains in the world and seen from the outside lives like everybody else, the infinite abstraction from everything should be expressed internally. That is to say, in everything they achieve in the world, in all the ends they attain, in all the duties they fulfil, they should be aware—in the infinite religious abstraction, in the inwardness of the relationship to God—that all this is nothing, and that with all this they are not capable of achieving anything. In the Postscript the

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relationship to God is called relating absolutely to the absolute end, which amounts to this: that human beings should express in their existence that they are nothing and incapable of achieving anything. This relationship means an internal breaking away from all concrete ends, abilities, inclinations, and duties, which is tantamount to relating relatively to relative ends. The renunciation is not external but internal, and the internal renunciation consists in the fact that the relative, concrete ends are not everything for human beings, but merely something highly relative. Whereas the relation to the ideal is a striving to become just like it, there is an absolute difference between God and human beings, and the expression of this is worship, in which God is absolutely everything for human beings, and the individual nothing at all. It is renunciation, the ‘first suffering’ of the relationship to God, the greatest exertion. [84] Against Kierkegaard, I shall assert that taking over existence is a problem only when you find your existence repellent, otherwise not. Kierkegaard is mistaken in generalizing this problem and transferring it to the case where the conditions of life do not cause difficulties and where, therefore, the ethical problem is different. However, I have to postpone the justification of my assertion to Section 8, when I have had the opportunity to set out what I understand by the sovereign expressions of life.

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3. The Abstract and Negative Self In order to describe the movement of infinity and the taking over of existence, Kierkegaard operates with an abstract and negative self. When the individual does not want to take over their concrete existence, they divide and double it in their thought, so its concrete form is one thing, and the self that will not know of its concrete form is another thing, which in contradistinction to the concrete form can be called an abstract and negative self. This characterization, however, is to an even greater extent due to the idea that the demand that we die away from immediacy is a demand that we must abstract from that which is external and concrete. It is emphasized in the early as well as the later writings that reflection on that which is infinite and eternal opens up the infinite abyss of abstraction. The individual can take over their concrete existence with its difficulties and advantages only with their abstract and negative self, a self which comes about through the infinite abstraction from everything that is external and concrete. Kierkegaard also calls this self the infinite and eternal self, because the individual separates themselves from immediacy through reflecting on the infinite and eternal (SKS 11: 178/KW 19: 63–4). After having described how love of God renounces everything, rejects everything, and sacrifices everything, and does not let itself be disturbed or diverted by anything, Kierkegaard asks the question in Stages on Life’s Way [85] whether this abstraction and its pride are not an inhumanity. Yes, he answers, they are, if human beings do not know, love, and honour the concrete things with which they break. The absolute demand’s abstraction is an inhumanity, if the individual does not take over their existence in and through this abstraction. The self is infinite and eternal when it is aware of existing before God, which is to say it is aware of the fact that the measure of the transformation of its concrete self is God. Yet the individual does not stop being an infinite and eternal self when they are not aware of existing before God. Human beings live in relation to infinity and eternity even in their breaking away from infinity and eternity, in the loss of it. The infinite and eternal self is the sheer possibility of the concrete self ’s transformation. The loss of infinity and eternity from which human beings cannot release themselves, manifests itself in the fact that they want to be their own infinity. This expresses itself forcefully in the despair of defiance, in which human beings themselves will to construct their own concrete selves and in which the infinity is the—impotent—infinity, which the construction presupposes. In its breaking away from eternity, in which the self has its ground, it wills to be its own ground, caught in the illusion that it can

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create and form its own concrete existence by means of its infinite and abstract self (SKS 11: 192, 181–3/KW 19: 77–8, 67–9). Thus, Kierkegaard uses the abstract and negative self in a twofold sense: it is the self with which human beings consider the eternal power that posited them, and it is the self with which human beings, breaking away from the eternal power, get caught in the illusion that, with their abstract self, they can create and form their concrete self, as though they were the ground of their concrete form. But no matter how different the abstraction of fantasizing is from that of the absolute demand, both are abstractions.

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4. Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Self-Enclosedness [86] Sartre’s drama Le diable et le bon dieu [The Devil and the Good Lord] is the best illustration of important lines of thought of Kierkegaard’s, especially in The Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death is the best commentary on Sartre’s drama Le diable et le bon dieu. Kierkegaard’s elucidations, which at first sight might seem artificial and contrived, get a vivid and lifelike force in Sartre’s characters and their conflicts, while at the same time Kierkegaard’s categories bring out what is at stake in Sartre’s drama. Chapter 4: Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Self-Enclosedness considerations will fall into three sections.vi First, a brief account is offered of some of the content of Sartre’s drama; a full commentary would carry us too far afield, as not only are the philosophical problems discussed complex, but so is the storyline. Next, Sartre’s drama is viewed in the light of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and Kierkegaard’s philosophy is viewed in the light of Sartre’s drama. And finally, there is a confrontation with fundamental features in the understanding of life of those two thinkers.

(a) Sartre’s Le diable et le bon dieu The action in Sartre’s Le diable et le bon dieu takes place at the time of the German Peasant’s Revolt.vii The inhabitants of Worms have murdered the old bishop, locked up the clergy, and are preparing to execute them. Only one single priest is at liberty, Heinrich, who has sided with the poor, the exploited, and the oppressed—with the result that he has unwittingly unleashed their lowest instincts. Goetz, the army commander, who is in the Archbishop’s pay, besieges the town with his army of mercenaries. To save his clerical brothers, Heinrich goes to Goetz’s camp, betrays the poor, and gives Goetz instructions for how to enter the town by a secret route. Goetz has been born out of wedlock, and that has determined his fate. The world [87] wants to have nothing to do with him because he is a bastard; in return he renounces the world, he practices evil, which gives him relief. His evil is boundless, nothing restrains him. Evil is what gives his existence its meaning, it is his raison d’être. Goetz has betrayed Conrad, his brother, who fought against the Archbishop. Conrad has been killed, mutilated, and now the inheritance, the castle and estates of Heidenstamm, fall to Goetz. He is a bastard by birth; however, the fine title of fratricide is to his own credit. But

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although Goetz has himself dispatched his brother, he yet wants to avenge him—on the Archbishop and on Worms. As mentioned previously, Goetz is in the Archbishop’s pay, but the Archbishop cannot control him. Since the Archbishop has come out on top after Conrad’s defeat and death, it would be most sensible, also economically, to spare Worms. He sends Fugger, the banker, to Goetz. Being worldly-wise, Fugger believes that if he can just find what is in a person’s interests, then he will be able to manipulate them. He takes it for granted that it is in Goetz’s interest to inherit his brother’s estates, and since it is the Archbishop who has to recognize Goetz as heir and disregard his birth out of wedlock, Fugger makes it a condition in the name of the Archbishop that Goetz refrains from sacking Worms. But to Fugger’s great astonishment Goetz does not want to comply; he would rather give up his inheritance than be cheated out of burning down Worms. In the first half of the drama Goetz is on the side of the rich and mighty, he is the condottiere of the barons and the Archbishop, against the poor, against the rebels in Worms, against the peasants. He has made his choice, poverty and equality bore him, what pleases him is fame, luxury, and war. He loves the nobility, therefore if they were wiped out—as Nasty,viii the baker and religious leader of the peasants who prepares the sacred war, fervently desires—for him this would be like blowing out the sun and all torches on earth and making existence into one single polar night. However, Goetz has a more significant motive for making his choice, which is that it is evil to oppose the exploited and oppressed, and for Goetz being evil is a religion. His atrocities shall resound in God’s ears. It is all the same to him how things go for human beings. And he doesn’t give a devil about the devil. [88] The devil merely receives souls, he does not condemn them, only God does that, and Goetz makes so bold as to deal only with God. God is the only enemy that is worthy of him, it is God and himself only, everything else and everyone else are phantoms. In the evening, preparing for the capture of Worms and the extermination of its inhabitants, he says that it is God he crucifies through the twenty thousand people, for God’s suffering is infinite—which makes that person infinite who makes God suffer. ‘This city will go up in flames. God knows that. At this moment, He is afraid, I can feel it; I feel His eyes on my hands, His breath on my hair, His angels shed tears. He is saying to Himself: “Perhaps Goetz will not dare . . .” exactly as if He were a man. Weep, weep, angels; I shall dare. In a few moments, I will march in His fear and His anger. The city shall blaze; the soul of the Lord is a hall of mirrors, the fire will be reflected in a thousand mirrors. Then I shall know that I am an unalloyed

64   monster.’ix Goetz’s continued monologue is a violent blasphemy, and it ends with his turning to the bystanders: ‘Do you know my equal? I am the one who makes the Almighty uneasy. Through me, God is disgusted with himself. There are twenty thousand nobles, thirty bishops, fifteen kings, we’ve had three emperors at once, a Pope and an anti-Pope. But can you find another Goetz? Sometimes, I imagine Hell as an empty desert waiting for me alone.’ Heinrich scoffs at Goetz’s conceit, at his pretending to be the only one who is evil. ‘But Hell is overflowing, you fool.’x And addressing the others he says about Goetz: Look at this man, the strangest of all visionaries that you can imagine, he thinks he is the only one who does evil. Every night Germany is illuminated by living torches and burning towns—but he considers himself to be the devil in person, only because he does his duty as a soldier. Goetz defends himself by claiming that the evil of others is not like his: they are evil out of pleasure and interest, by contrast he is evil for the sake of evil itself. But Heinrich [89] brushes his distinction aside: when no one can do anything but evil, the motive is without interest. God has willed that the good is impossible on earth. Love is impossible, justice is impossible. Goetz accepts the challenge; he wants to be able to do the good. He wants to change from a criminal into a saint. He plays dice with Catherine, his mistress, about whether he is to be evil or good. If he wins, evil will triumph; if he loses, he will bring about the good. He loses, but Catherine has seen that he cheated in order to lose. The soldiers are called back, the siege is raised, and Worms is spared, if only the priests are allowed to leave the town unharmed. But Heinrich feels deceived, the others get their freedom, their lives, and hope, but he does not get back his purity, he is stuck with his treason. Heinrich wants to follow Goetz, step by step, night and day, and judge his action, to meet him again after a year and a day. I shall address the drama’s second half in the next section; it raises yet another problem.

(b) Drama of Ideas and Drama of Characters Goetz wants to take everything himself, he wants to conquer everything. His passion is not wanting to receive anything, but wresting from the other person what he or she will not allow him to have. He does not even want to receive the favour of his mistress, he wants to possess her only under her resistance and disgust. He cannot put up with Catherine’s falling in love with him. Sartre is

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right to characterize being evil as not being able to receive anything. It is often thought that evil is hoarding things, never getting enough. The contrast between evil and good is supposed to be the contrast between taking and giving. But evil is at least as much a matter of not wanting to be grateful to anybody for anything. You want to owe everything, lock, stock, and barrel, to yourself. Evil reveals itself more clearly in not being willing to receive anything, rather than in not being willing to give anything away. This is because as long as evil consists in not being willing to give anything away, you can be caught in the [90] illusion that it is the relationship to all kinds of goods, material as well as spiritual ones, that matters, that it is these an evil person wants to accumulate and not give up. But this is hardly as crucial as not being willing to be given anything; for an evil person this is the deepest affront, they cannot bear owing anything to anyone. Why not? Because it breaks the self-enclosedness that is all-important to them. Throughout Kierkegaard’s work a distinction is drawn between human beings who make the movement of infinity and all those who live lost in worldly grief and joy, satisfied with life, in desire’s and pleasure’s immediate connection with the surrounding world. Of all the distinctions drawn by Kierkegaard, this is the most important one. Sartre’s Goetz exists in a movement of infinity. The historical person Goetz of Germany, at the time of the Peasant’s Wars, is also the protagonist of Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen,xi but Goethe’s Götz and Sartre’s Goetz are nothing like one another, any more than are the plot, the conflicts, and the other characters of the two dramas. However, the greatest difference of all consists in the fact that, whereas the intrigue and conflicts in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen are determined by the characters of the dramatis personae—Götz’s gullibility and dependability, Weislingen’s vanity, treachery, and womanizing, Adelheid von Walldorff ’s erotic attraction and cold calculation—in Sartre’s drama they are determined by the frenzied relationship of the persons to their ideas. In Goethe’s play there is a traitor too, but that is Adelbert von Weislingen, Götz von Berlichingen’s opponent, and his reason for betrayal is a weakness for princely flattery and the favour of women. In a conversation between Weislingen and Adelheid von Walldorff, who utilizes his love and entices him to the betrayal of Götz von Berlichingen, Weislingen accuses her of fickleness. She replies: ‘You men should be the last to accuse us women of that, you who seldom are what you want to be, and never [91] what you ought to be.’ This is an exact characterization of a human being who has never made a movement of infinity. Weislingen in Goethe’s drama is a traitor out of

66   weakness of character, he yields to every temptation. Goetz in Sartre’s drama is a traitor due to a movement of infinity. Fugger, the banker in Sartre’s drama, makes a mistake in only reckoning on people’s interests in earthly and temporal goods. Goetz’s interest is beyond him, he cannot understand his actions, and therefore he starts preaching: Goetz breaks the trust of the Archbishop, he betrays him. But Goetz sees through him: when realists cannot have their way, they try instead with the language of idealists, but that is humbug, because they do not relate to ideas. Sartre’s Goetz thinks that he is excluded by his fate, which is to be a bastard. This pushes him away from the ethical, from existing in society, into the movement of infinity, in a demonic way in the first half of the drama. Rejected by the universal, to use Kierkegaard’s expression, he lives enclosed in himself in an evil that is infinite. It does not serve temporal and earthly interests when it comes down to it. To be sure, he is interested in worldly goods, he is very eager to get hold of his family’s castle and lands, and when the inheritance has come within sight through his fratricide, he is on the verge of rather fancying a peaceful existence. But when it appears that he must moderate his evil, spare Worms, if as a bastard he is to be allotted his brother’s possessions by the Archbishop, he renounces them on the spot. He does not want to obtain one single good, however coveted it may be, on the condition that he has to restrict his evil. He does not put up with making it finite in order just to satisfy a few civic or noble desires. The opposite of Sartre’s Goetz in this respect is the human being who is evil in order to obtain goods of one kind or another [92], a finite and shabby bourgeois and non-demonic evil, the normal kind. And this is the real reason why the essence of evil comes to light more clearly in not being willing to receive than in not being willing to give anything away. The evil of human beings who will not give anything away is finite, they are just evil in order to hoard things. Evil is the only way in which they can come into possession of what is desirable in a purely earthly and temporal sense. In Goethe’s drama all movements of evil in Weislingen’s mind and entire existence are as finite as anything can be. Weislingen does not like being evil, he is very reluctant to betray Götz von Berlichingen, it is extremely embarrassing to him, but he falls for Adelheid von Waldorff, and he cannot resist the Bishop of Bamberg’s need for him. On the other hand, the evil of a human being who will not receive anything is infinite, it is self-enclosedness. It is logical, therefore, that Goetz’s evil in Sartre’s drama does not express itself at any point in his not being willing to give something away, as though he were interested in keeping everything, but that Goetz’s evil consists in his not being willing to receive anything.

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The movement of infinity in Goetz’s evil manifests itself most clearly when he says to Heinrich that he is evil for the very sake of evil, while all other people are evil out of desire and out of interest. Because the movement of infinity that Goetz makes in his evil is religious, human beings are left out, too, they become ghosts, as he puts it himself, there is only him and God, whom he will make suffer.

(c) Kierkegaard Illustrated through Sartre, Sartre Interpreted through Kierkegaard Sartre’s Goetz has become evil through being born out of wedlock, this is his ‘fundamental defect’,xii to speak with Kierkegaard. Goetz cannot abstract away from it, he is bound to acknowledge it, but does not put up with acknowledging it, and therefore he lets it be the occasion for ‘feeling outraged at the entirety of existence’. In defiance of the entirety of existence [93] Goetz wants to be at one with his status as a bastard, ‘defiant through his suffering’.xiii It seems to me that Kierkegaard in an inimitable way describes the origin of a demonic despair similar to the one Sartre’s Goetz suffers from: ‘A self that in despair desperately wills to be itself moans in some distress or other, which does not allow itself to be taken away or separated from their concrete self. So now they make precisely this torment the object of all their passion, and finally it becomes a demonic rage. By now, even if God in heaven and all the angels offered to help them out of it—no, they do not want that, now it is too late. Once they would gladly have given everything to be rid of this torment, but they were kept waiting; now it is too late, now they would rather rage against everything and be the wronged victim of the whole world and of all existence, and it is of particular significance to them to make sure that they have their torment on hand and that no one takes it away from them—for then they would obviously not be able to prove and convince themselves that they are right. This eventually becomes such a fixation that for quite their own reason they are afraid of eternity, which is that it will separate them from their entitlement—understood demonically—to be those who they are’ (The Sickness Unto Death, SKS 11: 185–6/KW 19: 72). With the prospect of inheriting Conrad’s properties, Goetz gets the possibility of eliminating his fundamental defect, namely being a bastard. And, of course, this lures him, this tempts him, for at no moment has he forgotten that it is due to his fundamental defect that devising evil has become his form of life. But when the chance of getting rid of his fundamental defect is available, he does not take it, he has got too much of a taste for existence as the

68   inventiveness of evil that he has taken on as a revenge for being a bastard. It is a form of existence he has grown into, indeed become one with, it has become him, and he has become it. Giving it up is giving up himself. And he does not want that. Everything has turned around; now the temptation is to get rid of the fundamental defect and become the heir of the Heidenstamm house, for who will he be in that case? [94] Kierkegaard’s analyses illuminate Sartre’s drama on one further point. Kierkegaard does not assume that human beings can either establish a relationship to eternity or refrain from doing so and live without eternity, but Kierkegaard assumes that human beings simply consist in a relationship to eternity; and if human beings do not want to know of eternity, human beings do not escape eternity for that reason, but eternity marks, indeed determines, the whole existence of human beings, even when human beings do not know it or do not want to know of it. One way in which the relationship to eternity expresses itself without human beings themselves knowing it, is by human beings themselves taking the place of eternity and making themselves the ground of their own existence; and this expresses itself in that they want to determine for themselves how their existence shall be, so that they view everything they carry out, say, and do in an experimental way. But when one relates in an experimental way to oneself, nothing stands firm, the individual is not bound to anything. No matter how much perseverance they display, this is still within a hypothesis; at any time it can be broken off, turn into something wholly different, for that matter, into the opposite. This is not overcome even if an individual displays the most fabulous steadfastness and self-control, for the individual can at any moment break off their perseverance and make a fresh start with something wholly different. ‘. . . In the very moment when it seems that the self is closest to having the building completed, it can arbitrarily dissolve the whole thing into nothing.’ ‘The negative form of the self exercises a dissolving power as well as a binding power; at any time it can quite arbitrarily start all over again, and no matter how long one idea is pursued, the entire action is within a hypothesis. The self is so far from successfully becoming more and more itself that the fact merely becomes increasingly obvious that it is a hypothetical self. The self is its own master, and precisely this is the despair, but also what it regards as its delight, its pleasure’ (SKS 11: 182–3/KW 19: 67–70). Sartre’s Le diable et le bon dieu illustrates this too in an [95] excellent way, and does so by the most decisive turn that happens in the play, namely by Goetz’s conversion. Goetz has displayed a fabulous perseverance and

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consistency in his evil, over thirty-five years. But just as his steadfastness has been fabulous, so it has been arbitrary to the same degree; he can break off in a jiffy and start on something wholly different, indeed the opposite, so that from being a criminal he can become a saint. Now the good is the hypothesis on which he acts, now the saint is his hypothetical self, to use Kierkegaard’s expression.

(d) The Sovereign Expressions of Life Kierkegaard and Sartre ignore a large area of human existence. I can best explain what that area is by distinguishing between two kinds of phenomena, which, for the sake of brevity, I shall call ‘the obsessive’ and ‘the sovereign’. I shall mention three examples of the obsessive or circlingxiv phenomena: feeling insulted, jealousy, and envy. In feeling insulted one makes oneself the victim of an affront, although one knows in one’s heart of hearts that one has no reason to feel wronged. Even if the affront is not pure invention, its occasion is at any rate some trifle of which one makes too much. There is no proportionality between the occasion and the reaction: this is the ludicrousness and pettiness characteristic of feeling insulted. Often the feeling insulted allows one to indulge oneself in some imaginary or trivial affront, which serves as an escape from facing up to one’s own fault, even though it is not so grave that, when it comes to it, one could not easily acknowledge it. But perhaps one feels so entitled that one cannot bear the thought of having done something wrong, and then feeling insulted is required for deflecting attention from one’s own error, and this is achieved by turning oneself into the wronged party. A human being is seized by jealousy when another has taken their place or threatens to do so in relation to a third person, a place which they believe to be rightfully theirs. One is ousted from the relationship with the person one loves, be it a lover or a friend. The jealous person assumes [96] that they are entitled to be the preferred choice, because the relationship is deemed exclusive. They think they are cheated out of what they can rightfully claim. Their bitterness is not directed so much at their rival—who is instead the object of envy—but more towards the one whose favour they covet and who commits an injustice by letting the rival benefit from it. However, it is not the case that the richer the relationship from which the jealous person is ousted, the greater is their jealousy. What is peculiar is that these two things need not have anything to do with one another; on the

70   contrary, the most glaring disparity can obtain. A relationship that is not worthy of jealousy may nevertheless foster an excessive amount of it, so that all other and far more valuable relationships are held of no account, indeed, are forfeited for the sake of this one paltry relationship. It is by no means just the possibilities for the realization of life that are fought for; jealousy is quite often a mania engendered by weakness. Jealousy is a relationship that involves three parties, in contradistinction to envy, where only two parties are involved. In envy one begrudges the other person their abilities, qualities, position, assets, fate, or whatever it may be. But envy does not just arise from the other’s having what one lacks oneself; indeed, for that matter this could just as easily elicit admiration. What is also required is that what one lacks is of a kind whereby one is not capable of coming to terms with lacking it, and where one sees it as an injustice that the other person possesses what they possess. Properly considered, they are not worthy of it. The envied person’s advantages are undeserved, and the envious person feels unjustly treated. Jealousy and envy have this in common, namely that they arise from powerlessness. After all, the jealous person can do nothing to become the favoured one and win the favour that they covet. Nor can the envious person change the distribution of advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, both the jealous and the envious person are thrown back upon themselves by their own powerlessness, immersing themselves in their exclusion. They burrow down into their [97] bitterness and find a certain pleasure in doing so. Jealousy and envy are circling thoughts and emotions in which people imprison themselves. In general, it holds good for all movements of thought and emotion that pursue their obsessive course—such as hatred, for instance, and vengefulness too—that they feed on themselves, engendering for themselves most of the wrongs that keep them going. Everything is interpreted in the worst sense with excessive suspicion. Because one enjoys oneself as a wronged person, one has to invent wrongs to feed one’s self-enjoyment. It is hardly correct to call that with which human beings enclose themselves emotions; they are rather fixated thoughts, whose paltry emotionality consists in the self forcing them to circle around itself. Kept on the ego’s leash, under its whip, these thoughts go round and round in the ego’s own ring. The contraries of the obsessive movements of self-enclosedness are the sovereign expressions of life: trust and compassion, for example. Unlike pity, which cannot be called sovereign, if only for the reason that many times nothing can be done because the sufferer’s situation cannot be changed, compassion is sovereign as the will to change the position of the person in

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need. Whereas pity is sympathy, perhaps resigned sympathy, and concerns those whose conditions of life have been unfavourable, compassion is driven by the thought that the other has received life in order to fulfil it and is now prevented from doing so. The sovereign expression of life draws its content from the situation and the relation to the other human being, which is to say from my understanding of the situation and the relation, of their present circumstances and history. The expression of life is not something that can be applied. Principles, precepts, and maxims can be applied. The sovereign expression of life cannot be applied, but can only be fulfilled in my realization of myself through it. This is due to its being sovereign. It does not rigidify the situation, but sets it in motion, transforms it, which is why people constantly have to involve themselves in it. [98] All of this is in contrast to the obsessive and circling movements of thought and emotion. When a human being is under their sway, action is called forth by what happens or does not happen. The action is reactive, not sovereign. The human being is merely a function of the situation, whereas in the sovereign expression of life the situation is a function of the human being; we reshape the situation in trust, in compassion, in openness of speech. But is Sartre’s Goetz not as sovereign as anyone? No, only in an external, arbitrary, and ruthless sense, and the arbitrariness and ruthlessness betray that the sovereignty is a sham, it is a side effect of the compulsive course his thoughts and emotions have taken in revenge for his fundamental defect. And to add one more thing about the difference between the sovereign expressions of life and the obsessive movements of thought and emotion: when there is a battle between them, for example between sincerity and betrayal, it is not certain that the sovereign expression of life will prevail. Far from it. But the sovereignty has so much weight that there is fear involved in the opponent’s countermeasures. To hold their own, they must resort to means that can help them overcome their own fear of sincerity. However high their social standing may be, they cannot escape the fear. No matter who triumphs or who suffers defeat, in one respect it is an unequal game. The one party lets it depend on the very expression of life, and can do so, because it is sovereign. The other party must resort to manoeuvres, tricks, and threats, because ultimately their battle consists in defending themselves, even when they triumph.xv Kierkegaard completely disregarded the sovereign expressions of life. And that is no accident. He is compelled to ignore them in order to be able to uphold the role of self-reflection. The reason is that the sovereign character of the expressions of life means that in their realization human

72   beings are—without further ado—themselves. They do not need to reflect on their becoming an independent person, they do not need to reflect on the task of becoming themselves; they only have to realize themselves in the sovereign expression of life, and then [99] the expression of life—rather than the reflection—takes care of the selfhood of human beings. Kierkegaard is mistaken in thinking that it is only through religious reflection that human beings can accomplish the task of becoming a self, as though we were not equipped with the sovereign expressions of life, which accomplish that task for us. As we have seen, Kierkegaard operates with both a concrete and an abstract self. However, Kierkegaard understands the concrete existence of human beings as something individual only: abilities, aptitudes, circumstances of life—in short, human beings in respect of the accidental properties which differentiate them. He leaves out the sovereign expressions of life. And because human beings can win their authentic self in relation to eternity only, he deems the authentic self to be abstract—as though human beings do not become themselves, and concretely so, by realizing themselves in the sovereign expressions of life and identifying themselves with them. What, then, has become of the sovereign expressions of life? As they are absent in Kierkegaard, something must be put in their stead! Their place must be occupied by something else! And so it is, namely by bourgeois life. The sovereign expressions of life are swallowed up by conformity, drowned in the existence in which one person imitates another. The dichotomy with which Kierkegaard operates everywhere is either to live in relation to the infinite idea, or to live in conformism. The claims made on us are either those of eternity or those of conformity. This dichotomy recurs in Heidegger, where eternity has just been replaced by death.xvi But this dichotomy is false. The sovereign expression of life has a claim on us too, and can have it, because it is definitive; it is not we who initially form it using indeterminate mental powers. The expression of life, whether it is speech, action, or conduct, or all of these at once, can change in a trice, quick as lightning; it is eminently mobile and mutable, but it is also definitive at every moment. It is no less definitive for being spontaneous; spontaneity does not exist in human existence as indeterminately surging life. In the most basic manner conceivable, claims are imposed on human beings; the claims are already included [100] in the definitiveness of the expressions of life. The claim has entered into the spontaneous expression of life and has given it character, making it the definitive thing it actually is. And the claim is strong, because it is so elemental. Let me illustrate this. Let us imagine that we stand facing a destroyer who is trying to win us for their cause, but we know that they will stop at nothing and

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are not to be trusted. Face to face with this person we discover to what extent we have to make an effort to be reticent. All the time the thought arises that we might be able to dissuade them from their destructive enterprise by speaking openly; we cannot get rid of this thought once and for all, rather we must unceasingly tell ourselves that talking things through is an illusion, we must unceasingly bear in mind that anything we say will be exploited in order to get rid of a weak third party. But why is this thought so persistent, why do we need to make such an effort to restrain ourselves, and why is this experienced as nothing less than contrary to nature? It is because we oppose the claim to openness that is inherent in speech itself. To speak is to speak openly. It is a claim from speech, it comes from speech itself, is identical with its definitive character as a spontaneous expression of life, and a claim imposed by speech at the very instant I have recourse to it and realize myself in it. For all their spontaneity, the expressions of life are always and beforehand something definitive; therefore, to fulfil oneself in them is to submit to the requirement to fulfil them in their own definitive way. The expression of life is indeed mine, but not in the sense that it is me who gives it its definitive character. My speech is indeed mine, and it is indeed up to me whether I will be open in my speech, but it is not I who have brought it about that the definitive feature of speech is its openness. When I deceive another person or when I am reticent, I resist the definitiveness that is integral to speech prior to and independently of me. In order to clarify further the alternative to Kierkegaard’s view, let me elaborate on the relationship between Götz von [101] Berlichingen and Weislingen, as it is presented to us at the beginning of Goethe’s drama. Weislingen seeks information and advice from Götz von Berlichingen, and he knows that Götz can render him both, and he trusts that he will help him to the best of his ability. And now what happens next is that Götz von Berlichingen does not deceive Weislingen. The reason for this is not because Götz von Berlichingen fails to understand that Weislingen, whenever it is opportune to do so, will abuse whatever support Götz gives him through his own words and works. Götz von Berlichingen may also have a vivid recollection of the many occasions on which Weislingen deceived him—and yet he does not take advantage of Weislingen’s trouble to take sweet revenge and give Weislingen a taste of his own medicine. Why does Götz von Berlichingen not do this? We say that it is against his nature, he cannot bring himself to behave that way, he is not sufficiently without substance to do so. But how does a human being acquire substance? They do so through identifying with that which is definitive in the expressions of life, through which they fulfil their life. Through identification

74   with the definitiveness of a complex of expressions of life a person has become a concrete self. Götz von Berlichingen perhaps toys with the idea of exploiting the precarious position Weislingen has got himself into to lead him astray, cause him harm, and by so doing pay him back in kind—but it does not get beyond merely toying with that idea. What, then, have Kierkegaard and the existentialist to say about a character such as Goethe’s Götz and his decisions? One of two things! Either: In the circles in which Götz von Berlichingen has grown up, it has been good form to be honest and forthright. He follows convention, conducts himself as others do. He has lost his identity to the others, he is not a self, he is not spirit. Or: In Weislingen’s request for information and advice Götz von Berlichingen finds himself under a demand, that is to say under a demand from eternity, which is in turn to say removed from the crowd, away from convention [102], set apart as an individual and rendered a self. Eternity makes demands of Götz von Berlichingen in order to constitute him as an eternal self in obedience to the eternal demand. Eternity confronts Götz von Berlichingen with the choice between obedience and disobedience and constitutes him as the abstract and empty self of this choice. Now, it is important for understanding Kierkegaard and the existentialist that for them there is no concrete commandment telling you: irrespective of what experiences you have of the other human being as a traitor, you have to show them trust and give them the help you think they need (not necessarily the trust and help they desire). There is only a convention with that wording, the honouring of which does not render a human being a self. But for the existentialist theologian and philosopher, what does then exist? Nothing but a demand without content, telling you that you have to live your life as a life under a demand—and from which it is then evident what you have to do in the present concrete situation. If Götz von Berlichingen yields to his thirst for revenge, he does not live under a demand; ergo he must not yield to his thirst for revenge—as if he did not already know from his thirst for revenge that it is evil. If Götz von Berlichingen shows Weislingen trust and helps him, he lives his life as under a demand; ergo he has to show trust and help—as if he did not already know from trust and help that he has been given these possibilities in order to realize them. But if Götz von Berlichingen, as portrayed by Goethe, has become so concrete and substantial by identifying himself with the definitiveness of the expressions of life of trust and speech that he does not dissemble and does not take revenge, what then? Well, then he is not sufficiently abstract and devoid of substance to leave room for choice and decision, and what explanation, then,

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do Kierkegaard and the existentialists have left to give for his conduct? They can only say that he conducts himself in a conformist way, that he conducts himself just as the others do. But it is not that simple. There is a difference between whether Götz von Berlichingen is open and shows trust because that is what his life has been given him for, [103] or whether he does so because custom requires it. If he behaves out of conformity, he will hardly avoid behaving stupidly, because in what is merely customary he shall find no motive to take the special circumstances of his relationship to Weislingen into account. If he is merely anxious to satisfy the customary standards of chivalry, to follow its code, he will walk blindly straight into Weislingen’s trap. Good form prompts him merely to follow his nose. His conformity will turn his trust into gullibility, his openness into garrulousness. He will proceed differently, however, if he is set on helping Weislingen and showing him trust. Neither to himself nor to Weislingen will he trivialize, much less conceal, that he is dealing with a traitor. He will uncover Weislingen’s traps, make his life difficult and take all the precautions he can. He will give battle, behave prudently and flexibly, narrowing the scope for Weislingen’s treachery as much as possible. He will let Weislingen know that he is aware of what to expect from him. But in all of this he will give him a chance—the chance that he will not refuse to have anything to do with him. In so doing Götz von Berlichingen wants to fulfil trust and openness—on his own terms, not on Weislingen’s treacherous terms. The chance that he will give Weislingen is of being won over to Götz’s own side against his own treacherous self. No matter how much Götz von Berlichingen is convinced that Weislingen will abuse this chance too—he shall have the chance nonetheless. But he cherishes no illusions; at the same time he does everything in his power to render Weislingen’s schemes harmless. If, by contrast, Götz von Berlichingen were conformist, obviously credulous and garrulous, he would invite Weislingen to dupe him, thereby further entrenching him in his ways. Only by ruthlessly letting Weislingen know what he thinks of him—without breaking the relationship with him—does he give him a chance. Conformity rigidifies the expressions of life, they become [104] templates, poses, and gestures. If, on the other hand, they are fulfilled, because that is what everyone has been given their life for, it is up to the individual to let the definitive expression of life force its way through even in the most complicated and unfavourable situation. I mentioned earlier that for Kierkegaard what stands firm does so eternally; if God does not bind, the individual is unbound, left to their own

76   experimentation with themselves. But I would contend that the latter phenomenon simply does not exist. This is because, in order to be able to experiment with oneself, the sovereign expressions of life would have to be indifferent. But they are not; they are definitive. Or else, in spite of their being definitive, the sovereign expressions of life would have to be neutralizable. But that is not possible either, because, in virtue of their definitive character, they make claims on us. It can be said of an actor that, in playing their part, they experiment with another persona. But this renders the sovereign expressions of life neither indifferent nor neutral. On the contrary, the actor shows precisely how definitive and demanding the sovereign expressions of life are in the life of the person they play, whether that person realizes themselves through them or lets them down and abuses them. If, on the other hand, human beings seek to be actors in their own lives, they fancy that they can handle and control the expressions of life, as though they were neither definitive nor demanding. But they are mistaken: the sovereign expressions of life are strongest, rendering the human beings who want to experiment with themselves either poseurs or liars. The human being portrayed by Kierkegaard says: When I speak and act, I experiment with my speech and action, I am not in my words or my action, I am always outside them. But that is impossible; one of two things will happen. Either, in their speech and action, they are themselves as the poseurs they are. Unnaturalness has become their second nature. And they are caught in a delusion when they think that because they put on an act they are outside their words and gestures, as though their affectation were merely play-acting, while they [105] themselves are able to remain intact, that is to say without affectation, outside those words and gestures. They are immersed in their affectation, not merely body and soul, but with their self. Or else the person truly is outside their words or actions like the liar, hypocrite, and deceiver, who pretend that their words or actions are true, sincere, and honest. The experimental way of relating oneself to oneself is either a theory that the poseurs use to flatter themselves—to show that there is more to them than affectation—or else it is a theory that can be used to trivialize and render innocuous lying, hypocrisy, and deception. Knowing full well that what they pass off as true, sincere, and honest is mendacious, hypocritical, and deceitful, they fancy that in knowing this they are not liars, hypocrites, and deceivers. Ignoring the sovereign and definitive expressions of life entails two things: the talk of choice, decision, and freedom becomes abstract, and the only alternative left is between existing as an individual in relation to the infinite idea or living in conformity, and then what results is existentialism’s contentless talk of the contentless self.

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Kierkegaard’s crucial error, which the existentialists, philosophical as well as theological, have adopted, is that he and they with him think that solely the individual’s choice, decision, and freedom make life definitive, as though our existence were not already and in advance something definitive in each of its (so to speak) anonymous expressions of life. In fact, all that is left to the individual’s choice, decision, and freedom is either to complete the definitiveness that is already and in advance integral to the sovereign expression of life through which the individual fulfils themselves—or to fail its definitiveness. Let me in conclusion illustrate the problem using another of Sartre’s dramas, with the relationship of Johanna and Werner in Les séquestrés d’Altona [The Condemned of Altona].xvii Werner is a lawyer in Hamburg who is happily married to Johanna, when his father, who has been told by his doctors that his death is imminent, demands of Werner that he takes over his post as head of Germany’s largest shipyard and fleet [106], which is a considerable concentration of financial power. This is because the eldest brother Franz, for whom this post was intended, for reasons I shall not enter into (which, incidentally, are the play’s principal theme) has disqualified himself. Johanna, who knows that it will be a disaster for Werner and herself if he yields to his father’s demands, fights against them, but in vain. As soon as Werner is within the environment of his family, everything he says and does is a reflection of the jealousy engendered since his childhood by his father’s slighting of him in favour of Franz. In one of the scenes Werner apparently starts defying his father, but Johanna intervenes and interrupts Werner’s speech: ‘You’re listening to yourself speak. Once you get mired in self-pity we are lost . . . Simply say no, without yelling and without laughing.’ Johanna senses that neither sentiment nor self-pity is sufficient to render a decision substantial. But what, then, is required? My answer is that what is required is that a person identifies with a sovereign and definitive expression of life. In Werner’s case, it is obvious what this consists in: it is his love for Johanna. If Werner were capable of identifying with it, he would be able to give substance to a decision that went against his father. But more powerful than Werner’s love of Johanna and her love of him is his jealousy, and therefore he succumbs. What does Kierkegaard have to say about this? He thinks that only eternity can give substance to a decision. Only eternity can break up self-enclosedness. The possibility of cure consists in being helped through the absurdity that for God everything is possible. But the difficulty in accepting this help, Kierkegaard adds, is as great as can be imagined, because its substance is precisely that the person in need cannot themselves determine how they want to be helped; they must leave this to God, and unconditionally so. To be helped they must give themselves up, become nothing in the hand of the helper.

78   And that is the last thing they want. There is nothing the self shrinks from more; rather than seek help, it would prefer to be itself and suffer all the torments of hell. [107] But this is to say that Kierkegaard has made the difficulty of accepting religious help so extreme that the person in distress feels an impulse to cling to their distress. The religious possibility for healing has been made so impossible that it can only become an incentive to become even more enclosed. And this is the result of making the relation to God abstract, through abstracting from all the opportunities for healing offered by actual life with its possibilities for spontaneous flourishing in a person’s relation to their work, to other human beings, and to the world around them. These lie beyond Kierkegaard’s purview, because the actual, temporal, and earthly life has nothing to do with eternity. It exists only to be sacrificed, not to be lived.

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5. The Absolute Good I return to Le diable et le bon dieu in order to proceed with its second half. If the earlier disasters struck the powerless and poor when Goetz waged war on them, now that he has started to love them, they pour down on them with a vengeance. There is no suffering his love does not inflict on them. His estates and his castle, all that he owns, he gives away to the poor. Goetz wants to build a City of the Sun on his estates, where, thanks to him, before the year is out, happiness, love, and virtue will reign. Nasty [the leader of the poor] warns Goetz: the German soil will bleed, if he gives away his properties. His foolish magnanimity will merely cause slaughter. Goetz does not understand that: it cannot be true that good begets evil. But it does. What Jesus exhorted the rich young man to do, but which he did not do, is apparently what Goetz does—and this begets disaster upon disaster. Everywhere the peasants rise against the barons, tumultuously and without preparation, and they are crushed. The barons invade Goetz’s former estates and murder the peasants. [108] A year and a day after Goetz decided to experiment with saintliness instead of criminality, Heinrich appears, followed by an invisible devil, to settle accounts. It is too easy, for before they have even begun, Goetz is already halfway to siding with Heinrich. This throws Heinrich somewhat off balance, as he had imagined the settling of accounts differently: Goetz crowned with roses, which he would have torn off him, a glint of triumph in his eye, which he would have extinguished. He would have forced Goetz to his knees; that was the task for which Heinrich had prepared himself. But the pride, the audacity has gone—Goetz is half dead, so the pleasure of having him exposed and destroyed doesn’t amount to much. Goetz knows only too well that his good deeds were transformed into corpses the very moment the peasants came in contact with them. In one single day, because of his virtue, he became responsible for twenty-five thousand corpses, more than during his thirtyfive years of evil. Neither is he prepared to defend his attitude of mind, his intentions. He gives up. When he was evil, the good seemed close at hand; but now that he had reached out for it, it had slipped through his fingers. The good is a mirage, the good is impossible. Goetz’s conduct is not warped because a deed envisaged to be good produced bad consequences, for that is an unavoidable risk that cannot be eliminated. Goetz’s conduct is warped, however, because he does not want to take those conditions into account and let them count in his considerations,

80   so as to find acts that involve the least risk of bad consequences, even though the risk cannot be eliminated. In order to do this, he should have started out by considering the fate of the peasants. But he does not do that—out of sheer religion. He does not renounce his possessions for the sake of the peasants, but because he wants to do, not just good, but absolute good. It is not the poverty of the peasants and the fact that they are cowed that moves him and that leads him to renounce his estates. It is not the peasants’ lot and his own wish to improve it that prompt him to act, [109] nor do his donations serve as a means to change the peasants’ conditions. It is the other way round. Having opted for the absolute good he asks himself (as it were) what an action in which the absolute good is manifest would look like. He is not guided by a consideration of the well-being of the people to whom he is already bound, he does not consider their situation, and this in spite of the fact that they are the ones who are the targets of his actions. Not bound to human beings, he lets a religious consideration alone determine the form of his action, not a political one. Goetz’s choice of the good, as well as the action through which he wants to realize the good, are choices detached from the situation and the world. The only question is which action bears the hallmark of the absolute good. The answer is the action that consists in renouncing one’s possessions. Ergo this is what he does, and then the peasants have to accept them by the irresistible force of the good. Goetz does not give his estates away for the peasants’ sake, but because it is an action the goodness of which is absolute. The action is a matter between Goetz and the absolute, not between Goetz and the peasants. During the settling of accounts at the end, Goetz and Heinrich infuriate each other, one accusation leads to another, one self-accusation outbids the other. Goetz accuses himself of having been generous merely to lift up his inheritance and smash it to the ground and have it scattered into bits. The poor are the victims; he pretended to bestow his possessions on them, while in reality he despised them. He exploited the gratitude of the poor in order to subjugate them. Earlier he violated souls with torture, now he violated them with the good. This is an exaggeration, and yet not an exaggeration, because Goetz has forced his good works upon the poor. They did not spring from being alive to their distress, but from his obsession with the absolute good— regardless of what actually happened to those who suffered his benefaction. In the same conversation he also says that he merely mimicked virtue. There is something in that too. When a human being chooses to perform an action, not because [110] they are urged to do it by an understanding for the other’s need but because the action bears the hallmark of absoluteness, such as does Goetz’s renunciation of his estates, the action is merely a mimicry of the good.

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Concerning the sacrifice which Goetz has converted to in the second half of the drama, he could have said the same as he said before about his wickedness: there is only God and himself, everything else and everyone else are phantoms. To perform monstrous evil he has no need of others, except just to be victims; to perform monstrous good, to sacrifice himself, he again has no need for others, except to offer him resistance and be a temptation for him. Goetz does not realize that it is the lot of human beings to do good works only if their attitude of mind is hidden beneath political considerations concerning what is best for the neighbour—the term ‘political’ being used here in the broadest sense. The attitude is a matter between the individual and God, hidden from everybody else, something Kierkegaard knew, but came to forget. If a human being wants to do what is absolutely and manifestly good, then the good becomes a mirror image of evil. This is what Sartre wants to say through the design of his play. And in this respect he is right. Just as the madness of Goetz’s wickedness lay in the fact that through it, God was supposed to be horrified with himself, so now the madness of Goetz’s goodness is that in it God is to be immediately present. It comes so easily to theologians to speak of the infinity, unconditionality, and radicalness of the demand and the good. But it is not that simple. There is an absolute goodness that is not vouchsafed by human beings—if they grab after it, its consequences will be indistinguishable from those of evil. Goetz takes his wickedness to extremes, makes it monstrous, in order that it can achieve infinity from God’s infinity. If he is to feel that he exists at all, Goetz must have infinity in his life; without that he is reduced to nothing. But it is the same with goodness. That too is required only to save him from being reduced to nothing. Devoid of everything, he needs infinity to [111] fill out his existence, nothing less will do; and this can be achieved only through a deed, making an effort which bears the hallmark of infinity, and only sacrifice does that. If a human being is to have the imprint of eternity stamped upon their life, because without eternity their life is a mere void, they must find an action through which they can feel in themselves that they represent eternity. It is not only through Goetz but also through Hilda, Goetz’s sweetheart in the second half of the drama, that Sartre wants to say that Christianity renders the good absolute, and that the absoluteness turns the good into a corrupting power, both for those who perform it and for those who suffer as the result of the good actions. The neighbour obtains benefit and happiness from works only if they are performed on an a-religious, purely human level. Having abandoned faith in God, Hilda is capable of doing the good. Bitterly Goetz says to himself that no matter whether he does good or evil, he turns himself into an object of hatred. By contrast Hilda is loved. How come, as she does not

82   act differently from him, does not keep anything for herself, gives everything away, helps everybody? There must be more to this than meets the eye, Goetz thinks, but he does not understand that the crucial difference is that whereas Hilda does it for the sake of the poor, he does it for the sake of the idea. Kierkegaard is responsible for a claim which is often advocated in theology nowadays, namely that the radical ethical demand is without content. To invest it with the content that we should take care of our neighbour’s life is to humanize the demand. To this it must be replied that when it is without content the demand is obeyed for its own sake, and the work becomes cold, religious self-affirmation, even if the obedience to it consists in renunciation and sacrifice. The idea of the absolute good can take one of two forms: it can either be realized in a social order or in deeming all life in society to be nothing. Goetz’s Schwärmerei, his dream of institutionalizing the Kingdom of God in what he calls a City of the Sun, has no relation to any present-day theological problem; by contrast, what has so much more relation is the idea of doing the absolute good through regarding as nothing [112] everything that belongs to this world. On Kierkegaard’s view, eternity must descend and infinity be captured in one single specific work: helping the neighbour to love God. All other works are without connection to the ethico-religious sphere. Never before has the ethical closed itself up in itself and shut out the entire world to the degree that this happens in Kierkegaard’s thought. What Hermann Brochxviii calls the ethical as a closed system is found in its extreme religious form in Kierkegaard.

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6. Conformity and the Collision between Faith in God and the Neighbour The individual wants to be themselves without God and the neighbour. They make the fulfilment of their own desires and endeavours their idol, which, time and again, is at the expense of others. Their own godlessness brings them into conflict with the neighbour. Kierkegaard takes the idolatrous relation to the temporal into consideration; in his terminology this is called relating oneself absolutely to what is relative.xix However, that this often is harmful to the neighbour is not something he considers very much. He is more concerned with the fact that, in their idolatrous relation to the temporal, human beings come to mutual agreement by way of conformity. Human beings relate absolutely to what is relative in the same ways, they are in agreement about these ways, each person lets their life be determined by the others. In short, being lost in evil towards the neighbour hardly matters to Kierkegaard compared with being lost in conformity. Neither has Kierkegaard, therefore, any sense of the fact that faith in God restores the individual’s life, so that their expressions of life convey benefit and happiness to other human beings. For him, faith in God does not consist in the individual fulfilling their life with other human beings in the expressions of life, which have been given them by God in order to fulfil themselves, and which serve the good of the other person. All this is the result of Kierkegaard’s giving much more thought to the conflict with the neighbour that is brought about by the individual’s faith in God than he [113] gives to the conflict with the neighbour that is brought about by the individual’s godlessness. The conflict with the neighbour caused by faith in God is more acute than the conflict with the neighbour caused by godlessness. In Kierkegaard’s view any non-conflictual relation to the neighbour is conformity, and ultimately there is only one thing capable of breaking up conformity, and that is the unceasing and irreparable clash with the beloved person brought about by faith in God. It is true that Kierkegaard dissociates himself from the idea that the work of faith should be loveless obedience. If love of the neighbour is not heartfelt, the work is not one of faith. This is emphasized again and again, already in Fear and Trembling. However, it is added that love, in order to be Christian, must consist in feeling pained that a community with the other person is impossible to achieve, a community which is the essence of love. Christian love is a love that is taken out

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7. The Sovereign Expressions of Life and the Question of the Freedom or Bondage of the Will [114] Like Luther, Kierkegaard rejects the idea of free will.xx But Kierkegaard is concerned with an additional matter, which is the struggle against determinism. He has to fight on two fronts, not only against the conception of a disengaged, free will, but also against determinism. To be able to wage war on two fronts he has to make a distinction, which Luther did not know about: the distinction between freedom of the will and freedom of existence. By his concept of freedom of existence, Kierkegaard sets himself in opposition to the idea of a free will as well as to determinism. Whereas Luther dissociates himself from the idea of a free will on the basis of an understanding of the nature of the will, Kierkegaard dissociates himself from the idea of a free will on the basis of the idea of the nature of freedom. By turning inwards, as he puts it in The Concept of Anxiety, the individual discovers freedom, not an abstract freedom of the will to choose this or that, but the freedom which the individual is in themselves, and which they use to render themselves unfree and to live in guilt. In his battle against determinism, Kierkegaard’s point is to show that human beings are guilty for their unfree life, due to the fact that their existence is freedom. If you ask what the freedom of existence consists in for Kierkegaard, the answer is: being guided by the light of eternity and the beyond. But although, according to Kierkegaard, this is sheer positivity, nothing positive can be said about it, because human beings have severed themselves from eternity and live in the loss of it in unfreedom and guilt. It is only the absolute—or the idea, as Kierkegaard also puts it—that is of importance for human beings, and that means infinite importance, and the absolute or the idea lies beyond human existence. What exists in the empirical world is and remains indifferent. Does this also apply to trust, compassion, and sincerity, understood in human terms? Yes, because, strictly speaking, the expressions of life have no claim on us, precisely because their fulfilment is of benefit to us. [115] Unlike Kierkegaard, I hold that there is much both positive and empirical to be said about the freedom of existence (to use Kierkegaard’s term), for this consists in the sovereign expressions of life. What Kierkegaard has in view with his talk of the absolute, of the idea, is that the absolute has a claim on us that cannot be set aside and is not up for negotiation. But the sovereign expressions of life do precisely the same, because they too are definitive and cannot be moderated. To contradict Kierkegaard with Kierkegaard’s

86   own concepts: What he has in view with his talk of the absolute, of the idea, exists in the empirical world, in the sovereign expressions of life. However, my disagreement with Kierkegaard does not stop here. Human existence is not sheer unfreedom, because the sovereign expressions of life are fulfilled; they assert themselves. If they did not, our lives together would not go as well as they do. This can only be due to the fact that we live off that which we do not owe to ourselves. This is because the sovereign expressions of life are not accomplished by the will. On the contrary, when the expression of life breaks through our self-enclosedness, it is because the expression of life, and not the will, is sovereign. Just as Kierkegaard argued that human beings would not be guilty if existence were not freedom, so I argue that we would incur no guilt through our selfenclosedness if there were no sovereign expressions of life. But here my agreement with Kierkegaard ends. Unlike him, I contend that guilt consists in evil’s battening on goodness. If there were no goodness evil could parasitize on, there would be no such thing as guilt. Precisely because we have experienced freedom of existence in a positive way in the fulfilled sovereign expressions of life, but nevertheless flout that experience and close in on ourselves, the unfreedom of the self-enclosedness is guilt and evil. By contrast, Kierkegaard renders existence barren, making everything in it indifferent, with the result that guilt becomes so comprehensive as to lack any concrete form, [116] so that it ultimately comes to consist in the human being’s inability to sustain their sense of guilt. I shall return to this. Johannes Møllehave has raised the objection against me that if there is such as a thing as sovereign expressions of life, it is also up to the free will of individuals to fulfil them and to break out of their self-enclosedness (Information, 22 July 1966).xxi He invokes Kierkegaard in his support, but to no avail. If Møllehave’s objection knocks me down, it knocks Kierkegaard down too. If Møllehave says to me: If human beings are endowed with sovereign expressions of life, their will must be free—he must also say to Kierkegaard: if the existence of human beings is freedom, their will must be free. But even aside from his invocation of Kierkegaard, Møllehave’s objection does not hold good. The sovereign expression of life is there beforehand; its fulfilment takes the will by surprise. It is one of those offerings of life which, to our good fortune, pre-empt us and without which we could not exist from one day to the next. By discounting the sovereign expressions of life Møllehave is unable to give an explanation of the fact that we exist, despite our wickedness. Either the will lets itself be overpowered and surrenders to the expression of life, or it relies on its own efforts, and through morality’s substitute actions we

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do what we reckon the sovereign expression of life would have done, if it had pre-empted our will. Or else we corrupt the sovereign expression of life, for instance by crediting to our own account what the sovereign expression of life achieves; we rob the expression of life of its sovereignty, thereby flattering our will with it, and this is another way in which the self-enclosedness parasitizes on the sovereign expression of life, now in the form of self-righteousness.¹ The sovereign expression of life is thus not hidden [117] in selfishness, stifled in self-enclosedness. Our will does not have sufficient power to make it unrecognizable. Admittedly, I did think previously that this is something I had to concede when, in The Ethical Demand (in the section on ‘The Wickedness of Human Beings and the Goodness of Human Life’) I thought that I had to accept that natural love and trust are ‘imaginary entities’, with which we operate ‘in a speculative manner’. Ole Jensenxxiii has criticized this, and I can fully endorse his criticism; it has made things clearer (See his ‘“Created Possibilities of Life”—“Sovereign Expressions of Life”’, 1967).xxiv As Ole Jensen points out, simply to treat the ethical demand and the sovereign expressions of life as parallel really won’t do.² It is true that the sovereign expressions of life and their works are demanded, but ‘the difference’ between the ethical demand and the sovereign expressions of life ‘lies precisely in their fulfilment’. The demand is unfulfillable; the sovereign expression of life is not produced by the will’s exerting itself to obey the demand. By contrast, the sovereign expression of life is fulfilled, but spontaneously, without being demanded. The demand announces itself when the sovereign expression of life does not come about—but does not engender it; therefore, [118] the demand demands that it is superfluous. The demand corresponds with sin, the sovereign expression of life with freedom.

¹ Møllehave added that there is no reason to be offended by the sovereign expressions of life. ‘There is no reason to take offence at the sovereign expressions of life; instead we must all feel deeply moved by them: trust, openness, compassion.’ However, this depends on how you see things. It seems to me that in order to be profoundly moved by the sovereign expressions of life, we must have a pretty superficial view of the task they require. Reverting back to my earlier illustration, let us imagine that Götz von Berlichingen, with a growing sense of offence, asks how long he has to go on trusting Weislingen, that traitor, how many times more he has to give him a chance; he has now done so seven times, and surely that must be enough. If Götz von Berlichingen gets the answer that nothing less than seventy times seven will do, I wonder whether he would not take offence. No one escapes taking offence at the task, if they take it seriously. Møllehave observes in the same context that in order to hear a demand and take offence at it, it must be something we cannot understand. This is true, if the offence is to be intellectual, but certainly not if the offence is ethical. What can be understood completely can perfectly well give offence ethically. The demand to Götz von Berlichingen that he must give Weislingen a chance seventy times seven times is perfectly understandable, and if he realized that this is what is demanded from him, his offence would be in proportion to his understanding.xxii ² As I did in my original reply to Møllehave in Information, which could only have been misleading.

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8. Taking over the Situation through the Sovereign Expressions of Life Attention has to be drawn to one more peculiarity of the sovereign expressions of life: you cannot bargain with the claim they have on you. If you are not fully at one with them, you are the opposite. If you reduce your sincerity in the least, you are insincere. If you hold back from being faithful to others even in the slightest, then you find yourself in faithlessness. In one single flash it changes from light to darkness. Corresponding to the radicality of the ethical demand, the modes of existing through which alone it can be obeyed are whole in themselves. It is another matter that what passes for sincerity, compassion, and faithfulness many times is merely insincerity, lack of compassion, and faithlessness compelled by external precepts to cloak itself in actions which otherwise are the expressions of sincerity, compassion, and faithfulness. But when what is demanded is not actions that are external and laid down, [119] but—more radically—the whole human being is called for, then the demand must be obeyed through what life is in itself. Obedience can never be made whole, if it is not realized through possibilities of life that have already been given to the individual; the demand corresponds to them. The naked will to obedience cannot make the obedience whole. In order to be obedient, the human being must be more than obedient: they must be sincere, compassionate, faithful. The demand does not engender the possible modes of existing through which it is obeyed. They are there already. Setting aside cases where existence presents difficulties one does not want to acknowledge because it is one’s fate to be marked by a fundamental defect, the task is not to take over existence and its conditions with the abstract and negative self, but to take over the interpersonal situation with the sovereign expressions of life. Kierkegaard is mistaken when he says that in order to release oneself from the immediate connection with the surrounding world in desire and pleasure, reflection is required in which the individual considers the infinite and eternal in themselves and becomes an abstract and negative self.xxv The individual is immediately connected with the surrounding world through desire and pleasure, but they are equally immediately connected with it through sovereign expressions of life such as trust, compassion, and openness of speech. And since the sovereign expressions of life make claims on the individual—claims that are non-negotiable because the sovereign expressions of life are definitive and cannot be moderated—the individual is already subject

90   to a radical demand in their immediate connection with the surrounding world. The battle between desire and trust, between pleasure and compassion, takes place in immediacy. This is where it begins. Kierkegaard is mistaken when he says that the movement of infinite resignation is required for the individual to become conscious of themselves in their eternal validity.xxvi He is mistaken when he says that the ethical task consists in being concerned about winning one’s [120] identity and becoming a self at every moment of one’s temporal life, by using every instant of time to relate oneself to eternity. Human beings are free from that concern. Winning one’s identity and becoming a self is something the individual should let happen behind their back by leaving it to the sovereign expressions of life. Eternity has incarnated its demand on us in the interpersonal situation, and in the sovereign expressions of life which correspond to it. Eternity does not incarnate itself for the first time in Jesus of Nazareth, but already in creation and the universality of the demand. It is a Christian contention that the idea of creation is not a specifically Christian idea, and it is a Christian contention that the radical demand is not a specifically Christian demand. It was Kierkegaard’s idea that eternity creates the self in human beings for eternity by situating it in the movements of infinity—through which the self severs itself from eternity in the infinite passion of despair. He is right about that. But Kierkegaard ignored that eternity does not create the self merely for eternity, but also for the neighbour, by giving it the possibilities of the sovereign expressions of life that correspond to the claims in which eternity incarnates itself in the interpersonal situation. If the interpersonal situation is taken over, it is taken over with the sovereign expressions of life. Only when it is the conditions of our existence which are to be taken over, can the subject faced with their taking over with some justice be called an abstract and negative self, because then the individual through their reluctance to take over their concrete existence has detached themselves from it in thought. The subject who is reluctant is conceived of as an abstract and negative self. Does the subject of the taking over of the interpersonal situation never think of itself as the abstract and negative self? Indeed it does—when the individual evades the situation and reflection sets in, and the individual is faced with choice. When the situation becomes moral, the self thinks abstractly and negatively about itself, for the situation becomes moral when the sovereign expressions of life do not come about. I shall come back to this. [121] A hypothetical objection must be addressed. Earlier, in Section 5, I said that it is madness to try to treat a definitive work as encapsulating

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eternity. However, now I say that eternity incarnates itself in the claim that proceeds from the other person’s existence and in the definitive expressions of life that correspond to it. Isn’t this a flagrant contradiction? No. Generally speaking, what applies to the sovereign expression of life does not apply to the work; in a crucial respect the definitiveness of the expression of life is in contrast to the definitiveness of the work. The expression of life does not allow itself to be assigned works that it has to perform under all circumstances. On the contrary, it is attentively searching for what can be done in the given circumstances to change the situation. The expression of life is the inspiration for the deliberations of the imagination and reason in consideration about what should be said and done. By laying down how to act you reverse the order of the factors and kill the expression of life. It is sovereign, it does not allow itself to be determined. The expression of life is certainly definitive, but its fulfilment consists in anything but straightforwardly following convention. Because the sovereign expression of life aims at changing the situation and liberating the other, be it from external need or from the obsessive course of emotional thoughts, eternity can incarnate itself in it. However, nailing eternity down to a definitive work is to religiously pervert temporality; even if the work were the godliest of all, that just makes matters worse.

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9. How the Ethical Life of the People Is Lost, Conformism, and How the Relation of Spirit Is Doubled Reflection sets in when prevailing morality, as laid down in custom and convention, is no longer found to be convincing. The moral validity of morality is questioned, it is subjected to criticism from a new and different understanding of what is good and evil, which is at variance with the one that was [122] incorporated in time-honoured morality. It might be that the existing morality has grown so external, enfeebled, and passé that it calls for criticism, even though no new understanding has yet arisen. However that may be, in earlier times the collective, society, and religion vouched for morality, but now this is a matter for the individual on their own. However, simultaneously with this, something else happens. The upheaval is more significant than that. When the collective morality starts to crumble, the change does not merely consist in the replacement of the old set of duties by a new set of rules, that then take on their power. The change is more radical. The moral attitude does not merely get a new and different content, but its very structure changes. As social morality loses its purchase, the individual is not only given a free hand regarding traditional moral content, but they are given a free hand regarding morality as a whole. They are not only required to take a stance on the duties that had been upheld so far, but also on duty itself. The question becomes the question of why one should be a moral individual at all, which manifests itself in a transition from speaking about duties in the plural to speaking about duty in the singular. In other words, just as it becomes the task of the individual to decide which moral content they are to accept, so at the same time it becomes their task to decide if they are to regard their existence as bound by duty at all. When the duties of custom and convention lose their power, it does not merely happen that one looks for another set of customary and conventional duties; rather, the question arises whether it even makes sense at all for the individual to live bound by duty, and why. The question expresses itself in a doubling: who says that we are to live bound by duty, when custom and convention no longer say we are? In Hegel’s formulation: do I have a duty to duty? Morality becomes spirit through a doubling. Hegel points this out, and Kierkegaard agrees. The shift from ethical life to morality, to use Hegel’s terminology,xxvii is appraised differently in empiricism and in idealism. Empiricism focuses on the idea that a deontological view yields [123] to, or is supplemented by, a teleological view. Primitive ethics is deontological; there are rigid duties, taboos, customs, and demands. Any behaviour that does not follow the

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prescribed course of action is condemned. There is no room for criticism of the moral code. As Stephen Toulmin observes, harmonization of the members’ wishes and action is achieved in a very crude way. But sooner or later, Toulmin continues, it happens that people find out that some of the principles are in conflict with each other, or they become acquainted with other people’s morality, or society undergoes changes. For one reason or another one begins to call the moral code into question. It is recognized that the members of the society have a right to criticize the prevailing practice and propose another one. A new phase of ethical development has started. Now members of society start to consider the motives of actions and the results of social practices, and do not just keep to the letter of the law. The deontological code is supplemented by a teleological one, which provides a criterion for criticizing the deontological one (Stephen Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 137–43). Unlike empiricism, in its view of the shift idealism remains within a deontological conception of ethics; indeed, it insists upon it. The duty to duty is founded on the idea that human beings stand in relation to the absolute. In the breakdown of collective morality, ideality is discovered, as Kierkegaard puts it, and this is the achievement of Socrates and Plato. In his free and excellent account of Kant, Hegel says that morality is something higher than virtue, ethical life, integrity, etc., because it is distinguished by reflection. Morality is a determinate consciousness of what duty requires and acting out of that consciousness, and so hence precedes action. From out of themselves, freely, the human being has instituted duty as that which they will. It is duty to duty, duty for duty’s sake and its fulfilment, which the human being decides upon through morality and its reflection. [124] Duty’s adoption as a rule of conduct, and compliance with it, proceed from a conviction that is freely formed. For Kant the foundation was reason, which relates to itself in its own absoluteness, which, as such, is freedom. Hegel expresses this in his own way: Kant made self-consciousness foundational, which finds and knows itself to be infinite. This is the turning point in modern philosophy, which Hegel recognizes. I shall not consider here his disagreement with Kant, which is to the effect that Kant fell back into setting up a fixed dichotomy between abstract universality and sensuous particularity (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 12 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1953), pp. 85–95).xxviii As already stated, the idea of the doubling of the relation of spirit emerges when the existing order, ethical life as custom and convention, begins to crumble and a subjective way of thinking seeks morality in the idea. That

94   was how Hegel saw it, and so, too, does Kierkegaard in his interpretation of Platonism. But the undermining of collective morality only takes place at specific junctures in world history, and once that turning point has occurred in the history of a people and a society, it is no longer possible to return to the primitive, religiously anchored ethical life of the people. But does this mean that everybody as a matter of course exists in a doubling of the relation of spirit? Not at all, the life which one starts out with, and which one lives most of the time, is that of the crowd. One’s existence is determined by others. In short, what appears in the vacuum left behind by the crumbling religious ethical life of the people, is conformism. Just as an existence in the doubling of the relation of spirit came about in times of crisis, when the ethical life of the people broke down, so it now continues to remain the task, but now in opposition to conformism. This is how Kierkegaard construes the problem.xxix It is characteristic of the epoch in which we live that the shift from the ethical life of the people to morality has become permanent. We are constantly doubtful and critical of the norms, as today we usually call custom [125] and convention; at any time we are ready to put them to the test. We assume that the norms are constantly in flux. We live in an age of reflection, as Hegel said; the morality we are familiar with is one distinguished by reflection. Also, as regards the permanent shift to the age of reflection, people find their ethical bearings in one of two places: either, with empiricism, in a teleological judgement, or, with existentialism, in that which is beyond human existence. In my opinion, however, the ethical circumstances are not well-elucidated, if we restrict ourselves to the tension between the radical ethical demand and the juridical, moral, and conventional norms, between the abstract and negative self and the ethical life of the people. A third phenomenon must be added: the sovereign expressions of life. Hegel and Kierkegaard are mistaken in thinking that, after the undermining of collective ethical life, the existence of the good or its knowledge is conditional on human beings having a capacity to abstract, generalize, relate to the idea, and that a doubling of the relation of spirit is required for attaining the ethical. The reason is that before duty becomes relevant in a given situation, a spontaneous expression of life is called for, such as trust, compassion, and sincerity, etc. This does not mean that we should take over the expression of life, as though we were supposed to take over a relation to it. That would be the same as making it a duty, with the doubling that duty gives rise to, as Hegel and Kierkegaard rightly observe. No, we are called upon to take over the

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situation—with the sovereign expression of life that corresponds to it. As the story goes, the Samaritan did not take over his own compassion through exercising it as his duty, but, through his compassion, he took over the man who had been assaulted and lay wounded by the roadside. What occupied the Samaritan’s thoughts—if we still understand the story in the immediate way in which it is told—was what the assaulted person needed and how he should go [126] about helping him. By contrast, we are not told at all that the Samaritan related to his own compassion in knowing that he was duty-bound to show it. But we can easily further elaborate the story and imagine that the Samaritan was tempted to behave in the same way as the priest and the Levite, refraining from taking over the situation, and then had to overcome his reluctance by letting the duty to duty enter as a new motive that is now needed. In the deliberations prompted by the temptation to pass by and leave the assaulted person to his fate, the Kantian Samaritan considers compassion as a duty, which may result in taking the assaulted person to the inn and tending his wounds, not from compassion but from duty. And when you are compassionate from duty, without being driven by compassion, you act from a duty to duty, as Hegel rightly claims. But he is certainly not right in claiming that this is morality in the best sense of the word. On the contrary, it is morality as a substitute, and there is no other morality. Granted, this is better than brutality and indifference, but worse than the immediate fulfilment of compassion’s sovereign expression of life. Duty presents itself when I am wriggling out of the situation. The duty to duty arises, then, on two or, if you will, on three occasions: when the ethical life of the people crumbles away; when we start questioning our own conformism; and when that which has to be achieved through our action is not sufficient to motivate it, but requires an extra motive. The doubling that Hegel and Kierkegaard speak about also takes place when duty has to enter as a motive, if the action is to come about at all.

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10. Morality is the Provision of Substitute Motives for Substitute Actions [127] Due to their spontaneity, the sovereign expressions of life are pre-moral. Our attitude of mind cannot be separated from what we want to change through our action, because the attitude of mind consists in aiming at the result of our action. It does not make sense to ask if a compassionate action is good in itself, regardless of its results. Separation of this kind is impossible; a term such as ‘compassionate’ is at once a characteristic of the action’s attitude of mind and also its purpose. Compassion is elicited by a person’s being impeded in fulfilling their life. This appeals to a hope for life so elementary that it is a hope of seeing every life fulfilled. The other human being’s fate is at odds with that hope, and this conflict arouses compassion, which, through action, seeks to make the hope for life prevail and remove the impediments, no matter what they consist in, be it poverty, need, oppression, or exploitation. From a philosophical point of view, ignoring the ethically descriptive phenomena entails pseudo-problems, and a pseudo-problem of this kind is the supposed conflict between an ethics of attitude and an ethics of goods.xxx If one confines oneself to a phenomenon such as compassion, the problem cannot arise at all, insofar as the attitude is aroused by the other’s misfortune and simply consists in striving to change it. Thus, Kant could come to his ethics of duty only by disparaging all ethically descriptive phenomena as inclinations, and Kierkegaard only by ignoring all sovereign expressions of life. Duty is not a phenomenon that can subsist by itself, it is merely a motive which requires fulfilment in an action one is reluctant to perform until the motive is strong enough. Compassion exists only when fulfilled, an action that is moved by what it seeks to accomplish. When an action is declared a duty, we have begun to separate motive and effect, attitude of mind and result. The effects [128] and results that should be aimed at are moving into the background; instead we stick to the motive and bolster it. An action that is turned into a duty is an action we are tempted not to perform; we reckon with inclinations that are strong and will pull us away from the action. Our absorption in the results of our action is thus not strong enough, it wanes. Then duty has to enter instead and ensure that the action is still performed. Duty sees to this, not by trying to bolster our attachment to that which is to be achieved by our action, but by supplying a fresh motive. This is important. When we turn an action into a duty, we discount the motivation that consists in our being absorbed by the goal of our action.

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We no longer reckon on being sufficiently intent on getting things done. Something similar applies to virtue: the motivation for which it is a disposition—that is, the thought and sense of the action’s rightness—is a substitute for being absorbed in the results of one’s action, which is the only natural and genuine motivation. Just as duty is a substitute motive, virtue is a substitute disposition. Morality exists to provide us with substitute motives for substitute actions, because the sovereign and spontaneous expressions of life with their devotion to the goal of action either fail to materialize or are stifled. In duty and virtue, the individual’s relation to other human beings, to society and the world, is loosened. How one thinks and how one feels about the rightness of the action are rendered self-standing and are interposed. To be sure, the action’s results are not ignored, for duty and virtue come about because, as was said before, we are aware that the results are indispensable; but the motivation is no longer drawn from the results which the actions have in other people’s existence and in society, but it is drawn from within the individual themselves. When motivation is divorced from results, the individual is thrown back upon themselves with regard to motivation. Duty and virtue are moral introversions. When the intended effect of the action is its motivation, the motivation consists in spontaneous expressions of life. Therefore, it is not possible to train a disposition [129] in order to achieve the motivations and then perform the actions. This is excluded by the spontaneity of the motivation. One cannot work at establishing and stabilizing duty and virtue. Doing this would have to mean reflecting on the motivation. One reflects on the rightness of the action to perform it for the sake of its rightness—and not for the sake of its results. But what, then, is the feeling evoked by the idea of the action’s rightness? It is natural to think that it is a feeling of falling in love with one’s own righteousness. The question is if it can be anything else. Yes, it most certainly can, say Kant and Kierkegaard. Put in Kantian terms: the relation to the noumenal world dissolves what has here been called the moral introversion, and respect for the law precludes self-righteousness from becoming the motivating feeling. Put in Kierkegaardian terms: the relation to infinity and eternity is not introversion, but internalization, and it lets decision replace duty and virtue. To put it perspicuously, albeit crudely: after the motivation has been divorced from the action’s intended effects, Kant and Kierkegaard think that they can bind the motivation religiously, whereupon the will, to speak with Kant, or obedience, to speak with Kierkegaard, become the only thing that is good in itself.

98   But in so doing Kant and Kierkegaard have forgotten that it is the nature of morality to be a substitute. Their ethics is a religious sublimation of the moral substitute attitude. Jørgen K. Bukdahlxxxi has put the question to me, partly as an objection, whether the individual should not one way or another ‘take over’ the sovereign expressions of life. There is a spontaneity of resolve, he says, and he means that not merely is the expression of life spontaneous, but the resolution is too. It must be bound up with the sovereign expression of life that you ‘vouch for it yourself ’, ‘take part in it yourself ’, he says. [130] But what is to be understood by a spontaneous resolution? It can perhaps be clarified through a comparison between a resolution to a definitive expression of life such as trust or compassion—and resolution to duty. This is because resolution is in a certain respect different in those two cases.³ To resolve to show trust or compassion is to resolve to give yourself over to trust or compassion. Trust and compassion must thus be there beforehand as possibilities of life. If they are not, the resolution cannot produce them. Therefore, the phrase ‘to resolve to show trust or be compassionate’ is somewhat inadequate; it is not wrong, though, because the resolution consists in giving up attitudes or movements of thought and feeling that are incompatible with trust and compassion, such as for instance aloofness, guardedness, reserve, glibness, vengefulness, gloating. The resolution gets its spontaneity from the spontaneous expression of life—trust, compassion, sincerity, etc.— which the person resolves to let run its course. By contrast, there is nothing inadequate in the expression ‘to resolve to do your duty’. Duty is self-governance, which corresponds to the self-governance of a resolution. There is no such thing as giving oneself up to one’s duty. On the contrary, in duty I make myself master of everything that lures and tempts me to neglect my duty. It is therefore also the case that I can use duty as a substitute motive, and thereby do what trust or compassion would have done, if they had been present. This is so, because I am not master over trust and compassion to the same degree as I am master over my duty. Whereas duty is a substitute motive, freedom is not even that. About the freedom that individuals themselves are, Kierkegaard says [131] that it is

³ I assume that Bukdahl does not ask for an explanation of freedom, as I take it for granted that he agrees with Kierkegaard that one cannot try to explain freedom without regarding it as an illusion, because it is the determining which is explained.xxxii

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continuously preoccupied with itself only.xxxiii Even the difference between it and liberum arbitriumxxxiv can be determined that way: whereas liberum arbitrium relates to something outside the individual, the freedom that the individual is relates to itself. As a result, freedom must be excluded as a motive for action, something that Kierkegaard seems not to have taken into consideration. Let us imagine that, in a concrete situation which requires a concrete action, an individual is considering their freedom to act. The action called for by the situation is not pleasant for the individual, they perform it only reluctantly, but concede that they have the freedom to perform it. With this consideration a paralysis has already set in. The individual has stepped out of the concrete situation and has stepped into their self, so to speak. To be sure, the situation and the possibility for action are still there; they have not been forgotten, but now they function as an occasion for self-reflection only. But this is to say that what Kierkegaard professes with his determination of freedom as preoccupied with itself only, namely a description of what happens when one makes a resolution and acts, is in fact a description of the very opposite; namely, a description of how we evade the action and venture into a state of paralysis. Consideration of the freedom to act is never itself an impulse to act. By contrast, consideration of an action’s goal, content, and meaning is an impulse to act. Only by forgetting it can I realize the freedom that I am and which my existence consists in. And this is not strange at all, for it is one thing to act, it is another thing to consider the constitution of one’s existence as freedom to act. Both are part of my existence, but it does not do to confuse their respective realizations. That an action is free does not mean that consideration of the freedom to act can serve as a motive for action.

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11. The Levelling Down of Finitude [132] The reason why Kierkegaard has no sense of the taking over of the interpersonal situation is that he has levelled down finitude. For, what does finitude, which plays such a decisive part in Kierkegaard’s anthropology, consist in? The answer is that finitude is the world in its quality of desirable goods, the world as the object of our desires and inclinations. For Judge William,xxxv the claims that the circumstances make on a human being are part of finitude too, but only as the claims that arise from ‘the order of things’, never as a demand that the existence of another human being makes on the individual. Otherwise, a conception of finitude in terms of a philosophy of value is dominant, and the question is never raised whether what applies to finitude as a world of goods, applies equally well to finitude as a world of demands. On the contrary, according to Kierkegaard what applies to the relation between the relative and the absolute with regard to the goods is— involuntarily—transferred to the relation between the relative and the absolute in the realm of the demands. It does not occur to Climacus that the relation between the absolute and the relative could turn out differently when it concerns the finitude in which one human being is dependent on another, and which is therefore a finitude of demands. He does not ask whether there is not this difference between how the absolute and the relative are related in the field of the goods and the field of demands: to claim that the absolute good becomes concrete in the relative world is tantamount to letting it exhaust itself in, and fraternize with, the relative goods; by contrast, in the demand which the other human being’s existence makes from one case to the next, the absolute demand becomes concrete. Climacus’s sole concern is to expose any attempt to allow any mediation between the absolute good, that is, eternal beatitude, and [133] finite and relative goods. ‘It is not true either that the absolute telos becomes concrete in the relative ends, because resignation’s absolute distinction will at every moment safeguard the absolute telos against all fraternizing.’ ‘. . . The relation to the absolute telos cannot be said to exhaust itself in relative ends, since the absolute relation can demand the renunciation of all of them’ (SKS 7: 364, 369/ KW 12.1: 400, 405). The slippage in his thought from goods to demands is fostered by Climacus’s making use of an aesthetic and eudaimonistic terminology in the way he

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determines the relation of human beings to their eternal beatitude, notwithstanding his intention to keep the relation free from any aesthetic and eudaimonistic distortion. Climacus determines the difference between the ethical-religious and the aesthetic pathos. In the aesthetic pathos, possibility is the supreme thing, and the fiction writer’s existence is held to be indifferent. By contrast, in the ethical-religious pathos, the transformation of one’s own existence in relation to what is the object of pathos is the only thing that matters. The reason for the difference is that, whereas the object of the aesthetic pathos is a relative telos, the object of the ethical-religious pathos is the absolute telos. But now something strange happens: the spheres are kept separated in such a way that, whereas the representation of the relative telos in the aesthetic pathos is concrete and substantial, the representation of the absolute telos in the ethical-religious pathos is abstract and thin; for this means that, terminologically, the relation to eternal beatitude is aesthetically determined, just as relating to something in a representation is relating to it aesthetically. Through the aesthetic terminology of the concept of representation, Climacus seeks to overcome what is aesthetic—by letting the representation of the eternal beatitude be as abstract and thin as can be imagined. It is equally strange that the determination of eternal salvation [134] as the absolute telos, the absolute good, seen terminologically is eudaimonistic. The difference between the relative and the absolute telos is even determined in a way which, from Greek ethics onwards, has been employed by every ethics that has operated with a hierarchy of values: ‘All relative willing is distinguished by willing something for something else, but the highest telos must be willed for its own sake.’ Climacus, then, thinks to overcome eudaimonism through claiming that the absolute telos, the absolute good, is transcendent, so that the existing person is and remains outside it. The existing person and the absolute good are never united within the temporal (SKS 7: 358, 367–8/KW 12.1: 394, 402–6). In short, the terminology Climacus has at his disposal when he is to determine the relation to God, is aesthetic and eudaimonistic, and it continues to be so, also when he attempts to determine the difference between the relation to God and any aesthetic and eudaimonistic relation. But can that be done? Doesn’t this terminology keep our attention away from the world of demands, from our existence together with other human beings, where alone the ethical-religious relation belongs, and which alone can give it an adequate terminology?

102   From a finitude which is levelled down to mere immanence and relativity, Kierkegaard cannot get an answer as to where and when the ethical situation and its claims occur; Christians themselves have to create it at every moment, which makes their lives concerned and strained to the utmost. As Climacus puts it: ‘A singer cannot incessantly sing tremolo; once in a while a note is sung with a coloratura. But the religious person whose religiousness is hidden inwardness strikes the tremolo, if I may so speak, of the relationship with God in everything . . .’xxxvi ‘. . . The absolute conception of God consumes them like the fire of the summer sun when it refuses to set, like the fire of the summer sun, when it refuses to cease’ (SKS 7: 431, 439/KW 12.1: 475, 485). [135] We certainly turn everything in finitude into our own relative ends, to which we relate absolutely. But this does not mean that finitude as such, in the way in which God has ordered it, is mere relativity. This is only the case through our immediate and all too finite sensible levelling down of it in our selfishness. But then Christianity does not consist in recognizing this levelling down. Nonetheless this is what Kierkegaard himself does. As Christianity for him consists in the idea that Christians at every moment, exerting themselves, create the ethical-religious situation for themselves, in their own interiority, the levelling down of finitude is presupposed. The kind of exertion that the life of a religious person will involve is made abundantly clear by the ‘edifying diversion’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The example is the innocent pleasure of visiting Dyrehaven [The Deer Park],xxxvii where the task is how to put this together with the idea of God. If now the religious person has the desire to visit Dyrehaven, they have to ask themselves if this is ‘a momentary inclination, an immediate whim’. This is because, if they follow their desire, they live in immediacy and do not relate to the infinite demand. They can only allow themselves to do it if it serves as a diversion which they need as finite and limited human beings, where God knows that such diversions are what we require (SKS 7: 449/KW 12.1: 496). But now how should the religious person know whether it is the one or the other? In order to ascertain where the desire comes from, they must try to do without the diversion, and in worry and mistrust must assume that the impulse stems from immediacy, and for good measure try to resist it. But now the religious person becomes irritable, because in doing without the diversion they feel keenly ‘the sting of thereby being dependent, of thereby always having to understand that one is capable of nothing at all’.xxxviii And now they become defiant—now they will to do without the diversion. But then, obviously, not [136] being capable of doing anything becomes something they are precisely capable of doing by their own capacity and will.

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The impossibility of complying with the infinite demand as a demand that one become nothing now presents itself. For, the inwardness of the relation to God is its persistence—otherwise it is merely a theory, because ‘. . . the absolute conception of God is not: to have the absolute conception en passant, but is: to have the absolute conception at every moment’ (SKS 7: 438/KW 12.1: 483). This means therefore that the inwardness, the persistence of the relation to God, annuls itself as a demand, just as certainly as its content consists in not being capable of anything. How does a human being get out of this difficulty? Well, the religious knowledge that the human being is capable of nothing also contains the thought that they are not capable of grasping this knowledge in each individual moment. The human being fortifies themselves, as Kierkegaard says, with the edifying observation ‘that God, who created human beings, presumably must know best all the numerous things that to a human being appear incapable of being joined together with the thought of God—all this earthly need, all the confusion in which they can be trapped, and the necessity for diversion, for rest, as well as a night’s sleep’ (SKS 7: 443/KW 12.1: 489). It is part of human lowliness ‘that they are temporal and in temporality cannot endure to lead uninterruptedly the life of eternity’ (SKS 7: 445/KW 12.1: 491). If they are not to perish, they need diversion. It is again the same difficulty, only in a somewhat different form: the idea of God, which consists in the recognition of not being capable of anything, annuls itself, insofar as—taken consistently—it is not capable of succeeding either, it is unable to maintain itself. But with regard to the latter edifying observation, the question inevitably arises: what differentiates it from ‘a momentary inclination, an immediate whim’? So now we are back where we started, and the whole thing can begin again. In the same moment in which the decision to [137] visit Dyrehaven is made, everything is set up to begin again—indeed, it must begin again. Religiously speaking there is nothing that can bring this circling of selfobservation to a halt, nothing that can interrupt this cycle of worry, dissolution of worry, and renewal of worry. Climacus can make the circling stop only through an ethical veto: ‘If a little later the thought flashes through their soul that it was after all a mistake, then they set an ethical consideration in opposition to it, because in the face of a decision made after honest deliberation, a fleeting thought must not play the master. The person disarms this thought ethically in order not to arrive again at the highest relationship, whereby the meaning of the diversion decided upon would be annihilated’ (SKS 7: 450–1/KW 12.1: 497). It is characteristic of Climacus’s account that the religious person relates to God apart from God’s word to human beings (in creation and its universal law, which means that finitude interrupts human

104   beings). The religious person is in relation to God outside the relation, which manifests itself in there being nothing (no God’s word) that can interrupt the restless religiously motivated self-observation from beginning all over again. Without any word to hold on to, human beings have found ‘peace in the boundary dispute between being indulgent to themselves and demanding much of themselves’—by means of an ethical veto. It is said by Kierkegaard that the religious person is convinced that God will not abandon them but help them to find out what is right; that is to say, show them that they need this diversion in virtue of the limitation of finitude, and that they need not fear that they seek diversion as a result of idleness. However, this decision can never be final; on the contrary, at the same moment the decision has been made, everything is ready to begin all over again, and indeed must do so. This is because there is no word to hold on to, imagination has a free rein, God can be ascribed any intention—and none, which can only result in self-observation that is plagued by ceaseless worry. [138] When we gave an account of Kierkegaard’s ideas about the taking over of existence, we saw earlier that he does not consider what it is that challenges the individual to act within the conditions governing the individual, their social world, and their fate which they might have accepted; Kierkegaard has no idea about situations calling them to action, he only knows of the action that eternity demands from the individual apart from all temporal and worldly challenges. And since eternity incessantly demands the individual’s action— since eternity at every moment, without any break, demands that the individual performs the ethical task—it is a situation-less and world-less action that is demanded by eternity. Which action is that? This remains uncertain, until it becomes clear that it can consist only in making the other human being hear eternity’s demand as well. The relation to eternity consists in personally being called away from temporality and finitude. Just as Socrates—on the level of knowledge, intellectually—called Plato away from finitude into the infinitude of ideality, so it is the Christian’s task—on the level of action, ethically—to call the neighbour away from finitude under the demand of eternity. There is no other action sensu eminenti, when the empirical world is nothing but mediocrity. Platonism’s speculative devaluation of this world as being without reality, a kingdom of shadows, recurs in Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity as an implicit claim that the empirical world is not only mediocrity through human mediocrity, but is so already from the hand of the creator.

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12. Consciousness of Guilt (a) Eternity’s Vertical Understanding of Guilt In Kierkegaard guilt is determined as total in two ways: by the idea of God and by time. The former could be called eternity’s vertical understanding of guilt, the latter time’s horizontal understanding of guilt. [139] ‘The totality of guilt comes into existence for the individual by joining their guilt, be it just one, be it utterly trivial, together with the relation to an eternal beatitude’ (SKS 7: 481/KW 12.1: 529). But it is total guilt, not guilt concerning something in particular, that has priority. In order to be guilty of something in particular human beings must be totally guilty, indeed also in order to be innocent, for when human beings declare that they are innocent in a particular case, they thereby indicate that they are guilty in a total sense—for the simple reason that a totally innocent person does not know what guilt is. The priority of its determination as total is due to the fact that existence as such is a relation to eternity. The consciousness of guilt determined as total is set in contrast to the comparative consciousness of guilt, which refers to a norm, a yardstick, in relation to which the extent of guilt can be determined, externally and quantitatively. The difference manifests itself also in such a way that the consciousness of guilt as total is continuous—and its passion consists in this, not in momentary intensity—whereas in the comparative consciousness of guilt ‘forgetfulness comes between the particularities of guilt’ (SKS 7: 491/KW 12.1: 540). In guilt the relation to an eternal beatitude is a misrelation, but the misrelation has not led to a break; it is still ‘the relation, which sustains the misrelation’. This corresponds to existing as being outside infinitude in the relation to infinitude. And this means that in the consciousness of guilt, as being a relation in immanence, the subject’s identity is preserved. The ultimate reason for this is that ‘the eternal comprises the existing person everywhere’, that is to say, existence’s character of becoming and motion is due solely to its relation to the eternal. The break between existence and eternal beatitude does not occur until Christianity, where the eternal determines itself ‘as temporal, as being in time, as historical, by which eternity comes between the existing person and the eternal in time’. But now we are no longer speaking of guilt, [140] but of sin (SKS 7: 484/KW 12.1: 531–2; cf. SKS 7: 480–91/KW 12.1: 528–40; SKS 4: 459–61/KW 12.1: 506–8).

106   There is a difference between total and comparative guilt, which is not addressed by Kierkegaard, and which is the following: guilt becomes total also through the fact that the existence of another human being makes claims on me which transcend the claims that the person is fully entitled to make on me on their own behalf, and which transcend the norms of social life and perhaps wrongs they have suffered give them the occasion to define. What others have no right to demand themselves, is demanded by God, whose demand is unconditional, which is to say without conditions in the norms created by social life, and without being conditioned by suffered wrongs; it is given with the other’s mere existence and directed to me in my mere existence. When the demand turns from being conditioned to unconditional, it acquires a new content, and so does guilt. The content is no longer what everybody owes to the other according to the norms of social life but love of the neighbour. For Climacus, by contrast, the content remains the same, when guilt from being a quantitative determination becomes a qualitative determination. It is guilt as ‘crime’, as ‘weakness’, as ‘negligence’, that becomes total by being put together with the idea of God. The transition does not come about because the neighbour takes the place of the norms. But this means that for Climacus, the transition from the comparative consciousness of guilt to the consciousness of total guilt is an intensification of the consciousness of guilt rather than guilt’s radicalization.

(b) Time’s Horizontal Understanding of Guilt According to Kierkegaard, human beings are already guilty, because their life goes on in time. Human beings have been given their life solely in order to take on the ethical task, so that already the least [141] consideration of what the ethical task consists in, is an abuse of time. The individual is under an obligation in each single moment to realize the ethical, so that the pause to consider, in which one commits to the task, is already an abuse of time that makes the existing person guilty. ‘Even while the individual deliberates they are ethically responsible for the use of time . . . Even at the moment the task is assigned, something is already wasted, because there is an “in the meantime” and the beginning is not promptly made’ (SKS 7: 478/KW 12.1: 526). ‘You shall do the ethical at every moment, and you are ethically responsible for every moment you waste’ (SKS 27: 394/JP 1: 271). This is an exaggeration of guilt, and it brings about a displacement. Guilt originally consisted in putting together the particular and concrete guilt with

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the idea of God, while guilt proper now comes to consist in not being able to maintain the consciousness of guilt. Proper guilt consists in fickleness of the consciousness of guilt. Detached from guilt in a concrete case, the consciousness of guilt proper comes to lead its own, independent life, which expresses itself in a doubling of it: the essential guilt comes to consist in failing to maintain the consciousness of guilt. What is demanded is not the realization of the ethical, but having a continuous and persistent sense of guilt. The same applies to repentance. About this it is said in The Concept of Anxiety that it delays action, which is what is really demanded by ethics: ‘. . . the moment of repentance becomes a deficit of action’—which is why repentance gets itself as its object (SKS 4: 419/KW 8: 118). The shift stands out clearly when Kierkegaard takes a stand on the objection ‘that no human being can endure such an eternal recollecting of guilt, that it is bound to lead to insanity or to death’. That may be right, he says. But then it is also the case that God allows the individual to forget their guilt to such a degree that they can bear to live: ‘Well, now, a human being cannot endure very long on water and bread, but then a [142] physician can discern how to organize for the individual, not in such a way, please note, that he ends up living like the rich man but the starvation diet is so carefully calculated for him that he can just stay alive.’ The existing person will themselves ‘seek to find the minimum of forgetfulness needed for enduring . . .’. But how, then, can one be clear where the limits of this minimum are to be drawn? They can never be found with complete certainty; and anyway, it would be fatal, because such certainty would annul the consciousness of guilt proper. For this is sustained by the constant uncertainty as to whether the individual has not given in too much and has forgotten the consciousness of guilt more than is strictly necessary to bear life (SKS 7: 487/KW 12.1: 536–7). The consciousness of guilt lives on itself, it is fed by its own uncertainty as to whether it has been maintained to a sufficient degree, and not by any concrete guilt. The consciousness of guilt leads its own pallid and bloodless sham-life, detached from any ethical situation. Merely in order to uphold his polemic against Hegel’s subordination of ethics to world history, Kierkegaard comes to neglect the historicity of human existence, which consists in the fact that the demand to love the neighbour, to which the individual is subject in interpersonal relations, always assumes an historically conditioned, which is to say a situation-conditioned, form. Time, left by history, haunts Kierkegaard as guilt. History does not give its content to time; the individual has to fill in time ethically on their own, and its emptiness makes the ethical task an assignment without pause.

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13. Action and Attitude of Mind For an action to be an immediate manifestation of the attitude of mind is primordial and natural. If this were not the case, it would not [143] be possible to talk with any clarity about attitude of mind; its goodness and wickedness could not be illustrated, as happens not least in the proclamation of Jesus of Nazareth. However, it is also certain that the will to do good can be forced by circumstances to express itself in actions that are normally regarded as effects of a brutal attitude of mind. Luther knew this. The authorities were forced to take a hard line and punish criminals, otherwise they could not discharge their office, which consists in protecting the citizens and providing for peace and order. It is even worse—and terrible—that it could also fall to the politician’s lot to make decisions that victimize people. Both misdeeds and the fact that it is an integral part of our existence that one person cannot live without others sacrificing themselves renders the relation between attitude of mind and action ambiguous in our political life. This ambiguity is not due to an unethical attitude of those who perform the actions, in this case the politicians or statespeople; rather, the ambiguity is due to the external conditions of their action, to evil and to the necessity of sacrifice. An ambiguity of a wholly different kind is the ethical-psychological ambiguity of hypocrisy. A human being can have quite other motives for their action than those that normally and immediately bring it about. People deceive, they do not have the attitude of mind they pretend to have with their action. As a rule, the deception is self-deception too, due to a displacement of the motive. Thus, we cannot conclude from an action to attitude of mind with certainty, as the same action can have different motives. There is a difference between the political and the ethical-psychological ambiguities. The political ambiguity is forced on the action from the outside, because injustice, oppression, and the necessity of sacrifice constitute the world of action. The ethical-psychological ambiguity has, on the other hand, its origins in the agent themselves; they act hypocritically, they dissimulate. We have to put up with the political ambiguity, we have to [144] reckon with the psychological one. Politically the action looks wicked without the attitude of mind being so. Psychologically it is the reverse: the action pretends to be good, though the attitude of mind is wicked. But the political and the psychological ambiguity have in common that unambiguity is considered the primordial and natural thing. Neither the political nor the psychological ambiguity can be described without

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presupposing unambiguity as the meaning of action and attitude of mind. The ambiguous relation cannot but be determined as a deviation from the unambiguous relation, a deviation that is forced on us politically, or which we cause ourselves when it is psychological. Ambiguity is different from an arbitrariness that would exclude any match between action and attitude of mind. According to Kierkegaard, in Christianity ambiguity is no longer a deviation, let alone an exception, but what has to be there. What Christians regard as love, is hatred from a human point of view. What is love from a human point of view, is refined self-love from a Christian point of view. The bond between attitude of mind and action is tied unambiguously by given life, and remains so even in the political and psychological-ethical ambiguity because these are and remain deviations from it; but this bond, as Kierkegaard sees it, has been broken in Christianity, and is now tied in an ambiguous way only. Christian life and given life have nothing to do with each other. This is not an idea that occurs for the first time at a later point in his work; it is there from the beginning, already in Fear and Trembling (1843). When Abraham is to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham dissimulates for Isaac: ‘Stupid boy, do you think that I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you think it is God’s command? No, it is my desire.’ And when Isaac invokes God, because Abraham has changed from being his father to being his murderer, Abraham says [145] to himself: ‘Lord in Heaven, I thank You; for it is better that he thinks that I am a monster than that he should lose faith in You’ (SKS 4: 107–8/KW 6: 10–11). Faith requires dissimulation, so the believer becomes completely alien to the others, to the closest relatives, indeed, to them especially. The condition of faith is the absolute loneliness of the individual. And this means that faith banishes joy from human life. Joy is incompatible with what God demands from human beings. Abraham could not, as it is put in Fear and Trembling, ‘forget what God had demanded from him . . .’ ‘Abraham’s eyes were darkened, he saw joy no more’ (SKS 4: 109/KW 6: 12). The problem plays a very important part in Fear and Trembling. It is not treated in terms of attitude of mind and action, but in terms of hiddenness and revelation, the individual person and what is universal. Kierkegaard calls the unambiguous relation between attitude of mind and action ‘becoming revealed in what is ethical and universal’; he calls the ambiguous relation ‘remaining hidden and remaining the individual person’, and this can happen either aesthetically or religiously.

110   The tragic hero, the aesthetic hero, and the knight of faith are compared. The tragic hero is of interest only as confinium [boundary] to the knight of faith. The tragic hero sacrifices himself and everything that is his for the universal: ‘his action, every emotion in him belongs to the universal, he is revealed, and in this revelation he is the beloved son of ethics’. He ‘does not know the dreadful responsibility of loneliness’. The ethical task for the individual is ‘to unravel yourself from your hiddenness and become revealed in the universal’. The aesthetic hero too is only interesting as confinium to the knight of faith, he is only mentioned in one single passage and only with a few words: the aesthetic hero is silent in order to save another person. He is silent, because he foresees that, if he talks, it will be to the other’s misfortune. But ethics does not approve of this; it requires revelation and considers the aesthetic [146] hero’s foresight an illusion. Ethics requires infinite movement, and the only reason the aesthetic hero is able to give for his silence is something as finite and fortuitous as foresight. Properly speaking, the aesthetic hero can talk—but, well, he will not (SKS 4: 200–1/KW 6: 112–14). What Johannes de silentio wants to say is the following, just to clarify it: The situation can arise where the individual person wants to be silent, because they are convinced that, in this particular case, the other will not be able to bear what they say, but will perish by it. However, their silence will never be ethically defensible. We are not allowed to suspect that the other would not be able to bear what we reveal. We are not allowed to issue such a vote of no confidence. The other has a claim to be confronted with the stress test of talk and revelation, and let it depend on themselves whether they will pass the test or succumb. I am not allowed to withhold the test from the other through my silence and hiddenness. Yet it happens that an individual, though fully aware that they defy ethics, is silent and remains hidden for the sake of the other. But the consideration for the other is aesthetic, as one is obviously silent in order that the other shall not succumb, become unhappy, which is something earthly. So, this is an aesthetic suspension of the ethical. Johannes de silentio does not use this expression, but the equivalent one: ‘the aesthetic hero’. What he wants to establish is that an individual cannot be authorized to be silent aesthetically, only religiously, only through an absolute relation to that which is absolute. One can have one’s doubts as to whether Johannes de silentio is right that the aesthetic hero’s silence can never be ethically justified, as surely as there is something called an ethics of exceptions. But this is less important. All that really matters is his portrayal of the knight of faith, to which his aesthetic hero is also only a confinium, as we have said.

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As an example of the silence that builds on the decision and the action as being the will of God, Johannes de silentio mentions that a young man abstains from marrying the girl he loves, because God has given [147] him to understand that it will become a misfortune for him and for her. God has given him to understand this privately, therefore he is bound to silence. We are faced with the paradox: God has placed him as an individual in an absolute relation to what is absolute. He has got the certainty that his silence is justified from its being sheer grief to him, and from not enjoying himself in the silence (SKS 4: 182–3/KW 6: 92–4). But otherwise, it is Abraham who is the example. Johannes de silentio agrees that the duty to love your neighbour derives from God, since what is ethical is obviously universal, and as such divine. But Johannes de silentio adds that this does not mean that human beings through their love of the neighbour enter into a relation to God, because ‘God’ is taken here in the abstract sense of the divine, the universal, duty (SKS 4: 160/KW 6: 68). Now, the ethical relation between Abraham and Isaac is that the father should love his son higher than himself. Therefore, in an ethical sense Abraham is a murderer, and if that is not all there is to say about it, there must be a religious suspension of the ethical (SKS 4: 151/KW 6: 57–8). What does this consist in? Why does Abraham sacrifice Isaac? He does this, because God demands that Abraham prove his faith in that way, and because Abraham wants to demonstrate it—for his own sake. Thus—in contradistinction to ethics where the universal is superior to the individual—in faith the individual is superior to the universal. The ethical itself is the temptation here, which will keep him from doing God’s will (SKS 4: 162/KW 6: 69–71). There is an absolute duty to God, a love of God, which ‘can bring the knight of faith to give his love to the neighbour an expression opposite to that which, ethically speaking, is duty’ (SKS 4: 162/KW 6: 70). The ethical relation, which is that a father should love his son, is degraded to something relative by Abraham’s absolute duty to God, which consists in sacrificing Isaac. In the paradox of faith what is universal is eliminated, and what is left is the highest egoism: Abraham does it for his own sake—and [148] for devotion in its most absolute form: Abraham does it for the sake of God. And it cannot be made comprehensible to anyone else. However, when the absolute duty makes a human being do what ethics forbids, this in no way makes the knight of faith relinquish his love. On the contrary. Abraham loves Isaac, only therefore can he sacrifice him. It is Abraham’s love of Isaac, which, through its contrast to his love of God, renders his action a sacrifice. It is the distress and anxiety of the paradox that he cannot make himself understood, for humanly speaking, considered universally,

112   which is to say as comprehensible, his work is murder. There is nothing higher in what is universal through which he can save himself (SKS 4: 165/KW 6: 73–4). Abraham is, as Johannes de silentio puts it, ‘an emigrant from the sphere of the universal’.xxxix The aesthetic hero is silent for the sake of the other; the tragic hero sacrifices himself, in a public and universal manner. Abraham is outside this, he sacrifices another, Isaac, for his own sake. Abraham cannot talk, because talk transfers a person into the universal; Abraham cannot make himself understood—cannot make it comprehensible that it is a trial. Abraham’s sacrifice is inhuman; it is not merely a sacrifice that the others do not understand, but the believer himself, Abraham, does not understand it. How, then, does he know that he has to make the sacrifice? Faith without understanding; can that be faith? When the believer themselves cannot say anything about the work’s justification, cannot make it comprehensible to themselves, then can it not just as well be something demonic rather than faith? Does it not become a blind decision as to whether it is something demonic or God’s will, when it is incomprehensible to the individual themselves?xl Over against ethics and its demand for revelation stand the secrecy and silence that are the determinations of interiority, and which make a human being something exceptional. But the secrecy and the silence can be both a demon’s captivation and a divinity’s shared knowledge with the individual. The demonic has this in common with [149] the divine: that the individual can enter into an absolute relation to it. In being demonic the individual as individual is superior to the universal. The similarity goes further: demonically possessed persons suffer in their silence too, and they can let this be a proof that their silence is justified. But what is the difference, then, between the demonic and the divine? Johannes de silentio can mention no other difference than that human beings close themselves up in themselves demonically, and therefore demonically self-enclosed persons can talk, whereas religiously silent persons cannot talk, however much they would like to do so (SKS 4: 177–8, 186, 193–4/KW 6: 87–9, 96–7, 104–6). In Fear and Trembling there are two fundamental themes. The one is that the faithful, having infinitely given up everything they love, believe that they shall get it back again. This was discussed in the first chapter. The other is that the faithful cannot reveal themselves, cannot make themselves understood. This fundamental theme is relevant in connection with the question of the relation between action and attitude of mind.

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In Kierkegaard’s other works the question is not that the faithful themselves do not understand their works; it is the other, the beloved, the neighbour only, who does not understand them, or rather misunderstands them of necessity, because those works oppose their temporal inclination for happiness. Ethics is not set aside when another human being, humanly speaking, is rendered unhappy for the sake of their eternal beatitude. This is not unethical but, on the contrary, ethical. It is done for the sake of the other. The question is, however, whether a work done for the other’s sake should not seek the other’s consent to it. This is not to say that the work loses its ethical nature when not accepted. It does not lose goodness by being rejected. But if it seeks to be rejected, it is evil. Understood this way a human being cannot go it alone with respect to ethics without thereby becoming evil. But when Kierkegaard does not confine himself to saying that it may happen [150] that Christian love excites hatred, that it may happen that the reaction to the Christian proclamation is persecution, but when he goes on and lets misunderstanding be characteristic of Christian martyrdom, in contrast to worldly martyrdom, lets it be the criterion of love’s being Christian that it is understood as hatred—then, as I see it, he renders Christian love evil, because it leaves the other out. When there is no Christian love without being misunderstood, it obviously cannot seek the other’s consent. All things considered, Kierkegaard has remained with Abraham in Fear and Trembling. It is not for the sake of the neighbour that Christianity is proclaimed to them, it is not for the sake of the neighbour that they are made the object of Christian love, but it is for the believer’s own sake, for the sake of their own trial. Were it for the neighbour’s sake, then the believer would have to seek the neighbour’s consent with everything they said and did. The aesthetic hero is silent and leaves the other in delusion in order to avoid causing them an even greater misfortune; but the Christian hero provokes the neighbour’s misunderstanding in order to be tried themselves. It has come this far, because Kierkegaard understands Christianity also in the light of his ever-present dichotomy: human beings either live in relation to the idea, or they live in conformity. In order that the attitude of mind can manifest itself unambiguously in our expressions of life, each of them must be definitive in advance. Otherwise it would not make sense at all to speak of their matching, be it unambiguous or ambiguous. Now, the expressions of life are not just definitive as a matter of pure fact, but many of them make the claim on us that we fulfil ourselves in them in their own, definitive way. As a claim that we realize ourselves, it is a claim on our attitude of mind that we be involved in the action, so that the relation between attitude of mind and action is unambiguous. This is due to

114   the fact that we express ourselves to others, and that, unless the relationship is spoiled, they count on our being present in our expression, in our reply and behaviour. They assume that our [151] attitude of mind matches our action. When we express ourselves, our aim is not merely that the other comprehends what is said and done in detachment from us, but we aim at their consenting to our words and works with their accompanying attitude of mind. Therefore, we continue to will the overcoming of disagreement; this does not cease until the day on which disagreement turns to war, so that we go for the other’s throat. Kierkegaard is right that the individual’s relation to what is absolute is and remains hidden. It cannot be read off a human being’s words and works what their relation is to the infinite and eternal demand, whether they are obedient or disobedient. That is inaccessible territory. But if there is nothing over and above this to be said about human existence from an ethical point of view, the relation between attitude of mind and action would be just as opaque as if it were a mere coincidence. However, there is more to be said. Our expressions of life, each in its own way, have a definitive character. Some of them are good in themselves, others bad.xli Action and attitude of mind correspond to each other. Otherwise we could not act hypocritically, and otherwise we could not regard hypocrisy as a deviation. But Kierkegaard has left the definitive expressions of life out, he has let them drown in conformity, and thereby the connection between attitude of mind and action has been broken. But what about indirect communication? It is one thing to communicate dialectically, it is another thing to explain the dialectics of communication, which is itself non-dialectical. It is one thing to communicate indirectly, it is another thing to explain the indirect communication, which is itself direct communication. Kierkegaard knew this as well as anyone, when, in 1847, he considered a plan to give twelve lectures on the dialectics of communication (SKS 20: 115 NB: 192 and SKS 20: 142–3 NB 2: 13/JP 5: 374 and 5: 381). He is fully aware of how dubious an enterprise this is. Since a human being will only win over a very few if they set forth the truth in its truest form, which is to say, indirectly, then according to Kierkegaard only their relation to God can make [152] them do so. Outside the relation to God a human being will compromise with the form and try to say the same in a less true form, and that is to say in a direct form, in order to win over the many and be a success in the world. Kierkegaard admits that, through his straightforward communication about the indirect communication, he seeks to gain

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the understanding of his audience, and that he is well on his way to making human beings the authority instead of God. Yet the reason is not merely that he wants to let his own wisdom rather than God’s be providence; he also thinks that he has a duty to do so. He thinks in this way, because the communicator is also responsible for making the others understand them, so that when it seems that the indirect communication has no effect, ‘it may be their duty, at least as a trial, to choose another form’, even though there is a danger that it is just done out of impatience. Thus he concludes that straightforward and indirect communication must go hand in hand. However, it is a contradictory enterprise, and he makes no secret of that. A communicator desires to be understood and obeys human beings instead of God. The recipient is not repelled into their own ethical existence as an individual, but is on the contrary enticed to imitate the communicator in a straightforward relationship to them. Kierkegaard’s thesis about indirect communication is untenable. This is shown by the notes for his lectures, where he does not content himself with indirect communication, though in his opinion this alone can give rise to ethical existence; but he supplements it with a straightforward explanation of indirect communication, notwithstanding its dissolution of ethical existence. The reason for this contradictory procedure is that, by his indirect communication, he has assumed a responsibility for the effect of the communication, so that he has to try to achieve it in another way, if it does not come about. But taking responsibility for the effect of your communication is tantamount to wanting to force another human being to accept [153] the communication. To be sure, it is Kierkegaard’s proclaimed intention with indirect communication to give the other a free hand. But the result is the opposite. Allegedly the communicator wants to free the recipient from any relation of dependence on them in order to place them alone before God. But the communicator precisely does not want to leave this to the recipient, but through the indirectness of the communication to see to it that it happens. The recipient does not decide themselves whether they will be the individual in ethical existence, but this has already been decided by the communicator on behalf of the recipient through their having repelled the recipient by the indirectness of their communication, as Kierkegaard puts it. The communicator does not leave it to the word itself to work by itself, but helps it towards a determinate effect through the artifice they create with the word. Through

116   their artifice the communicator takes it upon themselves to help God to govern his regimentxlii and take charge of the effect of the word. Could an intimation of this be reflected in the heading Kierkegaard gave to §8 in the draft referred to above, which runs: ‘Concerning indirect communication, how far a human being is permitted to use it, whether there is not something demonic in it’? (SKS 27: 411/JP 1: 288).xliii

Part IV Nothingness 1. Knowledge as It Is Understood in Transcendental Philosophy, and Existence [154] Kierkegaard determines the relation between knowing and existence purely and simply as a contradiction. They are each other’s opposites in every respect. They are not held together by any similarity, but solely by the fact that existing human beings also think. Kierkegaard presupposes the theory of knowledge of transcendental philosophy, and he knows exactly what constitutes its core, namely its claim that imaginationi is the fundamental capacity of human beings. It is due to this insight that Kierkegaard makes it his theory of knowledge. Traditionally, the transcendental philosophers, and also Kierkegaard, assume that our conscious relations to the world, that is to say the relations that involve understanding, are knowledge, emotion, and will, but they add that the understanding that characterizes them and without which they would not exist, is imagination. Two things are meant by this: human beings are productive in their understanding, and this productivity is ultimately not conceptual but intuitive. In his interpretation of Kant (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik [Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics] (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1929))ii Heidegger has shown that already for Kant the productive imagination is the core of knowledge. Anti-Climacus mentions Fichte (SKS 11: 147/KW 19: 31). Imagination does not meet any resistance from without. It creates its own world for itself. And does knowledge do anything else, once everything is understood a priori through the categories that subjectivity itself brings forward? Taken as a whole, consciousness forms its own horizons, within which everything comes into view.¹ [155] With the transcendental theory of knowledge as his starting point, Kierkegaard is led to a first formulation of the contrast between knowing and ¹ It must be added that, for transcendental philosophy, imagination can mean two things. Poetic imagination, which arbitrarily creates its own world for itself in the unreality of illusion, is one thing. Imagination as a productive power is something different; its imagination is anything but arbitrary, because it is intersubjective and yields necessary and universal knowledge. Controverting Kierkegaard. Translated by Hans Fink and Kees van Kooten Niekerk, Introduced by Bjørn Rabjerg, with notes by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern. Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern, Oxford University Press. © Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198874768.003.0004

118   existence: to think is to translate reality into possibility, whereas to exist is to maintain one’s own reality. When knowledge is governed by the productive imagination, it can never be reality but always only possibility that we know. In Kierkegaard’s own words: the representation of the self is its possibility. If we could know reality instead of its possibility, the individual would have to ‘be able to identify absolutely with the objective’; in other words, then the nature of knowledge would have to be assimilation, as is the case in Thomistic theory of knowledge or intellectual intuition as spoken about in idealistic philosophy (SKS 7: 522; 4: 319/KW 12: 574, 8: 11). But for Kierkegaard these kinds of views are not worth discussing. The impossibility of one’s being able to identify with what is objective is simply sufficient as a self-evident argument that knowledge is always concerned with possibility only, it is not an assertion that is in any way in need of a proof—Kierkegaard takes the transcendental theory of knowledge for granted as a matter of course.² In other words, insofar as consciousness, through the categories with which it operates, pretends to know what appears in the categories, it indeed assumes the unity of thinking and being, [156] but since the categories are consciousness’s own, because the core of knowledge is imagination, the unity of thinking and being can never be anything but hypothetical. The medium of thought is and remains possibility. But what, then, is existence? It is the annulling of possibility through decision and action. It is true that everything can be made the subject of thinking, including action—that is to say either before or after its performance—but this does not alter the fact that action itself annuls possibility, as it does not make the contrast between thinking and acting more moderate either; for when the decision has been made, so that the actual act has been performed, even before it has been carried out externally, we have to leave out thinking in the meantime. The decision forbids reconsideration, for this can just as well rescind the decision. Kierkegaard also specifies the contrast in a somewhat different way. Having established that we do not know reality itself but always only its possibility, it is conceivable that someone might object: but surely I must have adequate knowledge of my own reality! For it is identical with my knowledge of it.

² In The Concept of Anxiety it is said: ‘The notion that thought has reality was assumed by all ancient and medieval philosophy. With Kant, this assumption became doubtful’. And, Vigilius Haufniensis continues, the Hegelian philosophy has not sufficiently considered and overcome Kant’s scepticism so that it merely supposes that unlike ancient and medieval philosophy, it has demonstrated that thought has reality. But in Hegelian as well as in ancient and medieval philosophy it is and remains simply a presupposition that is taken for granted—in other words, it has not been proven (SKS 4: 319/KW 8: 11).

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Well, it depends on what is understood by ‘my own reality’. If it is my own psychological reality that is meant, I do not know it as anything other than possibility either. Isn’t there, then, any reality at all that is not translated into possibility through my knowledge of it? Yes, there is one: my own ethical reality. For, I have infinite certainty of this, because it is a certainty not through knowing and thinking, but in the internal act of decision.³ When what is known is something historical, one more reason is added for its being known as possible only, namely that ‘everything historical, [157] in as much as it must be known, is eo ipso past and has the quality of recollection’. All historical knowledge is approximate, even when it concerns the individual’s own past. Only the individual’s own knowledge of their own ethical reality is neither possible nor approximate, because it is not historical but ‘an expression of what is eternal in me’ (SKS 7: 522/KW 12.1: 574). One more, and very important, characteristic of imagination or productive imagination,iii which according to transcendental philosophy is the soul of knowledge, plays a decisive part for Kierkegaard. It is that imagination is ‘the medium of infinitizing’. Imagination is not just a capacity on a par with the other capacities, but a capacity that underlies them: ‘When all is said and done, whatever of feeling, knowing, and willing a human being has depends upon what imagination they have’ (SKS 11: 147/KW 19: 31). Similarly, infinitizing is not just a movement on a par with other possible movements within the individual, but the movement that together with finitizing actually constitutes the existence of the self. When Kierkegaard adopts the transcendental view of our understanding of the world as a productive activity of intuition, in which imagination is the core of knowledge, emotion, and will, he probably does this ultimately because transcendental philosophy at the same time does justice to the movement of infinitizing and demonstrates the danger of not going beyond the movement of infinitizing, because this movement both characterizes human beings and makes them betray their existence. If one does not go beyond it, the self loses itself, for when imagination constitutes the movement of infinity, it does not meet resistance; the self gets lost in a world that is boundless, because it is created by the infinitizing imagination. Human beings come to live in fantasy through imagination’s infinitizing of the activity of knowing, emotion, and will, thereby forgetting that they are a [158] finite, ³ For Kant, too, one’s own psychological reality is part of what the individual only knows as possibility; but whereas for Kant the remaining thing that cannot be translated into possibility is pure apperception (the unity of self-consciousness), for Kierkegaard it is my own ethical reality in the internal act of decision.

120   limited and, concrete self. Anti-Climacus describes it further: emotion is no longer an individual human being’s emotion on their own behalf, but a kind of abstract sensitivity on behalf of humankind. Self-knowledge does not keep up with knowledge but, on the contrary, the self wastes itself in seeking knowledge, which therefore—without self-knowledge—gets an inhuman character. And no will remains at all to ‘carry out the infinitely small part of work that can be accomplished this very day, this very hour, this very moment’ (SKS 11: 148/KW 19: 32). This does not mean, however, that the self acknowledges its final and limited concrete existence when it just stays within it and abstains from making the movement of infinity. On the contrary, in that case finitude is merely infinitized in another way: it becomes one’s idol, one expects everything from it, one relates absolutely to what is relative. No, without infinity the self cannot acknowledge its finitude, but the infinity now referred to is not that of imagination but rather that of the demand. Therefore, when Kierkegaard characterizes human existence as a synthesis of infinity and finitude, of eternity and temporality, then infinity and eternity are a demand prior to their being imagination, as surely as what Kierkegaard means to say when speaking of the synthesis is that human existence is action and not knowing.

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2. The Synthesis between Infinity and Finitude, between Eternity and Temporality For Kierkegaard human existence is a synthesis between infinity and finitude, between eternity and temporality, because [159] infinity and eternity are present in human existence as a demand.⁴ Kierkegaard connects his view with the question of the individual’s identity. The individual is not the same as a matter of course, merely in virtue of being consciousness, but only in virtue of their relation to infinity and eternity. The continuous movement, the uninterrupted oscillation which our life consists in, threatens to dissolve the human being’s identity. Therefore, to be one and the same is a continuous task, and the individual can win their identity in and through the alternation in their existence only through the relation to infinity and eternity. If they do not concern themselves about their relation to infinity and eternity, their identity is lost and they become, as Concluding Unscientific Postscript puts it, an ‘inhuman millipede’ (SKS 7: 162/KW 12.1: 176). But insofar as infinity and eternity are directed as a demand to existence, and place the individual in the decision, the individual can win their identity, their self, only in transforming their existence in relation to infinity and eternity. Kierkegaard’s view involves a polemic against any substantial understanding of the self, and his polemic has been of importance to continental philosophy and theology. But we find a polemic against a substantial understanding of the self in the Anglo-Saxon, empiricist, philosophy as well, where the polemic against it has a long tradition. Setting up a confrontation between the two may therefore be appropriate. According to Bertrand Russell, from a scientific point of view there does not seem to be such a being as a soul or a self; a person is a series of events, which are bound together in certain intimate relations, of which memory is the most important one (Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1949), p. 139). To bring the terminology closer to Kierkegaard’s: a person is movement and not a substance that endures through time. But Russell does more than dissociate himself from understanding the self as a substance. The claim that the identity of a person is given once [160] and for all need not take the form of the assertion that the soul is something substantial, as was the case in traditional metaphysics. It can also take the form ⁴ In Kunst og etik [Art and Ethics], in the essay concerning ‘Kierkegaards tale om åndsforholdets fordoblelse’ [‘Kierkegaard’s account of the doubling of spirit’], I have given a detailed exposition of the syntheses that for Kierkegaard constitute human existence. Therefore, the present account is briefer and sketchier.iv

122   of the assertion that personhood is a whole, a unifying principle, so that everything that belongs to a single consciousness permeates and modifies each other and, thereby, achieves a quality that makes it different from everything that belongs to the consciousness of another human being. Russell disputes this assertion too. It is true, he says, that a mutual influencing takes place between what belongs within a single human being’s consciousness, but this influencing happens according to general psychological laws, and it does not have the character of a mutual permeating that presupposes that consciousness is a whole. It is also true that there are no two human beings whose experiences are identical, but that is due to the fact that their experiences are private and not to a specific and individual quality which belongs to them. Put briefly, the view that personhood is something irreducible is not supported by the sciences. A person consists in certain occurrences which are grouped together, and the grouping is brought about by causal laws (Religion and Science, pp. 205–8, pp. 138–43). Likewise, Kierkegaard has no interest in claiming that personhood is both a static and an irreducible quality that endows everything that the individual experiences with an individual stamp. Such considerations are not to be found in his works. In this respect his view does not differ from an empiricist one. Put briefly, neither for Kierkegaard nor for Russell is existence or a person’s identity something static. They follow the same path in what they are polemicizing against here. But then there is a parting of the ways. This is not because Kierkegaard does not think that everything that goes on in the existence of a human being is determined just as much as Russell does. For Kierkegaard what goes on is, however, determined by the others—his view is ethical; whereas for Russell it is determined causally—his view is scientific. For the empiricist [161] it is a matter of a scientifically defensible explanation of what it is to be a person; for Kierkegaard, on the other hand, the question of a subject’s identity is neither a psychological nor a phenomenological question, but an ethical-religious one. What it is to be an identical subject, a ‘self ’, is decided—ethically—in the decision and not through a dispute about the unity of consciousness. The individual becomes the same, a self, in the relation to themselves that is occasioned by the infinite demand.v The reason why eternity presents itself as a demand is that the human being has broken away from eternity and lives in the loss of it. And that expresses itself in existence being movement and becoming. That, too, is not for Kierkegaard a psychological or phenomenological determination of human existence as it actually is, but an ethical-religious one. The eternal, the infinite,

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is negatively present in human existence, and existence consists in the movement and becoming that, as it were, is set in motion by that negativity. In eternity, where a human being possesses everything, there is neither movement nor becoming, and therefore no existence. By speaking about the synthesis between infinity and finitude, between eternity and temporality, Kierkegaard wants to say two things. First, human existence contains a contradiction; eternity and infinity are present in human existence in a negative way only. And secondly, human existence is action rather than knowledge, because the synthesis has the character of a demand. To confront once more the church father of existentialism with the heir of empiricism: In ‘My Mental Development’, the short introduction written to The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, the book about his philosophy that was published in 1946,vi Russell himself says that he had hoped to find religious satisfaction in philosophy. He had wished fervently that there was something eternal, non-human, he could relate to in admiration and awe. Those who [162] try to make a religion out of humanism and who do not recognize anything greater than human beings do not give him emotional satisfaction, it is said. But what does this say, if translated into Kierkegaard’s terminology, other than that Russell’s starting point was the desire that human existence should consist in a synthesis between finitude and infinity, temporality and eternity? But what their understanding of this synthesis involves more precisely is something to which Russell has not given much thought, as he felt forced to give it up early on, while by contrast it is the focus of the entirety of Kierkegaard’s thought—so their respective understanding is as different as can be imagined. Whereas Kierkegaard’s understanding of the synthesis is ethical, Russell imagined that it should consist in knowing and thinking, and thus be of an aesthetic nature, judged from Kierkegaard’s point of view. As one might expect, Russell speaks of admiration and awe. Nevertheless, perhaps the question of a person’s identity is connected not only for Kierkegaard but also for Russell with the adopted attitude in the philosophy of religion. Without the relation to infinity and eternity the individual is not a self, according to Kierkegaard. Through the denial of infinity and eternity, the question of a person’s identity is annulled by Russell, even though he has not made the connection between the two himself.

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3. The Doubling of the Relation of Spirit Above, in connection with my account of the dissolution of the ethical life of the people and the doubling of the relation of spirit, I have concerned myself with viewpoints in which Kierkegaard follows Hegel. Now I come to the point where Kierkegaard dissociates himself from Hegel. As was said previously, we also find in Hegel the idea of the doubling of the relation of spirit. He says: By virtue of being spirit, human beings double themselves, they do not merely exist in the immediate way of natural things, but they also exist for themselves. They intuit themselves, imaginatively represent themselves [163], think themselves, and only by existing for themselves in these ways are human beings spirit. When, therefore, what exists enters into human intuition and imaginative representation, it is through human beings that it comes into existence for human beings, as human beings actually intuit and represent themselves. For Hegel consciousness and consciousness of oneself is one and the same thing. For him the fundamental phenomenon is consciousness or spirit as the human being’s coming into existence for themselves. Human beings achieve consciousness of themselves in two ways: a theoretical way and a practical way. In a theoretical way, human beings make themselves conscious of themselves internally, that is to say, they become conscious of what moves in their breast, whether they have received it from without or have called it up from within. In a practical way, human beings have a drive to express themselves in what is available in an immediate and external way, in order to knowvii themselves therein. This happens ‘through a transformation of the things of the external world, which consists in impressing the seal of one’s own interior on them, in order to find one’s own determinations again’. One deprives ‘the external world of its refractory strangeness’, and can, ‘in the form of things, just enjoy that which is an external reality for oneself ’ (Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, p. 58).viii As boldly as can be, action is here subordinated to knowing, the action’s purpose is obtaining knowledge. This is connected with Hegel’s mediating; he does not content himself with the split into will and nature, abstract and concrete, which was Kant’s mode of thinking. Hegel wants to dissolve the contrast, not in the sense that it and its two parts should vanish, but in the sense that it is recognized that they exist only in being reconciled. He praises Schiller for having protested, even before philosophy did, against a conception of nature, emotion, and sensation as barriers to the abstract infinity of thought, and as barriers to duty for duty’s sake. Schiller was a

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pioneer because he demanded reconciliation and totality (Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, pp. 88–9, 96). Kierkegaard attacks both views. He turns [164] Hegel’s ranking of knowing and action upside down, and, by his assertion that infinity and eternity are present in human existence only in a negative way, he excludes in advance any idea of mediating between what is infinite and finite. Whereas for Hegel human beings are spirit in virtue of having consciousness and knowledge and relating to themselves through them, in Kierkegaard’s view this is not so straightforward. Human beings become spirit in the loss of eternity only, in their breaking away from it. That is to say, whereas for Hegel human beings are spirit through being their own and the world’s sovereign through knowing, action, and production of art, in Kierkegaard’s view human beings have no possibilities of being sovereign, neither eternally nor in time. As spirit, human beings have a sham sovereignty only, which consists in lack of freedom and in guilt, and it is obtained by breaking away from eternity, wherefrom and towards which human beings have their life. In Kierkegaard’s account of what he understands by the doubling of the relation of spirit, there is an unspoken polemic against Hegel, not least in his strict and definitive distinction between the synthesis of body and soul and that of infinity–finitude; for one could say that the precondition of Hegel’s subordination of action to knowing as well as of his mediation between infinity and finitude is that he does not keep those two syntheses apart. Consciousness and spirit (self ) are the same. And when Kierkegaard, through his distinction between those two syntheses, dissociates himself from Hegel, the reason is, to put it somewhat crudely, that the soul–body synthesis is the synthesis of consciousness and knowing, whereas the synthesis between infinity and finitude, between eternity and temporality, is the synthesis of action.⁵ ⁵ The soul–body synthesis cannot exist by itself, but must be sustained by a new synthesis between finitude and infinity, which is what first renders a human being a self. Anthropologists and sociologists will agree with Kierkegaard that the soul–body synthesis cannot sustain itself; but the reasons they will give for this is that this requires an instinctual security and a specialization of the organic equipment which we only find in animals, whereas the instinctual insecurity and lack of specialization of the organic equipment in human beings rules out the soul– body synthesis being able to sustain itself. The anthropologists and sociologists will, therefore, also agree with Kierkegaard that, as far as human beings are concerned, a synthesis is required. The difference is only that, whereas the new synthesis which the anthropologists and sociologists have in view is a human being’s relation to norms, for Kierkegaard it is the relation to infinity and eternity. But this does not mean that anthropologists and sociologists are committed to thinking that human beings everywhere and always are bound to the norms in a conformist way. The individual can take up a free and critical attitude to them, and they do so, being well aware that the norms, to use Keil’s expression, are blind to the situation. Therefore, the two syntheses have a different structure (cf. Siegfried Keil’s comparison of the sociological and theological problem in the beginning of his book Sexualität [Sexuality] (Kohlhammer: Stuttgart 1966)).

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4. Nothingness and Action [165] Not only Hegel, but also Socrates and Plato, subordinate action to knowing. But over the course of time Kierkegaard comes to disrespect Hegel, while he retains respect for Socrates and Plato. How can this be, when all three make existence into knowing instead of action? The answer is straightforward: Hegel makes the absolute immanent, whereas in the thought of Socrates and Plato transcendence remains transcendence—according to Kierkegaard’s own interpretation of them, which is all that interests us here, and which is all I will be discussing.⁶ Because Socrates and Plato do not mediate, Kierkegaard falls for them; because Hegel mediates, he has very soon only disdain left for him. But this means that Kierkegaard’s controverting of Plato is not really adequate. His controverting of Hegel is certainly radical, but his controverting of Plato is not. Kierkegaard believes that Platonism and Christianity agree that it is the task of human beings to die away from life, though with the difference that whereas [166] the Greek tradition understands the task intellectually, Christianity understands it morally. Since true knowing, which is knowledge of the ideas, is not fulfilled adequately and without impediments until the soul’s postexistence, when it is freed from the body, the philosopher longs for death. What they die away from is something indifferent, that is to say, sensory knowledge; what they die away to is something very abstract, because the existence of ideas prior to things, beyond any concrete existence, is something they cannot imagine. Just as the ideas are conceived in an abstract and formless way, so equally the soul is conceived of as devoid of predicates and indeterminately, the activity of which in its pre-existence as well as in its postexistence consists in knowing the ideas. It is admittedly true that Plato’s speculative longing for death presupposes that immortality is something positive, but in his own thoughts about it, it appears to be de facto so abstract and evanescent that it is almost negative (On the Concept of Irony, SKS 1: 127–8/KW 2: 67–70). All this is in contradistinction to Christianity, where the human being’s dying away from life is understood morally. What one dies away from is not something indifferent, but sin, and what one dies away to is something positive, a divine life. Therefore, in Christianity the human being’s dying away from life happens in action, in the transformation of existence.

⁶ Kierkegaard’s sympathy for Socrates and Plato undoubtedly induces him to draw them into a far closer proximity to himself than is in fact justified. But I disregard this.

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All that matters for the individual human being is their relation to transcendence. Only one way of living is worthy for human beings and that is dying away from life, using it to long for death. Everything else is letting oneself be ensnared by what is relative, and that is lethargy and befuddlement. Platonism and Christianity are in agreement about this. The difference is that whereas in Platonism transcendence is conceived of so abstractly that, all things considered, even though Platonism doesn’t realize it, transcendence is virtually negative, by contrast in Christianity transcendence is conceived of as something positive—that is, something positive about which nothing positive can be said, and which does not render anything positive in immanent existence either. But what, then, remains of the difference? How does the positivity of the Christian transcendence, about [167] which nothing positive can be said, and which only has negative effects in immanent existence, differ from the negativity of the Greek transcendence? The answer can be formulated as follows: It is characteristic of knowing that the more adequate and unhindered it is, the more what is known dominates, and the less important the knowing subject becomes. The more perfect knowing is, the less is the part that the subject plays, and conversely, the more flawed and partial a knowing is, the greater is the part that the subject plays as the source of its flawed and partial character. Therefore, if transcendence consists in a knowing that transcendence makes perfect, the subject becomes correspondingly unimportant. This must be the reasoning that underlies Kierkegaard’s claim that in Platonism transcendence is negativity, because it is knowing. The positivity of transcendence in Christianity means that the transcendent is a demand and the immanent life is action. Admittedly, the positivity of the transcendent is present in the immanent only in negativity, but yet we know that the negativity in the immanent is not sheer negativity, but the effect of positivity, and we know this from the fact that the negativity is a demand for action. And now, one may not object to Kierkegaard that this difference is not sufficient, namely the difference that Christianity is all about demand and action whereas Platonism is all about knowing—but that after all we still need to know something more precisely about the content of transcendence in these two traditions. For, in making this objection, one would have already opted for Platonism, and made the admission to it that knowledge is all that matters. In making this objection, one has already said that one will not be content that it is action, and action alone, that matters, and this is tantamount to saying that one will not content oneself with Christianity. All this may seem as if Kierkegaard conceives of the difference between Platonism and Christianity as radically as the issue [168] requires. But

128   this is an illusion, because the action that characterizes Christianity relates just as negatively to life on earth as does knowing in Platonic philosophy (as Kierkegaard understood it). Whether transcendence (speaking with the Greeks) is the seeing of the ideas, or (speaking with the Christians) is a divine life, the access to it is an annihilation of everything that exists and that we know. Of course, Kierkegaard has grasped a decisive difference between Platonism and Christianity, when he points out that in Platonism what we die away from is something indifferent, that is, sensory knowledge, whereas in Christianity what we die away from is of infinite significance, that is, sin. Yet sin is conceived of in light of Platonic presuppositions, because just as sin consists in making the indifferent infinitely significant (relating absolutely to what is relative), so overcoming sin consists in relating indifferently to the indifferent (relating relatively to what is relative). Christianity is conceived in the image of Platonism. Due to eternity, nothingness becomes the fundamental condition on which human beings are to live their life. This expresses itself in several ways. The individual does not first become guilty by abusing their possibilities of life, but without guilt the individual cannot become a self, cannot become spirit at all. Human beings are already guilty, because their existence is an existence in time. But first and foremost it is nothingness that gives human life its structure as possibility, as becoming, as has been explained above. Kierkegaard’s sense of negativity appears already in his preference for and interpretation of Socrates as the philosopher who does not let himself be captivated by any relativity, due to his irony which leaves it open whether in the end the absolute isn’t nothing. However, is it right to assert that in Kierkegaard’s view nothingness is the fundamental condition? Does it not make all the difference in the world whether [169] a human being understands their life from eternity, or whether they look nothingness in the eye? Using Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] as a comparison: Whereas for Heidegger anxiety is anxiety concerning nothingness, for Kierkegaard eternity lies behind nothingness. Whereas anxiety in Heidegger’s thinking is anxiety concerning the infinite meaninglessness of one’s own existence, for Kierkegaard it is anxiety concerning the infinite meaningfulness of one’s own existence, although it makes itself felt as nothingness in anxiety’s ignorance. To use Heidegger’s terminology: in the same existential (that is to say formal-philosophical) understanding of anxiety, the existentiell understanding is the opposite.ix But here it must be said that existence does not become positive by claiming that the positivity of eternity lies behind nothingness. On the contrary, annihilation then becomes our very task, so that human existence becomes

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even more negatively determined than when it is just pointed out that nothingness is our condition; in the latter case, our task becomes actually no more than to look nothingness in the eye in all that we may be doing. For Kierkegaard, what characterizes human beings is an infinite striving, the negativity of which is due to a positivity: beatitude. If there is no negativity, this is worse than if there is no positivity, for if there is no negativity, positivity loses its infinity for the individual. For positivity to be present in human existence in a positive way, it gets finiteness from human finiteness and becomes mediocrity, bourgeois life, and conformity. If there is no infinity, there is no subjectivity; they are the same. Therefore, Kierkegaard also summarizes it as: no infinite becoming a subject without negativity. It is a leading idea in Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity that eternity loses its significance, if this life incorporates expressions of life that are given to us in order to fulfil them in a positive and straightforward way. Eternity can only become everything for human beings who have been given this life in order suffer it all the way through. Oddly enough Kierkegaard, whose thinking he himself claims to be determined first and last [170] by Christianity, has obtained a far-ranging significance for a modern philosophy that is atheistic and irreligious. Nihilism is Christianly inspired. This is due to Kierkegaard’s assertion that nothingness, and nothingness alone, renders the individual’s action ethical in an outstanding and strict sense, sensu eminenti, as Kierkegaard tends to say. Kierkegaard is at the same time the thinker of negativity and of ethical action. To the same degree that this combination is peculiar, so its impact continues to be considerable right up to the present day. Apparently, Kierkegaard satisfies an inclination in our time to unify nihilism and high morality. And these can of course be unified very well in the individual’s personal existence, existentially as it is called; but philosophically the combination of nothingness and ethics is nevertheless an illusion, as I shall try to show. According to Socrates (on Kierkegaard’s interpretation) finitude was the existing, the useful, the mediocre, and so it is for Kierkegaard. Socrates taught Plato ‘to lose sight of finitude and steer out upon the Oceanus, where ideal striving and ideal infinity recognize no alien considerations, but are themselves their infinite goal’ (SKS 1: 178/KW 2: 126). Kierkegaard understands Christianity in the image of this ideality. God has no idea that the neighbour ought to be helped in their worldly needs; this is a foreign consideration. God has not given human beings the humane possibility of compassion in order to render that help, but God is God’s own infinite aim. Love of the neighbour consists in helping the neighbour to love God.

130   So thoroughly has Kierkegaard occupied himself with Socrates and Plato that ideality has got into his blood, his thought and emotions carry it along everywhere, even in his understanding of Christianity.⁷ Ideality provides the basic concepts with which [171] he determines what is Christian. And this forces him to exaggerate that difference between Christianity and Platonism, which can find room only within the ideality through which both are understood. The difference between knowing, which is the focus of Platonism, and action, which is the focus of Christianity, is boosted artificially. Of course Kierkegaard is right that there is this difference, everyone knows that the attitude of Greek philosophy and its ethics are intellectualistic, compared with Christianity. But this difference spreads throughout his works; it can be found in increasing profusion, in order to conceal that ideality which his understanding of Christianity shares with Platonism. He is not able to break free from it, he does not reach a point where he can come to see that it is ideality that constitutes the difference between Platonism and Christianity, and therefore he is incapable of giving a reasonable account of the difference of the interplay between knowing and action in Platonism and Christianity respectively. Through an—admittedly grandiloquent—sophistry, he tears knowing and action apart, in order to give Platonism knowing without action, and give Christianity action without knowing, both of which are sheer constructions. Kierkegaard’s dependence on idealism appears also in the dominant part that abstraction plays in his understanding of what is religious and Christian. He takes over the abstract self from Hegel, backdating it to Plato. But in spite of his critical demonstration that Plato comprehended the existence of the soul abstractly and negatively—not merely in its pre-existence and post-existence, but also in its temporal existence—the soul is abstract and negative in his own religious [172] thinking too (SKS 1: 130–1/KW 2: 164). Because abstraction plays just as great a part in his own religious thinking as it does in Greek thought, in order then to maintain the total difference between his own view and that of the Greeks, he has yet another reason to set knowing and action at odds with one another, and to assert that everything depends on whether the abstract and negative soul is one of knowing or one of action.

⁷ A terminological remark: By idealism I understand Platonism and not, as Wilhelm Anz does, the modern identity philosophy represented in different versions by Goethe and Hegel, and which differs crucially from Platonism. Cf. Wilhelm Anz, Kierkegaard und der deutsche Idealismus [Kierkegaard and German Idealism] (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1956), pp. 70–1. The treatise by Anz is, incidentally, a thorough account of the relation between Hegel and Kierkegaard in the history of ideas, and it results in a precise and perspicacious criticism of Kierkegaard.

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However, the difference is carried so far that only two actions are Christianly possible. When Kierkegaard states that it is action and not knowing that matters, he cannot ignore concrete existence, and he does not do so either. As it is the individual’s task to take over the fundamental conditions of nothingness, it is their task to take over their concrete existence as it actually is, and not insist on determining imaginatively and by themselves how it shall be in order to be willing to take it over. But when Kierkegaard devotes so many considerations to the taking over of concrete existence, mustn’t he, then, have an eye for life in agency? It cannot be inferred that he has, because taking over concrete existence may mean no more than accepting the conditions of your life. This is even the most natural understanding, whether it is a question of the individual and destined fundamental conditions or of those of nothingness. And this is not acting, it is still merely taking over the conditions on which alone actions can be performed. Only where the conditions of life present difficulties and are harmful in a way that is unbearable, does the taking over of them, the willing to bear them nevertheless, constitute action. It is therefore in the struggle with that problem, too, that Kierkegaard’s thinking has been formed. This is one action that is Christianly possible. The other is Christian martyrdom. This is because, if one claims that Kierkegaard does not seek to derive the goal of action from negativity, but from the positivity that transcendence is in Christianity, one has to add that for Kierkegaard there is no access to transcendence as positivity except through annihilation. Therefore, this becomes [173] the only goal of action. And since annihilation as access to eternity is suffering, the goal of action becomes more specifically suffering. This is the other action that is Christianly possible. Kierkegaard has made the difference between action and knowing so great that no action is possible on the conditions of Christianity, except for the taking over of existence that is unbearable and for the self-chosen Christian martyrdom. This is because all other actions require knowledge and cannot be performed on the condition of nothingness. When the condition is that of nothingness, the problem is the character of the relationship between the three entities that are integral to all other actions: goal, motive, and conditions. It goes without saying that no goal can be derived from nothingness (except for the two Christianly possible actions mentioned above); on the contrary, the goal must motivate the action in spite of the condition. Without knowledge of the goal there is no action, but this knowledge cannot be derived from nothingness. On the other hand, nothingness can clear the goal of action and its knowledge of the illusions which we indulge

132   in through our conformist busyness. This is a negative influence, and this is the influence nothingness can have. However, nothingness can only succeed in its work of disillusioning us through the separation of goal and motive, rendering the goal indifferent and weakening the motive. The goal loses its attraction, the motive its impetus. Kierkegaard’s purpose is to relate action sensu eminenti closely and intimately to the fundamental conditions of our existence. But the opposite happens. Our life in agency, understood positively, and the fundamental conditions of our existence, come to have nothing to do with one another, and they cannot, when the fundamental conditions are those of nothingness. By the way, they cannot in Heidegger either, in his work Sein und Zeit [Being and Time]. To be called out of being lost in ‘the one’, in order to become oneself as an individual, face to face with nothingness, is what Heidegger calls ‘resoluteness’. But this is not resoluteness to act, but to accept the conditions of nothingness and its [174] disillusioning significance for our actions—which continue to stem from conformity. If I am allowed to use an analogy, in Kierkegaard and Heidegger nothingness has a similar function as pure reason has in Kant. And if I am also allowed to make use of a somewhat disrespectful metaphor: in Kant reason is too pure to provide the will with one single goal, so that the will is bound to continue getting its goals from sources as impure as desire and inclinations, until they are set free after having been sent, in the form of maxims, through the universalizing purification plant of reason, and having had their eudaimonism filtered out. Likewise, in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, nothingness is too pure to provide one single goal for action, so that action is bound to continue getting its goals from a source as impure as conformity, as the goal and the motive are not set free until they have been sent through the disillusioning purification plant of nothingness, and have had their illusions filtered out.

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5. Knowledge and Reflection When the individual looks nothingness in the eye, what, then, happens in the individual’s consciousness to possibility and becoming, into which nothingness transforms human existence? The answer is that, since nothingness cannot be known, possibility and coming into being of existence are reflected in the individual’s consciousness as an eternal worry and restlessness. Anything that can be known, that is to say, what you can put behind you and from which you can go on, is and remains indifferent, even though your knowledge is perfectly correct. Only what the individual can never be finished with—namely nothingness—is of importance for them, which is to say of infinite importance. This cannot be grasped in knowing, and because nothingness is the fundamental condition of our existence, [175] unknowability becomes the decisive existential criterion of truth. But then what happens is that the roles of what was the basic phenomenon (nothingness) and what was the effect in consciousness (restlessness) shift. The eternal worry, into which nothingness turns the possibility and becoming of our existence in our reflection on nothingness, is made the criterion of what is the fundamental condition of existence and what is not. Kierkegaard knows from the restlessness of thought that no other conditions of our existence can claim to be so fundamental as that of nothingness. For one could ask: How does Kierkegaard know that a human being can become a self, can live authentically, in guilt only? Why is it excluded that a human being can become a self in trust, compassion, love, sincerity, faithfulness? How does he know that a human being’s fundamental condition presents itself in anxiety only? How does he know that it is not a fundamental condition that presents itself in an individual’s joy, so that this is a fundamental mood too? He knows this from human consciousness, which keeps within it a criterion that separates anxiety out from all other emotions, and which separates consciousness of guilt and longing for death out from all other expressions of life as the only ones in which human beings are themselves. And this criterion is that only that state of mind, that mood, that thinking which is in eternal worry, is a true one. But the only thing which sets the mind and thinking in eternal worry is nothingness. Kierkegaard knows from restlessness, from unknowability, that there are no other fundamental conditions than those of negativity. This recurs in Kierkegaard’s understanding of love of the neighbour. He claims that trust, compassion, sincerity, even sacrifice, being the humane expressions of life that they actually are, are compromises, since they are to the benefit and utility of the individual themselves, because they are

134   understood by others. This is, however, hardly the whole story. What is wrong with them too, according to Kierkegaard, and which is perhaps even more compromising for them, is that the individual can rest in their fulfilment, [176] being secure in their sovereignty. They lack worry and restlessness. This shows their mediocrity. Only one single work is without compromise, is whole and undivided, and that is the love of the beloved that consists in helping him or her to love God, and having this love interpreted as hatred. This work is marked by the stigmata of eternity, the suffering it causes is never relieved. Love produces the suffering, intensifies it and is tested by it. Love and suffering keep each other in an infinite movement, stasis is not possible, there is no equilibrium, incessantly it starts all over again. Love and suffering must condition each other in order that love can become restless, and, as restless, be determined eternally. In love of the neighbour it similarly appears that the individual can relate to transcendence in restlessness only. Kierkegaard’s enthusiasm for ideality’s reflection in the enthusiasm of consciousness, his interest in consciousness’s becoming eternal worry and restlessness, is a romantic interest; his contempt for the expression of life that the individual rests in, his view of them as sheer lethargy, is a romantic contempt. What is knowable must have reality. Nothingness cannot be known. The restless preoccupation of thought with the breaking through of nothingness into our existence in death, guilt, and anxiety is not knowing but endless reflection. The acknowledgement of unknowable nothingness as the fundamental condition of our existence therefore further reinforces an abyss between knowledge and reflection. And as surely as we can act only on the basis of knowledge, never on the basis of reflection, and as surely as nothingness cannot be known but gives rise only to reflection, the combination of action and negativity, of ethics and nothingness, that sustains Kierkegaard’s thinking, turns out to be illusory. Thorkild Bjørnvigx states that for a reflecting person everything is one and the same, that is, ‘. . . eternal reflection, which scorches everything and trivializes everything, reflection, which is hardly distinguishable from [177] knowing, but in reality is its ape. One might say’, he continues, ‘that reflection mirrors the world in a closed mind, while knowledge is action, which opens the mind and connects it with the world’ (Kains Alter [Cain’s Altar] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1964), p. 112). There are other forms of reflection than the one Bjørnvig refers to, and which he calls the levelling down and trivializing one. There is the irony we know from Romantic theory, which

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annihilates everything; there is the debunking we know from Nietzsche, which is incessant debunking; and there is the reflection we are discussing here, which nothingness initiates and never lets out of its grip. But all forms of reflection have in common that in them the individual traps themselves within themselves and is prevented from acting. Action only comes about through a knowing that opens up the world. For Kierkegaard it is, however, not a question of action in general; on the contrary, it is a question of the action the individual performs on their own behalf, in contradistinction to the busyness in which the individual hurries or idles when they are tied by the leash of conformity. The condition for the individual to come to act on their own behalf is that they reflect on themselves and thereby detach themselves from the existing world, which again is conditioned by the individual’s relating to the absolute. But the absolute is present in the individual’s existence in negativity only because it lies beyond our existence. This is what Kierkegaard says, but there is more that should be said. When the individual’s reflection on themselves becomes a reflection on negativity, reflection becomes infinite, it is set in a perpetual beginning again by the negativity, in a perpetually intensifying reproduction of itself, which precludes action coming about. A human being can only act through having reflection being brought to a halt. A human being can only bring reflection to a halt by betraying negativity. To sum up: In contrast to the Greek tradition, where knowledge is the human task, Kierkegaard claims—with Christianity—[178] that action is the human task. However, in diametrical opposition to his intention, Kierkegaard excludes action, partly by creating enmity between action and knowledge, and partly by letting reflection, inspired by nothingness, take the place of knowledge.

Editors’ Notes Where full bibliographical details of a work referred to in the notes are not given here, they can be found in the ‘Select Bibliography’, while abbreviations are explained in the ‘Translators’ Preface’.

German Foreword i. For an explanation of this Foreword and how it came to be written, see footnote 3 of the ‘Introduction’. ii. For some discussion of Grundtvig’s relation to this work, see §2.1 of the ‘Introduction’.

Part I i. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus uses the term ‘the god’ (Danish: ‘guden’) rather than ‘God’ (Danish: ‘Gud’). The reason is that Climacus’s point of departure is philosophical, rather than Christian, because he seeks a philosophical investigation of the question whether Christ is an incarnation of the god. Therefore, he speaks of ‘the god’ in a distanced way, not of ‘God’ as the name of someone he is intimately connected with. ii. The Danish text here has ‘til tro og eller vantro’ (English: ‘to believe and or not believe’) which we suspect is a typo, as in Danish (and English) one would write ‘og/eller’ (English: ‘and/or’) with a slash. However, it does not make much sense to both believe and not believe, and therefore we have chosen to omit ‘and’ and just write ‘or’. iii. In the Danish text, Løgstrup cites this passage as a quotation, but it is in fact not a direct quotation, as Løgstrup rearranges Kierkegaard’s formulation. We have marked Løgstrup’s own contribution to the quotation in square brackets here. iv. Løgstrup discusses Kierkegaard’s account of indirect communication in more detail in ‘The Category and the Office of Proclamation, with Particular Reference to Luther and Kierkegaard’ (1949). v. In his later works, Løgstrup developed a theory of sensation, which is precisely direct and immediate, or as he would term it: distanceless. Sensation always operates in tandem with understanding, where the latter creates distance, because we ‘draw ourselves back’ from sensation in our understanding. This is also the case for interpretation, as it is a distance-creating act. Cf. Creation and

138  ’ 

vi.

vii.

viii.

ix.

x.

Annihilation Part 2, Chapter 2: ‘Space and Understanding’; and Source and Surrounding Part 1, especially sub-chapter 5: ‘Withdrawal’ (a selection from Løgstrup’s Metaphysics is translated by Russell L. Dees in Metaphysics, vols. I and II: see vol. I, pp. 119–32 and vol. 2, pp. 33–42). Løgstrup does not indicate who these ‘later theologians’ might be, but it is probable that he is thinking of someone like Rudolf Bultmann (and like-minded theologians). The context is the discussion with historical-critical methodology and ‘the quest for the historical Jesus’, which (at least to some extent) seeks to base faith on historical facts. Here, Bultmann distinguished between ‘das Dass’ (that Jesus lived as a historical person) and ‘das Was’ (which historical facts can be established regarding this life), placing all emphasis and significance on the former and excluding the latter (cf. e.g. Das Verhältnis der urchristlichen Christusbotschaft zum historischen Jesus [The Relation between the Early Christian Message of Christ and the Historical Jesus], Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1960), translated in The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ, translated by C. E. Braaten and R. A. Harrisville (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1964). As Bultmann states, ‘I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist’ (Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, translated by Louise Pettibone Smith & Erminie Huntress Lantero (New York: Scribner, 1958), p. 8). Løgstrup is probably making the point that even though Kierkegaard also addresses the problem of historical truths, it became much more influential in the twentieth century, and therefore Bultmann and others changed the scope of the problem. Here we have modified the Hongs’s translation slightly from ‘happiness’ to ‘beatitude’. Kierkegaard uses the word ‘salighed’ which can mean a state of great happiness, but which is primarily associated with the happiness which comes from unity with God. Løgstrup seems to have given the wrong reference here, which has been reproduced in the following Danish editions. Løgstrup refers to p. 274 in the Kierkegaard edition he was using (Søren Kierkegaards Værker, 3rd edition), but the content that corresponds to Løgstrup’s paraphrase is found on p. 374 in that edition, so it appears that Løgstrup made a transcription error here. See René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by John Cottingham, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 2, p. 31: ‘By the word “God” I understand a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else (if anything else there be) that exists.’ Løgstrup makes a similar point in The Ethical Demand, p. 176/Den etiske fordring, p. 232: ‘An individual cannot proclaim to another human being a demand which demands that it can be fulfilled, when those who proclaim it

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xi.

xii.

xiii.

xiv.

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recognize that it is unfulfillable in their own case. It is a fundamental principle, which we all accept, that it is a dirty business to demand something of another human being, to admonish, or (uninvited) to urge them to do something, which we who do the admonishing or urging have not done and cannot do ourselves.’ The phrase ‘once and for all’ (Danish: ‘een gang for alle’) should be taken very literally here, meaning that Jesus’s words and suffering happened once (one time in history) and for all (occurred that one time for everybody). Harald Østergaard-Nielsen (1910–77) was a Danish pastor and doctor of theology. His dissertation ‘Scriptura Sacra et Viva Vox’ on Martin Luther’s theology was defended in 1957 in Aarhus, the year after Løgstrup had published The Ethical Demand. Løgstrup refers to Østergaard-Nielsen in various places throughout his authorship, including in The Ethical Demand in 1956 and Ethical Concepts and Problems in 1971. ‘Efterfølgelse’ is usually translated as ‘imitation’, but here Løgstrup uses the word ‘efterfølgelse’ as a higher order concept and draws up three different kinds (or interpretations) of efterfølgelse, where imitatio Christi is one of these. To avoid speaking about imitation in two different senses, we have used ‘following’ as the higher order concept and ‘imitation’ as the lower order concept. Luther’s distinction between immediate (direct) and mediate (indirect) vocation is found in his Commentary on Galatians. The Apostles were called directly by Jesus, just as the prophets were called directly by God; however, now, Luther states, everyone is called indirectly by God through a human being (cf. WA 40.1: 59–60; LW 26: 17).

Part II i. The Ethical Demand begins with a section that argues for the need to ‘Attempt to Determine in Purely Human Terms the Attitude to the Other Human Being Which Is Contained within the Religious Proclamation of Jesus of Nazareth’: see The Ethical Demand, p. 3–5/Den etiske fordring, pp. 9–5. ii. Here, ‘concrete ethics’ is our translation of ‘materialetik’ (literally: ‘material ethics’) and refers to the position that there are concrete answers to ethical questions such as abortion, sex, organ donation etc. In this way, a ‘concrete Christian ethics’ would consist in finding the concrete answers in the Bible, and being a Christian would thus amount to following these ethical imperatives. When Løgstrup rejects the notion of Christian ethics in Chapter 5 of The Ethical Demand, it tells us a good deal about his understanding of this ethics, because (in Løgstrup’s view) it would turn Christianity into law—just following rules, but with no individual responsibility for finding the correct response in the ethical situation. By contrast to this approach, he characterizes the demand as silent, requiring the individual to determine for themselves (and thus being responsible for deciding) what is best for the other person.

140  ’  iii. Løgstrup’s use of ‘root’ here is connected to his understanding of evil as radical (the radical concept of sin). ‘Radical’ comes from Latin ‘radix’, meaning root, and thus sin/evil is understood as something that ‘goes to the root’. Similarly, the ethical demand is radical because it demands that the individual be wholeheartedly (to the root of their being) concerned with the other’s well-being. This idea of evil going to the root is also involved when Løgstrup refers to the intensive understanding of sin (as discussed on p. xl), meaning that evil is not an extensive category, but rather intensive, because it goes to the root of human nature—not extensively affecting the whole of (created) existence. iv. In fact Anti-Climacus does not use this expression (neither in The Sickness Unto Death nor in Practice in Christianity); however, in Works of Love (i.e. under the name ‘S. Kierkegaard’) Kierkegaard uses the term ‘strain his spiritual powers’ [‘overarbeide sin aand’] in two places (SKS 9: 355 and 356/KW 16: 361 and 362), and he expounds on this in the following passages, stressing that the burden is to remember in every instant that you are capable of nothing. It seems very likely that Løgstrup confuses this idea from Works of Love with Anti-Climacus, which (from Løgstrup’s perspective) isn’t a long stretch, as Anti-Climacus repeatedly stresses the impossibility of meeting God’s demand. v. Løgstrup does not give a reference, but Kierkegaard uses this phrase in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: see SKS 7: 396/KW 12.1: 435–6, 410/451, 422/465. vi. This distinction between uses of the law goes back to Luther and is a standard part of Lutheran theology. The first use is the ‘curbing’ use of helping to control sinful human behaviour which thereby makes society possible, while the second use is the ‘accusing’ or ‘convicting’ one, of showing us our sins by revealing to us that we are unable to fulfil the law. See for example ‘Lectures on Galatians, 1535’, Luther, WA 40.1: 485/LW 26: 312–13: ‘We say that the law is good and useful, but in its proper use, namely, first, as we said earlier, to restrain civic transgressions; and secondly to reveal spiritual transgressions.’ vii. This is available in English as Creation and Law, translated by Ross Mackenzie (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1961). Wingren discusses the uses of the law in Part II. viii. What Løgstrup means here by ‘selvkredsning’ is that the subject goes round in a circle, turning back in on themselves, rather than pointing outwards in a line towards others; this idea therefore connects to the Lutheran conception of sin as ‘incurvatus in se’. Hans Fink has also suggested that Løgstrup may have in mind a distinction drawn by the Danish philosopher Ludvig Feilberg between what he called ‘ligeløb’ (straight-running) and ‘kredsning’ (going-in-circles): see Feilberg, Om Ligeløb og Kredsning i Sjælelivet: Bidrag til en Aandelig Sundhedslære [On Straight-Running and Going-in-Circles in Mental Life: Contributions to Spiritual Hygiene] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1896), pp. 209–305. (The clear parallels between Feilberg and Løgstrup have been most thoroughly discussed by Mogens Pahuus in his Livsfilosofi [Philosophy of Life] (Aarhus: Philosophia,

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ix. x. xi. xii. xiii.

xiv.

xv.

xvi. xvii. xviii.

xix.

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1989)). However, as has been pointed out by Kees van Kooten Niekerk, Løgstrup seems to have in mind especially Jakob Knudsen’s critical remarks to Feilberg, that the crucial difference is the existential difference between self-consciousness and self-forgetfulness, where the former is likened to death, and the latter to life, see Jakob Knudsen, Idé og Erindring [Idea and Memory] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1949), pp. 48–9. Løgstrup does not give a reference, but Kierkegaard discusses this particularly in Practice in Christianity, for example SKS 12: 116–17/KW 20: 108–9. Løgstrup here uses a pun, as ‘ukristeligt’ (unchristian) also means ‘terribly’ or ‘horribly’. This is available in English as Luther on Vocation, translated by Carl C. Rasmussen (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004). This is available in English as The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man, translated by E. B. Ashton (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963). The Danish term for authority here is ‘instans’. While ‘instans’ can mean authority in the sense of lawgiving, arguably its primary meaning when used to discuss matters of authority is as an authority which judges in relation to the law, not which lays down or legislates the law in the first place, where in the legal context ‘instans’ is usually used to refer to the system of courts. This usage has an echo in English in the phrases ‘first instance’ and ‘last instance’, which stems from the first and last steps in legal proceedings. In Danish and German, it is also a sort of dummy sortal, like ‘thing’ or ‘entity’. ‘Life in our calling and station’ (Danish: ‘livet i kald og stand’) refers to the Lutheran idea of vocation, meaning that you should live life where you have been put, cf. §2.1. of the ‘Introduction’. Løgstrup does not give a reference for the next few quotations; the ones in this paragraph come from SKS 12: 121 and 118/KW 20: 113 and 110, and the details of the others are given in the next two notes. SKS 12: 116/KW 20: 108. SKS 12: 117/KW 20: 109. This is a reference to an important aspect of Luther’s ‘theology of the cross’, where such misfortune is seen as one of the seven or visible signs by which the true church of Jesus Christ distinguishes itself from the world, and as one of the ways the vocation of being Christian shapes the faithful: see, for example, Admonition to Peace (1525), WA 18: 310/LW 46: 29: ‘Suffering! suffering! Cross! cross! This and nothing else is the Christian law!’ By the ‘universal’ (‘det almene’) here, Løgstrup is referring to Kierkegaard’s conception of broadly Hegelian ethical life represented by Judge William in Either/Or, in which the individual takes their place in the general or universal system of norms such as marriage, and lives accordingly. See also the ‘Translators’ Preface’.

142  ’  xx. Tidehverv refers to a Danish theological journal and movement which was highly influenced by Kierkegaard through Kristoffer Olesen Larsen (1899–1964), cf. §2 of the ‘Introduction’.

Part III i. The book of Tobit (or Tobias/Tobi) is one of the deuterocanonical books (also known as the Biblical apocrypha), which were part of the Greek version of the Old Testament (the Septuagint), but which were not included in the Hebrew Bible. It relates the story of Tobit from Nineveh, who sends his son Tobias to Media to collect ten silver talents from a distant relative in Ecbatana, where he marries his relative Sarah. Sarah’s misfortune is that the demon Asmodeus has killed her previous seven husbands, something that has left her on the brink of suicide. Yet, she prays to God that she may find happiness. ii. Løgstrup also compares the views of Kierkegaard and Heidegger on guilt in Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, Chapter 5. iii. The term ‘taking over’ (Danish: overtagelse) implies taking your own existence upon yourself, to take ownership of one’s existence, embracing who you are. iv. ‘Thorn in the flesh’ refers to 2 Corinthians 12:7: ‘Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.’ v. Løgstrup does not give a reference for these quotations, which both come from The Sickness Unto Death, SKS 11: 192/KW 19: 77 and SKS 11: 191/KW 19: 77. vi. The chapter is actually divided into four parts, not three. It is based on an article published in 1966, ‘Sartres og Kierkegaards skildring af den dæmoniske indesluttethed’ [‘Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Inturnedness’], but Løgstrup restructured it slightly in the book, dividing part two of the article into parts b and c. As most of the article is reprinted verbatim in the book, Løgstrup simply forgot to change ‘three parts’ to ‘four parts’. For more on the differences between the article and the book, see §3.3. of the ‘Introduction’, pp. lvi–lvii. vii. For an English translation see The Devil and the Good Lord, translated by Kitty Black in The Devil and the Good Lord and Two Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1960). viii. The English translation changes this to ‘Nasti’, presumably to avoid confusion with the adjective. ix. This is on p. 55 of the English translation. x. This and subsequent quotations and paraphrases can be found on pp. 60–1 of the English translation. xi. For an English translation of Goethe’s play see Götz von Berlichingen, translated by Charles E. Passage (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965).

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xii. This is the translation of ‘grundskade’, which Kierkegaard discusses in several places such as The Sickness Unto Death, SKS 11: 184/KW 19: 70 and Stages on Life’s Way, SKS 6: 225/KW 11: 241. xiii. Løgstrup does not give any references here, but the quotations are from Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death, SKS 11:184–5/KW 19: 70–1. xiv. The term for ‘circling’ here is ‘kredsende’. Løgstrup uses two different words to describe the negative counterpart to the sovereign expressions of life: tvungne and kredsende, the first of which emphasizes that they have a compulsive nature and the second that the person circles around themselves in a continuous and confining preoccupation with oneself. These have been translated as obsessive and circling, respectively. For further discussion of the background to these terms see §3.3. of the ‘Introduction’, pp. xlvi–xlvii. xv. In the article version of this text (see editorial note Part III note vi above and the ‘Introduction’ p. xliii, note 67), Løgstrup wrote a short paragraph that has been omitted here: ‘Returning now to Kierkegaard, is he not the one who—perhaps more than anyone—has analysed the obsessive or circling movements of thought and emotion? Yes, probably, but only when they have been infested with the movement of infinity, only when they have attained religious status. Enclosedness when it is not demonic, when its movement is only finite—as is the case in feeling insulted, in jealousy and envy—did not interest him’ (p. 36). This suggests that Løgstrup did not think of human inturnedness or enclosedness as necessarily ‘extreme’ (or ‘demonic’), but that he was interested in a more ‘common’ version, what he calls ‘finite’ self-enclosedness, and that this was how he perceived the feelings of insult, jealousy, and envy. Indeed, the passage seems to suggest that these finite movements are his primary concern, as he precisely criticizes Kierkegaard for not taking an interest in them. These views could also connect with Hannah Arendt’s thoughts from around the same time of evil as ‘banal’ (‘finite’, ‘trivial’, or ‘common’) rather than ‘demonic’ (‘infinite’, ‘monstrous’, or ‘extraordinary’). xvi. Løgstrup also challenges the dichotomy discussed here in Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation. xvii. For an English translation see The Condemned of Altona, translated by Sylvia and George Leeson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), where the quotation below is from p. 22. xviii. Hermann Broch (1886–1951) was an Austrian modernist writer, best known for his novels The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler, 1930–32) and The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil, 1945), but he also wrote philosophical essays—all of which are part of Løgstrup’s private library. Broch was also an early proponent of a version of systems theory, inspired by his readings of thinkers such as Max Weber and Heinrich Rickert. Here, Broch distinguishes between ‘closed systems’ and ‘open systems’, where the former is based on imitation and forms a selfenclosed rational system that shuts other values (and systems) out (cf. Broch’s theory of crowd psychology, Hermann Broch, Kommentierte Werkausgabe,

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xix.

xx.

xxi.

xxii.

xxiii.

xxiv.

xxv.

Volume 12: Massenwahntheorie: Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik [Theories of Mass Hysteria: Contributions to a Psychology of Politics], edited by Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–81)). In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (SKS 7: 376/KW 12.1: 414), Kierkegaard writes (using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus): ‘But the maximum of the task is to be able simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute τέλος and relatively to the relative ends, or at all times to have the absolute τέλος with oneself.’ To relate oneself absolutely to the relative is to turn something merely relative into an idol; this can be anything from a person to an ideological principle or a material object. Thus, the task is to relate absolutely to God alone, and in doing so, everything else in finitude becomes of merely relative value. For further discussion by Løgstrup of Luther’s rejection of free will, and how it compares to Kierkegaard’s position, see Ethical Concepts and Problems, Chapter 8. Information is a Danish left-wing newspaper. Johannes Møllehave (1937–2021) was a Danish Lutheran pastor, author, and public figure, who was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard in his work. The reason why Møllehave focuses on the fact that the Christian message must ‘cause offence’ is that this was essential to the Tidehverv movement and to Løgstrup. The Christian message is a radical demand upon human beings, its radicality consisting in Christianity’s revelation of human sin and inadequacy. An important place in Scripture is Matthew 18:21–2: ‘Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.” ’ Tidehverv’s point, and Møllehave’s (and Løgstrup’s) is that Christianity must remain true to this offensive core, that hearing the Christian message is an offence. Ole Jensen (1937–2021) was a Danish theologian, Professor of dogmatics, Lutheran pastor, public lecturer, and author of numerous works on Løgstrup and environmental ethics. He was a student under Løgstrup, and after Løgstrup’s death he was a main figure in advancing Løgstrup’s thought in Scandinavia and Germany. Ole Jensen, ‘ “Skabte livsmuligheder”—“Suveræne livsytringer”: Bemærkninger til et grundtema hos K. E. Løgstrup’ [‘ “Created Possibilities of Life”—“Sovereign Expressions of Life”: Remarks on a Fundamental Theme in K. E. Løgstrup’], in his Sårbar usårlighed: Løgstrup og religionens genkomst i filosofien [Vulnerable Invulnerability: Løgstrup and the Return of Religion Within Philosophy] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994), pp. 18–34; English translation by Ole Jensen and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resourcesand-link/. Here, Løgstrup may have in mind Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, where Anti-Climacus speaks of the requirement for ‘a total break with immediacy’, ‘a

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xxviii.

xxix.

xxx.

xxxi.

xxxii.

xxxiii.

xxxiv.

xxxv.

xxxvi.

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self that is won by infinite abstraction from every externality, this naked abstract self ’ that ideally ‘becomes responsible for its actual self with all its difficulties and advantages’ (SKS 12:170/KW 19: 55). The reference is to volume 2 of Either/Or, for example: SKS 3: 183/KW 4: 189. The Danish terms ‘sædelighed’ and ‘moral’ as used here are equivalent to the German terms ‘Sittlichkeit’ and ‘Moralität’. This is a distinction which Hegel draws in his Philosophy of Right, associating Kant with an emphasis on the deontological rules of ‘morality’ and himself with the socially richer position of ‘ethical life’. See Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Parts II and III. For an English translation see Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. 1, p. 52–61. For further discussion by Løgstrup of Kierkegaard’s position here, see Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, Chapter 1. Traditionally, the English terminology is deontological and consequentialist ethics, but an important aspect in deontology is here the focus of the attitude of mind (Danish: sindelaget) of the individual person, such as the importance of the sense of duty in Kant (and to some extent in Kierkegaard). For more on ‘ethics of attitude’, see also §2.1. of the ‘Introduction’, p. xxv. Jørgen K. Bukdahl (1936–79) was a younger colleague of Løgstrup’s at Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, Aarhus University. His main areas of interest were Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and critical theory. Løgstrup could be thinking of The Concept of Anxiety, where the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis writes: ‘We have said what we again repeat, that sin presupposes itself, just as freedom presupposes itself, and sin cannot be explained by anything antecedent to it, any more than can freedom (SKS 4:414/KW 8: 112). Løgstrup makes similar comments concerning Kierkegaard’s view of liberum arbitrium in Ethical Concepts and Problems, pp. 64–6, where he gives references to Kierkegaard works there. The Latin term ‘liberum arbitrium’ is used to refer to free will and particularly to the capacity for free choice. It is freedom of this kind that Erasmus defended in his text De libero arbitrio and which Luther rejected in his text De servo arbitrio, which argues instead that the will is bound or unfree. While this is how his title is usually translated into English, it is in fact not entirely clear whether William is actually a judge. The Danish word is assessor, which (as in English) is a person who can assist and who has legal training. He could thus be an assistant judge or maybe even a public officer or civil servant at a courthouse. The Hongs translation has been changed here: they have ‘vibrato’ where we have ‘tremolo’, and they have ‘tremolo’ where we have ‘a colorated note’. ‘En koloreret node’ is not ‘a tremolo’ but ‘a coloratura’, which is a sequence of

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xxxviii. xxxix. xl.

xli.

xlii.

xliii.

different notes; translating it as ‘tremolo’ misses Kierkegaard’s point, which is that a ‘trille’ (which is translated best as ‘tremolo’ rather than ‘vibrato’) cannot be sung incessantly, so it needs to be interrupted by a coloratura). The Deer Park (Dyrehaven, officially Jægersborg Dyrehave) is a large forest park north of Copenhagen. It was founded around 1670 by the Danish King Frederik III and his son Christian V (who had visited Louis XIV in France and wanted to use it as a hunting park). Løgstrup also discusses this passage in Kierkegaard and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to the Proclamation, pp. 39–41/Kierkegaard og Heideggers eksistensanalyse og dens forhold til forkyndelsen, pp. 56–8. This quotation comes from SKS 7: 449/KW 12.1: 496. This quotation comes from SKS 4: 202/KW 6: 115. In The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup states that ‘faith without understanding is not faith, but coercion’, and he continues: ‘Only if one understands a proclamation can one accept it for the sake of its content. By contrast, to accept it without understanding is to accept it on the basis of different or illegitimate motives, which means one imposes it on oneself. If a proclamation cannot be understood, then there is no difference between proclamation and obscurantism’ (p. 4/p. 10). As discussed in the ‘Introduction’, Løgstrup here seems to suggest that the circling thoughts and emotions are also ‘expressions of life’; however, there are reasons to think that his formulation here is erroneous, cf. §3.3. in the ‘Introduction’. The term ‘regiment’ (regimente) here is closely associated with Luther, and his distinction between two regiments or kingdoms (die zwei Regimente)—the worldly regiment and the spiritual regiment. While God allows human powers to have some jurisdiction in the former, the latter is governed by God alone, in a way that the communicator is here said to disregard. The Hongs translation has been modified here: they have ‘whether or not there is anything demonic in it’.

Part IV i. Here Løgstrup uses the Danish word ‘fantasi’ largely because this is also Kierkegaard’s term, but in the same discussion he also uses ‘indbildning’ when talking about the productive imagination. We have chosen to translate both as ‘imagination’, as terms like ‘fantasy’ in English here would be too suggestive of wishful thinking and daydreaming. ii. For an English translation see Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, translated by Richard Taft, 5th edition, enlarged (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). iii. Løgstrup here first uses the term ‘fantasi’ and then ‘produktiv indbildningskraft’, where as noted above we are translating ‘fantasi’ as imagination.

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iv. The chapter Løgstrup is referring to is almost identical to Chapter 2 of Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, and so consulted in English there. v. For further discussion, see Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, Chapter 1. vi. Paul Arthur Schlipp (ed), The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Volume 5 (Evanston, IL: The Library of Living Philosophers, 1946), pp. 1–20. vii. The German term for ‘know’ that Løgstrup is referring to in this context is ‘erkennen’, which has implications of recognition and thus seeing oneself in something. viii. For the English translation see Hegel’s Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 31. ix. In Heidegger’s terminology, ‘existential’ refers to the ontological structures of human existence (Dasein), whereas ‘existentiell’ refers to the ontic level, that is, particular instantiations of the individual Dasein. x. Thorkild Bjørnvig (1918–2004) was a Danish Poet. Bjørnvig and Løgstrup became friends after having met through the literary journal Heretica, which Bjørnvig helped establish, and they were both members of the Danish Academy in the 1960s (along with Karen Blixen who was a close friend of Bjørnvig’s). Through the 1960s and 70s, Bjørnvig and Løgstrup both became very engaged in the environmental debate, and Løgstrup refers to Bjørnvig and Bjørnvig’s poems several times in his Metaphysics.

Select Bibliography For a full bibliography of Løgstrup’s works, see: Hansen, Karstein M., K. E. Løgstrups forfatterskab 1930–2005: En bibliografi, edited and extended by Kees van Kooten Niekerk (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2006), available online at http://loegstrup.au.dk/fileadmin/Loegstrup_Forskning/ebog.pdf.

Primary texts in English ‘The Anthropology of Kant’s Ethics’, translated by Kees van Kooten Niekerk in Hans Fink and Robert Stern (eds), What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2017), pp. 19–34. Beyond the Ethical Demand, edited by Kees van Kooten Niekerk, translated by Susan Dew and Heidi Flegal (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007). ‘The Category and the Office of Proclamation, with Particular Reference to Luther and Kierkegaard’, translated by Christopher Bennett and Robert Stern, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 40 (2019), pp. 183–201. Ethical Concepts and Problems, translated by Kristian-Alberto Lykke Cobos and Kees van Kooten Niekerk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). The Ethical Demand, translated by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). ‘Ethics and Ontology’, translated by Eric Watkins as an appendix to K. E. Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, edited by Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1997), pp. 265–94. ‘Humanism and Christianity’, translated by Kees van Kooten Niekerk, Bjørn Rabjerg, and Robert Stern, Journal for the History of Modern Theology, 26 (2019), pp. 132–46. Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation, translated by Robert Stern et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Metaphysics, volumes 1 and 2, translated by Russell L. Dees (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1995).

Primary Texts in Danish and German Auseinandersetzung mit Kierkegaard (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1968). Den erkendelsesteoretiske Konflikt mellem den Transcendentalfilosofiske Idealisme og Teologien, edited by Kees van Kooten Niekerk (Aarhus: Klim, 2011). Den etiske fordring (Aarhus: Klim, 2010). ‘Eksistensfilosofi og theologi’, Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, 11 (1948), pp. 1–20.

150   ‘Eksistensteologien og dens skelnen mellem tro og verdensanskuelse’, Teologiska Foreningen i Uppsala. Förhandlingar. Acta Societatis Theologicae Uppsaliensis, 1951–1955 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 1956), pp. 33–54; English translation by Hans Fink and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/. En fremstilling og vurdering af Max Scheler’s ‘Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik’ (Aarhus: Klim, 2016). ‘Enhver moralsk tanke er en bagtanke’, Menighedsbladet. Kirkeligt Samfunds Blad, 18 (1936), pp. 429–38. ‘Ethik und Ontologie’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 57 (1960), pp. 357–91. Etiske begreber og problemer (Aarhus: Klim, 2014). ‘Fænomenologi og psykologi’, in Religionspsykologi. Et teologisk-psykologisk symposium, edited by K. E. Bugge and Reimer Jensen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1970), pp. 111–30. Republished in Solidaritet og kærlighed, pp. 116–40; English translation by Hans Fink and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/. ‘Gudgivne og selvlavede bevægelser i sindet’, Elsebeth Diderichsen and Ole Jensen (eds), Prædikener fra Sandager-Holevad (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995), pp. 118–20. ‘Guds Skabning’, Menighedsbladet. Kirkeligt Samfunds Blad, 20 (1938), pp. 451–4. Kierkegaards og Heideggers eksistensanalyse og dens forhold til forkyndelsen, edited by Svend Andersen (Aarhus: Klim, 2013). Kierkegaards und Heideggers Existenzanalyse und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung (Berlin: Erich Blaschker Verlag, 1950). Kunst og erkendelse: Metafysik II: Kunstfilosofiske betragtninger (Aarhus: Klim, 2018). Kunst og etik (Aarhus: Klim, 2020). Norm og spontaneitet: Etik og politik mellem teknokrati og dilettantokrati (Aarhus: Klim, 2019). Opgør med Kierkegaard (Aarhus: Klim, 2013). Ophav og omgivelse: Metafysik III: Betragtninger over historie og natur (Aarhus: Klim, 2013). ‘Sartres og Kierkegaards skildring af den dæmoniske indesluttethed’, Vindrosen, 13 (1966), pp. 28–42. Skabelse og tilintetgørelse: Metafysik IV: Religionsfilosofiske betragtninger (Aarhus: Klim, 2015). Solidaritet og kærlighed (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1987). System og symbol: Essays (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1982). Venskab og Strid [with Hans Koch] (Aarhus: Klim, 2010). Vidde og prægnans: Metafysik I: Sprogfilosofiske betragtninger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1976). ‘Viljesbegrebet i De servo arbitrio’, Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, 3 (1940), pp. 129–47.

Further reading Andersen, Svend, Løgstrup (Copenhagen: Anis, 2005). Andersen, Svend and Kees van Kooten Niekerk (eds), Concern for the Other: Perspectives on the Ethics of K. E. Løgstrup (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Bennett, Christopher, Paul Faulkner, and Robert Stern, ‘Indirect Communication, Authority, and Proclamation as a Normative Power: Løgstrup’s Critique of Kierkegaard’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 40 (2019), pp. 147–82.

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Bugge, David, ‘Vi kommer ikke ud af os selv: Menneskets indesluttethed og forløsningen udefra som et grundtema i den unge Løgstrups prædikener’ [‘We Do Not Come out of Ourselves: Human Inturnedness and Redemption from without as a Major Theme in the Young Løgstrup’s Sermons’], Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, 80 (2017), pp. 94–109. Christoffersen, Svein Aage, ‘Efterskrift’ [‘Afterword’], K. E. Løgstrup, Opgør med Kierkegaard [Controverting Kierkegaard] (Aarhus: Klim, 2013), pp. 181–219. Ferreira, Jamie, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s ‘Works of Love’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Fink, Hans and Robert Stern (eds), What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2017). Geismar, Eduard, Søren Kierkegaard. Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed [Søren Kierkegaard: His Personal Development and His Work as an Author], volume 3 (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gads Forlag, 1927). Jensen, Ole, ‘ “Skabte Livsmuligheder”—“Suveræne Livsytringer”: Bemærkninger til et Grundtema hos K. E. Løgstrup’ [‘ “Created Possibilities of Life”—“Sovereign Expressions of Life”: Remarks on a Fundamental Theme in K. E. Løgstrup’], in his Sårbar Usårlighed: Løgstrup og Religionens Genkomst i Filosofien [Vulnerable Vulnerability: Løgstrup and the Return of Religion Within Philosophy] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994), pp. 18–34; English translation by Ole Jensen and Robert Stern available at https://ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/. Jensen, Ole, Historien om K. E. Løgstrup [The Story of K. E. Løgstrup] (Copenhagen: Anis, 2007), translated into German as Knud Ejler Løgstrup: Philosoph und Theologe (Stuttgart: Radius, 2015). Karlsen, Gunnar M., ‘Løgstrup’s Criticism of Kierkegaard: Epistemological and Anthropological Dimensions’, Kierkegaardiana, 17 (1994), pp. 98–108. Malantschuk, Gregor, ‘Løgstrups Opgør med Kierkegaard’ [‘Løgstrup’s Controversy with Kierkegaard’], Kierkegaardiana, 8 (1971), pp. 163–81. Møller, Maria Louise Odgaard, The True Human Being: The Picture of Jesus in K. E. Løgstrup’s Thought (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019). Olesen Larsen, Kristoffer, ‘Nogle Bemærkninger om Forholdet mellem Humanisme og Kristendom’ [‘Some Remarks on the Relation between Humanism and Christianity’], originally published in Tidehverv, 31 (1957), pp. 77–84; reprinted in Søren Kierkegaard Læst af K. Olesen Larsen 1. Artikler fra Tidehverv [Søren Kierkegaard Read by K. Olesen Larsen 1. Articles from Tidehverv] (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gads Forlag, 1966), pp. 254–67; English translation by Kees van Kooten Niekerk and Robert Stern available at https:// ethicaldemand.wordpress.com/resources-and-link/. Olesen Larsen, Kristoffer, ‘Et Stykke Krigspsykose’ [‘A Fragment of War Psychosis’], At være menneske. Udvalgte arbejder af K. Olesen Larsen. Bind I [To be Human. Selected Works by K. Olesen Larsen. Volume I] (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gads Forlag, 1967). Rabjerg, Bjørn, Tilværelse og forståelse: Et antropologisk grundtema i Løgstrups teologiske og filosofiske tænkning [Existence and Understanding: A Fundamental Anthropological Theme in Løgstrup’s Theology and Philosophy] (Aarhus: Klim, 2016). Rabjerg, Bjørn, Løgstrup & Kierkegaard (Aarhus: Klim, 2018). Rabjerg, Bjørn ‘Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s Reception of Max Scheler’s Ethics of 1932 and Beyond’ (forthcoming). Rabjerg, Bjørn and Robert Stern, ‘Freedom from the Self: Luther and Løgstrup on Sin as “Incurvatus in Se” ’, Open Theology, 4 (2018), pp. 268–80.

152   Stern, Robert, The Radical Demand in Løgstrup’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Thornton, Simon, ‘Moral Grace: On Løgstrup’s Theory of Expressions of Life’, Mind, 130 (2021), pp. 759–81. For a full bibliography of works in English on Løgstrup, see https://ethicaldemand. wordpress.com/resources-and-link/.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abraham see God: Abraham’s relation to God abstraction 58–61, 127–8, 144–5n.xxv action lix–lxi, 14, 26, 34, 36, 45, 47, 57–8, 64, 68, 75–6, 81–2, 93, 95–9, 104, 106–14, 118, 120, 123–32, 134–5 almene, det xiii see also universal, the Anz, Wilhelm 130n.7 atomic war 32, 34–5 barmhjertighed ix see also compassion Barth, Karl xxi–xxiii, xxvi belief 4, 9, 15–16, 40–2 Bjørnvig, Thorkild 134–5, 147n.x bourgeois/bourgeois life ix, 50–1, 57–8, 66, 72–3, 129 Broch, Hermann 82, 143–4n.xviii Bukdahl, Jørgen K. 98, 145n.xxxi Bultmann, Rudolf xxii n.10, xxiii n.15, 138n.vi Christ xxvi, xxviii, xxxix, lviii, lx, 3, 5–6, 9–10, 16, 18, 20–5, 31, 36, 40–2, 46–8, 138n.1 see also Jesus of Nazareth Christian love 37–8, 83–4, 113 Christian martyrdom 21–2, 31–2, 39–42, 55, 113, 131 Christian proclamation see proclamation Christianity viii, xix, xxiv, xxvi, xxix, xxxi, xxxv, xxxix, xli, liv, lvii, lix–lxii, lxvii, 1, 6–7, 9, 11, 15–18, 21, 28–32, 35–42, 45–8, 54–6, 81, 102, 104–5, 109, 113, 126–35, 139n.11, 144n.xxii circling thoughts and emotions xix, xliii, xlviii, liii, lv–lvi, 27, 29–30, 70–1, 103–4, 146n.lxi compassion ix–xi, xlv, liii–lv, 12, 70–1, 84, 89–90, 94–6, 98, 129, 133–4 concrete ethics 26, 30, 139n.ii concrete existence 56–61, 72, 90, 120, 126, 131

conformity 29, 72–3, 75–6, 83, 113–14, 129, 132, 135 controversion x, lxv, lxvii creation xxxvi, xliv, 34–6, 90, 103–4 cross, the lviii, 21–2, 40, 46–7, 141n.xviii Crucifixion, the xl, 21–2, 40 see also cross, the death 13–14, 28–30, 35–7, 40–2, 45–7, 72–3, 126–7, 133–4, 140–1n.viii decision xlix, lxv, 3–4, 9, 14, 18–19, 74–5, 77–8, 97, 103–4, 111–12, 118–19, 121–2 definitiv x see also definitive definitive x, xlix, lvi, 72–3, 75–7, 85–6, 89–91, 98, 113–14 demand xi, xxvii, xl, l, 15, 17–19, 24–8, 35–6, 43–4, 50, 60–1, 74, 81–2, 84, 86–7, 89–90, 94, 100, 102–4, 106–7, 112, 120–3, 127, 138–9n.x, 139n.ii, 140n.iii, 140n.iv, 144n.xxii see also ethical demand deonotological 92–3, 145n.xxvii, 145n.xxx Descartes, René xxxv, 11, 138n.ix determinism 85 direct and indirect communication 5–6, 114–16, 138n.iv duty 92–9, 111–12, 115, 124–5, 145n.xxx efterfølgelse 139n.xiii empiricism 139n.xiii emotions xix, xliii, xlv–xlviii, lv–lviii, 43–4, 70–1, 130, 133, 146n.xli see also circling thoughts and emotions empiricism lxv, 92–4, 123 erkendelse xii see also knowledge eternity lviii, lx, 5–6, 15–17, 21, 32–5, 39–40, 53–4, 67–8, 72–4, 77–8, 82, 85, 90–1, 97, 103–5, 120–3, 125, 128–9, 131, 134 ethical demand, the xi, xxxviii n.57, 58, liv, 18–19, 74, 82, 86–7, 89, 140n.iii ethical life 92–5, 124, 141n.xix, 145n.xxvii

154  eudaimonism lxi, 101, 132 evil xxxvi, xl, xliii, l–li, lvi, lviii, lxi, 11–13, 23, 27, 42–6, 48, 54, 62–9, 74, 79, 81–3, 86, 92, 108, 113, 140n.iii, 143n.xv expression of life ix see also sovereign expressions of life existence xxxi, xxxvi–xxxviii, 15–16, 20, 59, 85–6, 117–35, see also concrete existence; human existence existentialism xix, xxvi, lxii, 76, 94, 123 faith ix, xxiv, xxvi, xxxi, xxxiv, xlii, lxv, 3–11, 14–20, 31–3, 36–40, 49–56, 69, 81–4, 89, 109, 138n.vi, 146n.xl see also knight of faith fate lvi, 29–32, 35, 45–7, 51–5, 62–3, 66, 89–90, 95–6, 104 Feilberg, Ludvig 140n.viii Fichte, J. G. 117 finitude xxiii, xlii–xliii, liv, lviii, lx, 37, 40, 50–1, 54, 58, 100–4, 120–1, 123, 125, 129, see also synthesis between infinity and finitude fordring xi see also demand freedom xlix–l, 32–5, 76–7, 85–8, 93, 98–9, 125, 145n.xxxii, 145n.xxxiv fundamental defect 56, 67–8, 71, 89–90 Geismar, Eduard xxi–xxii, xxix–xxx, xxxiv n.48 God xxiv, 34–6, 42, 82–4, 101, 103–4, 114–16 Abraham’s relation to God 109–13 difference between God and the human xxiv, xxvi, 1, 6–8, 15, 42, 58–9 existing before God 60–1 faith in God 52–3 see also faith God and good works 43–4 God and love of the neighbour 129, 134 see also love of the neighbour God in Le diable et le bon dieu 63–4, 81 God’s creation xliv, lxv God’s demand 84, 106 God’s kingdom 13–14, 21–4, 29–30, 37–42 God’s law xxvii God’s power 11–12 God’s revelation xxxvi–xxxviii, lviii, 7–8, 36 God’s will 57 God’s word xxvi, xxxviii, 47, 103–4 idea of God 56–7, 105–6 Jesus as the son of God xxxiv, 1, 9, 11 love of God xl, 49, 60, 111–12 suffering as leading to God xl

god, the xxxiv, xxxix, 1–4, 7, 9, 15–22, 24 god-in-time xxxix, 16–17, 19, 21–2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 65, 74–5 see also Götz von Berlichingen Good Samaritan ix–x, liv, 94–5 goodness xxxvi, xlvii–xlviii, l–li, lviii, lxi, 12–15, 18–19, 42, 79–84, 86, 108, 113 Götz von Berlichingen 65–6, 73–4, 130 gratitude xxxvi, liv Greeks, the 101, 126–8, 130, 135, lix–lx grundskade 143n.xii Grundtvig, N. F. S. xx n.4, xxiv, lxv guilt xlviii, li, lxi, 19–20, 53–4, 85–6, 105–7, 125, 128, 133–4, 142n.ii Hansen, Knud xxxiii n.46 Hegel, G. W. F. xix, 92–5, 118n.2, 124–6, 130, 144n.xxvii Heidegger, Martin 53–4, 72–3, 117, 128, 132, 142n.ii human existence xi, xxiv, xxvi, xl, xliii–xliv, xlvii–xlviii, liii–liv, lvii–lviii, lxi–lxv, 7–8, 11, 17, 42, 69, 72–3, 85–6, 94, 107, 114, 120–5, 128–9, 133, 147n.ix idealism xii, xxi–xxii, xxiv, xx n.7, xxx, xliii n.65, lix, lxv, 17, 92–3, 130, 130n.7, 146n.i, 146n.iii see also transcendental philosophy imagination 57, 91, 103–4, 117–20 immediate xii, xlii, 5–6, 40–2, 65, 89–90, 95, 102–4, 108, 124, 137n.v, 139n.xiv

incurvatus in se see inturnedness indirect communication see direct and indirect communication infinite xxxv, 5, 7–10, 15–16, 23, 63–4, 66–7, 76, 84, 93, 119, 125, 128–9, 133, 143n.xv see also synthesis between infinity and finitude infinite abstraction see abstraction infinite demand xi, xl, 26, 102–3, 122, see also demand; radical demand infinite qualitative difference xxiii–xxviii, 7–8 infinite movement of resignation xlii, lvii–lviii, 49–54, 110, 134 instans 141n.xiii inturnedness li n.86, 143n.xv Jaspers, Karl xix, lxvii, 27–35 Jensen, N. O. xxiv Jensen, Ole xxxvi n.52, li, 86–8, 144n.xxiii, 144n.xxiv

 Jesus of Nazareth xix, xxiv, xxxiv, xxxiv n.48, xxxviii–xl, lviii, 1–15, 21–4, 35–6, 38, 79, 90, 108, 138n.vi, 139n.xiv, 142n.1 Jesus’s proclamation see proclamation Kant, Immanuel 93, 96–8, 117, 118n.2, 119n.3, 132, 145n.xxvii, 145n.xxx Kierkegaard, Søren, works of Concluding Unscientific Postscript xlii n.64, xliii, 45, 58, 102, 121, 138nvi, 138nvii, 140n.v, 141nix, 142n.xx, 141n.ii, 143n.xii, 143nxv, 144n.xix, 144nxxi, 145n.xxx, 145n.xxi, 145n.xxxiii Either/Or xxvi Fear and Trembling xlii–xliii, 49–53, 56–8, 83–4, 109, 112–13 For Self-Examination 40–2 Judge for Yourself! 40–2, 47 On the Concept of Irony 126 Philosophical Fragments xxxiv, 1–4 Practice in Christianity xxiii n.13, 5, 23–4, 140n.iv, 141n.ix Stages on Life’s Way 60 The Concept of Anxiety 85, 106–7, 118n.2, 145n.xxxii The Sickness Unto Death 15–16, 67–8, 140niv, 142n.v, 143n.xii, 143n.xiii Works of Love xxi, 140n.iv

knight of faith 50, 58, 110–12 knowledge xii, xxvi, xxxi, lvii, lix, lxi, lxv, 9–10, 12–14, 18–20, 103–4, 117–20, 123–7, 131 Knudsen, Jakob 140-41n.viii kredsende 143n.xiv see also circling thoughts and emotions law xxvii, xli, 21, 35–6, 55, 92–3, 97, 103–4, 139n.ii, 140n.vii, 141n.xiii uses of 29–30, 43–4

Le diable et le bon dieu 62, 66–9, 71, 79–82 Les séquestrés d’Altona 77 liberum arbitrium 98–9, 145n.xxxiii, 145n.xxxiv see also freedom Lindstrøm, Valter 40n.1 livsytring xi see also expression of life love of the neighbour xxiv, xxvii, 29, 31, 35–6, 43–5, 81–4, 104, 106, 111, 129, 133–4 life see bourgeois life; ethical life; life as a gift life as a gift xxxvi, xxxviii, xlv Lipps, Hans xlv Luther, Martin ix, xii, xxvi–xxvii, xxxix–xli, lx, 22, 24, 32, 40–5, 85, 108, 139n.xiv,

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140n.vi, 145n.xxxiv, 146n.xlii see also law, uses of Lutheranism xxiv, xxvi, lxi Løgstrup, K. E., works of Art and Ethics 121n.4 Controverting Kierkegaard xix–xxi, xxx, xxxii, xxxviii, xlvii–xlviii, li–liii, lvi, lxii Creation and Annihilation xxxvi n.51, 137–8n.v Ethical Concepts and Problems xxxviii n.57, li, 139n.xii, 144n.xx, 145n.xxxiii ‘Existence Philosophy and Theology’ xxxi ‘Existence Theology and Its Distinction between Faith and World-View’ xxxv–xxxvi Friendship and Strife xxx n.37 ‘God-given and Self-made Movements of the Spirit’ xlv n.72, xlvi ‘God’s Creation’ xliv Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and its Relation to Proclamation xxxi, xlv n.70, 142n.ii, 143n.xvi, 145n.xxxix, 147n.iv, 147n.v ‘On the Concept of Will in Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio’ li n.86 ‘Phenomenology and Psychology’ xlv ‘Rejoinder’ xxxvii n.56 ‘Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s Portrayal of Demonic Inturnedness’ xliii n.67, lvi Solidarity and Love xxix Source and Surrounding 137–8n.v ‘The Category and the Office of Proclamation, with Particular Reference to Luther and Kierkegaard’ 137n.iv The Ethical Demand xix, xxviii nn.29,31, xxxi–xxxii, xxxvi n.50 n.51, xxxvi, xxxviii n.58, xl n.62, xlvii, xlvi nn.73–75, l–li, 86–7, 138n.x, 139n.xii, 139n.i The Nazi’s Philosopher xxx n.36

martyrdom see Christian martyrdom materialetik 139n.ii see also concrete ethics medio-passive model xlix–l misfortune 30, 32, 45–7, 96, 110–11, 113, 141n.xviii Møllehave, Johannes 86, 144n.xxi moral 145n.xxvii neighbour see love of the neighbour Nietzsche, Friedrich xxvii, xxvii n.23, 135 nihilism lxi, 129 norms xxvii, 94, 105–6, 125n.5, 141n.xix nothingness xxvi, lix, lxi, 32–3, 128–35

156  obsessive thoughts and emotions xliii n.66, lvi, 69–71, 91, 143n.xiv, 143n.xv Olesen Larsen, Kristoffer xxii–xxiv, xxvi, xxix–xxx, xxxii, xxxix n.60, lx n.96, 142n.xx ontological structure xxxv–xxxvi, xxxviii, xliv, xlvii, lxi ontology xxxv, lvi openness of speech lv, 71, 89–90 opgør x, xix see also controversion Østergaard-Nielsen, Harald 22 overtagelse xiii see also taking over paradox xxxi, xxxiv–xxxv, xxxviii, 3, 7, 9, 15–18, 20, 51, 111–12 persecution 1–14, 25, 31–2, 37–42 phenomenology vii, xxxv, xliv philistine ix Plato xlii, lvii–lix, 93, 104, 126, 129–30 Platonism lvii, lix, 93–4, 104, 126–8, 130 political, the 29, 33–5, 43–4, 55, 81, 108–9 proclamation xxvi, xxxi, xxxvii–xxxviii, xlv n.70, 1, 7, 11, 13, 15, 21, 24, 31–2, 35–6, 38–40, 108, 113, 146n.xl radical demand 15, 84, 89–90, 94, 144n.xxii realisere xlviii–xlix n.81 reflection lv, lxi, 47, 60, 71–2, 77, 89–90, 92–4, 133–5 resignation see infinite movement of resignation revelation xix, lviii, xxvi, xxxv–xxxviii, xlv n.70, 7–8, 23–4, 36, 109–10, 112, 144n.xxii Russell, Bertrand 121–3 Ryle, Gilbert xlv sacrifice 31–5, 49–50, 56, 81–2, 108–9, 133–4 salighed 138n.vi salvation 29–30, 35–6, 101, xli Samaritan see Good Samaritan Sartre, Jean-Paul xix, liv, lxvii, 62, 64–5, 67–9, 71, 77, 81 see also Le diable et le bon dieu; Les séquestrés d’Altona Scheler, Max xlvii–xlviii n.79, xliv Schiller, Friedrich 124–5 Schwärmerei xii, 13–14, 82 self, the xl, xlvii, l–li, liii–liv, 56, 60–1, 68, 70–1, 77–8, 90, 119–22 self-enclosedness xlvi, liii, 64–5, 70–1, 77–8, 86–7 self-denial 18, 31, 37–42, 47

selvkredsning 140n.viii sin xxiv–xxvii, xl, xliii, li n.86, lviii–lix, 16, 19–20, 27, 29–30, 32, 35–7, 39, 43–4, 54, 57, 86–7, 105, 126, 128, 140n.iii, 140n.viii, 144n.xxii, 145n.xxxii sindelaget 145n.xxx Sløk, Johannes xxiii n.12, xxxi–xxxii, lx n.96 social norms see norms Socrates 15–17, 93, 104, 126, 128–30 sovereign expressions of life x–xiii, xix, xxv n.19, xxxix n. 61, xliii, xlvii–li, liii–lvi, lx, lxii, 59, 70–3, 75–6, 85–90, 94–6, 98, 145n.xxx spidsborger/spidsborgerlighed ix see also bourgeois/bourgeois life Strauss, David Friedrich xxxiv n.48 suffering xxxv, xxxvi n.51, xxxix–xli, lviii, 1–2, 13, 18, 20–2, 25–6, 28–32, 35, 37–48, 52, 56–9, 63–4, 67, 79, 131, 134 sværmeri xii see also Schwärmerei synthesis between infinity and finitude lviii, 120, 123 sædelighed 145n.xxvii taking over xiii, 57–60, 90, 95 temporality lviii, 6, 21, 39, 49–50, 53–4, 56, 91, 103, 120–1, 123 the god see god, the Tidehverv xxii, xxix, 142n.xx Tidehverv movement xxii, xxiv–xxx, xxxii, xxxix n.60, xliii, liv, lxi, 47–8, 144n.xxii time xlii, lvii, 37, 49–50, 53–4, 105–7, 121, 125–6, 128–9 Toulmin, Stephen 92–3 transcendent, the lxi, 33–4, 101, 127 transcendental philosophy 117, 119–20 tro ix see also belief trust ix, xi, xlvii, xlix–li, liv, 7, 16–17, 22, 70–1, 74–5, 85–7, 89–90, 94–5, 98, 133–4 truth xxxvii, liv, lvii, lix, lxi, 12–20, 25, 114–15, 133 umiddelbar xii see also immediate understanding of life xxxv, xxxvii, 62 universal, the xiii, 47–8, 51, 57–8, 66, 110–12 virtue 79–80, 93, 96–7, 103–4, 121 wickedness xii, xxxvi, xl, l–li, 12–14, 18–19, 23, 81, 86–8, 108 Wingren, Gustaf xl, 29–30, 32, 140n.vii