The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre 9780226404653

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The Religion of Existence

THE RELIGION OF EXISTENCE Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre

Noreen Khawaja

The University of Chicago Press c h i c a g o & l o n d o n

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-40451-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-40465-3 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226404653.001.0001 Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Page 42: “The Existentialist Tree,” from Emmanuel Mounier’s Introduction aux existentialismes, © Éditions Denoël, 1947. Reprinted by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Khawaja, Noreen, author. Title: The religion of existence : asceticism in philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre / Noreen Khawaja. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016014740 | ISBN 9780226404516 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226404653 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Existentialism. | Asceticism. Classification: LCC B819 .K484 2016 | DDC 142/.78—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014740 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Your true penitence is worth more than a true, constant faith.

—Metastasio, La Clemenza di Tito

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Feel of Religion 1 1

Authenticity and Conversion 28

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2 3

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Conversion as a Way of Life 70

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Philosophical Methodism 113

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The Infinite Mission 158

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Ascetics of Presence 199 Conclusion 230 Abbreviations 243 Notes 245 Index 299

Acknowledgments

It is for several reasons misleading to begin with a page of acknowledgments. First, the fact that there are so many conversations, so many fundamental acts of sharing, so many generous people and unforeseen spurs, without any of which this work would simply not have come about. In their broad shade, the project of writing out my acknowledgments seems impossible from the start. Second, the fact that the best and truest acknowledgment of all these acts and influences is the work itself. There is no metadiscourse capable of representing these relations more fully or more precisely than the work already expresses. Perhaps one should begin always as Marcus Aurelius did, with a full chapter of philosophical thanksgiving in which family and fortune, friends and enemies are all assimilated: those from whom I have learned, from whose lessons this work attempts to teach me again, anew, something worth writing down. Having neither his courtesy nor his serenity of temper, I will thank just a few of those whose spirit and time have helped this book come to fruition. My colleagues at Yale have given substance to the idea of an intellectual community. Katie Lofton, above all, the righteous conjurer of worlds. Her quickening gaze and fundamental belief in the practice of thinking made it possible for me to work beyond the limits of my own experience in all those fragile moments of conception and construction, when the biggest bets of the project were all still in play. Elli Stern has been a relentless comrade, and his appetite for ideas has constantly provoked and inspired me to reach for the biggest and clearest version of what I was trying to say. I am thankful for his keen criticism, unflagging support, and true friendship. Martin Hägglund’s incomparable attention, reaching for big stakes and leaning on local phrases

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with equal gusto, made this book much stronger than it was before he read it. Our “reading group” on Kierkegaard was an impetus in my early work on this project. I am deeply grateful to Jennifer Herdt, who read the first draft of this work in a generous and thoughtful spirit and offered many useful suggestions for improvement. Paul Franks generously offered his time and readership and helped me see the stakes of a “Christian” genealogy in a critical new light. Kathy Tanner helped me on several occasions to see both the strengths and the weaknesses of this work in a way I had not previously imagined. Her exceptionally helpful comments on the relation between Pietism and philosophy came at a key juncture. Hindy Najman’s attentive reading of an early draft of my introduction allowed me to see a context for this work that I would not previously have imagined. Nancy Levene, in the example of her work and the powerful presence of her thinking, kept challenging me to go all the way to the bottom of things. In the refracted light of our conversations, many ideas at the basis of this work began at last to become clearer to me. I would also like to thank the colleagues and friends at Brown University who invited me to their colloquium on religion and helped me think through a draft of the first chapter of this work. Alexis Glenn gave a wonderfully sharp response, and I appreciate enormously the feedback and suggestions given by so many there, especially Mark Cladis, Tal Lewis, and Steven Bush. Similarly, a colloquium held at Yale through the Yale Seminar in Religious Studies on the manuscript during the spring of 2015 offered a tremendous breadth of insights into the readership of this work. Peter Gordon’s munificent and epically thoughtful comments—at the colloquium and beyond—were of crucial help in formulating the scope of my argument and the stakes of some of its key terms. He raised difficult questions that made the book much better (though I am sure not to have answered them all). Taylor Carman helped me anticipate important criticisms of this work and, in the spirit of existentialism itself, encouraged me to finish the book in the way it wanted to be finished. George Pattison offered typically sharp and helpful comments on many key points in core chapters of the book and has been a supportive presence throughout its development. Jen McWeeny asked me superb and difficult questions about the Sartre chapter that I am still not sure I have resolved. Christian Sommer offered several insightful suggestions about the Heidegger material in particular. During the final stage of the writing process, Jessica Helfand put an actual roof over my head, and I feel profoundly lucky to call her my friend. Marissa Gemma and Lauren Boehm read several chapters of this book in their roughest, most deranged form—it is only because of their sharp eyes, searching imaginations,

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and true, true love that this work made it into a state where it might be read by anyone else, ever. There are several people whose readership has been essential to me over the longue durée—not only of this book itself but of the thinking and the writing that led me to it. Joanna Radin showed me the meaning of intellectual kinship before I knew that without that lesson all would have been lost. She is my partner in imperfect crime. Walking and talking with Emanuele Coccia is an art in itself. Our conversations made it possible for me to experiment with this book as an act of writing, for which my gratitude is as inexhaustible as the supply of exclamation marks in his computer. David Kangas opened up so many intellectual possibilities for me—with respect to Kierkegaard in particular, but through Kierkegaard, with respect to the whole. His example casts its shadow throughout this work. David Marno—expert on thanksgiving, and whom I cannot thank enough. We started out together, and while I was worrying about the religious dimensions of phenomenology, he was rethinking devotion in phenomenological terms. In the course of our dialogues, many ideas within this work came into being. My advisors at Stanford helped me get going in my research on existentialism and believed in me long before there was evidence to back up that credence. Tom Sheehan and Brent Sockness, Brent Sockness and Tom Sheehan—their support in difference made my work stronger at every turn. Sepp Gumbrecht has always had the best possible eye for what was interesting and what was not and taught me the absolute importance of that skill. I am also grateful for the stalwart support and interest of those who had no reason to offer it—Van Harvey and Allen Wood, most especially. Family is by necessity the first to give or not to give one opportunities in life. Mine by fortune gave me the means to pursue the life I now have. The support of my parents in particular has given me the confidence to commit to this work across all manner of moments. Their bookshelves bore the first works of philosophy I ever read, a literal truth from which many metaphorical ones could be spun. I am thankful for the Morse Fund, the Griswold Fund, and the Hilles Grant at Yale University for giving me the financial backing to complete this project. And the fact that it is not just a project but a book, a thing in the world, is large part thanks to Alan Thomas, to his staunch support and many wise ways. At the close of this long and too-short list: Espéraza, the idea of which allowed me to write this book, the reality of which nearly stopped me from finishing it, and the living spirit of which makes me want to begin everything all over again.

Introduction

The Feel of Religion

It takes an atheist of world-historical proportions to have one’s entire oeuvre banned by the Vatican. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1959 distinction, uncommon for a philosopher in the twentieth century, placed him in the company of Spinoza, Diderot, and John Stuart Mill. Even Voltaire’s works had received only a selective prohibition. Three years before the verdict, Walter Kaufmann, the most important translator and defender of existential philosophy in America at the time, had observed that Sartre’s uniquely insistent atheism was at the root of the controversy that had grown around his stateside reception. Pointing to the long association between departments of philosophy and theology in American universities, Kaufmann cited “a wide-spread assumption in the United States that an avowed atheist is eo ipso no philosopher” and differentiated Sartre’s vociferous atheism from that of the British philosophers more familiar in the American context, who “do not usually make a point of their disbelief.”1 Sartre’s atheism has often been understood as something more than an expression of his own philosophical attitude. After his 1946 essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” which contains his most pointed declaration of atheism, became the most widely read and circulated work on existentialism in the postwar context, it became difficult to distinguish discussions of Sartre’s position from those of his fellow existentialists. “Existentialism Is a Humanism” was originally given as a lecture in 1945 to a room packed with Parisian intellectuals, all looking to each other for help navigating the political and moral quagmire of liberated France. As the copula in the title would suggest, the text is closer to a manifesto than an essay, and Sartre’s chief aim was a

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Introduction

political one: he wanted to convince his audience that existentialism, despite its concern with subjectivity and its insistence on the finite character of human freedom, was not a theoretical argument for quietism. Many of his listeners had been, like Sartre himself, active in the French Resistance and in 1945 found themselves leaning toward versions of Marxism in the search for a discourse that could balance a radical critique of tradition with a deep investment in the political and social future of Europe. Sartre sought to establish that existentialism—through its original concept of personal “authenticity”— was not only compatible with but even essential to any progressive agenda devoted to the advancement of material and political freedom. He also spared no time in pointing out that existentialism, properly understood, had nothing to do with religion. There was, to be sure, a lot of philosophical and quasiphilosophical talk about “existence” among those sympathetic to the monotheistic traditions of Christianity and Judaism. But here Sartre came armed with a new distinction: such talk was not existentialism but rather “Christian existentialism.”2 Utterly distinct from this Christian discourse was “atheistic existentialism,” of which Sartre offered himself as the primary representative. The first principle of atheistic existentialism emphasized the total isolation of the human being and the total responsibility of each person for his own existence: “Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.”3 Among the Christian existentialists, he named Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. Martin Heidegger was the only philosopher he placed in his own company. The published version of Sartre’s lecture quickly became one of the most widely read texts of existential thought. Within a few years, it was translated into English, Dutch, German, Danish, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Quite soon, in other words, Sartre’s context-specific defense of his philosophy, along with his fundamental division between “Christian” and “atheist” as two available types, was made to stand as the authoritative characterization of existentialism at an international level.4 At the same time, as Sartre’s definition gained more and more influence, the other so-called existentialists wanted less and less to do with it. Heidegger addressed the subject in his 1947 “Letter on Humanism,” loudly rejecting any philosophical affinity with Sartre. By the time Kaufmann’s influential anthology appeared in 1956, Kaufmann felt the need to open with the concession that existentialism had been haunted almost from its inception by the possibility that it may not even exist. The uncertainty about whether or not existentialism existed, or could be used coherently as a term, also served to mask a different sort of problem: Sartre’s dichotomy between Christian and atheistic existentialism had little basis in fact. There were, to be sure, those like Marcel and Blondel in the French

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context who identified both as Christians and as existentialists.5 But in attempting to prevent his audience from confusing his own philosophy with that of Marcel, Sartre created a good deal of confusion elsewhere. Heidegger, for one, explicitly rejected the label Sartre created for him, insisting on a formalism so absolute that it seemed to make the very question of theism irrelevant to the procedure of philosophy. And Jaspers, whom Sartre describes as a “professed Catholic,” consistently argued that his notion of “transcendence” could not be understood under any specific confessional orientation. What’s more, Jaspers’s background was Protestant, not Catholic, and it is first of all to Protestantism one ought to look in order to understand the Christian elements in his thought. The issue is not that Sartre was wrong about Heidegger or Jaspers, nor even that those influenced by his essay inadvertently repeated his errors. The issue I want to stake out here is that Sartre’s premise itself is false: the role that religion plays in the broad field of existential philosophy cannot be explained by relying on a dichotomy between Christian and atheist. Existentialism is a tradition comprised of Protestant theologians (Tillich, Bultmann, Gogarten), Catholic theologians (Rahner, Blondel, Jacques Maritain), Jewish theologians and religious thinkers (Buber, Soloveitchik, Benjamine Fondane), postconfessional religious writers of an impressively global cast (Jaspers, Unamuno, Chestov, Henri Corbin, Keiji Nishitani), vocal atheists who stood against religion (like Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir), as well as “methodological atheists” whose relation to religion is more ambiguous, like Heidegger, but also like many of the existential psychologists who appropriated and disseminated key ideas of this philosophy under the rubric of spiritual health and selfactualization in the second half of the twentieth century (R. D. Laing, Irvin D. Yalom, Rollo May).6 When Sartre’s explanation for the apparent “Christianness” of existentialism was adopted by a larger audience, the flawed distinction became the basis for a flawed theory of religion. Most attempts to account for what unites such a diverse array of figures have focused on the themes that appear in their writings. According to such accounts, existentialism is best characterized by a series of philosophical motifs, primarily connected with “negative” emotions—fear, anxiety, isolation, boredom, guilt, nothingness, finitude.7 Thematic analyses were propagated by all sorts of figures. First of all, we find them advanced by those invested in and sympathetic to existential thought, such as Helmut Kuhn, who describes Heidegger’s Being and Time as being “perfumed with the exhalations of death. Like the uniform of the black guard, it is marked all over with the mortuary emblem of skull and bones.”8 Kuhn is an admirer and early interpreter

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Introduction

of existential thought, but his reading would appear with no great shift of tone as the core argument in dismissals of Heidegger’s work. Walter Kaufmann, for another example, treats the diversity of attitudes toward religion among the figures he collected for his existentialist canon as evidence of their lack of agreement about “essentials” and posits that unity should rather be sought in the “one essential feature shared by all these men”: “perfervid individualism.”9 This same impression would appear in the words of critics, but as a negative caricature: the antisocial existentialist, faithful to himself and to himself alone. It would also leave existential thought vulnerable to a misunderstanding that haunts it to this day—namely, that it is a doctrine of the individual developed from the long tradition of European romanticism. The persistent appeal of such thematic approaches stems from the sense that existentialism lacks the deeper unity of a movement with shared objectives. But I would add that this lack itself only appears as a problem to the extent that one tries to understand existentialism as a “movement” in the first place. This certainly was the impression many readers got from Sartre’s manifesto, and he did little to work against it. Nonetheless, the impression was a false one, and it obscured the simpler nature of the connection between the main figures associated with the label. Existentialism is a tradition, not a movement. It is a tradition in the most literal sense of the word: a pattern of intergenerational influence, in which later figures read and appropriated the work of earlier figures. These figures do not always agree about “essentials,” but their intellectual kinship has little to do with the presence of common themes in their writings. The kinship is felt, even when the disagreement is undeniable, because their works are in constant conversation with one another. It is virtually impossible, for example, to discuss Kierkegaard’s notion of “choosing oneself ” without having Heidegger’s concept of authenticity in the background. Likewise, I challenge any reader to produce an example of Heideggerian Angst without drawing from the iconic encounter in Nausea in which Roquentin fails dramatically in his attempt to pick up a crumpled scrap of paper from the street. This almost automatic entanglement of ideas and images should not be seen as an indication that Heidegger is more precise than Kierkegaard or Sartre more influential than Heidegger. Nor should we be too quick to chastise our own tendencies to interpret the past anachronistically. We find ourselves in this situation because existentialism is a tradition, and it is the nature of a tradition to create situations of anachronicity. In Kierkegaard’s case, this intrinsic anachronism was aggravated by the

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relatively late reception of his writings in western Europe. Though he was a contemporary of Schelling, Marx, and Burckhardt, it would take until the years following the First World War for Kierkegaard’s collected works to be translated into German. And what emerged from this translation, in addition to a German academic field of Kierkegaard research, was a wide-ranging intellectual tradition in which Kierkegaard’s ideas were appropriated and progressively explained in a number of disciplines, serving as the stimulus to new conversations in philosophy (Heidegger and Jaspers), theology (Karl Barth and Theodor Haecker), and political thought (from Carl Schmitt to Adorno). This German “Kierkegaard” then made his way into France in the 1930s, during the same period that French philosophers were beginning to get excited about the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. Sartre’s formative trip to the Insititut Français de Berlin in 1933–34 has been credited as one major impetus for the explosion of existential thought in postwar France.10 Likewise, Jean Wahl’s 1938 opus, Études Kierkegaardiennes, which depends entirely on German translations and scholarship, provided the emerging existentialistes with the first comprehensive study of Kierkegaard in France. More than seven hundred pages long, this work also included a reissue of Wahl’s important 1932 essay “Heidegger and Kierkegaard: Search for the Original Elements of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” which positioned Heidegger as the direct philosophical descendant of Kierkegaard just as Heidegger was becoming known in France.11 Kierkegaard died in Copenhagen nearly a century before the word “existentialism” began ringing in people’s ears. Kierkegaard himself was raised strictly in his father’s Pietism, a Danish hybrid marked by both Moravian and Halle traditions. Although he was a writer of many voices, Kierkegaard consistently described the aim of his work as that of explaining what it means to become a Christian. Thus at the heart of his authorship is the idea of the Christian mission, but his audience was composed not of the distant tribes of Asia or America but of what Schleiermacher once called religion’s “cultured despisers”—the bourgeois citizens of Christendom who treat their religion as custom rather than an object of ongoing, passionate commitment. But for our purposes, it is important to note that it is not only that Kierkegaard understands his audience as the lapsed Christians of nineteenth-century Denmark; his work addresses its reader as if she were that lapsed Christian. Judging by the demographics of his own day, this would have been a fair bet. But decades later, and in the context of a far more diverse and international audience, this strategy had an interesting consequence: whether or not she acknowledges

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Introduction

this address, Kierkegaard’s reader finds herself deciding about how to draw lines between the discourse of theoretical psychology and the discourse of the Christian mission, both of which traverse his work. As the existential tradition claimed Kierkegaard as its father, in other words, those within that tradition found themselves in an inevitable confrontation with Christianity. It is quite true, as Kaufmann and others have observed, that Heidegger’s formal sublimation of Kierkegaard’s Christianity differs from the overt and atheological criticism of Sartre. Moreover, in their respective attitudes toward Kierkegaard’s religion, Heidegger and Sartre are just about equally far from the approaches taken by a Jewish philosopher such as Martin Buber or a postsecular Jew such as Lev Chestov. And yet these differences should not eclipse the fact—perhaps more salient today than in 1956—that to have Kierkegaard as one’s father also means to share Protestant Christianity as a semantic horizon of one’s work. This is so regardless of the degree to which existential thinkers explicitly engaged Christian ideas outside of their engagement with Kierkegaard. More often than not, however, their confrontation with Christianity was not merely the side-effect of their attraction to Kierkegaard. The young Heidegger, for example, seemed to be as interested in the character of Kierkegaard’s Christianity as he was in Kierkegaard himself (an influence which is now quite well documented).12 At a time when Heidegger was working out how to make the transition from medieval theology to contemporary philosophy and from conservative Catholicism to a more mediated position, inflected by liberal Protestantism and devotional literature alike, Kierkegaard presented a promising way of working through Christian ideas in a fully modern psychological language. Even more important for the development of existentialism is the fact that Kierkegaard’s Christianity wore its theoretical sophistication rather lightly. His insistence on exploring ideas through the embodiments of voice and character, his complex and only partially systematic layering of distinct perspectives, his inability to repeat an argument of speculative philosophy without it sounding like a parody—all of this made his writings seem very far removed from the abstract and impersonal discourse of traditional systematic theology. Here there was no rigid differentiation between action and reflection. In fact, most of the philosophical and psychological architecture of Kierkegaard’s writings seemed designed to portray Christianity as the form of life that emerges when a reflective individual begins to take up the problem of his own existence as a matter of passionate, personal concern. Faith is not dogma but autopsy.13 The so-called “existential” turn within phenomenology that began with Heidegger would aim at just this kind of methodological revolu-

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tion. Heidegger, inspired by the personal nature of Kierkegaard’s work and of Protestant theology more generally, wanted to find a way for philosophy to speak more immediately than as a second-order theorization of experience. He sought to position philosophical discourse against abstraction, as a development and intensification of the latent questions and assumptions that guide human beings in their everyday conduct. And when Sartre, to take a final example, exuberantly describes his discovery that an “idea” is never just a proposition one adopts but the sort of thing “one slips into”—“an immense complex of thoughts, actions, and feelings, a projection onto my future and a clearing up of my past”14—what he is describing is the idea as an aspect of one’s first-person experience of the world, as something lived. Philosophy had been looking for a new way to relate to life, one in which theory is simply one way of doing something and action itself is seen as an implicit thought. Kierkegaard’s exceptionally articulate form of Christian piety had opened up a way for thought itself to gain access to the passionate, desperate, intensely personal experience of the individual—and to express that experience through the charged psychology of a religion in which every moment stages the risk of gaining or losing one’s “eternal happiness.” To call Christianity a shared semantic horizon of existentialism thus points to something beyond the fact that the existentialists had to come up with a way of analyzing the role that Christianity played for Kierkegaard, qua progenitor of their ideas. Insofar as existentialism took on “the bold task of making philosophy homogenous with life,” in the words of an early reviewer,15 it had ventured into a space in which some of the most influential models were those developed by Protestant theologians intent on carrying forward the spirit of Reform. Luther’s special notion of vocation had charged even the most mundane and physical of labors with spiritual value, making room outside the monastic context for intellectual possibilities once attached primarily to the vita contemplativa. Living as a Christian, rather than reading or learning, is what makes one a theologian, Luther famously declared.16 Schleiermacher would later develop this idea even further with his idea of theology as a “positive” science—not a speculative or abstract system of doctrines organized by logical necessity, in other words, but simply a formal working out of the religious individual’s concrete, living posture of faith.17 Heidegger takes up Schleiermacher’s definition of theology in his 1927 essay on theology in so close a paraphrase that it could be construed as plagiarism.18 What Heidegger did was to call attention to this connection between thinking and life by giving it a name: “the existential.” Quietly but dramatically, this word would come to shift the terms on which the distinction between theol-

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Introduction

ogy and philosophy was negotiated in the twentieth century. The word is so familiar now that it is easy to ignore how specific its contemporary meaning really is. When we describe something as “existential”—a question or topic, for example—we are describing something that is personal but not exclusively emotional or psychological. We are describing something that concerns big life choices and deeply held values but that tends not to be reducible to the abstract language of ethics. Just as emphatically as an “existential crisis” insists on its being someone’s, on its being personal, the qualification “existential” also implies that the crisis bears a relation to the whole of things, to the stakes and limits of existence. Perhaps most commonly, we use this term to carve out a space within the rhythm of daily life for “why” questions that are without any clear answer. Philosophers had been using the word “existential” in a technical sense for centuries, indicating that which relates to the “existence” of a thing, in contrast with its being or “essence.” But beginning with Kierkegaard and Jaspers and Heidegger, the “existential” comes to denote the character of something that is both subjective and systematic, something with intense personal stakes and yet concerning the whole of things.19 The term was digested almost immediately by contemporary theology. Of particular note is the fact that it was adopted not as one applies a general theory to an unrelated subject matter (as in, e.g., “a post-Structuralist theory of the Trinity”) but rather as if “the existential” was itself an endogenous description of Christian theology. Rudolf Bultmann is perhaps the best known promoter of such a view. The New Testament, he writes in 1950, “is addressed directly to existential self-understanding.”20 This is not the theoretical account of existence offered by the abstract philosophies of Jaspers or Heidegger, he would insist, but the understanding of “myself in my concrete here and now, in my concrete encounters,” which at the same time is not “marginal” but “guides all my caring and willing, all my joy and anxiety.”21 Just as Hegel’s philosophy of spirit happened to reveal Christianity as the most spiritual of religions, Heidegger’s philosophy of existence happened to reveal Christianity as the most existential. Bultmann made a claim for “the existential” as the communicative dimension proper to the Christian proclamation, a move that would later be widely criticized within theological circles as a form of intellectual capitulation. As the then Professor Ratzinger put it, “The task of hermeneutics is to ‘actualize’ Scripture. . . . It asks the question: what significance have these past events for today? Bultmann himself had answered this question with the help of Heidegger’s philosophy and had interpreted the Bible in a correspondingly existentialist manner. This answer attracted no interest then, nor does it now; to that extent Bultmann has been superseded in the exegesis currently

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acceptable.”22 This sort of disregard, typical of the theological criticism of Bultmann, is less focused on the classic problem of to what degree theology ought to avail itself of philosophy in elaborating its own texts and doctrines than it is on the fact that Heidegger’s account of existence never quite sheds the impression of being Heidegger’s. When an existential interpretation is applied to the New Testament, the scripture suddenly appears subordinate, as if it were an example of Heidegger’s theory rather than the context in which Heidegger’s theory makes the most sense, as Bultmann no doubt had hoped. Yet the truly remarkable aspect of the theological reception of existentialism lies in the fact that even those who were opposed to the idea of an existentialist theology, or a theological existentialism à la Bultmann, found themselves drawn to the idea of “the existential” in their attempts to explain what Christianity was all about. The first wave of this reception can be seen in dialectical theology, and particularly in Karl Barth’s 1922 Epistle to the Romans. At the time of this second edition, Barth had so thoroughly absorbed Kierkegaardian ideas about Christianity being an exclusive affair of the “existing individual” that he endeavored a kind of existential pneumatology: “The Spirit is existential meaning and sense.”23 Or, a few pages before, “The Spirit has made thee from the law of sin and death—yes, thee, that is, thine existential self.”24 Paul Tillich, in telling his version of the story of existential theology, makes an emphatic distinction between “existentialism” and “existential,” saying that while the former represents a “school” of philosophy, the latter refers to a “human attitude”—that is, a kind of perennial idea, without any origin or discernible history. It is crucial for Tillich to make this point, since he wants to argue that the “existential” has more to do with religion than it does with the atheistic ontologies of any Heidegger or Sartre: “By its very nature, theology is existential; by its very nature, science is non-existential. Philosophy unites elements of both.”25 Here, for more or less the same reasons as Sartre divides the atheists from the Christians, Tillich wants to make it possible for “the existential” to appear as the proper medium of theology, not—as Ratzinger and others alleged—as a philosophical theory borrowed in order to make theology appear more relevant. David Tracy would make a similar argument, insisting that religious language, ideas, and symbols are effective only insofar as they have “existential meaningfulness.” Tracy borrows from Schubert Ogden—a renowned scholar of Bultmann—a notion of “existential faith” as the transcendental condition for all human activity, which all religions explicate and represent.26 Even Ratzinger, who consistently argued against the influence of existentialism on theology, seems to have been unable to avoid this use of the term: “What, in light of the Bible, is ‘faith’? And let us

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Introduction

again affirm clearly: it is not a system of semi-knowledge, but an existential decision—it is life in terms of the future that God grants us, even beyond the frontier of death. This is the attitude and orientation that gives life its weights and measures, its ordinances, and its very freedom.”27 This is not just an appeal to the “existential” as a category that can help in expounding a particular religious doctrine. This is not Kant drawing on an idea of moral philosophy to help explain providence or perfectibility. This is a definition of faith itself as existential. The inconspicuousness with which the word “existential” seeps into the language of Christian theology is not limited to systematics. Even historians of theology find themselves drawn to the term, however anachronistic it may appear in connection with pre-nineteenth-century Christianity. John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, whose familiarity with existentialism made him more than usually sensitive to its provenance, used the term to explain a quote from Calvin’s Institutes that relates knowledge of God to knowledge of “ourselves”: “Genuine knowledge of God, in Luther and Calvin, is related to the meaning of life. To use a modern word, such knowledge is existential, i.e., related to one’s very existence.”28 But we will find this term used plentifully in historical scholarship on Christianity even without Welch’s attentive caveat. Ernest Stoeffler, the great scholar of Pietism, wrote the following of Francke’s notion of conversion: “The new being is really a new creation in the sense of a complete existential re-orientation.”29 From such passages one gains the impression that the “existential”—along with other aspectual designations such as “psychological” and “sociological”—appears as a relatively neutral way to describe the personal element of religion, that which touches the individual in her reflection on what this life is ultimately all about. On the one hand, this is obvious, and few would require us to marshal so many examples to be convinced of it. At the same time, “existential” is unlike “psychological” and “sociological,” in that it is a word whose almost boundless diffusion in theological literature issues from the rise of a rather narrowly defined philosophical tradition, rather than from the long percolation of an entire branch of knowledge into the cultural consciousness of the West. At no university, to my knowledge, is there a department whose mandate is the science of existence. People started using the word “existential” to mean something other than the technical sense of “relating to the existence of a thing” to the extent that they had been reading Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre. My interest here is not in the theological implications of this appropriation but in the curiousness of the fact that the word “existential” seems tailormade for such an application. Looking again at the passages from Tracy or

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Ratzinger or Stoeffler, there is in fact no single word that could take the place of “existential” in simultaneously describing the personal, the passionate, and the reflective character of Christian faith. It is so appropriate a term that it appeals not only to those theologians who have learned from existentialism in formulating their positions but also from those who find existential thought to be a detrimental force within theology. I do not think that this is an accidental coalescence between a particular philosophy and a particular religious zeitgeist. Rather, I would side with the theologians to some extent: Christian faith is a matter of existential decision, and Christian language is a matter of existential meaning, but not because the Christian message is a kind or instance of the larger genre of existential communication. Christianity is existential because the existential itself is about Christianity. It is important to emphasize that being about Christianity is not the same thing as being Christian. The present work investigates the ways in which the existentialists’ relation to Christianity takes shape at both the historical and the philosophical levels. But it is at no point my intention to claim that these philosophers are, despite their best intentions—“still” “just”—Christians at heart. In fact, I believe that if we take seriously the question of what it means for existentialism to be “about” Christianity, to have Christianity as its object, we will find that it changes how we will want to think and speak about the relation between religion and philosophy in the twentieth century, and particularly, about how, when, and why we draw a distinction between what is Christian and what is not. To get a clearer idea of what is at stake in this issue it will be helpful to review some of the more important interpretations of the relation between religion and philosophy within the tradition of existentialism. Until now, there have been roughly three kinds of narratives about the role of religion in existential thought. The first has several variant forms, but it centers on a differentiation between discourses of greater and lesser generality. Philosophy aims for an account of what is, and of the conditions of its being, at the maximum level of generality. Even if it is not possible to think entirely “without presuppositions,” it is the ongoing business of philosophy to examine, criticize, and abandon its presuppositions wherever it can. Christianity, on the other hand, makes truth contingent on having the right presupposition, which is not “there” to be discovered or explicated but must be revealed by the power of a transcendent god. Only for those who have heard this message is righteousness a possibility. From a philosophical point of view such as I have drawn, insofar as Christianity regards the natural as of deficient or incomplete value and seeks to ground its story about what is in the opaque

12

Introduction

register of transcendent authority, it renounces the claim to full universality. A philosophical description of existence aims at maximal universality and formality. A Christian theological account of existence categorically depends on historical revelation and prescribes explicit, concrete norms. Though this simplification risks caricature, it is not without foundation, and more pertinently, it is shared by a number of influential interpreters of existentialism. It has long been a standard characterization of Heidegger’s appropriation of Kierkegaard. Champions of Heidegger’s approach, such as Hubert Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, as well as critics, such as Patricia Huntington and Daniel Berthold-Bond, identify Heidegger’s formalization of Kierkegaard’s psychology and secularization of Kierkegaard’s religion as one and the same gesture.30 Paul Tillich, in calling into question Sartre’s account of existentialism as a field divided between Christians and atheists, presents the distinction between the general and formal and the particular and concrete in terms of the distinction between question and answer: “In reality there is no atheistic or theistic existentialism. Existentialism gives an analysis of what it means to exist. . . . It develops the question implied in existence, but it does not try to give the answer, either in atheistic or in theistic terms. Whenever existentialists give answers, they do so in terms of religious or quasi-religious traditions which are not derived from their existentialist analysis.” For Pascal, this extra-existential resource is the Augustinian tradition, Tillich continues, for Kierkegaard the Lutheran, and for Heidegger and Sartre it is humanism.31 On Tillich’s view, existentialism itself is neutral with respect to religion. Personal commitments and traditional biases are what steer the formal, philosophical description of existence toward the “answer” of Christianity, or toward something else. And yet, just a page later, Tillich will say that because this apparently formal, religiously neutral discourse happens to interpret human existence in such a way that it corresponds to what is theologically understood as the “old eon”—that is, “the predicament of man and his world in the state of estrangement”—existentialism is actually a “natural ally of Christianity,” and “the good luck of Christian theology,” one that “helped to rediscover the classical Christian interpretation of human existence.”32 For Tillich, existentialism is not only a handy theoretical discourse in which to explore religious ideas and tropes, it is the ideal modern prolegomenon to the Christian faith. Thus even if we accept his claim that the “question of existence” posed by the existentialists as philosophers is entirely distinguishable from the answer offered by them in their capacity as Lutheran or Thomistic theologians, we must at least admit, by the same account, that it is quite the leading question.

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Here, as so often with discourses framed as universal, an unacknowledged tie to the particular can be traced and brought into question. The second major approach to understanding the relation between existential philosophy and religion follows what now tends to be called, after Charles Taylor, a “subtraction narrative” of the emergence of the secular sphere. Philosophers, for the most part, still refer to this development in the nineteenth-century language of the “death of God.” And although the focus is somewhat different, the underlying idea is the same: the difference between the religious and the nonreligious can be expressed as a loss. The atheists lack the unifying ground of the monotheistic God and the trustworthy norms that flow from it. In his recently retranslated essay, “Anxiety about God in an Ostensibly Godless Age,” Leszek Kolakowski cites the work of Sartre and Camus as examples of “the permanently festering wound in the European spirit” left by the death of God.33 Kolakowski interprets the “negative” tonality of existential writing, with its emphasis on despair, uncertainty, and alienation, as the paradoxical symptom of its success. The authority of Christianity had been systematically undermined; existentialism, like all revolutionary movements, lost its strength and sense of purpose just as soon as the tyrant it was born to criticize had been effectively deposed. Another variant of the subtraction story identifies existentialism as the surrogate of religion rather than its usurper. Hans Jonas argues for a deep kinship between existentialism and Gnosticism on the basis of the fact that both are formations of a metaphysically traumatized civilization. Jonas’s position on this score, interestingly, is a historically minded revision of his initial approach to Gnosticism. Beginning from the observation that there were remarkable “parallels” between Gnostic religious tropes and the central philosophical ideas of Heideggerian existentialism (at which he first arrived while participating simultaneously in Bultmann’s and Heidegger’s seminars in Marburg), Jonas imagined himself to have found confirmation of existentialism’s success as a universal account of human existence—that is, of “any existence whatsoever,” no matter how historically or geographically remote.34 When Jonas revised his opinion on the matter some years later, he postulated instead that both traditions were attempts to respond to the loss of moral unity characteristic of their times. If there was a resemblance between Gnostic ideas and existential philosophy, it was now to be explained by the fact that Gnosticism had occupied the spiritual vacuum left by the collapse of the ordered Greek cosmos. Existentialism, for its part, had emerged as a response to the collapse of Christian metaphysics, to the loss of a God that could generate norms.35 This privative view of existentialism is as standard as it comes. In 1949,

14 Introduction

Helmut Kuhn cites “theology without God,” as the unofficial, paradoxical name by which people were then referring to existential thought. This title differs from those similar-sounding phrases that have now become so familiar—“death of God,” “religion without God,” or more recently still, “postsecularity”—in that while the role of God in any religion can be debated, God is categorically the object of theology. Expanding on this title, Kuhn presents existentialism not as theological discourse without an object but as a discourse that turns its lack of an object into the object of its discourse. This sounds clever because it is: “The Encounter initiating crisis is not an encounter with God who discovers our Nothingness but with Nothingness as the vacuum left by the nonexistent God as in Sartre, or the absent God as in Heidegger.”36 As a surrogate, as the form of spiritual “encounter” that grows in a condition defined by loss, existentialism cannot help but be understood negatively, as the ongoing bearer of a lack. This trait is rarely more pronounced than when existentialism is being contrasted with the Christianity it is said to have replaced. As Kuhn continues, he argues for the distinctness of existentialism from Christianity on the basis of this lack. In a comparison with Gnosticism, apparently channeling Jonas, Kuhn writes, “While Gnosticism promises to its followers liberation through the Paraclete  .  .  . the contemporary Existentialist bids us to live without hope, but in freedom, a stranger to the world, but voluntarily so.”37 On this view, the existentialist is not a Christian to the extent that his alienation itself has been willed. It is one of the recurrent features of the surrogacy theory of existentialism to present the similarities with Christianity as strategic—that is, as the medium of a deeper attempt to distort or revalue Christian categories. Kuhn does this through a remarkable simile with Daumier: “Crisis as depicted by the Existentialists is the Christian crisis in caricature. The original is recognizable, just as in Daumier’s cartoons representing court procedures the judge is recognizably a judge. But the effigy represents also the opposite of the supposed model.”38 Resemblance, according to this view, is the war-paint of criticism. As this last point suggests, those who would see in existential thought a philosophical response to the moral and spiritual void left by a collapsed Christian metaphysics tend to de-emphasize the problem of conceptual genealogy in favor of the problem of metaphysics. It is less important whether or not the existential description of the human is based in a Christian anthropology than whether the existential account accepts the reality of anything beyond the human. If the encounter with nothingness never yields to the hope of something more, the threat of resemblance is neutralized. Or in other words, the distinction between Christianity and philosophy is meaningless in the

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context of a nonmetaphysical discourse. If the human condition is described in apparently theological terms (thrown, guilty, alienated), on this interpretation, it is not only because there is a structural analogy between the philosophical and theological anthropology but also because the supracosmic fall has been recast in historical terms as the decline of Christianity as a moral and intellectual milieu. The third approach to understanding the role that religion has played in existentialism is considerably less systematic than the two I have just discussed. It would be difficult to argue, indeed, that this approach constitutes a genuine “interpretation” of religion, were it not for the fact that in many cases, little more is said about the matter. The approach I refer to here is one in which the “religious” within the “philosophical” is identified as a kind of linguistic-rhetorical accent, something that adds a dimension of resonance to the analysis or argument in question but does not form a part of that argument itself. This view accepts that the religious is something that can insinuate itself into the background of philosophical discourse. Jean Wahl set up this way of thinking about existentialism in the 1930s, in the attempt to assess the fundamental relation between Heidegger and Kierkegaard that would prove so influential on Sartre and others of his generation: “From Kierkegaard’s religious ideas, Heidegger of course embraces only this shadow they cast upon human affairs; he reduces, to put it in this way, the categories of the religious onto the moral plane.”39 Once “reduced,” these categories serve neither as examples of a universal analysis nor as competitors in an account of the real but as “colors of the theological background.” This view leads to a way of speaking about religion in primarily anecdotal, rhetorical terms, as something that demands no explanation and cannot be philosophically interrogated. Merleau-Ponty, for example, will describe the difference between Sartre and Gabriel Marcel not as one of atheism and Christianity or belief and disbelief but rather as one of a “religious accent.” Sartre’s philosophy, Merleau-Ponty insists, could not be described as “irreligious, in a very large sense of the term, since on the contrary we arrive there at a domain where certain Christians have found themes that they like.” Sartre and Marcel, indeed, share a number of basic categories and presuppositions about existence and how it should be analyzed. Both understand existentialism in fundamentally humanistic terms. The difference is that for Sartre, there is no emphasis on the mysteriousness of human reality. Marcel’s “mystery of being” becomes, when transferred into Sartre’s hands “a kind of lucid mystery.”40 Merleau-Ponty is voicing a prevalent understanding of what “religious” might mean as a distinction between two figures who both reject supernatural claims, including those pertaining to revelation—two fig-

16

Introduction

ures who will not argue for the relevance of Christianity as a tradition in either historical or moral terms, but who nonetheless come to opposite conclusions about whether the finite character of human consciousness should be read as an enclosure or as an openness to something beyond, however indefinite that something may be. It is not that Sartre the atheist denies God and Marcel the Christian invokes one. Nor can the religiousness of Marcel’s existentialism be characterized as the application of existential analysis to a concrete religious worldview. What Merleau-Ponty (and Wahl) is saying is that in existentialism, philosophy wears its religion as rhetoric. The significance of this last view for the present study is not immediately apparent. Why should one take seriously the marginal and imprecise characterization of religious “colors” and “accents” in the work of Heidegger and Sartre? How can such an unmethodical approach serve as the reference point of any systematic discussion of existentialism? The significance appears, I would argue, when we see this approach as the symptom of a deep and widespread uncertainty in the twentieth century about what makes thought “religious” if it regards neither the Bible nor tradition as a source of authority and it emphatically eschews metaphysics. Are ideas religious inasmuch as they were conceived in religious traditions? Are ideas religious inasmuch as they trigger in an extraconfessional context the affects and experiences associated with a particular religious tradition (wonder, mystery, dread)? Iris Murdoch, attempting to make sense of these ambiguities within Sartre’s oeuvre, referred to a latent “quasi-religious” dimension in Sartre, as well as to his “religious hatred of religion.”41 The satisfying crack of such phrases distracts from their obscurity. She is on to the next topic before we have time to ask, exactly what work is the word “religious” doing here? My wager is the following: What all three of these approaches address is that something about existential philosophy feels religious to its readers, even at its most atheistic pitch. Just pages after citing Sartre’s robust atheism as the explanation for his troubled American reception, Kaufmann proceeds to a rather astounding simile between Sartre and the Buddha, who “also made a point of his lack of belief, and for essentially the same reason as Sartre.”42 Kaufmann quickly admits the ridiculousness of this comparison, reasoning that Sartre “is not saintly but aggressively human.” “Nevertheless,” Kaufmann continues, “the Buddha, too, opposed any reliance on the divine because he wanted men to realize their complete responsibility. His final, and perhaps most characteristic words, according to tradition, were: ‘Work out your own salvation with diligence.’ ” Kaufmann does not address the fact that the Bud-

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dha’s “final words” appear to be a strikingly close paraphrase of the standard English translation of Paul’s famous line—“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”—from the letter to the Philippians (which would also go on to inspire the title of Kierkegaard’s most famous work).43 Reaching for a way to characterize existentialism’s quasi-religiosity, Kaufmann’s circuitous comparison delivers Sartre to the shelves of new age spirituality and the Buddha to the neoliberals. Lacking a methodical approach to religious phenomena, it has been a pattern for philosophical readers who detect some connection with religion in apparently atheistic existential thought to trace this impression to a rhetorical or biographical hangover on the part of the author in question. What categories, apart from rhetoric or biography, do we have to explain why the writings of Sartre—whose vocal atheism was partly responsible for making existentialism a household word—have seemed so religious? Surely it was the lingering traces of his Protestant upbringing, the Schweitzer side of the family tree rearing its kulturreligiöse head.44 Heidegger, for his part, consistently dismissed Christian theism as an unoriginal twist on the misunderstanding of being propagated by Western metaphysics. If we take this dismissal seriously and do not postulate some sort of complex crypto-theological game,45 we might have to imagine that the religious impression of his writings is the product of his stylistic decision to write a secular, theoretical account of human existence by way of Christian psychological categories (itself surely bolstered by his own religious upbringing and formation). Understood thus, as part-biography and part-innuendo, the role of religion in atheistic existentialism becomes more or less irrelevant from a philosophical perspective. As long as such religious accents do not violate the limits circumscribed by a fully humanist philosophy, what is the point in worrying about them? In fact, we might even expect them to fall away entirely with subsequent generations as the historical ties to Christianity become more and more attenuated. Wahl anticipates this moment already in 1938, excited by the question of what Heidegger’s philosophy would actually be if it were to eliminate “all theology, every religious idea.”46 Wahl is worried that Heidegger’s philosophy is too thoroughly marked by religious ideas to survive such a purge, but his question betrays the deeper conviction that such ideas should be eradicated wherever possible. In their frenzied and unfocused way, all of these interpretations have their finger on the fact that existential philosophy was in constant conversation with Christianity. This is so whether we are talking of Kierkegaard and Marcel and Bultmann or of Heidegger and Camus and Sartre. The existential tradition as a whole is engaged in the interpretation of elements of Christian piety within

18

Introduction

the context of a humanistic philosophy that rejects metaphysics and grants no particular authority to Christian scripture or tradition. Sometimes this engagement was deliberate and methodical; at other times, it seems to have been inadvertent. Where we go astray is in thinking that when philosophy engages with ideas from another domain (history, religion)—we must choose between two alternatives in understanding what has happened: those ideas are either pushed into the foreground as a properly philosophical argument (in which case they can be debated) or remain in the background as style (in which case they can at best be mocked). If Heidegger describes human existence as fallen, on this view, fallenness is either a description of the moral character of the individual or it is a metaphor. Either Heidegger is arguing that human existence is bad or lacking in some fundamental way, in other words, or his vocabulary is simply misleading. And if such language is not ultimately in service of a moral valuation, as Heidegger’s most serious philosophical interpreters will claim, what stands in the way of a sharper (and less religious) reinterpretation? Could we not eliminate the ambiguity by abandoning the innuendo and describing “authentic” and “inauthentic” existence in terms that are less normatively charged and more phenomenologically precise? Engagement with religious concepts is rarely just a matter of language, of course. As anxiety, conversion, conscience, sin, and guilt found their way into the halls of German academic philosophy, they brought with them complex and unacknowledged values. Many of those who write about authenticity have been concerned with the question of whether a philosophical vocabulary that formalizes basic Protestant ideas—that is, ideas forged in a religious context in which the individual is caught in a condition of radical sin—can ever manage to describe human reality without preemptively devaluing it. But the issue of religious value goes deeper than the question of whether or not Heidegger and Jaspers and Sartre, by using “negative” words, are complicit in a discourse that defines finitude as a condition of moral privation. The question I think we should be considering instead is how the interpretation and formalization of religious categories itself generates norms within the practice of philosophy. It would be reasonable to treat the influence of religion on existentialism in a purely rhetorical manner if Heidegger had been the beginning of this story. The present book begins with Kierkegaard. I do so in part to emphasize that Kierkegaard is not a mere representative of the “religion” that Heidegger secularizes. On my view, it is Kierkegaard who is the first to reformulate Christian theology in fully “existential” terms. And within Kierkegaard’s thought, this existential formulation of Christianity serves a religious purpose. As I will

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argue, the idea of authentic selfhood at the center of existential philosophy is first developed by Kierkegaard, where it serves in a missionary project of bringing the citizen of Christendom closer to “true” Christianity by means of a pietistic intensification of one’s commitment, or faith. Authenticity, in this tradition, is not something one obtains or at which one “arrives”; it emerges from the interminable labor of an individual’s choice of herself and obtains only as long as that choice continues to be affirmed, or worked out. The idea that existentialism is engaged actively with Christian ideas is not itself new. Habermas repeatedly cites existentialism as one of the “translating” movements within philosophy (along with dialectical materialism, empiricism, and nominalism) that reach into the “semantic potential” of the history of salvation and bring it into public communicative contexts.47 Peter Berger also described existentialism as a key force in the subjective, experiential “translation” of religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one that facilitated the widespread secularization of religion (which Berger at that point maintained). Due to the immense popularity of existential thought and its influence on mainstream psychoanalytic and therapeutic literature, Berger held existentialism as a powerful secularizing discourse within culture at large, as well as in the intellectual and academic conversations about philosophy and religious thought.48 It is probably significant that of the many readers who have addressed the influence and role of religion in existential thought, the two figures to do so in terms of a wholesale “translation” of Christianity into public discourse are Germanophone thinkers of the same generation (in fact, both were born in 1929), both of whose most original work is formed by bridging philosophical analysis and social thought. Their remarks about translation theory do accord some agency to the existential interpreter, acknowledging that Christianity is not just a style of discourse that some existentialists have chosen and others have rejected. Yet Habermas’s and Bergers’s remarks do not rise above the anecdotal level. They tell us next to nothing about what this experiment actually achieved. What does the translation translate? If it is not simply rhetoric and vocabulary that link existential thought to Christianity, what does this rhetoric do? And then there is the further development, unforeseen even by Kierkegaard, which saw existential thought become the basis for a reformulation of Christian piety in the twentieth century. As much as existentialism can be credited for dressing up atheism in the twentieth century as simultaneously ethical and cool, existential thought is also at the root of many important theological and religious renewals of the twentieth century, from the orthodox Barth to the liberal Tillich and from the Catholic Rahner to the Jewish Soloveitchik.49 In other words, if

20

Introduction

existentialism is an example of secularizing translation, how do we make sense of the fact that its secularization never quite seems to stick? I propose that we investigate the impact of Christianity in philosophical existentialism as a problem of values. By values, I do not mean the evaluative rhetoric or language many existentialists borrowed from Christian theology. I also do not mean belief.50 Whether or not Heidegger’s philosophy can be described as theistic in some meaningful sense is not my concern in this book. The same goes for the rather tired question about whether an atheism as insistent as Sartre’s depends on epistemic claims comparable to those involved in religious faith. Values here refer to those implicit priorities and subthematic choices that orient a particular discourse and the distinctions that it makes. These priorities can be brought out through critical reflection, but in general, they are not expressly avowed or acknowledged by the author or in the discourse itself. In fact, to the extent that an author explicitly announces an attachment to a given principle (“Becoming a self is never complete”), my approach is to look beyond the literal sense of the announcement for an idea operating between its words and its lines (Completion is bad? Completion is illusory? Completion is desirable but in this case just not possible?). There is something apparently “suspicious” about this mode of interpretation. It seeks out and draws attention to what the text does not confess. As such, my approach may appear accusatory, as though I were claiming something about what the author(s) in question should have acknowledged about their work. But critique and accusation are different in kind, not in degree. In fact, there is often a direct tension between these two modes of reading and interpreting texts, for if the critic is to retain her “suspicion” even when the text states its commitments explicitly, the text can only ever be “guilty” of masking something that criticism would need no particular vision or originality to draw out. Nonetheless, when it comes to the subject of religion, postures of critique and delegitimation are difficult to disentangle. We often suppose, in secular contexts, that religion is the kind of thing people ought to reveal about themselves. And this of course implies the belief that religion is something people feel inclined to hide. My interest in the subthematic relation between religion and philosophy in existentialism should at no point be confused for an attempt to delegitimize existential philosophy by showing it to be “insufficiently” secular, whether in comparison with its own objectives or with ours. Nor does my argument here support a perennialist view about the inevitable resurgence of religion in general or Christianity in particular. I am simply try-

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ing to understand what was at stake in the existential tradition more clearly than its proponents understood it themselves. What such a critical gaze will offer us, in the course of this book, is a new portrait of the shifting relation between philosophy and religion in late modern Europe. What tends these days to be called “secularization” in academic contexts—that is, the process by which a politically and culturally dominant religion is transformed into a subculture and its authority distributed among other social spheres—took place in the arena of European philosophy long before the period I am considering here. One narrative might identify this beginning of the intellectual secularization of Christianity with the birth of so-called Continental philosophy itself—with Descartes, Spinoza, and Bayle, with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel—as human reason declared its autonomy and began to examine the truth claims of theology with an ever greater independence. Another might focus on the streams of Enlightenment thought in particular. In either case, it is clear that the existentialists came late in this story—too late, I think, to argue that the impact of Protestant piety on their work is merely the reflection of an unfinished secularization. Indeed, the deliberateness and analytic distance with which these thinkers engage Christian ideas can only be understood as taking place in a context in which secularization is well under way.51 So if philosophical secularization describes the process by which Christian theology is transformed from a dominant, organizing framework for modern philosophy into a philosophical topic, then existentialists—including Kierkegaard—are all secular thinkers. This means that we will need to search for another sort of concept if we want to understand what the existentialists were up to when, from within a philosophical culture that had already pulled away from an organizing Christian frame, they began to explore the philosophical potential of biblical stories and theological ideas. Shared by all of these explorations is one crucial but rarely acknowledged sentiment: Christianity is too important to the project of philosophy to be left to theologians. This is to say that existential critiques of religion rarely aim at the kind of whitewashing familiar from some contemporary debates about the secular. By and large, they are not interested in removing Christian ideas or tropes from philosophical discourse. On the contrary, they are experimenting actively with this material and looking for new ways to relate to it, which operate outside the traditional purview of Christian theology (and again, this includes Kierkegaard). This active, experimental relation to religious ideas is the precise meaning of my statement above that existentialism is itself about Christianity. And in this regard, it would not be inappro-

22

Introduction

priate to wonder about a certain kinship between the historical-philosophical project of existentialism and the study of religion itself. At the very least, we might postulate a spectrum operating between, on the one hand, the work of existential thinkers and the work of the scholar of religion, inasmuch as both aim to grasp the sense of religious phenomena while bypassing the authoritative systems of interpretation that have grown up around them. Following subthematic values in play in the philosophy of authenticity will lead us to a series of surprising results. First, we will come to understand the remarkable extent to which a familiar secular discourse of authentic selfhood is shaped by a specifically Protestant-Pietistic tradition of thinking about religious conversion—that is, we will see that the religious stakes of existential philosophy are far deeper than the metaphors it uses and far more specific than a general theoretical interest in the idea of humanity as fallen.52 Indeed, the secular ideal of personal authenticity will prove to be wrapped up with this Pietistic tradition in so many ways that it should bring us to reopen the question of what the Pietists’ emphasis on personal conversion was really about in the first place. The most dramatic result of this study, however, appears when we tackle the comparatively undertheorized question of how philosophy is transformed through its engagement with its religious background. When the architects of authentic existence engage with Protestant formations of piety, what emerges is a new form of asceticism. “Ascetic” is not a word we hear frequently in connection with modern philosophy. In late antiquity, as Hadot and Foucault will tell us, ascetic schools such as those of the Stoics and the Epicureans were precisely those which transgressed modern distinctions between religion and philosophy.53 But in contrast with these Hellenistic schools, existential thought is based in a radical affirmation of finite temporality and embodied concern. So what role can asceticism play in such a context? To start with, we will have to discard the impression that asceticism necessarily involves a reproachful attitude toward finite life or toward the senses. I will have much more to say about this subject at the end of the first chapter, where I define in precise terms the sense of asceticism as it applies to my argument in this book. But it will be helpful to note this difference from the start. While in one sense we do see with existentialism a kind of echo of the late antique situation, inasmuch as the ambiguous space between religion and philosophy opens up as a space of ascetic selfcultivation, it is a largely Protestant asceticism that rears its head here. And as Weber has taught us, Protestant asceticism is capable of bearing all sorts of paradoxical relations to the value of finite, innerworldly goods. This mention of Protestantism brings me to another crucial point. In the

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context of this book, the “Protestant” does not refer to a particular denomination or set of denominations within the Christian church. Rather, Protestantism designates an open-ended historical tradition in which certain spiritual, social, and theological tendencies within Christianity were concentrated, developed, and institutionalized. What this means, first of all, is that when we talk about typically or characteristically Protestant ideas and norms, we at no point need suppose that the phenomena we are looking at should be present exclusively within the materials belonging to the Lutheran and Reformed churches. The emphasis on personal conversion and repentance over the rite of baptism is a distinctive feature of Protestant theology. But it did not develop out of thin air. Considering the penitential cast of the writings of Paul and Augustine, one might even say that an emphasis on conversion was a part of Christian theology from its earliest stages. As I see it, such precedents actually support the historical claims I am making here, for if we understand Protestantism not as the “other” to Catholicism or any other religious tradition but as one particular way of concentrating and working out certain possibilities already operative within the broader Christian tradition, we should be more surprised to find that existential ideas have little resonance with preReformation Christianity than to find that they have considerable resonance. At the same time, it is worth noting that it is not to Aquinas that one’s thoughts are likely to drift in reading the works of the existentialists, but to Paul and Augustine, to Eckhart and Tauler, to Silesius and Pascal—in other words, to those same pre-Reformation and Catholic thinkers with the most decisive impact on the development of Protestantism itself. (Luther himself was an Augustinian, of course.) These figures naturally cannot be seen as Protestants, and I think it would overstate the coherence of the denominational divisions within Christianity to see them as something like proto-Protestant or quasiProtestant thinkers. A better way to understand this resonance is to view the Pauline, Augustinian, and Rhineland heritage as key chapters in the history of Christianity in which the devotional possibilities that Protestants would later formalize in the context of wide-ranging theological and ecclesiastical reform were initiated and developed in a preliminary way. In noting the diversity of the existential tradition, I mentioned above that it included Jewish thinkers, Catholics, atheists, as well as those with roots in Buddhist traditions. With this in mind, one might reasonably wonder what an argument for the Protestant roots of existential authenticity entails for those same Jewish and Catholic and atheistic existentialists. We might think of the striking question Levinas poses in 1976, without offering an answer: “Can one still be a Jew without Kierkegaard?”54 As any scholar of religion would be

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Introduction

quick to point out, these categories are not mutually exclusive. In this book, in fact, it is my precise aim to show how a quietly lapsed Catholic such as Heidegger and a zealous atheist such as Sartre both came to deploy at the center of their philosophies an ascetic ideal developed in the context of pietistic Protestantism. This does not make Sartre any less of an atheist, nor Heidegger any less of a Catholic (though it is debatable how much of a Catholic Heidegger was to begin with). Sartre’s atheism is as plural and porous as any other concrete historical stance. What my argument does entail is that to the extent that Sartre’s (or Heidegger’s, or Nishitani’s, or Arendt’s, or Camus’s) thought is shaped by the ideal of an existence that is “authentic” by virtue of the spiritual labor that the subject undertakes to own up to her fundamental situation—an ideal that equates the proper, an existence most truly “one’s own,” not with what is natural or “given” but with transformative labor, merit, and conscious, active reflection—his thinking also participates in a specifically Protestant tradition of working on the self. What the “specifically” Protestant offers us, in other words, is a way to account for the ascetic patterns of valuation that have shaped one of the most powerful spiritual ideals of our times—the idea that my “true” self is not given to me but something I am responsible for producing.55 And on this subject, it is attention to existentialism’s engagement with Protestant piety that will be most revealing. There are counterintuitive elements to the claim I am making here. For many, Protestant Christianity is associated with a devaluation of work in favor of personal faith. Asceticism is associated with a rejection of worldly concerns while existentialism is known for promoting the view that this world and this life is all that there is. However, Protestantism and existentialism have something still more fundamental in common. At the heart of both is a strident critique of naturalism and a commitment to the valuebestowing capacity of spiritual labor. It is through such labor—by choosing, thinking, affirming, believing in, appropriating the given—that what is comes to participate in the free movement of spirit. The authentic existence, according to such thinking, is never what is most natural or uncorrupted. The authentic is the natural insofar as the natural has come into its own. My argument in this book focuses on the idea of personal authenticity at the center of existential thought. I focus on three “figures” within the existential tradition: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. Their importance to my argument is not in any simple sense a function of their overall influence or stature within the history of philosophy; rather, it is in the work of these three thinkers that I find the richest and most consequential work on the concept

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of authenticity taking place.56 In Sartre’s hands authenticity stood for the total divorce of humanism from Christianity. To be authentic was to achieve, in a given situation, a kind of Promethean coup by which moral authority is wrenched from nature or the gods and restored to its proper seat in the human being. Authenticity is the core virtue of Sartre’s vision of existentialism as the philosophy that “puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.”57 In the broad arc of the book, I will show how the moral ideal that appears as the cornerstone of Sartrean humanism is in fact the product of a complex and sustained engagement with certain Protestant notions of the religious conversion of the individual. Two moments within this engagement are particularly key: (1) the phenomenological strain of existentialism took on the format of a Pietistic ideal of conscious, personal conversion just as (2) the ideal of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) was being formulated as the crowning achievement of a first-person philosophy. I will argue that one prime reason existential thought can’t seem to shake the impression of religion, even at its most atheistic pitch, is because it fuses an ascetic logic of self-cultivation into the methodological procedure of phenomenology. If this account is persuasive, we will come to see a direct, nonmetaphorical line running between Kierkegaard’s devotional idea of “becoming a self ” and Heidegger’s fascination with “the piety of thinking” (die Frömmigkeit des Denkens); we will come to see a historical as well as a conceptual connection between Kierkegaard’s intramural mission of turning Christendom toward Christianity and Sartre’s global mission to empower humanity by disenfranchising God. The first chapter, “Authenticity and Conversion,” serves as a conceptual prolegomenon to this story. It takes these two rather nebulous concepts and narrows their field of reference to demonstrate a conceptual and historical convergence between the existential ideal of personal authenticity and the Pietistic-Protestant ideal of personal conversion. Far from referring to a “true” or “real” self underlying false, social, or superficial performances, existential authenticity describes a way of working on the self. This work takes on the form of an exercise (askesis), I suggest, to the degree that it becomes difficult to articulate what the work is good for, what it is supposed to achieve. Conversion, likewise, is more than a dotted line separating religious from nonreligious existence. With the Pietists’ emphasis on the conscious experience of radical transformation, I argue, the theological idea of conversion becomes available as a way of thinking about life as in need of ordering activity. In the final section of this chapter, I outline the sense of the term “asceticism” as it applies to this book. In contrast with renunciative ascetic practices, which focus

26

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on abstaining from worldly interests and concerns, the ascetic tendency that runs through Pietistic and existential traditions is what I call an energetic asceticism. Here the term “ascetic” is compatible with an affirmative philosophy because it refers to a view in which a thing derives its value not from what it is in itself but from its having been transformed into an object of spiritual labor. In “Conversion as a Way of Life,” I present the core problem of Kierkegaard’s thought—the question of what it means to “become a Christian”—as a thinly veiled psychological reformulation of Pietistic notions of conscious, ongoing conversion. As Kierkegaard adapts this theological model of conversion to the task of becoming a self, he creates a new, fully modern language of subjectivity in which the individual’s relation to herself is charged with an ascetic normativity. Kierkegaard’s idea of “choosing oneself,” which gave rise to existentialist notions of authenticity as decision or “resolve” about one’s own finite existence, is here defined simultaneously as the way of being “one’s own” (sit egen) and as an act of repentance. On this model, each situation in which the individual finds herself is subtly recast as an opportunity—to earn her own existence by choosing, or to fail to do so. The third chapter, “Philosophical Methodism,” takes up Heidegger’s neologism Eigentlichkeit (“authenticity”) as the formalization of Kierkegaardian notion of the “own” that emerges through self-choice. Given that the choice of oneself, in Heidegger’s picture of things, does not lead either to despair or to faith, but simply to a more explicated way of being in the world, it has been customary to treat Heidegger’s appropriation of Kierkegaardian ideas about the self as a secularization of Kierkegaard and of Protestant psychology more generally. However, the formalizing gesture by which Heidegger abstracts from Kierkegaard’s religious idea of becoming also functions as an adaptation of the ascetic ideal within the methodological dimension of philosophy. Method, for Heidegger, is never a set of rules for how academic philosophy should proceed. Method describes the way in which philosophy grows out of and feeds back into the everyday reflective praxis of the existing human being. Once we see the connections between authentic self-choice and philosophical method, on the one hand, and philosophical method and reflective life, on the other, the ascetic, penitential aspect of self-choice reappears at the center of Heidegger’s philosophy. In the fourth chapter, “The Infinite Mission,” I examine how Sartre finds in Heidegger’s notion of Eigentlichkeit the elements for an explicit and robust ethics of personal authenticity. What was for Heidegger a formal and normatively ambiguous criterion of philosophical method becomes for Sartre a core humanist virtue. To be authentic in Sartre’s view is not just one possible

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“mode” of existence, as Heidegger will describe it. Authenticity is the only possible basis of human freedom and it is what everyone ought to pursue (Jews, blacks, anti-Semites, Marxists). Sartre defines authenticité as the moral cornerstone in humanity’s “infinite mission” of absorbing and shouldering the legacy of the “dead God.” The chapter examines the historical irony behind the fact that Sartre will repeatedly describe the passage from “bad faith” to “authentic existence” as a kind of conversion. Despite the atheistic bent of Sartre’s thinking, the ascetic element of authenticity remains forceful: the self is free and good—it is itself—to the extent that it is and continues to be the product of its own penitential labor. In the final chapter of the book, “Ascetics of Presence,” the analysis turns back somewhat, examining how and to what degree a notion of the sinful condition of human beings has impacted the tradition existential thought coming out of Kierkegaard. There is an intuitive impression that if authenticity is an heir to the idea of Christian conversion, inauthenticity reflects the idea that human being requires conversion because of its sinfulness. I work against this impression, arguing that it is the differential, discontinuous structure behind the notion of sin that most influenced existential thought. Protestant thinking about sin introduces into existential discourse the idea that the true form of human life is not continuity but rupture and break. Moreover, the injunction that the convert “repent”—that is, acknowledge his own sinfulness— pressurizes the boundary between confessing and affirming oneself as sinner. This ambiguity leads to the theologically problematic but philosophically crucial implication that the disrupted and broken character of life is not only the truth but a truth worth valuing. Through the adaptation of the ascetic discourse of conversion into an ethics of authenticity, sin gives rise to a new way of thinking about existential temporality, which would prove a key point of departure for later twentieth-century critiques of essentialism. The work that follows does not pretend to be a complete account of the problem of religion in existential thought. On the contrary, its success should be understood as contingent on the fate of its invitation to others to take up the question of existential religion anew.

Chapter 1

Authenticity and Conversion

The words of this title stand in no obvious relation to one another. They are not synonyms or antonyms. They are not subcategories of a common genus. In fact, they seem to describe things of utterly distinct sorts. Authenticity describes the quality of “genuineness” or trustworthiness and can refer to both things and persons. Conversion tends to refer to an event in life, a person’s coming to belong to a new religious community or tradition. If I asked you to consider these two terms together, you would likely find your thoughts drifting toward a vague conceptual tension: authenticity refers to a thing’s being what it is, or is supposed to be, while conversion describes a change, a fundamental alteration of identity. In this chapter, I will present a case for why we should think differently about the relation between authenticity and conversion, focusing on distinct senses of each of those terms. In particular, I will show how the ideal of personal authenticity advanced by many existential philosophers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrates a remarkable set of parallels with the ideal of conscious conversion emphasized in many of the Pietistic revival movements that flourished in Northern Europe in the previous two hundred years. These parallels, I will suggest, yield more than an interesting structural analogy between two modern psychospiritual ideals. They reflect a deep historical connection between existentialism and pietistic Protestantism that has been overlooked by most philosophers and scholars of modern European thought.

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T h e C u lt u r a l D i s c o u r s e o f A u t h e n t i c i t y In everyday speech, authentic most often points to the “true” or “genuine” or “trustworthy” character of an object. In such contexts, it is generally clear what we want to know. To ask whether one is looking at an “authentic” Ming vase or an “authentic” eighteenth-century manuscript is to ask whether the object’s origins are what they seem to be. It is to ask whether the story that accompanies the object is plausible and can be verified. When it is not a physical object, however, but a human being whose authenticity is in question, such clarity vanishes. To be “authentic,” to be an “authentic person” or “authentic self ”—these are phrases we hear often enough. Each election cycle brings a fresh opportunity to deepen our unchecked assumptions about what constitutes an authentic politician and what does not. The great spiritual authorities of our age have built their messages around the idea that personal authenticity is both the right and the duty of the modern individual. There is surely some degree of semantic overlap between the “truth” of an authentic individual and that of an authentic Ming vase. But to say that I am authentic is to say something more than that I am not a con artist or a fraudulent substitute for the original version of myself. If authenticity depends on a synthesis of the “true” and the “good,” when applied to humans it intersects with a logic of subjective individualism to yield an additional demand: the “authentic” individual is not a “fraud” by virtue of her both being a singular individual and being faithful to that singularity. Unlike the authentic vase or the authentic manuscript, the authentic self is subject to failure and not merely to negation. When we read European existential philosophy from the vantage point of the contemporary cultural discourse of authenticity, we face a peculiar sort of difficulty. On the one hand, the music critics and political pundits who so frequently deploy the concept of authenticity today have generally quite little to do with the works of Kierkegaard or Jaspers or Camus. Alexis Petridis is certainly not channeling Heidegger when he evaluates the authenticity of a hip-hop artist. In the deluge of journalistic anxiety about Hillary Clinton’s “authenticity problem,” one would be hard pressed to find a theoretical parallel with the works of Beauvoir. And this is not a matter of neglect; there are far-reaching differences between the capacious cultural ideology of authenticity that circulates in the media today and the rather more focused concept of authenticity coined by these philosophers. Authenticity seen from this wider view is not only a philosophical concept but also an overarching aesthetic, a worldview, a way of life.

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Yet as different as the diffuse ideology of authenticity might look from the precise existentialist descriptions of an authentic self, the two sets of ideas have been fused at many different levels of the cultural imagination. The earliest and most influential critiques of the culture of authenticity were all deeply influenced by existential philosophy. Particularly common, as we will see, was a tendency to fold existential and Romantic theories of the self together in attempting to understand the intellectual background of this culture. And from the other side, attempts to understand and analyze authenticity as a philosophical ideal are not necessarily immune to the norms and pressures of the cultural discussions of authenticity that operate around them. A recent philosophical work on identity even presents authenticity and existentialism as two rival pictures of self-formation; the former is a matter of being true to yourself, we are told, while the latter is a matter of making yourself up as you go along.1 The task of the following few sections is to bring the existential picture of authenticity into sharper focus. Only by doing so will we come to see the connections between authenticity and Pietistic notions of conversion.

T h e T w e n t i e t h - C e n t u ry D e bat e The cultural prevalence of authenticity in recent decades has also made it a popular target of criticism. A sizeable field of scholarly literature has grown around the phenomenon, with particular concentration on the intersection of capitalism and identity formation in American contexts. Cited again and again, however, are three theoretical texts on authenticity, each of which has become a kind of modern classic in Anglophone intellectual history: Marshall Berman’s 1971 The Politics of Authenticity, Lionel Trilling’s 1972 Sincerity and Authenticity, and Charles Taylor’s 1992 The Ethics of Authenticity.2 I’ll start with the first two of these works. Berman and Trilling are responding to the sudden explosion of talk about authenticity within the critical and countercultural movements of the 1960s. When they take on the task of characterizing authenticity—and both are writing just after the collapse of the New Left— they describe it as a new moral and political value with roots in Romantic ideologies of the individual. Berman defines authenticity as the chief value of the modern democratic citizen, whose main distinction from his premodern counterpart is that he considers his own creative role in the political order as both a right and a responsibility. Berman’s book outlines the genealogy that will be found in most subsequent histories of authenticity: the contemporary conversation has roots in eighteenth-century French social thought, he claims, particularly

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in the work of Rousseau. At the same time, in explaining how he came to the concept in the first place, Berman credits the contemporary philosophy of Heidegger. As a literary critic, Trilling is more tuned in to the shifting status of cultural and artistic representations than to political theory. In his presentation, authenticity appears as a new paradigm in the Western understanding of truth. Authenticity occupies the place that “sincerity” once held in Western ethics and aesthetics, Trilling tells us. Under the new regime, a cultural product is judged not just by how well it expresses the truth but also by how deeply it grasps the idea that the truth is its own to make. To be authentic is not only to be who you truly are; it is also to recognize that you must be “original.” Like Berman, Trilling traces the individualism behind this idea to Rousseau’s notion of “the sentiment of existence.” He also appeals to the influence of the English Romantic tradition, and particularly to Wordsworth, in explaining the desire for originality, which he sees as part of this picture.3 And when Trilling gets to the discussion of Sartre—whose own distinction between sincerity and authenticity inspired the central premise of Trilling’s book—Trilling wraps him up into a much larger story about the self stretching from Rousseau to Freud. To the extent that “authenticity” designates the broadly individualistic values of late modern culture, as we see in these works, it is implicated in a kind of stock genealogy of the individual, which has come to be known by the phrase “expressive individualism.”4 As Robert N. Bellah defines it, “expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.”5 In this doctrine, the social and traditional norms of the surrounding world are seen to be in tension with one’s “authentic” identity. As authenticity came to be seen as another name for antisocial individualism, it became embroiled in the polemic about the seemingly “narcissistic” and “atomistic” tendencies of postwar American culture. Far more stridently than Trilling’s softly critical grumble, but using his historical and critical characterization of authenticity as support, influential works such as Daniel Bell’s 1976 The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Christopher Lasch’s 1979 The Culture of Narcissism cited “authenticity” as a “cultish” value that had helped lead to the moral crises and increasing political fragmentation of the postsixties era.6 When Taylor picks up the topic in his 1992 monograph, he takes Trilling’s genealogy as his conceptual point of departure.7 Taylor tells us that he hopes to steer a middle course between the champions and the critics of authenticity (in his methodically unadorned prose, the “boosters” and the “knockers”). But given the disproportionate success of the critique of authenticity at the

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time of Taylor’s work, his account is effectively framed as a qualified defense. To defend the idea of authenticity against its critics, Taylor inflects it with a communitarian ontology: all identity is socially determined, even “authentic” identity. Provided we keep in mind that even what is most distinctive about an individual person is shaped through the need for recognition and the force of historical circumstance, the ideal of authenticity need not be seen as a pathological form of egoism. In fact, it can even play a constructive role within a democratic society, which depends on the investment and agency of each individual citizen.8 But in order for this to work, Taylor insists, we must correct for the Romantic misconception of the individualistic basis of authenticity and allow for authenticity, too, to be understood as a product of shared social and historical contexts. Such debates touch on important political, philosophical, and aesthetic aspects of our concept of the individual. But in identifying the contemporary culture of individualism with the discursive ideal of authenticity (and vice versa), and in wrapping up existentialism with the Romantic expressivist tradition, these accounts mischaracterize existential philosophy and risk misunderstanding the sort of phenomenon they are looking at. Between its circulation as a relatively technical term within the field of historicist criticism and its dissemination as a word of nebulous “moral slang,” as Trilling put it, authenticity was the crowning moral idea of existentialism, a philosophical tradition that had an enormous impact on postwar American culture.9 It will not be possible to assess here the ways in which revising the picture of existential authenticity might help us in evaluating the broader cultural ideal of authenticity. But we may at least begin by trying to get that picture right.

New Words and New Meanings Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time develops a distinction between Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) and Uneigentlichkeit (inauthenticity) as two fundamental modalities of human existence. Eigentlichkeit is one of the many awkward words Being and Time nudged into the German language.10 It forms an abstract noun from the adverb eigentlich (“really,” “actually,” “properly”), which itself comes from the verb eigen (“to own”).11 Heidegger’s quasi-neologism is all the more remarkable given that there was already a common word for “authenticity”—Echtheit, which comes from echt (“legitimate,” “genuine”)— that was often used in situations where the Latinate Authentizität/authentisch felt too abstract or foreign.12 One of the primary antecedents of Heidegger’s way of using this network

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of terms is Kierkegaard. The basic starting point of all Kierkegaard’s reflections, the word Kierkegaard once expressed a desire to have inscribed on his grave—“that single individual” (hiin Enkelte)—is defined as the one who “owns herself ” (eie sig selv).13 The dedications of Kierkegaard’s signed works offer a particularly helpful view of this self, inasmuch as they indicate how and by whom Kierkegaard hoped to be read: “[This little book] seeks that single individual, to whom it gives itself wholly, by whom it wishes to be received as if it had arisen in his own heart . . . that single individual who willingly reads slowly, reads repeatedly, and who reads aloud—for his own sake. . . . The understanding is complete when he keeps the book  .  .  . to himself in the inwardness of appropriation [Tilegnelse].”14 As Joachim Ringleben has put it in his exceptionally systematic study of Kierkegaard, “ ‘Appropriation’ [Aneignung],” which is “the making-one’s-own [Sich-zueigen-Machen] of religious objectivity through the religious subject,” represents “the fundamental category of communication of the religious consciousness” for Kierkegaard.15 But Kierkegaard did not make a noun of “ownness.” Its value everywhere determines his theory of the self, but it never comes into relief in an explicit or formal way. Those who write about Kierkegaard’s “concept” of authenticity are, whether they admit it or not, interpolating this concept back from the existential tradition that developed his ideas. It is with Heidegger that the term comes to have a systematic meaning as a description of human existence. However, the definition Heidegger offers is so thoroughly wound up with the core philosophical arguments of Being and Time, and his use of the word is so peculiar and etymologically determined (often playing off of other words with “ownership” roots: Zueignung and Aneignung and Eigene), that if we were to imagine an alternate version of history in which Heidegger’s book had been published to no great success, the story of Eigentlichkeit and its Kierkegaardian antecedents might well have ended where it began: as one of the many narrow roads interior to the world of Heidegger-exegesis. As it happened, however, Being and Time became a kind of overnight sensation in Europe, and over the course of the following years, Heidegger’s work was interpreted and translated into languages both near and quite far flung.16 It was not until Heidegger’s term was translated into French and English— in countless reviews, summaries, and critiques—that the philosophical idea of authenticity, relating to individual conduct and personal responsibility, shared linguistic turf with the more widely used historiographical values “authenticity/authenticité.” The single most important “translation,” however, appeared long before Being and Time was fully rendered into French or English. It was Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 Being and Nothingness. While Sartre’s

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work itself would not be translated into English until 1958 (which is still four years before the first English version of Heidegger’s magnum opus), Sartre’s burgeoning career as a global intellectual, with a degree of celebrity that remains unmatched by any thinker to this day, helped transform the term authenticité and its captivatingly named alternative, mauvaise foi, or “bad faith,” into international buzzwords. Though it was based in an equally complex and counterintuitive theory of human consciousness, Sartre’s word, “authenticité,” had none of the new-car smell of Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit.17 This meant that with Sartre, the strangeness of the idea of personal authenticity was able to slip rather effectively beneath the familiarity and self-evidence of a word of historicist method and highly effective mass advertising. If given the option, who wouldn’t prefer to read the “authentic” version of Galatians or Hamlet rather than the fraudulent one? Who wouldn’t prefer to look at an “authentic” Rembrandt rather than a later copy? And now that we have been alerted to its possibility, why not also an authentic self ? Sartre had become more than a writer or philosopher; he was a global “phenomenon,” and his mode of existence itself seemed newsworthy to many in the postwar context. One thus had no need to crack open his sevenhundred-page tome to gain access to his idea of authenticity; one need only come across one of the many popular profiles of him and the existential “movement” of which he was often presented as the leader. He was being written up in American publications as mainstream as LIFE magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.18 But Sartre was also writing in mainstream journals himself. Most important in this context is the 1948 English publication, in three issues of the newly established Commentary magazine, of his infamous 1946 essay on anti-Semitism, Refléxions sur la question juive.19 His theory of Jewish authenticity and anti-Semitic inauthenticity had had an instant and enormous impact in postwar France.20 Its American publication spawned a broad and vigorous debate, particularly around Sartre’s paradoxical claim that a Jew could become an authentic Jew only by accepting that Jewishness itself is a heteronomous determination, a category imposed from without, under conditions of utmost hostility and violence. As one might expect, the criticism did at least as much for Sartre’s argument as his argument did for itself. The debate kept Sartre’s theory in the spotlight and ensured, at least in the short run, a much wider audience than his other works had received. To the extent that it put postwar conversations of Jewish identity on the defensive, the essay also set the terms of the debate. Among the numerous criticisms of Sartre’s account of Jewish identity, one highly prevalent approach was to challenge his conclusion (that Jews were

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socially disposed to inauthenticity because of their history of persecution) not by challenging the idea of “Jewish authenticity” itself but by countering that Jewish identity was in fact self-determined.21 The fact that critics from Harold Rosenberg to Hannah Arendt argued against Sartre by claiming that he had missed the rich internal, traditional sources of Jewish identity represented a defeat for his conclusion but a victory for his premise. Insofar as the rebuttals of Sartre’s argument accepted the premise of an authentic Judaism, this entire conversation formed a key moment in the transmission of existential authenticity into the broader, far less philosophically geared discourse of cultural and political identity.22

The First Theorists of Authenticity a n d t h e F a l s e T r a i l o f I n d i v i d ua l i s m Adorno’s 1964 Jargon der Eigentlichkeit made the argument that insofar as existential thought’s basic categories emphasized individualism and the arbitrariness of individual choices, the irrationality of existence, the significance of mortality, and the formality of its distinctions, it had rhetorically implicated itself in Nazism and the Hitlerian regime. This work has rarely been taken seriously by scholars of Heidegger, mainly because Adorno has so little to say about the coherence of Heidegger’s own articulated concepts. Instead, he focuses on an oblique interpretation of authenticity as the atmosphere of irrational and exclusionary values created by Heidegger’s rather precious way of writing and speaking. Nonetheless, Adorno’s monograph does hit upon the issues that would feature centrally in much of the criticism that followed: Heidegger’s work is characterized by individualism, irrationalism, arbitrary emphasis on “negative” moods and conditions (despair, anxiety, boredom), and by an obscure normative charge that mysteriously pervaded the whole under the name of Eigentlichkeit. What critics tended to focus on in the discourse of authenticity was its advocacy of a form of radical individualism that seemed linked with a growing culture of antisocial and antidemocratic politics. Those concerned with the rise of this culture, particularly in the American context, tended to ignore its connection with existentialism even as they borrowed its moral vocabulary. The Heideggerian roots of this somewhat diffuse midcentury discourse of authenticity would have been much more apparent in German-speaking contexts, where existential authenticity had its own distinct set of terms (its “jargon”).23 In the American context, by contrast, the word became quickly normalized. As Trilling observes in 1971, “The word ‘authenticity’ comes so

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readily to the tongue these days and in so many connections that it may very well resist such efforts of definition as I shall later make.”24 In fact, Trilling is able to construct his portrait of authenticity from such a wide range of cultural and literary sources by 1971 that his references to Sartre, the international prophet of authentic existence, and one of the few subjects in Trilling’s book who actually uses the term authenticity itself, appears as but one example among others. Nowhere does Trilling mention that the basic premise of his book, the distinction between sincerity and authenticity, is derived from a central claim in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.25 Trilling does not seem to observe the difference between the organicist conceptions of Wordsworth and the thoroughly shattered subjectivity of Sartre. Similarly, Taylor’s defense of authenticity against its social critics recapitulates many of the qualified descriptions of “being-with-others” found in Heidegger and Sartre without once identifying the extent or significance of his reliance on them. Berman’s problem is the same but in reverse—uniquely among the three, he actually credits his “discovery” of authenticity to his reading of Heidegger. But as he begins to defend what he takes to be Heidegger’s idea, existentialism begins to sound a lot like romanticism. Defining authenticity as “the dream of an ideal community,” in which individuality is not only not suppressed but “fully developed and expressed,”26 Berman claims this dream has been “a leitmotif in Western culture since early in the eighteenth century”27—except, that is, for the century stretching between the early 1850s and the late 1950s, when liberalism and capitalism seemed to be the only forces interested in the political potential of the individual. It was Heidegger, according to Berman, who restored to the individual his proper place as an heir to the politics of the Enlightenment: “Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is the greatest work on authentic individuality since Rousseau’s Emile.”28 The issue here is thus not that Berman neglects to see a connection between existentialism and authenticity but that he sees “authentic individuality” as a kind of perennial ideal that both Rousseau and Heidegger happened to take a stab at formulating. And in the end, this appreciation of Heidegger also amounts to a kind of neglect, because in seeing the relation between amour-de-soi and Eigentlichkeit as one of linear progression and not of critique, Berman underestimates the distinctness of the notion of authentic selfhood that apparently inspired his book. Even where accounts such as these draw a broad continuity between existentialism and romanticism, the Romantic traditions tend to be given more genealogical weight. One reason for this subordination may have to do with the wider cultural reputation of existentialism as a stark, pessimistic philoso-

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phy concentrated on the isolated reflection of the individual in despair and cultivated absurdity. When Berman celebrates “authentic individuality,” he does so within the context of an exuberantly democratic social and political philosophy. The first hero of existentialism, by contrast, is a former civil servant governed by spite and misanthropy and who is only known to his readers as the Underground Man.29 Doug Rossinow, for one, argues against this impression, making a strong case for the impact of what he describes as a specifically Christian strain of existentialism on the politics of the Left in Cold War America. Rossinow looks at figures such as Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer— who enjoyed a wide reception not only among intellectuals but also among the expansive and powerful Christian youth groups on college campuses in the 1960s—and shows how they were uniquely positioned to address the spiritual and political “anxieties” of the age.30 But even he, like the many critics he is arguing with, sees a tension in the connection of existentialist ideas with democratic politics: The atheistic understanding of existentialism, associated with Sartre and Camus, emphasizes the ontological priority of the individual and the need for individuals to create meaning out of an absurd world through acts of personal rebellion. . . . Much of the difference [between atheistic existentialism and American “existential politics”] stems from the strong presence of Christian and communitarian impulses in the setting I examine, in contrast to the atheistic and radically individualist Sartrean variety of existentialism. The search for values that would assist the movement from alienation to authenticity, as the people I consider imagined it, would occur only in a community, not as an individual enterprise.31

“In the world of Christian existentialism,” Rossinow continues, “salvation was returned to its original, therapeutic meaning: the healing of a wound, the bridging of the awful separation of the human from the divine. Sin was reinterpreted as alienation, and salvation now meant authenticity.”32 Rossinow does not seem to realize that it is not the “Christian existentialists” but Heidegger who writes about “fallenness” as an ontological condition. It is Sartre who speaks of the “conversion” to authenticity as a way of “redeeming” oneself. What Bultmann and Tillich, and to a lesser extent Bonhoeffer, do is simply agree to this philosophical reinterpretation as a new starting point for theology. They agree to work with the existential-philosophical description of alienation and authenticity, in other words, as explicitly religious concepts.

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Rossinow is quite right to identify a “therapeutic” element at work in existentialism. My point is that he simply need not struggle so hard to find it. The architects of the 1962 Port Huron Statement offer us another example. While they were known to have been directly influenced by the works of Sartre and Camus in particular,33 they formulated their own appeal to the moral ideal of authenticity with a built-in defense against possible connections with “egoistic” or individualistic politics: Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, selfunderstanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with an image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn. This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own. Nor do we deify man—we merely have faith in his potential.34

These anxieties are instructive for the present study. They show us that despite the influence enjoyed by existentialist accounts of authenticity in the postwar period, few of existentialism’s interlocutors—whether fans or critics—were aware of the fact that we will come to appreciate over the course of the following chapters: authenticity was a norm governing the self-formation of the individual at the same time as it was involved in a critique of the individual. To put it another way, these attempts to associate and disassociate authenticity from a doctrine of individualism dance around one key point that to this day has not been properly formulated: it is possible for a norm of personal authenticity to function even without the norm of a self. It will be crucial to keep this in mind as we begin to interrogate the way norms do show up within the concepts and procedure of existential philosophy.

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Existential Authenticity: Owning, E a r n i n g , a n d C r e at i n g a S e l f The notion of authenticity put forward by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre differs in a number of important ways from the Romantically tinged prioritization of individual experience discussed by Berman, Trilling, and Taylor. Perhaps most fundamentally, all three existential thinkers maintain that the experiential temporality of being one’s own self defies the logic of expressivism. One’s self, on this model, is not locked up or hidden beneath layers of social distortion. It is not there to be discovered and expressed. It is the new product of an active, original choice on the part of the individual. Authenticity points to a way of choosing oneself—not, as is often thought, in abstraction from one’s peers and surroundings but as already engaged in a concrete world of possibilities and others. The psychology underlying this idea of authentic “self-choice” is based in the idea that an individual does not precede her interests and concerns but is their product in such a fundamentally reflexive way that this existence itself also forms part of her concern. Existential authenticity is in fact quite radically opposed to the idea that one ought to be “true” to oneself. Such fidelity is not authenticity but merely an illusion, according to Sartre—an idealized state of self-identity that is not only not desirable but “impossible to achieve, of which the very meaning is in contradiction with the structure of my consciousness.”35 Authenticity is not, as we will see over the course of the following chapters, the ideal of “being oneself ” but of “appropriating” oneself through an act of decision that is possible in each instant. As the possessive cast of the Danish and German terms indicates, authenticity as understood by the existentialists is a category used to indicate something about the relation between the self and what is “proper” to the human being. It seeks the space of the “proper,” we might say. This existential ideal takes as its point of departure an understanding of the individual as “outside” himself in his very “core,” a priori engaged by “world,” as Heidegger famously termed the fundamentally relational character of consciousness itself. Because of this underlying notion of subjectivity as perpetually thrown, situated in and drawn out of itself by the possibilities of its world, the discourse of authenticity continually bumps up against the discourse of property. Again and again we confront the question of how an existence that I did not create can become “mine,” of what it can mean that I am to “appropriate” existence by means of a radical “decision,” in which something of which I am not the origin becomes “my” responsibility. Another way to understand the intersection between authentic self-choice

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and property is to consider that for these thinkers, the “own,” that self which is one’s own, is not something that one has by default but something that must be earned through the activity of the finite, existing subject. And once we begin to consider the way in which notions of labor and property are at work in existential theories of authenticity, a Lockean element to these theories begins to emerge: the self conceived as the result of a process of moral appropriation, won by spiritual labor, the exercise of choosing, of tracing the implicit, given conditions of existence to their roots and holding oneself responsible for them. “In the external world,” we read in the opening pages of Fear and Trembling, “everything belongs to the possessor . . . and he who has the wealth of the world has it regardless of how he got it.” However, “in the world of the spirit, only the one who works gets bread. . . . Here it does not help to have Abraham as father or to have seventeen ancestors. The one who will not work fits what is written about the virgins of Israel: he gives birth to the wind—but the one who will work gives birth to his own father.”36 Sartre prefers the metaphor of creation to that of birth and rebirth: “All technical action is a decision about the human being himself. Man’s action is the creation of the world, but the creation of the world is the creation of man. Man is created by the intermediary of his action on the world.”37 For reasons that will become clear only when we can discuss his understanding of the relation between authenticity and the will, Sartre maintains that the act of assuming responsibility for the given reality into which one is “thrown” is itself an act of “creation”: “We are condemned to create and . . . at the same time we have to be this creation to which we are condemned.”38 “So also our facial structures and our bodies,” as Frederic Jameson illustrates Sartre’s theory, “are not simple static facts that we have to cope with, but are constantly assumed and mediated through expression. . . . All ‘facts’ are human.”39 Recognizing the necessity of this situation and living out all its possibilities is the act of appropriation that constitutes my “self.” This analysis forms the basis for Sartre’s refrain: “I am nothing other than my work.”40 Conceived as a function of one’s spiritual labor, authenticity can never be something that I have achieved. Then it would be a possession distinct from me, which requires just the idea of a self authenticity was invented to criticize. Heidegger’s elegant way of indicating this condition is to tie all existential performances to a temporal index of absolute occasionality. I am not enduringly self-possessed and enduringly self-alienated on this view, but am so only “in each case” ( je). The fact that I cannot even lay hold of this way of being, which is a priori operative, except by getting hold of it “in each case,” is a condition Heidegger calls the “ecstatic” character of human existence. He will insist,

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for example, that the decision to assume responsibility for one’s condition through an act of authentic resolve is something that is “in each case” possible for me to do, which means that it is also possible, in each case, not to do so. “Can one even talk about ‘preserving’ [authenticity]?” Sartre writes, “The instant that it arrives is novel, the situation is novel: a new authenticity has to be invented.”41 There can be no profiting from “acquired momentum.”42 Authenticity, in this line of thinking, is not a matter of being true to what I essentially or already am but a matter of making mine what already is through an ever-renewed spiritual labor. In this way, I take on as my own the general as well as the specific conditions of my existence—the finite and historically determinate character of consciousness itself as well as the fact that I am five feet seven inches tall and that I grew up in the Rust Belt. The details of what is involved in this labor and of where it leads vary considerably among the three authors examined in this study. Here it will suffice to observe that because human subjectivity is understood as “outside” itself at its very core for all three thinkers, each act of authentic appropriation—each act of “choosing” oneself and one’s world by claiming responsibility for it—may be just as easily conceived as a change in one’s self as it may be conceived as a preservation of what was there before. In other words, to point back to the opposition I noted at the start of this chapter, the ontological view of the self shared by most existential thinkers entails that the distinction between identity and transformation is in a certain sense indifferent. No matter how well we grasp this account of consciousness in abstract terms, there remains something shocking about the idea that the self is involved in a constant renegotiation of the terms on which its identity can be formed. Camus captures this shock aptly in his description of existence as a “Sisyphean” battle with absurdity. The hero of the absurd becomes a hero only by continually taking responsibility for what will continually escape his grasp. He is engaged in “permanent revolution.”43 As Helmut Kuhn has acutely observed, this metaphor not only individualizes an idea of radical change designed to apply to a collectivity; it transforms estrangement from a phase to be overcome into a kind of perpetual dance partner, through which life receives its value and absurdity its form.44

Mounier’s Oblique Discovery: E x i s t e n t i a l i s m a s R e v i va l In the opening pages of his early work on existentialism, Introduction aux existentialismes (1946), Emmanuel Mounier offers an arboreal model of the

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f i g u r e 1 . The Existentialist Tree

development of this diverse tradition (figure 1). The trunk is the generous abode of Kierkegaard, who runs up through “phenomenology” to arrive at a series of small, crowded branches occupied by figures such as Jaspers, Marcel, Chestov, Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. To the five roots of the tree, which climb up into Kierkegaard’s trunk after passing through Maine de Biran and Pascal, Mounier applies just four words: Socrates, Stoicism, St. Augustine, and St. Bernard.45 Besides the somewhat idiosyncratic choice of Maine de Biran, the most surprising name on Mounier’s tree may well be its youngest root, Bernard. Bernard of Clairvaux is the sole figure in Mounier’s entire scheme who is truly not a philosopher. The founder of the Cistercian order and a key mouthpiece for the Church during the Second Crusade, Bernard’s most influential and celebrated works are sermons and treatises directed at other clerics. Mounier cites Bernard’s very unphilosophical nature—his “setting out in the name of Christian conversion and salvation on his crusade against Abelard’s systematization of faith”46—as the reason for his inclusion in the tree and then proceeds to say nothing about him for the remainder of the monograph. Since the

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publication of Mounier’s essay, countless books have been written about the origins and background of existentialism. And while the other antecedents he cites have all been amply and regularly discussed over the course of this literature, one would be hard pressed to supply just one more example of a work citing Bernard as a key figure in the development of existential thought. Mounier’s inclusion of Bernard only begins to make sense when we grasp the larger agenda of his primer. The work is organized by themes, with each chapter devoted to a theme Mounier finds of particular importance: philosophical revival, the dramatic, personal conversion, engagement, the other, existence and truth, and so on. With the exception perhaps of the last three terms in this list, these topics are not identified as explicit categories used by the existential writers Mounier presents and summarizes. The main example Mounier cites as evidence of existentialism’s focus on personal conversion is a quote from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in which the ethicist proclaims that a fully realized self requires that one “choose oneself.” When Mounier speaks of the “theme of philosophical revival [réveil],” he discusses the existentialists’ “refusal to deliver man to an instrument”47 by emphasizing the “density of the subject” and the individual’s resistance to systematic and totalizing structures.48 Even in the most explicitly religious writers he considers, such as Kierkegaard, Marcel, and Blondel, Mounier nowhere suggests that they thought of their own work in revivalist terms or that they had an explicit notion of personal conversion. At work here is an understanding of life as a problem (an understanding with deep roots in Christian theology) and a conviction that existentialism is the discourse best suited to solve or address this problem. This leads to his theory of existentialism as categorically about conversion: “Personal life is not created completely shaped to fit life. Every individual must take up the conquest for himself.  .  .  . Every type of Existentialism develops a dialectic of conversion. Each type describes several ways of life echeloned between the poles of existence lost and existence regained.”49 Given the breadth of this thesis, there are several contexts where conversion is described in a highly metaphoric way (as with the discussion of Heidegger, where Mounier’s translator even adds scare quotes around the term “conversion”).50 The discussion of Sartre forms a still more striking example. Mounier includes Sartre in his long list of existentialist thinkers of conversion, analyzing Sartre’s concept of authenticity, in particular. But he does so without addressing, whether out of ignorance or indifference, the fact that the category of conversion was itself one key way in which Sartre defined the passage to authenticity. In other words, Mounier seems to understand the connections he himself is drawing in almost accidental terms. He produces

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a revivalist theory of existentialism not because he has detected concrete revivalist elements within existential discourse but simply because his basic premise is that existentialism is but the latest eruption in a long tradition of “réveil” within the history of Western Christianity. In linking the author of the “Sermon on Conversion” to existentialism, Mounier is not interested in reading Bernard “existentially” or seeing him as the father of existentialism. He is putting forward a view of “religious awakening” as a unified spiritual tradition, one that begins with the twelfth-century theologian who declared that “sickness has real utility when it leads us to the doctor’s hands, and he whom God restores to health gains by having been ill,” and that carries us through history, straight to the door of the existential therapy.51 Mounier was one of the leading voices of the Catholic revival in postwar France. And as Jonathan Judaken has shown, Mounier’s religious genealogy of existentialism in Introduction was part of a larger, ideologically driven battle being waged against the atheistic philosophy of Sartre, which came to a head in his contribution to the widely read 1948 volume Pour et contre l’existentialisme: Grand débat.52 Mounier’s claim that Christianity, with its emphasis on salvation over knowledge and on the image of an incarnate God over nature, is the ideal “ontological atmosphere . . . to receive the Existentialist call”53 is his attempt to turn Sartre’s own distinction between the “Christian” and “atheistic” wings of existentialism against himself. By relegating Sartre and Heidegger to the isolated leftmost branch of the tree, Mounier took the two figures Sartre had claimed to be the most legitimate representatives of existential philosophy and portrayed them as aberrant and exceptional. Sartre had claimed that atheistic existentialism was the only consistent kind of existentialism. But if existential philosophy was a subform of religious revival, as Mounier claimed, then it was actually the atheists who were being inconsistent, they who were working against the principles of their genre. What makes Mounier’s genealogical fantasy especially interesting is its timing. At precisely the same moment that Mounier is moving against Sartre by casting existentialism as a movement aimed at personal conversion and salvation in the long tradition of Christian awakening, Sartre is composing a six-hundred-page defense of existential authenticity as a “permanent conversion” to atheism. This conversion, Sartre writes, is an unceasing affirmation of responsibility that each individual has inherited as “heir to the mission of the dead God.”54 In the compact intellectual universe of postwar Paris, the two figures could not have avoided each other’s critiques even if they had wanted to. Indeed, at the end of the Pour et Contre volume, Sartre himself responds to his critics, including Mounier. And yet, over the course of the two years

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stretching from Sartre’s “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” to Mounier’s Introduction, to Sartre’s unpublished but still well-known Cahiers, to the Pour et Contre volume to which a number of Sartre’s close supporters contributed and in which a transcribed radio interview with Sartre himself was included, Mounier never mentioned that Sartre was trying to redefine the meaning of “conversion” in the context of an atheistic morality and Sartre never mentioned that Mounier was trying to use the term “conversion” to show the essential continuity between existentialism and Christian soteriology. Sartre and Mounier simultaneously understood and misunderstood each other. And their accounts of existentialism are linked in ways that neither of them was able to appreciate. In trying to defend the categorical legitimacy of religious existentialism, Mounier missed the ways in which his reading had actually, if inadvertently, hit the mark. Sartre, meanwhile, was proudly considering as irreligious an evangelistic philosophy explicitly defined as the heir to Christianity and focusing on the conversion of the individual. The basis of their unrecognized agreement, I would like to suggest, is the connection between existentialism and the tradition of pietistic Protestantism. Within this tradition, personal conversion was often regarded not as an isolated biographical event but as a qualitative norm of piety that frames religious life as a whole. What Mounier’s reasons may have been for missing this connection can only be the subject of speculation. Perhaps because of the strongly Catholic cast of his critique, he overlooks the far more direct resonance between atheistic existentialism and Christian awakening. It is at least conspicuous that Mounier’s tree, which maps the development of spiritual awakening centered in individual existence, does not include a single Reformation or Protestant figure. It would be much easier to make sense of Kierkegaard as a “revivalist” in the broader Lutheran tradition than as an isolated Danish successor to Pascal.

Historical Connections between Pietism and Existentialism It has become customary among readers of existentialism to refer to the personal, biographical influence of Protestantism on a variety of “atheistic” existential thinkers such as Heidegger or Camus and Sartre. Sartre and Heidegger do not seem to have been connected to the confessional or traditional formations of German Pietism. It would be fair to say, however, that the Protestantism that made the biggest impact on their thinking was not the abstract theological discourse of Protestant scholasticism or even the liberal dogmat-

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ics of a Schleiermacher or Harnack but pietism with a small “p”—that is, the dimension of Protestant theology concerned with the experiential and devotional structure of an individual Christian life. Sartre, who was raised in large part by his Alsatian Protestant grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, would find himself struggling throughout his career to differentiate his work from what he referred to as “Protestant piety” and “Quietism.”55 Though his upbringing was not officially religious, Christian piety had influenced his own values and expectations deeply enough for him to consider deconversion a lifelong task—in his own words, “a cruel and long-range affair.”56 We will see later how Sartre’s mounting anxiety about his own interest in Gide, whose atheism Sartre began to suspect as a merely propositional divorce from ascetic Protestantism, serves as a pretext for Sartre to reflect on the impact of Protestant piety within his own house and within his broader cultural milieu.57 Heidegger, though brought up and educated as a Catholic, underwent a “turn” toward Protestantism that is consistently credited as a watershed in his academic career as well as in the direction of his early philosophy.58 This change was not a personal conversion at the level of faith or a change of religious community but the discovery of Protestant theology as a powerful theorization of life—of religious life, but also of life itself. Heidegger’s “Protestantism” was actually a turn back, via the writings of Luther and Kierkegaard and also Schleiermacher, to Augustine and Paul as sources for the phenomenological description of piety—a life structured by the intense and highly reflexive devotional experience of the individual Christian.59 The impact of these studies on Heidegger’s thought was profound enough in the years leading up to Being and Time that one standard way of characterizing that work as a whole is to call it a phenomenological “retrieval” of Christianity.60 Heidegger himself defines the focus of his interest less as Christianity than as “primitive Christianity” (Urchristentum). The “Ur-” in this word has often been taken as a reference to “early” Christianity in the chronological or developmental sense. What it in fact designates is the philosophically fundamental aspect of Christianity, which Heidegger sees as the aspect of piety (or, in his phenomenological dilation, “the experience of religious life” [religiöse Lebenserfahrung]). It is perhaps this interest in the “small-p” pietism of Christianity that links his readings of historical Christian texts with the linguistic and psychological legacy of Swabian Pietistic tradition, which some scholars have connected to Heidegger’s later writings.61 With Kierkegaard, the connections are more direct. His religious upbringing was strongly marked by the intensely Pietistic faith of his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. Both Moravian and Halle congregations had

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made strong inroads in eighteenth-century Danish society, due largely to the substantial support of Danish King Frederick IV and, later, of his son and successor King Christian VI. It was in the area of one of the more vibrant Moravian revival movements of Western Jutland that Michael Pedersen had grown up, and when he moved to Copenhagen for business, he continued to attend meetings of the Moravian fraternal society, to which he often brought the young Kierkegaard along with his older brother.62 While the institutional presence of the Halle and Moravian strains of Pietism dwindled in Danish society over the course of Kierkegaard’s life, the influence of this sort of Christianity on the religious landscape of Denmark was enormous. The Danish Pietists paved the way for a wave of intensive Lutheran revival movements in the late nineteenth century (the largest and best known of these being the Danish “Inner Mission”) whose impact persists to this day. It is also worth noting that when Kierkegaard’s voice was first heard in German, it was in the German of a former pastor with deep roots in Swabian Pietism.63 Given these connections, it should be surprising how negligibly Pietism has factored into philosophical and critical assessments of existentialism. Even in the case of Kierkegaard, the well-documented historical connections to Pietism have only recently been taken up as bearing on the systematic and intellectual understanding of his work.64 One perhaps counterintuitive reason for this neglect may be the fact that Pietism is one of the more frequently cited forces in explanations of secularization, that is, of the emergence of a secular culture within modern Western society. At least since Weber’s idea of “innerworldly asceticism,” Pietism has been at the heart of the debate about the relation between Christian and secular values in late modern Europe. And whatever the criticisms of Weber’s overall argument, scholars of religion continue to cite a Pietist emphasis on individual “experience” and the “inward” character of religious life as an important turning point in the evolution of the late modern subject.65 If Pietism is widely accepted as an impetus to the emergence of an individualistic and secular culture in general, it may not have seemed particularly pressing to explore the ways in which it also influenced existentialism, in particular, as one intellectual tradition among many within that broader culture. The idea that pietism was a form of religious individualism, taking the Christian idea of “working for one’s own salvation” to an extreme, enabled a narrative connecting Protestant spirituality to late-modern individualism favored by theologians and secular critics alike. For liberal theologians such as Albrecht Ritschl and Ernst Troeltsch, Pietism was to be understood on the model of Christian mysticism. Troeltsch in particular took the flourish-

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ing of Pietist movements as one symptom of the weakening of social forms of Christianity within modern Europe and tended to frame the development of personal religion under Pietism within the liberal language of “rights”: “Pietism does not seek to reform the world; it simply gathers ‘earnest Christians’ together into a party within the Church, and seeks to convert the heathen; this all shows how indifferent it is to questions of social reform. Its task is simply to seek the conversion of individuals, and to gather ‘converted’ souls into groups for fellowship and edification. Its interest in the release of the third estate . . . consists in giving the right to possess an independent personal piety and the right to form conventicles.”66 Karl Barth was the first to suggest a connection between Pietism and existentialism, though he saw that connection as consisting primarily in the fact that Kierkegaard was implicated in both movements rather than in a systematic connection between the ideas of, say, Jaspers and Zinzendorf. Kierkegaard represented for Barth a proponent of “holy individualism,” which, in taking Pietism to its furthest and most reflective conclusion, prepared the way for the theological existentialism of twentieth-century Europe.67 Barth, indeed, had a keen eye for latent affinities between theological and secular ideologies. Just as he saw the opportunity to marry Nietzsche’s critique of Christian morality with Christianity’s critique of secular power, he sensed a deep connection between Pietism and Enlightenment as two variants of humanity’s “optimistic effort to master life.”68 Despite Barth’s remarks, which form a passing but rather well-known dismissal of existentialism, connections between existentialism and Pietism remain quite unexplored. This should be all the more surprising given the fact that the theological criticisms of Pietism and the ethical criticisms of existentialism centered on the same accusation: hyperindividualism and a prioritization of the “inward” and “subjective” locus of experience combined with little to no concern for the relation to the “other.”

Common Ground: Conversion as a n I n t e n s i f i cat i o n o f L i f e While their shared reputation as individualistic and experiential gives us an initial clue as to how to compare Pietism and existentialism, there is a far more concrete connection between the two traditions. Pietistic movements involve some of the most consequential developments of conversion within Western Christianity. In fact, looked at both theologically and historically, the valorization of personal experience is actually just the formal consequence of what scholars have taken to calling the Pietistic insistence on “conscious conver-

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sion.”69 The emphasis on experience was one of the chief concerns among Protestant critics of Pietism. Placing such a weight on personal experience seemed to suggest, the critics worried, that human will and self-knowledge could give rise to an individual’s conversion—that is, that the sinner could heal herself, instead of conversion being seen as God’s gracious and everunmerited gift.70 The experiential focus of Pietistic discourse was often further connected to a sensualism—particularly in the Moravian context, with their “blood and wounds” tradition of imitatio Christi—that seemed to many more orthodox Lutherans to be at odds with the affects of true repentance, which should be earnest, sober, and private. As with any religious tradition, there is no such thing as “pietism” and at the same time there are many different forms of “pietism.” It was a name first applied to Spener by one of his critics and bore a distinctly pejorative connotation. That being said, there are a good number of shared emphases and priorities among the schools and movements associated with the term “Pietism”—from Philipp Spener, to the Halle school of August Hermann Francke, to Nicolaus Zinzendorf and the expansive Moravian commune, to the Württemburg Pietists who would go on to impact the generations of German intellectuals trained in Tübingen (who name Kierkegaard’s most important German translator among them, Christoph Schrempf ). Common among these various streams is an expansion of the motifs of conversion, renewal, and rebirth to encompass the central features of Christian theology and devotion. As Martin Schmidt notes in reference to Spener, “One mistakes Spener’s doctrine of rebirth when one only holds it up against that of Lutheran orthodoxy. . . . This inner structure of each is distinct. In orthodoxy rebirth designates only one element within the ordo salutis, but with Spener it encompasses the entire Heilsprozeß.”71 Schmidt’s point is a historical one: Spener transforms the function of conversion from being an expedient to a holy life, a step on the path to justification, to serving as the ongoing resource from out of which a Christian life can be shaped and structured.72 Francke further consolidates Spener’s transformation, bringing the conscious experience of conversion into the center of religious life.73 In bearing the weight of the entire sanctifying process, conversion and rebirth are transformed from experiences at the threshold of religious existence to norms of piety governing the ongoing character of a Christian life. A key motive for this valuation of conversion was the perception on the part of many Pietists that Christianity in post-Reformation Germany had become a passive, impersonal matter. The emphasis on conversion became a way to ensure, in Stoeffler’s words, “an understanding of the life of faith which

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requires complete dedication and an investment of all one’s energies.”74 It was a battle against “the Christianity of custom [Gewohnheitschristentum],” to use the definition of another historian, “in that it pressed for the individual appropriation [Aneignung] of faith, religious experience in the inwardness of the soul, increase in faith and its practical probation in daily life.”75 The sentiment that Christianity had become hollow and superficial was one of the ideas shared by the diverse strains of Pietism that spread across northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That this religious critique of a secularized Christianity should help us understand a twentieth-century philosophical movement predominantly associated with atheism is perhaps less surprising than it may seem, given that the Pietists’ outlook resonated in Europe long after the movements themselves had lost steam as ecclesiastical reforms. One compelling expression of this impact, viewed at the personal rather than social level, comes from the posthumously published magnum opus of the New Testament scholar Johannes Weiss. Weiss, who was a student of Ritschl and a teacher of Bultmann, makes a rather unconventional aside in the course of his exposition of Urchristentum: “Essentially a conversion and mission-theology, [Pauline theology] is looked upon by the Church as standard, the life of the Apostle and his converts is presented as the normal one which every Christian must follow, and everyone who is to be considered as ‘believing and ‘converted’ must imitate Paul; he is the model of the converted sinner, and his experiences must be duplicated.” It here that Weiss surprises us with a quasi-biographical detour: “Most of us, in fact, [who have] grown up in the Christian community  .  .  . and have been educated in the normal way in the fundamental commandments of Christianity . . . have never experienced personally, the deep night of a heathenism sunk in sin.” Because of this, he continues, many Christians wonder, “When comes the great moment when I too become believing and am converted? It is usually just those who were most in earnest who have felt the holy responsibility to experience their day of Damascus, and in this endeavor have sought to bring about a crisis which would not appear of itself.”76 In some ways, the revision of categories such as conversion and rebirth on the part of piety movements—to indicate a deepening of one’s religious commitment as opposed to the shift into Christianity from some other way of life—returns to a much older meaning of conversion within Christian history. One of the earliest nominal uses of the term “convert”—the “conversi”—did not signify those postulants who turned to Christianity from irreligion or sin, let alone from another religion, as the term tends to be used today. With the emergence of monastic movements within Christianity, the term “conversi”

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was used to signify an intensive qualification of religious life among those already belonging to the Christian community—lay brothers who chose to undertake a marriage of continence, for example.77 In this early period, the most common use of the term “conversi,” moreover, was to describe monks who were not born or trained in the monastery from an early age but rather who, as adults, chose the path of an ascetic Christianity.78 This meaning of the term gained a theological reputation through Benedict’s highly influential idea of the conversatio morum, which designated the extra commitment required of the monk to change his “manners,” or morays, in undertaking a life of devotion. The “conversion of life,” as it has often been translated, sets an internal bar for all of the monk’s future conduct “in order that, if he should ever do otherwise, he knows that he is damned by the one he mocks.”79 In other words, “convert” designated first and foremost an intensification of religion—not the movement by which one came into faith or into a Christian life as opposed to some other form of life but rather that change of life by which one’s thoughts and actions are brought under the purview of an exacting religious code. The specific rhythms and habits of life in a medieval monastery would have had little in common with those of the populist religious movements of post-Reformation Germany, which were often known for cultivating enthusiastic and rapturous experiential states and for their extroverted, evangelical tendencies. But Pietists did share with their monastic predecessors an idea of conversion as a modification and intensification of the commitment with which the Christian is already implicitly involved. “The genius of Pietism lay in the adjectives it employed,” as one scholar puts it, “true Christianity; heartfelt, living faith; a living knowledge of God; the inward Christ and the inner Word.”80 Giorgio Agamben has been arguing recently that the Benedictine tradition of conversatio can be seen as a context where the normative project of giving “form” to one’s life took its first steps.81 In regard to Pietism, we may put the connection between conversion and life-formation in even sharper terms: by insisting on the universal importance of conversion and spiritual rebirth, Pietistic movements blended the monastic with the missionary tendencies of Christianity to yield a vision of religious existence that has more in common with the ascetic communities of Christian antiquity than is often understood. Socially speaking, however, the Pietist congregations that spread across northern Europe during the eighteenth century tended to be quite the opposite of cloisters. Thanks, in large part, to support from several generations of the Danish royal family, both the Halle and Herrnhuter Pietists formed

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vibrant missionary organizations in Europe and abroad.82 And as they propagated the message of rebirth and conversion as inward intensifications of Christian faith, a distinctive sort of worry emerged. We are telling these Christians that they need to be reborn in order to be Christians, so how will they know whether and when they have done so? As Francke notes in a letter to a friend in 1725, in a discussion of the techniques and the responsibilities of a pastor, “It will not a little serve the good ends proposed in the question for a minister, very frequently, to lay down in his sermons the distinguishing marks and characters both of the converted and of the unconverted, and that with all possible plainness so that every one of his hearers may be able to judge his own state, and may know to which of these two classes he belongs.”83 He further recommends that ministers frequently “explain in their sermons that renewing or change of the mind which is so essential to all true religion, and which yet, alas! very few persons seem to understand.” He adds, Nor is it enough to explain that first and mighty change, which is at once made in a sinner at his conversion. . . . But that further progressive change should also be greatly recommended in which the Christian must be improving to the very end of his life, which St. Paul refers to in 2 Cor. 3:18: But now . . . we all with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even by the Spirit of the Lord. Hereby the mind is more and more renewed, the Christian grows up in the spirit and temper of the Christ, and his lovely image is drawn upon the soul in fairer lines every day.84

For Francke, conversion and rebirth realize the religious possibility only forecasted by the individual’s baptism. This realization consists in transforming the baptized Christian into the conscious, or “resolute Christian” (entschiedener Christ).85 As Hartmut Lehmann puts it, “Without a conscious and unambiguous decision [Entscheidung], without a revolution of life marked by repentance and contrition and without the accompanying lifelong struggle for sanctification, it was not possible in this world to be considered a child of God.”86 We see a parallel demand in Zinzendorf: When a person becomes a Christian . . . I do ask for the essential in this, and that is that a person who has seen abstractly and purely must in the next moment realize that he has actually seen; that a person must know as certainly that his spirit has seen, that his heart has seen and felt, as when in ordinary human life one can be certain that he has seen or touched some-

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thing. In the moment when this happens he does not need to have a sense experience or see something visible (this cannot be excluded with any certainty, but neither is it essential); it is only necessary that afterward the essential effect remain.87

In a sense, this this whole discourse turns on a question about the authenticity, or genuineness, of conversion.88 We may be accustomed to think about the relation between conversion and authenticity as a question arising on the part of religious communities when they debate and negotiate the conditions of belonging. To the extent that religious identity is determined by faith—that is, by deeply held beliefs on the part of the individual religious subject—the criterion of belonging is invisible. One can act and do as most Christians act and do without believing what they believe. One can also profess belief while silently doubting or denying. There is nothing new about this with Pietism. In fact, this constitutive possibility for a divergence between doing and thinking or saying and doing has had a long history in missionary Christendom, including some of its darkest and most violent chapters. But in the Pietistic context, this tension between an evangelical, missionary religion and a notion of conversion as a spiritual and essentially invisible transformation reaches an apex, since for the Pietists, this tension appears at the level of self-reflection. Francke, for example, will use the pietistic emphasis on conversion to transform social anxieties about conversion and belonging into a matter of religious conscience. In his lectures to students of theology who are training to become pastors, Francke exhorts these future pastors to ask not only their congregations but first and foremost themselves the following question: “ ‘If [= when] did you become a true, upright Christian?’ ”89 Markus Matthias explains the Pietistic emphasis on rebirth and conversion on the basis of an understanding of the Christian message to be a priori distinct from common culture: “In a widely christianized society, new criteria for the identification of the authentically Christian, if this is not simply to merge into common culture, must be established.”90 What Matthias spells out here is a fundamental concern of post-Reformation Protestantism—the demand for a new evangelical logic suited to the terrain of Christendom.91 This worry finds a direct and systematic expression in the work of Kierkegaard. His rich and diverse oeuvre, which he dedicates in its entirety as an effort to clarify “what it means to become a Christian,” sets off from the premise that the Europe of his time is characterized by a thoroughgoing confusion about what a Christian actually is. It is his distinction between Christendom (the geographical domain of the merely baptized) and Christianity (a  reli-

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gion of the heart) that one finds so widely applied in scholarship on Pietism, precisely because this distinction is itself a theorization of the chief task of reform. One of his masterfully clear, though largely overlooked, “Christian Discourses” treats the question at the heart of Pietist preaching: “When didst thou become a believer?” Over the course of Kierkegaard’s essay, the question is repeated and reformulated several times. Each time, he expands on the previous instance, ultimately yielding a gloss on the word become that sounds much like Zinzendorf ’s account of conversion: “Art thou essentially conscious of having experienced the decision to become a believer?”92 It would not be exaggerating to say that Kierkegaard’s entire oeuvre can be interpreted in light of this question. But as we will soon see, while Pietistic theologians tended to treat the personal character of conversion as a problem for practical theology, Kierkegaard explores the its consequences and possibilities within a theoretical account of subjectivity. The self that emerges from this reflective religious praxis, Kierkegaard postulates, is a self made by appropriative resolution. Heidegger will take up this idea of the self wholesale in Being and Time, where he links “authentic resolve” to the ability of a human being to be herself, to be “her own” (eigentlich).93

Pietism and Existentialism: Shared Defenses One might imagine that the connection between Pietistic discourse about conscious conversion and existential talk of authenticity forged through decision or resolve should have been a natural one for scholars to make. This is so particularly when one considers that the criticisms as well as the defenses of each tradition have so much in common. In this section, I will examine the defensive analogy between pietism and existentialism in relation to two central critiques—decisionism and social polarization. In both cases, we will see how scholars have responded to such charges by emphasizing the ongoing, unfinished character of the tradition’s spiritual ideals. In each case, in other words, the defense draws on an affirmative attitude toward time and becoming. Protestant critiques of Pietism—especially those of neoorthodox theologians such as Karl Barth—take issue with the idea that conversion could be framed as a human “decision.” Faith is not supposed to be a voluntary attitude; it is supposed to be the free, unearned gift of a transcendent God. A  similar criticism would also be levelled against existentialism. Here, of course, it is less an issue of understating the power of God than it is of overstating the freedom of the human being. In the search for a way to describe what seemed to be the naïvely, and even dangerously, voluntaristic character

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of Heidegger’s “choosing one’s heroes” and Sartre’s “choosing one’s birth,” these critics would be inspired enough to coin the felicitously repugnant term “decisionism.”94 Theologians with less critical views of Pietism have tended to present the emphasis on choice and decision as the result of an attempt to discourage the individual from taking a passive approach to her own salvation. This emphasis on engaged and active religious subjects, on what Philip Gorski has described as the “soteriological significance of ethical behavior,”95 is the lens under which Pietism often appears in accounts of European secularization. Through its defense of the authority of the heart and insistence that Christianity is a matter of personal experience, otherworldly religion managed the seemingly unlikely transition from “theology” to “anthropology”—that is, from the moral devaluation of the human being to the idea of the human being as the de facto bearer of duties, capacities, and rights. Eberhard Busch, for example, in assessing the shortcomings of Barth’s critique of Pietism as anthropomorphic and highlighting the Pietistic responses to that critique, is forced to go to great pains to show that the deeper theological agenda of many Pietists, despite their occasionally polemical and hyperbolic discourse, was consistent with Protestant doctrine on divine grace.96 Similarly, when Sartre declares authenticity to be the sole virtue applicable to the human being, seen as the “heir to the mission of the dead God,”97 it is tempting to think, as some of his readers have, that Sartre’s celebrated existential humanism is achieved only by “deifying” man.98 But it is not God into which Sartre shapes man; it is the dead God. Man as his own dead God—Sartre’s man is not particularly powerful and certainly not omnipotent; he simply has no one and nothing else to which to appeal. A second line of argument common to defenders of Pietistic and existentialist models of “decision” points to the way in which a focus on first-person experience has contributed to the critique of metaphysics by recognizing value in “becoming.” One of the earliest and most enduring critiques of Pietism from other quarters of Protestant theology was based in the argument that in emphasizing the universal spiritual need for each individual to undergo conversion, Pietists actually ended up with a new social classification, which polarized the Christian community. By polemically calling into question what it meant to lead a Christian life, the critics argued, Pietists wound up with a distinction between the “converted” and “unconverted,” considered as two distinct groups of people.99 Most contemporary scholars of Pietism aim to undermine this image of the movement by interpreting the distinction in temporal and personal rather

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than social terms. One will find, amid the articles in Pietismus und Neuzeit and the entries of the monumental Geschichte des Pietismus, for example, countless remarks indicating the ongoing, inexhaustible nature of conversion and repentance for the Pietists.100 As Matthias writes of Spener’s work, “The thematization of the beginning of the position of the Christian [Christenstandes] (baptismal-rebirth) steps back behind the requirement of an enduring process of spiritual renewal.”101 One of Spener’s key innovations, which opened the door for later Pietistic thinking on this subject, was his redefinition of the idea of “renewal” from that supported in the Formula of Concord to encompass not only the first coming into being of the “new man” but his continuation and retention as well.102 A parallel concern can be found in the existential context, where attempts to articulate the difference between “authentic” and “inauthentic” existence or behavior were often perceived as implying a difference between “authentic” and “inauthentic” individuals. This perception formed one of the main axes of Adorno’s critique of existential discourse. Whether or not it was intended to do so, the jargon of authenticity “marks the adept,” Adorno writes, “as untrivial and of higher sensibility.”103 What’s more, this marking (or perceived marking) between authentic and inauthentic existence often found itself contending with the very same “other” at the basis of the Christian trope of conversion: the Jew. Heidegger’s political-philosophical experiment, which coupled a personal anti-Semitism with a philosophical attempt to think German nationalism through the lens of authenticity, has been denounced for suggesting a distinction between the “authentic” Germans and the “inauthentic” Jews (among others).104 And though he attempted the opposite valuation, Sartre, too, has been interpreted along these lines. In Réflexions sur la question juive, Sartre attempted to expose anti-Semitism as a calcified form of inauthenticity. But insofar as he interpreted the complex psycho-political burden borne by French Jews—expected to assimilate but prevented from ever becoming fully French—as a struggle against essentialistic notions of “identity” and for authentic existence, Sartre was widely criticized for propagating the same anti-Semitic stereotypes he sought to undermine. In each case, critics worried that the formulation of a new value would also yield a new, polarizing social typology. One traditional response to this line of criticism mirrors closely what we saw with the Pietists. Instead of seeing authenticity and inauthenticity as a polar distinction between groups or individuals, this interpretation insists on its meaning as a modal and temporal distinction within one particular (and of any particular) human consciousness. Sartre himself will insist that what

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distinguishes authenticity from conventional moral categories is that it can never be achieved une fois pour toutes (“once and for all”). Incapable of being enduringly possessed, authenticity can never form the basis of a moral or social typology. Jean Wahl, in his 1938 Études Kierkegaardiennes, which was for many in France the first introduction to the works of both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, describes “la pensée existentielle” as follows: Here, there will never be completion and perfection, but only movement ahead, momentum. There will never be dead truth, but appropriation of the truth. The philosopher stays in movement; he is only in becoming, without his completion ever being able to find a determinate moment. . . . Existential thought is thus ceaselessly in movement. . . . This becoming, this dialectic will be a discontinuous becoming and dialectic, made by bounds and leaps. Suddenly, I find myself before the decision; in basing myself on reasoning, I would arrive only at probability; unconditionality requires the leap, leap beyond objectivities, by which I encounter myself, leap that cannot be the object of any description, any prescription, or any generalization. . . . Existence will be an incessant putting-into-question and an incessant transformation of oneself.105

Much in this vein, twentieth-century readers of Kierkegaard have frequently seized upon Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the task of “becoming” rather than of “being a Christian,” as working against a distinction between Christians and non-Christians. In treating “Christianness” as a temporal distinction rather than a social one, Kierkegaard is not only not distinguishing between the Christians and the non-Christians, the argument runs, but challenging the substance-driven metaphysics on which such distinctions rest. In most cases, this defense has been wrapped up with a reading of Kierkegaard’s work as participating in the “affirmation of becoming” occurring in modern European philosophy more broadly considered.106 For George Pattison, the affirmation of finite temporality is one of the key elements uniting religious and atheistic existentialists. Whatever their other differences, he proposes, existentialists share a common vocation as “critics of closure.”107 Clare Carlisle’s monograph on the problem of becoming in Kierkegaard also treats the emphasis on becoming as the basis of Kierkegaard’s “existentialism”: “The ‘existentialist’ perspective that Kierkegaard brings to the spheres of philosophy and faith accentuates the priority of becoming over being.”108 At work in the background of such arguments are two prevalent assumptions: first, that religions tend to be viewed as the sorts of things that hold to a static,

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idealized view of how things are and ought to be, and second, that the critique of closure tends to be viewed as a basic and progressive feature of existentialism’s critique of religion. By emphasizing Kierkegaard’s role as a thinker of finite temporality, such readings work against these assumptions by showing that the progressive, affirmative, nonmetaphysical elements of modern philosophy can also be found in modern religious thought. In the final two sections of this chapter, I would like to call attention to an inverse possibility. The critique of closure is neither the distinctive achievement of atheistic or secular philosophies over and against religious metaphysics nor simply the shared achievement of secular philosophies and certain strands of nonmetaphysical religious thought alike. We do not face a choice, in other words, between thinking about the critique of closure as either hostile to religion in general or hostile only to metaphysics and having no bearing on religion more generally considered. Rather, what the critique of closure achieves is a neutralization of that aspect of religious norms that would make the integration of those norms into the space of secular philosophy appear most conspicuous and most problematic. In the foregoing discussion, I sketched a set of parallels between dominant criticisms of Pietism and existentialism—both traditions overstate the power of an individual’s decision, and both threaten to polarize communities by distinguishing “adepts” from “uninitiated,” the “authentic” from the “inauthentic.” I also showed how scholars of both traditions have appealed to the dynamic character of commitment and the recognition of finitude in seeking to defend existentialism and Pietism against these charges. What I would like us to consider now is how these accounts of the interminable, ongoing character of commitment not only make room for a Protestant version of the critique of closure; they also create the conditions for authenticity to develop as an ascetic ideal within the space of philosophy.

Theorizing the Ascetic Ideal This claim may sound surprising. The word “ascetic” is not generally used to describe philosophies like existentialism or ideas like authenticity. Asceticism tends to be associated with antisensualism and the renunciation of worldly goods, while existentialism is all about finitude and being in the world. How can a philosophy that honors temporality and denies the availability of a perspective “beyond” finite existence create the conditions for asceticism? In order to grasp the connection between asceticism and authenticity, it will be important to get a bit clearer on what is and is not meant by ascetic here. I will

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begin by discussing two models of ascetic normativity with which my argument is in close conversation. One of the richest and most influential philosophical portraits of asceticism comes from Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s writings on asceticism are inspired and provoked by Schopenhauer, who developed a notion of ascetic consciousness as the denial of the will to live.109 Schopenhauer had recognized that this consciousness is always paradoxical, since it involves a will divided against itself—denying the will, but nonetheless willing the denial. Nietzsche reworks the elements of Schopenhauer’s theory to yield a surprising conclusion: the fact that the renunciant must nonetheless will the act of renunciation is not actually paradoxical. Or rather, it is paradoxical only if one views self-denial as a means to an end. For Nietzsche, it makes no difference whether this end is figured as otherworldly blessedness or as the this-worldly state of abulia itself. Both are “instrumental” forms of self-denial and neither gets to the heart of ascetic behavior.110 The ascetic does not will renunciation in order to be without will; on the contrary, he takes pleasure in his ability to overcome the resistance of his will. The paradox of asceticism, for Nietzsche, is thus relocated: it is not paradoxical that one must will in order to renounce, but it is paradoxical that renunciation can be a way to enjoy one’s will. The ascetic consciousness does not simply find itself in conflict—it “wills itself to be conflicting,” and indeed “relishes itself in this affliction.”111 Thus, for Nietzsche, asceticism represents the most extreme, paradoxical form of the will, the “desire to give form to oneself as a piece of difficult, resisting, suffering matter, to brand it with a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a ‘no,’ this uncanny, terrible but joyous labour of a soul voluntarily split within itself, which makes itself suffer out of the pleasure of making suffer.”112 Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of this definition is that it allows Nietzsche to consider as ascetic not only the overtly renunciative practices of monks and priests who are supported by otherworldly ideologies but also any form of this-worldly self-cultivation that struggles against the instincts and the senses. The pursuit of truth characteristic of modern science, Nietzsche famously argues, should be seen as ascetic in this sense.113 Nietzsche’s interpretation had a profound impact on another great theorist of asceticism, Max Weber. Like Nietzsche, Weber deployed the concept of asceticism in a far broader way than it had traditionally been used in the study of religion. Like Nietzsche (and unlike Schopenhauer), Weber used the distinction between instrumental self-denial and denial as an end in itself to draw a counterintuitive connection between capitalist forms of behavior and

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Protestant theology. The “highest good” of the Protestant-capitalist ethic combined “the earning of more and more money” with “the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life.” This pursuit, Weber continues, “is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational.”114 And while Christian asceticism had once been primarily associated with monastic tendencies and with removing oneself from the world, under the influence of Protestantism, asceticism “strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world.”115 Each of these is a rich and demanding portrait of asceticism, full of interesting ideas and full of problems. But for our purposes, two points are especially pertinent. First, in both cases, asceticism is a term used to help track normative structures that traverse the boundary between religious and secular contexts. Both Weber and Nietzsche are also sensitive to the way in which Christianity developed ascetic norms that are particularly amenable to being spiritualized and disseminated, that can be detached from the material context of a monastery with its elaborate behavioral codes, and even from the theological frameworks that once supported such codes.116 Christianity, in other words, generates not just asceticism but also ascetic ideals—and these ideals spread through the wider culture in ways that are not easy to circumscribe. Most relevant to my argument here is a second point: both Weber and Nietzsche apply the term “ascetic” where a form of conduct is considered as an end in itself (rather than a means to some other good) but at the same time is not itself understood as “good.” In other words, asceticism for both Nietzsche and Weber marks off a form of normativity that cannot be accounted for in purely ethical terms. In fact, this exclusion is a premise of Weber’s account: the Protestant ethic is not itself “ethical”—its exercise outstrips moral ends such as the pursuit of a good life or the cultivation of virtue. Because he was dealing with capitalism—that is, with forms of behavior that often look like straightforward examples of the pursuit of pleasure, profit, or gain—Weber’s notion of asceticism will have a particular resonance here. Schopenhauer cites Jesus and St. Francis as the paragons of ascetic self-denial; Weber’s ascetics are titans of industry and they accumulate more wealth than they could ever hope to use. Puritanical developments of the idea of the calling, Weber argues, encouraged a form of asceticism that “turned with all its

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force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer.”117 To put Weber’s formula another way, the “enjoyment of life” can be a form of asceticism as long as that enjoyment is not spontaneous.118 This is the specific terrain of Protestant asceticism for Weber and, as I will argue, for existentialism: action that is an end in itself (not instrumental) but is not in itself (spontaneously) good. One reason the connection between Pietism and existentialism may have seemed unlikely to many readers has to do with a version of the impression I mentioned at the start of this section: while Protestant piety involves a negation of the world, existentialism affirms worldliness and treats finite concerns and relationships as fundamental to human being. As a theology of conversion, Pietism demands that the individual become new, become other from what she is or has been.119 A philosophy of authenticity advocates, on the contrary, that the individual be or become more fully what she is. Earlier, I pointed out that existentialist interpretations of the subject—as ever exceeding herself, never fully self-coincident—imply that there is a kind of paradoxical indifference between identity and transformation. What Nietzsche’s and Weber’s theories of asceticism allow us to consider is a correspondingly paradoxical form of willing in which the distinction between self-affirmation and self-denial is perpetually insecure. The existentialists share with their Christian interlocutors a basic anthropological premise: existence is finite and individual freedom is heavily circumscribed. To affirm my existence in the mode of authentic self-choice is never simply a proposition that states the abstract value of finite temporality. Indeed, the value of existence does not “come from” existence in the manner of something natural or spontaneous; an affirmative philosophy of existence assigns value to its object by affirming it. Value, here, is a function of the conscious, active acceptance on the part of the existing individual—her spiritual labor.120 While thinkers such as Heidegger and Sartre do not see finitude as indicative of anything beyond itself, they nonetheless attempt to see this finite situation as capable of generating some form of normativity. What sort of norm can be generated by the sheer fact of finitude? From the sheer fact that things are and are as they are? A norm of the economic sort—use what is given, do not waste.121 And it is at this juncture that the libidinal economy of Christian asceticism becomes newly relevant: the paradoxical will of the ascetic, now charged with the task of affirming finitude. The Greek word askesis means “exercise,” and the name “ascetic” in late antiquity was used to describe a great variety of practices—from athletic train-

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ing to cultic practices to the philosophical pursuit of virtue. If I persuade you here that ascetic norms are recharged with philosophical potential around the concept of existential authenticity, then we might begin to see existentialism as part of a much longer tradition of spiritual exercise, one that has traversed the boundary between religion and philosophy from Hellenistic times, at least. In the emphasis on finitude and the avoidance of waste, models of Stoic renunciation may, at times, seem especially pertinent. At the same time, existentialists disagree radically with late antique ascetics about the ultimate goal of the exercise: more restlessness and passion, not peace and indifference, is what is desired. Thus, even where discussions of finitude may tempt us to draw parallels with Hellenistic traditions of spiritual exercise, we must take care to note the structural nature of the commonality. What the existentialists discern within Christian traditions of asceticism is a set of resources for thinking about desiring, itself, as a kind of redemptive work. On my understanding, the ascetic dimension emerges within a particular practice when it satisfies two conditions. First, that practice must relate to an ideal that cannot be realized in a permanent or lasting way but is subject to the continual renewal of effort. Second, the practice must not be considered to have intermediate value—that is, the doing of it is not useful in attaining some other end. This is important because while we might agree that social equality is not achievable in a permanent or imperturbable manner, we might also agree that a bit of equality is better than no equality, and that a lot of equality is better than a little. What is distinctive about an ascetic norm is that failing to realize the ideal while “trying”—that is, getting closer in the manner of an asymptote—does not generate some intermediate or secondary type of benefit. When labor itself is redemptive, there is no such thing as trying.122 As I will show, both of these two conditions characterize the existential ideal of authenticity. Authenticity for the existentialists describes a good that cannot be achieved or possessed. I cannot arrive at my authentic self or be my authentic self as though authenticity were a predicate attached to my subjective being. In fact, one of the primary purposes of authenticity, particularly for Sartre, is to serve as an ideal of conduct that counteracts such illusions of possession. But neither is there any sense in approaching authenticity in the manner of an asymptote. The latter solution to impossibility achieves nothing here, for insofar as authenticity is an aspect of willing itself, there is absolutely nothing at all to which one might get closer. The critique of metaphysics (along with the critique of closure) wants to ensure that our ideals reflect the always excessive and incomplete nature of human performance. In this way, the critique undermines the ideological

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frame that links the ascetic performance to an otherworldly ontology. But to value becoming is also to ask for other ideals—ideals that keep things open, or keep them from becoming too fixed. And in this way, the critique sets the stage for a reinvention of ascetic normativity. This new form of asceticism appears under the sign of an affirmative and even joyful approach to existence— an energetic asceticism.

Energetic Asceticism One of the prevalent criticisms of the Pietistic focus on continual rebirth and repentance was that it promoted a religion full of despair, anxiety, and mourning. In response to this criticism, Ernest Stoeffler has made a compelling account of the systematic role of joy across many different forms of German Pietism. What he hones in on, however, is not just the centrality of joy to many strands of Pietistic religiosity but the way in which joy is fitted into the ascetic skeleton of Pietistic devotion. Of Francke, for example, Stoeffler writes: It was his firm belief that if one door closes God in his providence can find a thousand others which he may open, and that the opening and closing is finally controlled by a love so unfathomable that man can appreciate it best on his knees. Hence anxiety simply has no rightful place in Christian experience. In its place should be joy. By this he did not mean a momentary affective response to a pleasant situation, but an attitude toward God and his world which is profoundly appreciative of all the good that is and will be. Such joy will make one’s daily life almost literally a song.123

This point extends, too, to the Württemberg Pietists: “Pietists, whether at Halle or at Württemberg, generally held that the new state of being must above all else eventuate in a new life. While Preziger agreed with this he insisted with Praetorius that the ‘newness’ of this life must express itself primarily in religiously motivated, almost uninterrupted joy. Over against the general pietistic emphasis upon a life lived under God’s Law, Pregizer thus stressed an emotional state of constant elation based on the existential knowledge of divine forgiveness and mystical union in baptism.”124 And to Zinzendorf: As Luther before him, Zinzendorf was the inveterate enemy of all legalism. What he expected of his followers was the doing of that which comes natural in a continuously experienced joyful relationship to Christ. The Christian life is thus essentially a matter of living through every moment

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of time, of meeting every challenge and trial in happy contemplation of the crucified Lord, and of his gift of salvation. With such an understanding of the Christian life one is not surprised to find that among the early Moravians the difference between piety and worship becomes minimal. All of life’s tasks and challenges become occasions for worship and are in turn transformed into acts of religiously motivated service.125

Stoeffler’s analysis points to the key way in which the classic opposition between law and spirit is transformed in the context of Lutheran Pietism into an opposition between law and devotion. His discussion not only points, in other words, to the centrality of joyful and grateful worship within this tradition of piety but to the way in which an emphasis on rebirth as an inexhaustible spiritual task transforms every moment into an “occasion for worship.” Through joy, each act becomes a devotional opportunity to be lost or gained. There is here a direct line not only to Kierkegaard but also to the stridently atheistic discourse of Sartre and Camus. This discourse shares with Pietism a widespread reputation for being interested in “negative” moods. Many of the most well-known interpretations of existential thought have presented the loose unity of the tradition on the basis of common themes—beginning with despair, anxiety, death, and alienation.126 Even when they are not explicitly criticizing it, in other words, scholars have contributed to the propagation of the idea that the “seriousness” of existentialism is a function of its pessimism. In the last decade or so, however, there has been a mounting effort to counteract this familiar image. With the accelerating publication of Heidegger’s later lecture courses, which deal with topics such as “wonder” and “lettingbe” (Gelassenheit) in discussing poetry and art, and with increased attention on Kierkegaard’s later religious discourses dealing with themes such as joy, love, and prayer, many prominent scholars of both figures have been trying to make the case that these thinkers are at least as interested in hope as they are in despair.127 Often overlooked in these discussions, however, is the degree to which this “hopeful,” “positive” thread in the works of Kierkegaard and later existential thinkers is structured by a very specific devotional logic. Just a few pages after the celebration of spiritual labor, which I cited above, Johannes de Silentio offers a description of that paradigm of religious virtuosity he calls the “knight of faith”: “Every moment of his life he buys the opportune time at the highest price.”128 This ever-renewed capitalization of the devotional opportunity presented by each moment, our author continues, is distinct from the anxious

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world-denying work of resignation. The knight of faith, by contrast, is the man that “has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity. He drains the deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the blessedness of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher, because his remaining in finitude would have no trace of a timorous, anxious routine, and yet he has this security that makes him delight in it as if finitude were the surest thing of all.”129 In the discourse on lilies and the birds, which represents one of the most beautiful and lucid discussions of joy in his entire corpus, Kierkegaard relates this “movement of infinity” to a disposition of unconditional joy exemplified in these biblical images of nature: “Everywhere and always [the bird] finds something, or rather it finds enough to rejoice over; it wastes not a single instant, but it would account every single instant wasted in which it was not joyful.—What joy when the dew falls and refreshes the lily, which now that it is cooled is ready for repose; what joy when the lily after its bath dries itself luxuriously in the first rays of the sun; and what joy all the long summer day!”130 The lily and the bird are images of absolute joy; they are “joy itself,” as he is fond of repeating. Human consciousness, with its fundamentally anxious and distracted character, can never attain the unconditional joy of the lily: “How do the lilies and the birds behave in a case like this which seems almost like a miracle: in the deepest sorrow to be unconditionally joyful, when there is such a dreadful tomorrow, nevertheless to be—that is, to be unconditionally joyful today.”131 But the lily does serve as a reminder of the nature of the spiritual task facing every individual: “What is joy? or what is it to be joyful? It is to be present to oneself; but to be truly present to oneself is this thing of ‘today,’ that is, this thing of being today, of truly being today . . . . Joy is the present tense.”132 The movement that transforms the experience of despair and suffering into an opportunity for joy is one of the ways in which Kierkegaard defines “conversion.” As he writes in a discourse entitled “Misfortune is Good Fortune,” “It is required of the sufferer that he call a halt to his erring thought, that he reflect what the goal is, that is to say, it is required of him that he turn himself about.”133 The occasion that gives rise to conversion is, according to this analysis, a matter of spiritual indifference: “In deference for the goal it has now become indifferent to thee whether what brings thee to the goal is what ordinarily is called misfortune or what ordinarily is called good fortune: what brings thee to the goal is good fortune.”134 If it would seem that this exhortation to turn even the most “misfortunate”

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experiences into opportunities—“occasions”—for spiritual renewal lies far from the godless authenticity of Sartre and Camus, consider the following passage from Sartre’s War Diaries, which defines authenticity as the act of “assuming” responsibility for one’s situation. Sartre insists that this assumption of responsibility is different from a merely stoic resignation or “acceptance” of one’s fate because the authentic response is not to take reality as it is given but to invent a desire for that reality: “To assume [what happens to you . . .], in other words to adopt it as one’s own, exactly as if one had given it oneself by decree, and, accepting that responsibility, to make it an opportunity for new advances, as if that were why one had given it oneself.”135 Camus, too, despite his protests to the contrary and his explicit criticism of existential thought, repeats the same logic in pristine form. Human life is defined by the irreducible twofold: the demand for clarity, or the innate drive to understand the world and ourselves, and the fundamentally irrational character of that world. Some (Husserl) delude themselves about unreason and seek to clarify the world; others (whom Camus calls “mystics”) prioritize chaos and sacrifice the drive for understanding. The only appropriate response to this “absurd” condition is an immersive existential performance in which one relives the tension continually, with open eyes and the full force of one’s will. Enter Sisyphus, the victim who becomes a hero through his vigilant and ritualized love affair with the absurd. Camus describes this ritual as a life of “permanent revolution,” a movement of “unceasing struggle” yet characterized by “a total absence of hope.”136 If you can neither defeat what torments you nor abandon the project of defeating it, your only free maneuver within this austere, fort/da economy is to throw all your weight into it, to live out this impossible situation with energy and lucidity. “The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given,” Camus writes. This man’s only choice is whether to delude himself about his condition. If he does not do so, “he can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength,” along with “the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”137 The only meaning life has in this sort of universe is generated by the labor that converts each passive encounter with absurdity into an active affirmation: “But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else . . . but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given.”138 Without naming it explicitly as an independent spiritual ideal, Markus Matthias’s essay on Pietistic rebirth lends some historical support to my focus on the logic of the “occasion”:

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From out of its new determination of devotion [Frömmigkeit] Pietism formulated a re-Christianization and a universal reform as its goal, which drew its impetus from the postulated opposition between a resolute [entschiedenen], living, active Christianity on the one side and a customary, churchgoing, and “professed” Christianity on the other. Thereby Pietism became a utopian movement, which in principle never reaches its goal, on the one hand because it seeks to achieve a universal (and enduring) reform via the transformation (conversion and rebirth) of the individual, on the other because each attained position of Christianization can become again occasion [Anlass] for a new, “more resolute” Christianity and must become the goal of Christian identity formation.139

As I mentioned before, Pietism often shows up in accounts of secularization that attempt to trace the roots of contemporary notions of “privacy” and “optionality” in relation to religion. From such studies one gets the sense that Pietism accelerated the process of secularization set off by earlier Protestant reforms and can be understood as a kind of “missing link” in the history of the secular sphere—either by seeing Pietism as a religious push for the privatization of religion or, more interestingly, by seeing it as a forerunner of the very sorts of publicity we often attribute to secular contexts.140 By highlighting the historical and structural connections between Pietistic thinking about conversion and existential thinking about authenticity, my approach here is certainly in conversation with such studies. But I am not arguing that the Protestant individualism of the Pietists melted into the postProtestant individualism of the existentialists and thereby one chapter in the secularization of Christianity was concluded.141 The point here is first of all to show how an ascetic logic of life formed and governed by an ideal of spiritual conversion is adopted at the heart of an atheistic movement within philosophy. To turn too quickly from an examination of the connection between these two ideals to a narrative of secularization would be to leap over a number of key issues—particularly, the question of how to distinguish between the religious, the theistic, and the metaphysical on the one side and the secular, the atheistic, and the existential or immanent on the other. The primary reason a “secularized” theory of authenticity feels wrongheaded to me, however, is a historical one. It implies that the origins of authenticity are presecular in nature and then became otherwise. As historians of Pietism such as Harry Yeide will tell us, Pietist reforms are not premodern but are themselves a response to modernity: “Pietism is, theologically and organizationally, an early

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response of the Christian community to the emergence of modern western society.”142 Hartmut Lehmann, in a more recent article, will go even further. Lehmann argues that “the whole of early Pietism” can be understood as “the attempt at re-Christianizing a society endangered by de-Christianization. This re-Christianization campaign was supported by smaller and larger groups of resolute [entschiedenen] Christians, who had a clear consciousness of the progress of the history of salvation.” These “resolute Christians” believed that the re-Christianization of society would be possible only on the basis of their “personal renewal in faith and their life as awakened and reborn Christians.”143 What I do hope to show here is that the philosophical notion of personal authenticity developed by existential thinkers and the religious notion of conversion developed in Protestant theology are actually part of the same history. At the broadest level, what I mean is that they are both part of the history of Western asceticism. In this sense, to see a particularly strong connection with Protestant ascetic ideals need not prompt us to fold existentialism back “into” confessional Protestantism. Rather, this connection should also encourage us to think about the ways in which religious value formation may itself be less confessional than it might seem. But more concretely, what I mean is this: when we consider the history of authenticity and the history of conversion together, they can tell us something about how decision has come to be an bearer of spiritual value in modern culture. Joachim Wach, the predecessor of Mircea Eliade and founder of the History of Religions program at the University of Chicago Divinity School, once suggested using the existential concept of authenticity as an instrument of religious modernization: “Only if the religious meanings which were once adequate can be translated into contemporary language or spiritual power can a religion claim to be regarded as genuinely religious. Here modern existentialism with its insistence on authenticity has much to teach every religious community.”144 Where most contemporary philosophers reached for a language of secularization to explain the atheistic piety of existential thought, Wach looked at the same evidence and saw something different. Authenticity, from the standpoint of the historian of religion, looks like the language of religious renewal rather than of secularization. Wach’s point is not exactly in agreement with the one I am trying to make here. He sees a potential religious application in the theory of authenticity insofar as authenticity points to the individual’s responsibility for the ends she pursues and for the meanings attached to her projects. On Wach’s view, this notion of responsibility can be a helpful reminder to religious communities struggling to live with a core of an-

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cient images and ideas. My point is something of a metacomment on Wach’s suggestion. To illustrate, let me turn briefly to Simone de Beauvoir. In the last essay of Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, often considered to be the most “existentialist” of her writings, she addresses the complicated situation of political action in the postwar period via a historical comparison relevant to the present discussion. “It has often been observed that revolt alone is pure,” Beauvoir writes, without mentioning Camus, “Every construction implies the outrage of dictatorship, of violence. . . . [Those who] do not want to retreat from the outrage and resign themselves to impotence, usually seek refuge in the values of seriousness. That is why, among individuals as well as collectivities, the negative moment is often the most genuine.”145 And here comes the comparison: “We know how the seriousness of the Catholic Church was substituted for the Christian spirit, which was a rejection of dead Law, a subjective rapport of the individual with God through faith and charity; the Reformation was a revolt of subjectivity, but Protestantism in turn changed into an objective moralism in which the seriousness of works replaced the restlessness of faith.”146 Needed, according to Beauvoir, is that which Protestantism attempted within the context of Christianity but failed to hold onto, that which revolutionary humanism—in which the party functions like another Church—“accepts only rarely”: “the tension of permanent liberation.”147 Beauvoir’s point can help us see Wach’s suggestion in a new perspective. Sociologists and historians have long observed that there is something curious, singular even, about the intimate relation between secularization and religious reform in the West. Does reform cause secularization? Is an ongoing secularization the precondition for reform? I will not have much to say about such questions at the general level. But in what follows, I would like to see what happens if we take Beauvoir’s analogy seriously. Specifically, I would like us to consider the possibility that the reason authenticity might appear to Wach as a theoretical language apt for religious reform is because this concept is itself bound up with the work of the Reformation.

Chapter 2

Conversion as a Way of Life If you planted and watered but saw no blessing, if heaven was shut and the testimony failed to come, you are still happy in your work.1

At some point early on in his career, Kierkegaard decided not to use the word “conversion.” In the work best known for laying out the plan of his authorship, Kierkegaard explains that the objective animating his entire oeuvre, from the pseudonymous treatises on Mozart and Abraham to the signed religious discourses on marriage and faith, was to clarify what it means to become a Christian.2 The phrase is disconcertingly simple. Like Heidegger with his “question about being,” Kierkegaard uses simplicity strategically here, as part of a technique to disarm his reader and to criticize her for supposing that she already knows what “becoming a Christian” entails. Disarmed and accused, the reader looks more closely at Kierkegaard’s phrase. And when she does, she comes to understand that she has underestimated what Christianity demands of her precisely to the extent that she has underestimated the demands of becoming. Christianity is struggle without rest—not because the goal is so difficult to reach, but rather because the struggle is itself part of the goal. It is Kierkegaard who pays tribute to the well-known biblical line “The way is narrow” by adding a sequel: “[It] becomes narrower and narrower to the end, to death.”3 Kierkegaard’s emphasis on becoming as “the medium of Christianity” has led many to include him in the tradition of affirmative philosophy of time that will come into its own at the end of the nineteenth century, around the figure of Nietzsche.4 In the 1938 book that introduced Kierkegaard to French intellectuals, Jean Wahl argues for a fundamental kinship between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and calls for a comparison of the two as great “philosophers of becoming and of time.”5 In his influential interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of

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eternal return, Deleuze follows Wahl’s suggestion. In fact, he channels Kierkegaard’s idea of repetition to such an extent that one could just as soon call Deleuze’s theory an application of Kierkegaardian repetition to Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” (ewige Widerkehr) as an interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea itself.6 Over the course of this long-running association, Kierkegaard gets wrapped up with Nietzsche as a thinker interested in “revaluing” our values, in undoing the metaphysical denigration of finitude and becoming and turning it into something positive. By the time he becomes interesting to poststructuralists, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on becoming appears almost as a kind of metaphysical heroism, a way of standing up for the difficult and the marginal aspects of existence. As John D. Caputo has it, Kierkegaard “takes the side of becoming against Being,” and his work contains “the first ‘postmodern’ attempt to come to grips with the flux.” Kierkegaard “wants resolutely to avoid turning the world into a frozen eidos, stilling its movement, arresting its play, and thereby allaying our fears.”7 Such a picture of Kierkegaard as a thinker of “becoming” can be helpful in tracing the connections between his quite unusual authorship and the wider traditions of German and French modernism, on which his thought made a tremendous, if diffuse, impact. Yet it would be a misstatement to say that Kierkegaard’s interest in becoming stands and falls as an attempt to avoid a static, top-down metaphysics of existence. Just as Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return affirms becoming only to the extent that becoming is subjected to the weight of an imagined eternity, Kierkegaard’s affirmation of becoming is predicated on a number of evaluative criteria. “There are other narrow ways” besides the sheer fact of struggle, and not all of them lead to heaven.8 Kierkegaard does indeed see value in becoming. The question is what makes becoming good. As we consider this question, it may both enlighten and mislead us to recall that “becoming,” in Kierkegaard’s phrase, is complemented by the word “Christian.” What might mislead in such a reminder is the potential implication that Christianity exists as an encompassing and authoritative index of doctrines from which the idea of becoming could be read off, as if it were but the philosophical expression of a particular theological concept.9 As if it were not amply clear from his work itself, Kierkegaard puts the point directly: “My task is to revise the definition of a Christian.”10 Emphasizing the tie of “becoming” to “a Christian” may help us understand the stakes of Kierkegaard’s theory of becoming, but it does so only by threatening our critical perspective on Kierkegaard’s account of Christianity. Becoming, as we will see, is not just a philosophical apology for the idea of a “restless faith.” It is one of the values

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Kierkegaard will use to define the aim and significance of Christianity itself. When Kierkegaard explains the purpose of Christianity in an entry in one of his late journals, he appeals to an idea of becoming: “Christianity is that which, from the deepest ground, wants to move existence.”11 Thus we are led to a problem: becoming is good to the extent that it is Christian, but Christianity’s purpose is to generate some form of becoming. Reflected within this simple phrase, in other words, we find the tension between competing images of the relation between Christianity and philosophy in Kierkegaard’s work overall. On the one side, we have a picture of Kierkegaard as a philosopher of becoming, who found in Christianity a fertile context for thinking about basic existential problems: time, freedom, subjectivity, truth. On the other side, we have Kierkegaard the committed Lutheran, who develops a multivocal philosophy of becoming as a new format for religious existence, but only within the dogmatic context of Christian theology. I would like to suggest that what the simple phrase masks is something simple: to become a Christian is to convert. Looked at on its own, this sentence is almost analytically true. It should hardly merit an argument, let alone a “suggestion.” Yet in the context of Kierkegaard’s authorship, the equation between conversion and becoming a Christian is curiously disguised. While “becoming a Christian” is a pervasive phrase in Kierkegaard’s published and unpublished writings, “conversion” (Omvendelse) is a word one finds only by looking, and even then not in abundance. Scholarly discussions of Kierkegaard’s work mirror this tendency very closely. While there are countless books, edited volumes, and essays devoted to restless faith and becoming and struggle—not to mention to Kierkegaard’s infamous “leap”—there has been next to nothing written about Kierkegaard as a thinker of conversion.12 Kierkegaard was a master of disguises. Here, too, he seems to have been successful. But why, you may well be asking, should one think that Kierkegaard’s favoring of the more schematic phrase “becoming a Christian” is a choice not to use the word “conversion”? And even supposing that we do understand the choice in this way, why should we also understand the choice as a disguise? These questions cannot be answered in an incontrovertible way. There is no tucked-away journal entry in which Kierkegaard confesses dissatisfaction with the word “conversion” and proposes “becoming a Christian” in its place. What can be shown, however, is that when Kierkegaard speaks of helping the “in a way Christians” of nineteenth-century Europe understand what their professed Christianity actually requires of them, “conversion” would have been by far the most natural term for him to use.

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Kierkegaard the Pietist In the context of Lutheran theology, conversion does not primarily refer to a change of religious affiliation or belief system, as we often use the term colloquially today. Bekehrung is a moment within the ordo salutis of the Lutheran orthodoxy, referring to a moment in the Heilsprozeß, through which the soul of a penitent sinner is transformed and justified through the work of divine grace. In Kierkegaard’s own religious education, however, the mark of orthodoxy pales in comparison with that of the Pietistic Lutheranism in which his father was immersed.13 And it is with Pietism that conversion is transformed from one moment in the process of justification into an encompassing devotional ideal.14 It would have been impossible for someone brought up as Kierkegaard was to have remained indifferent to the use that the Pietists made of terms such as “conversion” and “rebirth.” By the time of Kierkegaard’s birth, Denmark had been playing a crucial role in the expansion of Pietism for several decades. The support among Danish nobles for the missionary work of Francke and Zinzendorf, for example, contributed substantially to the bankroll of Pietistic movements heading to North America. Within Denmark, royal favor had granted Zinzendorf ’s Moravian Church the unique right to establish a Pietist community in Western Jutland—the same region from which Kierkegaard’s family had come. Young Kierkegaard himself attended meetings of the Moravian Congregation of Brethren in the Copenhagen outpost of this itinerant missionary society.15 Over the course of his life, Kierkegaard would increasingly come to understand himself as engaged in missionary activity. What differentiated him from the conventional missionary, he argued, was the simple fact that he was preaching not to the “heathens” but to the citizens of Christendom.16 In this self-conception he had much in common with his Pietistic contemporaries and near-contemporaries, whose pastoral emphasis on rebirth and conversion was directed more at the Christians already living as Protestants rather than at those in far-flung parts of the globe who had yet to encounter the Christian message. Because of this common perspective, Kierkegaard’s lifelong outlook toward religion remained quite close to that of influential Pietists such as Spener and Francke, at least in its broad approach to carrying forward a “true” Reformation by intensifying the personal relation to Christianity. Kierkegaard did not associate with the Danish Pietists as an adult. And on the infrequent occasions on which he spoke of Pietism, his remarks are just as likely to be critical as appreciative. Yet the reasons for this attitude can

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be explained by referring to the very same principles that betray the mark of Pietistic discourse on his thinking in the first place.17 Kierkegaard felt that the Pietists such as Francke could get derailed in frivolous discussions about proper Christian clothing and about whether dancing was permitted, which distracted from the resolutely subjective piety Kierkegaard sought to articulate. The knight of faith could be a vaudeville dancer, as far as Kierkegaard was concerned, as long as he treats Christianity as the most urgent and personal struggle for the truth of his own existence. There is, moreover, no imaginable religious congregation that Kierkegaard would have been able to take part in without a large measure of irony. He had been too deeply isolated in his upbringing, and too deeply marked in his thinking about communication by the ideal of Socrates—the solitary naysayer, the man who went to his grave holding on to a secret—to have consented to his work being classed within the larger socioreligious movements spreading across Danish society. Given that we are looking at a world-class ironist, we may have here one plausible reason for Kierkegaard’s resistance to the word “conversion” in describing the aim of his work. Kierkegaard’s productive years fall between the peak activity of the Danish Moravians and the rise of Denmark’s most influential and lasting revivalist movement, the “Inner Mission.” Thus it is reasonable to suppose that dedicating his authorship to the clarification of “what it means to undergo conversion” would have cast Kierkegaard’s work as a species of Pietistic theology. It would have anchored the religious psychology he advanced in a far more clear-cut doctrinal and confessional context, thereby collapsing the distance from Christendom that he sought so fervently to preserve. With a more oblique and schematic gloss on conversion, however, such distance might be more easily maintained. In presenting his work on the model of the Christian mission, Kierkegaard tended to look past the examples of his immediate surroundings, focusing on the model set by the early apostles. But even in relation to these remote archetypes, he would insist on his own singularity: “In the eighteen hundred years of ‘Christendom,’ there is absolutely nothing corresponding to my task, nothing analogous to it,” he wrote; “it is for the first time in ‘Christendom.’ ”18 The singularity of his project stems from the singularity of his situation. Never before had Christianity enjoyed such privilege, such an uncontested hold on society, as it did in Kierkegaard’s Denmark. And yet, Kierkegaard found, precisely to the extent that Christianity was being celebrated as a cultural heritage and a sociopolitical identity, that which Christianity requires in a religious sense from the individual was being forgotten. His task was thus twofold: First, he sought to convey how an individual baptized and reared in a

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diffusely Christian culture misunderstands Christianity and fails to recognize its demand for an exacting and hyperpersonal spiritual struggle. Second, he sought to present this struggle in a form that might capture the imagination of a modern, urbanized, and literate society, whose obsession with all things “new” and “interesting” formed just one more piece of evidence of its growing malaise.19 This attitude toward the slackening of personal religion is similar to that which brought Pietists in regions where Protestant reforms had proven most successful to present conversion as a universal need and as an ongoing spiritual task rather than as the result of an isolated baptismal act performed on one’s behalf. There is also considerable resonance with the Pietists in Kierkegaard’s criticism of Protestantism as having effectively, if unintentionally, secularized Christianity. Kierkegaard identifies the source of this error as the mistaken belief that in a land where Christianity has become victorious, the agonistic posture of early Christian religious experience can be refined, even discarded, for a more “tolerant” attitude.20 But if Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the contemporary religious situation shared so much with that of the Pietist reformers of a century before, why did he not share in their response—that is, why did he not also propose a theology recommending personal conversion and ongoing rebirth? The short answer is that he did. Many of the most explicit passages about Kierkegaard’s self-conception as an absolutely singular missionary, undertaking the sketch of an intensified, subjective reorientation in Christianity, stem from Kierkegaard’s late writings and notebooks. This is after his rather scarring experience at the hands of P. L. Møller in the satirical rag The Corsair, which had translated caricatures of Kierkegaard’s work and above all his person into such a contagiously vulgar idiom that Kierkegaard began to be hounded in the streets by mocking schoolchildren and derisive glances.21 The increasingly antagonistic and polemical cast of Kierkegaard’s late writings on Christianity have often been traced to this experience. But right from the start he holds to the notion of lifelong conversion. In a journal entry from 1836, when Kierkegaard was just twenty-three years old, he writes, “Conversion is a slow process. . . . One easily grows impatient; if it cannot happen immediately one might just as well give up. . . . We are therefore told that we should work for our salvation in fear and trembling, for it is never completed or perfect; but a relapse is possible—and that is certainly in part the unrest which made people desire martyrdom so ardently, so as to make the test as short and momentarily difficult as possible, which is always easier to endure than a protracted one.”22 The attitude toward martyrdom expressed in this passage

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will change over the course of Kierkegaard’s life. As we will see later on, the martyr later comes to stand for Kierkegaard as that vocation best designed to hold on to the slow, patient, protracted struggle of Christian life. But what does not change is the underlying theological view: conversion is ongoing struggle without rest.

Conversion and Identity The most important result of Kierkegaard’s replacement of “conversion” with “becoming a Christian” is that he makes conversion explicitly a matter of Christian identity. While retaining all the subjective and conscious elements characteristic of the Pietistic emphasis on conversion, “becoming a Christian” distances conversion even further than they did from the idea of a discrete experience.23 In this way, it would be more correct to understand “becoming a Christian” as a radicalization and extension of the conscious conversion ideal favored by the Pietists than as a rejection of that idea. To see how this radicalization works, we should consider one of the discourses published in Kierkegaard’s 1848 collection under the title “Now are we nearer our salvation . . . than when we became believers.” This short discourse, I would like to argue, is Kierkegaard’s psychological reboot of a classic type of Pietist sermon, now framed in the terms of a crisis of Christian identity. The title and theme for the discourse come from Romans 13:11, a passage in which Paul urges his audience “to wake from sleep,” since “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.”24 Ignoring the apocalyptic element for which this line has often been remembered, Kierkegaard turns the “now” of Paul’s exhortation into the occasion for a Protestant examination of conscience. He opens the essay with a bang: “Great God, where are we!” The point of this exclamation is to highlight the fact that today, “in Christendom,” where “so many Christians are born every year, so many are baptized, so many confirmed,” a preacher who simply repeats Paul’s words creates a deep ambiguity. “Is he to talk about our salvation being nearer than when we believed, but leave it entirely vague who these ‘we’ are,” Kierkegaard asks, “whether it is they who lived a hundred or several hundred years ago?”25 He then repeats the question, and not for the last time—Where are we? The worry driving Kierkegaard’s dramatization of this question is the worry of a missionary to Christendom. His missionees think of themselves as Christians, but few understand what Christianity entails, and “it is senseless to say, one is ‘now’ nearer than ‘when’ one began, if one never began.”26 As the discourse continues, this interrogation intensifies and begins  to

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change shape. “Where are we?” becomes “When did you become a believer?” and then at last turns into the question Kierkegaard is really asking: “Have you become a believer?”27 Without needing to know the “hour and the minute,” what this question demands, in Kierkegaard’s own terms, is that one is “essentially conscious that [one has] experienced this decision to become a believer.”28 The question that seemed to be about matters-of-fact is reconstituted as an unanswerable provocation, the instrument for an examination of conscience. Paul’s line enjoins the believer to wakefulness through the promise of imminent salvation and its “blessed comfort.” Kierkegaard takes Paul’s promise of comfort and turns it into a test.29 At the end of the discourse, he makes a formal gesture acknowledging the difference between the comforting words of “the Apostle,” as Kierkegaard refers to him, and his own exhortative use of them. Kierkegaard concedes that while his focus has been entirely on “our own activity,” Paul’s line stresses the fact that “our salvation is from God.”30 Kierkegaard explains this objective difference by appealing to a subjective order of priority: “It might well be necessary to talk about this [i.e., the comfort]—if only it always were clear where we are. But in order to become aware of this we must first know whether we have become believers.”31 Kierkegaard’s discursive interrogation of the reader does not ask whether he or she has experienced conversion, whether he or she has undergone the central religious experience of Protestant piety—he does not ask Weiss’s historical question, which we saw in the last chapter, about whether modern Christians can have conversions as intense as those of the earliest followers. He asks whether the individual has “become a believer.” He closes with a remark reconsidering the possibility of comfort after the crisis. Perhaps Paul’s assurance will be comforting once we do establish the fact that we have become believers, Kierkegaard supposes. But here, too, he plays the ironist, for the entire essay is predicated on the idea that the one who thinks of himself as a believer is the one who is vulnerable. It is precisely this person to whom the identity crisis is addressed. Just a few paragraphs earlier, Kierkegaard has dropped a not-so-subtle clue into his soteriology: “Salvation is correlative to danger.”32 If this is so, Paul’s line will never give comfort to the believer, even when he is certain of the “conscious decision to become a believer” and can compare his present lot with his past. The only comfort he can have is the knowledge that he has not as yet submitted to comfort. For if salvation’s proximity depends on knowing “where” one is and at the same time on being in danger—entertaining doubt about one’s decision and treating the saying as a “test”—then there can be no occasion on which salvation will be nearer. One

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may perhaps consider oneself nearer or further than one could have been, but the essay has been working to create an exigent “now,” and its exigence undermines the very notion of spiritual progress on which any comfort would depend. Between the believer and the comfort of immanent salvation, Kierkegaard inserts an identity crisis. Between the Pietistic self-examination and the Pauline reassurance, he draws an infinite loop, held open by the problem of “becoming”—becoming, that is, the very thing that one was “baptized,” “instructed,” and “confirmed” to be.33 By relying on the formulation of “becoming a Christian,” Kierkegaard is much more effectively able to graft the idea of continual conversion into the trope of personal identity and to circumvent what he would certainly have regarded as the pitfall of a more conventional Pietistic discourse of conversion “experiences.” As he puts it in the pamphlet that appeared just after his death in 1855 and that would have been composed a few weeks before, “I am not a Christian.” This phrase is not just a rhetorical gesture on Kierkegaard’s part to undercut the “authority” of his work with respect to the reader. He insists on it with such doggedness that I think it can only be understood as having a devotional meaning, as itself a performance of piety.34 “Now we are nearer” is premised on the expectation that Kierkegaard’s contemporaries will have consistently weak and uncertain responses to the questions he is posing. And if he is right—if asking “Where are we?” “When did I decide to become a believer?” and “Have I consciously experienced the decision to become a believer?” is enough to generate a crisis in the religious consciousness of his reader—then the exam also reveals a deep theological problem: What does it actually mean to “decide” to become a believer? What counts as a “conscious experience” of the decision to believe? In framing the soteriological problem of Christianity in terms of a denial that the Christian is a Christian, Kierkegaard turns personal identity into both the language and the prize of piety.35

A l i e nat i o n a n d A p p ro p r i at i o n Whether writing at his most polemical pitch or at his most generous and relaxed, Kierkegaard understood Christianity as being organized around the principle of spiritual labor. “In the world of the spirit, only the one who works gets bread,” we are warned at the start of Fear and Trembling.36 Or in the essay on Christ’s invitation from Matthew 11:28, “Come Hither to me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, I will give you rest,” Kierkegaard’s most religious

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pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, poses a follow-up question: “But what then is it to be labour and to be heavy laden?”37 This question and the response he offers are presaged in Kierkegaard’s signed preface to the essay, in which he specifies that the work is addressed solely to himself, in order “that I might learn not only to take refuge in ‘grace,’ but to take refuge in such a way as to make use of ‘grace.’ ”38 Such is the upshot of Kierkegaard’s placement of offense and scandal at the center of the Christian experience; they are what ensure that Christianity remains difficult. The paradox that an infinite and eternal God became a human being is meaningful only and precisely to the degree that it remains a paradox, only insofar as it defies understanding. But in nineteenth-century Christendom, all this has become too easy. The problem of the “in a way Christians,” therefore, is one Kierkegaard understands in historical terms. Christianity, by its very “success,” has created conditions hostile to itself. Those who identify themselves as Christians without grasping that what Christianity requires of them is not infant baptism or a well-meaning doctrinal education but a restless and whole-hearted toil have invested their identity in a religion they do not understand. They have what even the aesthete of Either/Or can recognize as “unhappiness”: the one “who in one way or another has his ideal, the substance of his life, the plenitude of his consciousness, his essential nature, outside himself.”39 The ordinary citizen of nineteenth-century Denmark is living in a state of fundamental selfestrangement. And once Kierkegaard defines the failure of Christendom as an attempt to short-circuit the long road of Christian identity, he has shifted the problem of piety to the terrain of a dialectic whose conceptual frame has been taken from Hegel. Kierkegaard’s critique of Christendom reopens the Pietistic exhortation of conscious, personal conversion through the dialectical logic of property and identity—of alienation and appropriation. Protestant theological discourse is hardly a stranger to the rhetoric of property. Luther, for one, will regularly describe the relation of the Christian to Christ as a joining of property on the model of a marriage, in which the faithful individual expropriates to Christ all of her sins and appropriates all of Christ’s virtues.40 But in Kierkegaard’s hands, the talk of property and “owning” is promoted from the rhetorical to the systematic level. “It is every human being’s essential destiny to become free, independent, to become himself,” or, as Kierkegaard glosses it, “to become his own [blive sit Egen].”41 Similarly, in a discussion of Judge Wilhelm’s to which we will shortly return, “True greatness is not in making conquest but possessing. . . . When a person conquers, he is continually forgetting himself; when he possesses, he recollects himself.”42 Even the passage cited above from Fear and Trembling— “only the

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one who works gets bread”—builds its argument for the value of labor out of the presumed value of possession, for he adds to this proverb a bit of commentary: “In the external world, everything belongs to the possessor [Ihændehaverens].” The image he closes this discussion with is noteworthy: “The spirit of the ring obeys the one who has the ring, whether he is an Aladdin or a Noureddin, and he who has the wealth of the world has it regardless of how he got it.” But “it is different in the world of the spirit.”43 This last line would be an apt epitaph to Kierkegaard’s entire oeuvre. The metaphysics operating in these passages is a Hegelian one, concentrated at the level of subjective spirit. In Hegel’s phenomenology, spirit realizes itself, or comes into its own, by becoming increasingly conscious of its own activity in the world (from which it initially understands itself to be alienated). Because spirit is the principle of all reality for Hegel, spirit’s coming into its own is also a history of the human world in which individual minds become central only at certain world-historical junctures. For Kierkegaard, the lifespan of a single existing individual is the only meaningful context for thinking. But beneath this difference, there is a key similarity: Hegel and Kierkegaard are both committed to analyzing human experience through a logic of mind or spirit (pneumatology). And at the individual level, their pneumatologies are largely parallel: an individual develops by progressively realizing her own active role in sustaining the reality in which she finds herself. Such realization often begins with a shock, as we see in a remarkable passage voiced by the young protagonist of Repetition: “What does it mean to say: the world? . . . Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrown into the ranks as if I had been bought from a seller of souls? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality?”44 The alienation described here exhibits the precise structure of Hegelian “unhappiness,” a consciousness that discovers itself in a world without having consented to entering, a world with laws that appear to have no relationship to that consciousness itself or to its desires. It is from this standpoint that all the “givens” of existence—including the fact of existing itself—appear as arbitrary and accidental in relation to the will of the individual. Further in line with Hegel, Kierkegaard defines this standpoint as “immediacy.” Immediacy is anything about us, anything that determines us, such that we have no active relationship to it (regardless of whether that relationship is creative, questioning, affirming, rejecting). While Kierkegaard follows the basic logic of Hegel’s dialectic—the idea that spirit is in a struggle between alienation and what is its own—he cannot

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follow Hegel’s way of working the tensions of spirit out. Hegel’s metaphysics of spirit reconciles estrangement only by rounding up from the problem of individual existence to offer an account of absolute spirit coming into its own through the full penetration of history by absolute self-consciousness. But for Kierkegaard, the problem of estrangement begins and ends as the problem of an existing individual. And Hegel’s universal concept is of little use to Kierkegaard’s single individual, who demands a solution in the space of his own life.

From Consciousness to Choice Kierkegaard applies Hegel’s isomorphism between immediacy and alienation throughout his authorship. He also accepts the Hegelian analysis of consciousness as the element that mediates alienation, transforming it into something else. But as we will see in this section, the full response to the alienation of subjective spirit for Kierkegaard is a function not of self-knowledge but of choice. Let us take the young man of Repetition as an example. At the beginning of the story, the young man finds himself in love with a young girl. However, this love happens to him. And it throws him into such a profound state of disarray that his only hope of emerging, he is told, is to “repeat” the love at the level of passionate, aware commitment. That is what marriage would be, “this resolution that is the rebirth of erotic love.”45 The resolution of marriage is “a repetition” and an eternal commitment in the sense that it is to be made and remade at every moment of the couple’s shared life: “It is the beginning of the vigilance that will find the married couple constant in the evening of life, as expectant after the wedding as the wise bridesmaids were before.”46 Similarly, the dyadic argument of Either/Or presents, on the one side, through the eyes of “the aesthete,” a series of attempts to allow accident to fully engulf one’s life. The aesthete is emphatically not a hedonist; he so radically evades commitment that he cannot even commit to his own desires, which makes it impossible for him to feel pleasure. In a sense, the aesthete is anaesthetized. As he writes in one of the book’s opening passages, “My soul is dull and slack; in vain do I jab the spur of desire into its side; it is exhausted, it can no longer raise itself up in its royal jump. . . . If I were to wish for something I would not wish for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere.”47 On the other side of the eponymous disjunction, through the eyes of “the ethicist,” we find an elaborate moral and psychological interpretation of the aesthete’s misery. What the aesthete suffers from, the ethicist tells us, is his failure to recognize that choice itself is never just an option: “Imagine a captain of a

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ship the moment of a shift of direction must be made; then he may be able to say: I can do this or that. But if he is not a mediocre captain he will also be aware that during all this the ship is ploughing ahead.” Rephrasing this nautical metaphor in psychological terms, our ethicist continues, “Already prior to one’s choosing, the personality is interested in the choice, and if one puts off the choice, the personality or the obscure forces within it unconsciously chooses.”48 To refrain from choosing the course of one’s life on the grounds that every alternative might lead to regret is only possible “because others have chosen for [you]”49 or because you have made a choice of denial. Unless one will take this in the direction of the seducer, who pours all his considerable genius into the construction of a life demonically consecrated to chance, this attitude is destined for reflective depression and its “vast penitentiary.”50 The one who treats death as the end that befalls all human beings, as a necessary feature of the “human condition,” and thus an accidental feature of my condition in particular, meets a similar fate in Kierkegaard’s analysis: “Even if the contemplation of death uses pictures of horror to describe death and terrifies a sick imagination, it is still only a jest if he merely contemplates death and not himself in death, if he thinks of it as the human condition but not as his own.”51 Death itself is a brute fact of existence. But Kierkegaard’s discourse is about turning attention away from death as brute fact to “the earnest thought of death,”52 which is the “certain uncertainty”53 that “inspects every moment [seer efter hvert Øieblik].”54 Death means that time is scarce, “but with the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity so that the year and the day receive infinite worth.”55 We find the same structure in Kierkegaard’s analysis of religious “givens.” Sin—“original” sin—which is arguably the most important “given” of Christian existence, is subjected to an ingenious argument in this regard. In the idea of a hereditary sin, committed by an ancestor and passed down through the race, The Concept of Anxiety’s author sees an outward representation of the fact that sin is not a condition built gradually out of other more basic attitudes and actions but rather represents a fundamental shift of understanding on the part of the individual. “By the first sin, sinfulness came into Adam.”56 But if we are to understand “original” as meaning that Adam’s sin created a condition, or “state,” of sinfulness that was then passed down to the whole race, “the concept [of sin] would be canceled.”57 What these arguments have in common is that a socially given, historically inherited, or naturally established fact—all that is accidental or arbitrary visà-vis the will of the individual—is viewed as a species of “immediacy.” This is the attitude the individual takes up when she treats the features of reality

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as entirely external to her own will and interests. In other words, these forms of immediacy all represent states of self-alienation in which the individual is “lost.” For Hegel, the corrective to this inadequate view of reality is a more accurate view of reality, a greater and more precise perception of the ways in which the individual spirit and her objective reality are codetermined. Kierkegaard makes a link between this discussion of alienation and his religious project. Recall that for the Pietists, too, self-consciousness—exemplified through an ideal of conscious, personally experienced conversion—was a supreme value. Because of this agreement about the value of self-consciousness, Kierkegaard is able to draw on Hegel’s equation linking immediacy, alienation, and unreflectivity in formulating what it is that the “in a way Christians” have gotten wrong. He reformats the project of Protestant reform in the language of idealist philosophy. Whereas Hegel succeeds in immunizing the individual against the view that she is alienated from the world by clarifying to consciousness the activity of spirit at the root of all reality, for Kierkegaard, this type of reconciliation is both too intellectual and too long-range. Kierkegaard’s goal is not to subjugate the accidental to the objectively necessary. Rather, he seeks to show how it is possible for the “single individual” to overcome the alienation of a life constructed entirely by outside forces. This is the problem that no conceptual mediation can solve. Choice is Kierkegaard’s answer to Hegelian reconciliation. To choose, as the ethicist of Either/Or reminds us, is not merely to pick between this or that. It is, first of all, to choose choice itself. Every choice involves, at an implicit level, the choice of choice itself as one’s task. To choose is thus to affirm that choice is possible, and therefore to affirm that one is responsible for either choosing or not choosing. As long as one is not choosing, one is denying precisely that responsibility. With the ethicist’s account of choice, we have a more Kierkegaardian way of describing alienation, not as a state in which one exists but as an attitude that results from the choice that one has denied oneself: “When a person considers himself esthetically . . . He says: I have a talent for painting—this I regard as an accidental trait; but I have a keen wit and a keen mind—this I regard as the essential that cannot be taken away from me without my becoming somebody else. To that I would answer: The whole distinction is an illusion, for if you do not take on this keen wit and keen mind ethically, as a task, as something for which you are responsible, then it does not belong to you essentially.”58 The alienated attitude toward the world has its modal correlate in what Kierkegaard calls anxiety (Angest)—a concept that will worm its way into the

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heart of twentieth-century existentialism. Anxiety can only be overcome by continual resolution, by the faith that issues from a recognition of freedom’s infinite possibility.59 Whether I choose to marry or not to marry, I have appropriated the love affair by transforming the relation from an innamoramento with which I had nothing to do into a resolution that I make and remake at every instant, which becomes the task of my life. The conceptual “mediation” between conflicting views is replaced, for Kierkegaard, by the risky venture of a personal decision in which the individual has everything to lose. A human being’s eternal dignity lies precisely in this, that he can gain a history. The divine in him lies in this, that he himself, if he so chooses, can give this history continuity, because it gains that, not when it is a summary of what has taken place or what has happened to me, but only when it is my personal deed in such a way that even that which has happened to me is transformed and transferred from necessity to freedom. What is enviable about human life is that one can assist God, can understand him, and in turn the only worthy way for a human being to understand God is to appropriate in freedom everything that comes to him, both the happy and the sad.60

By rewriting in spiritual ink, in the ink of the ever-renewed decision, facts and conditions that are given to one from without, resolute appropriation turns temporal possessions into “eternal” possessions—that is, possessions that can be accessed at any moment, provided one is ready to work.61

T h e L i m i t s o f A p p ro p r i at i o n But was there not another question burning through the young man in Repetition? His protest was categorical and existential; it was that no one informed him about his being thrust into the world, into the “big enterprise of actuality,” as he put it. The radical alienation he expresses, the realization that his existence itself is alien with respect to his will, seems more difficult to mediate. What sort of decision could he possibly make such that he would be reconciled to the sheer givenness of his existence? What can he “do” with this fact that would make it “his own”? How could the fact of existence itself be appropriated? The young man’s problem with existence was not just with his “being there” but with the fact that he cannot extract himself from the world in order to get a proper view of it, that each attempt at self-understanding and

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self-consciousness is complicit in the mediation of world, which he did not and cannot seem to choose.62 The subject is entangled with and invested in a reality that continually escapes his grasp. Although Kierkegaard does not have a single name for this idea, it is an essential part of his thinking. It has often been discussed by readers of Kierkegaard in the context of an argument against abstraction: there is no objective position, no “Archimedean point” from which to survey one’s life. “If one believes that at some moment a person can keep his personality completely blank and bare or that in the strictest sense one can halt and discontinue personal life, on certainly is mistaken,” as the ethicist of Either/Or puts it.63 Any abstract account of existence mistakes its object by taking human life for the sort of thing that can be described as if from the outside. But the thinking of entanglement, of the “thrown” or “factical” character of existence, as Heidegger will soon seal the term, is connected with more than Kierkegaard’s war on abstract theorizing of existence. It also appears in many of the most decisive arguments of Kierkegaard’s thought, in which he tries to show that the attempt to take on—to “retake” (gjentage)—the given aspects of existence through resolute action is as doomed as it is necessary. Consider an individual who has been training her powers of resolution in the manner that Kierkegaard recommends. She falls in love; she resolves to marry and to allow her life to express the commitment to this union in each of its smallest details, in each of its moments. She is talented in singing; she undertakes her musical gift as an inexhaustible task and devotes all the moments she can to developing her skills. She has grown up in a family and a society of churchgoing Lutherans; she approaches the religion of her surroundings as a message directed specifically at her, and she grapples with its ideas and commands in the understanding that her eternal happiness depends on it. But this woman is very gifted, for on top of her marriage and her singing and her piety, she is also quite naturally adept in the field of local politics, since her father was once the mayor. And of all the things she enjoys, there is none she finds greater pleasure in than reading and analyzing Japanese poetry. And then one day she falls in love again, with someone who is not her spouse. Here we have an individual whose spiritual task is to appropriate the givens, the accidents of her existence, by treating them as the occasions for a resolution in which she progressively realizes her own stake in those accidents and thereby lives them out not as brute, given facts but as elements of the fabric of her own conscious activity in the world. And precisely in doing so, this individual comes to face a problem: the object and aim of her labor do not converge. The finite gift cannot serve as the basis of an inexhaustible task.

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Kierkegaard has many names for this problem. One of the better known, discussed extensively by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus in the Postscript, is that of the misrelation of an absolute desire to a finite or relative object.64 But this familiar Climacian maxim tells us little about what is at stake in such a misrelation. It is clear enough from such discussions that one can be disappointed, feel loss, even become lost oneself. But why should one aim to infinitize one’s desire in the first place? Why not just decide to live in the tragi-comic aftermath of a desire that outlasts its object? The idea that an infinite striving is mismatched when applied to a finite object is logically rather tidy. But it seems to presuppose a great deal. In order to understand why Kierkegaard is so wrapped up with this problem, we need to consider that what is at stake in such discussions is not the realization of this or that particular desire but the project of using the arc of one’s desire as a medium to achieve formal integrity for one’s life as a whole.65 The aesthete of Either/Or, in one of the very first aphorisms of that book, fixes this problem in an exceptionally precise image when he recalls lamentingly the special type of insect that dies “in the moment of fertilization [Befrugtelsens Øieblik].” His lament focuses on the contamination of joy with an experience of loss, when “life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.”66 But the critique works in silhouette. Its true target is not that special, rare insect, but all the rest of us—for we face the same problem as the fruit fly, along with the added challenge that we must continue to live on.

D e s pa i r a s R a d i c a l A l i e n a t i o n The richest and most articulate account of the limit of appropriative labor is found in the first section of The Sickness unto Death. Tucked into the quiet and abstract pages that follow the book’s bombastic opening, we find one of the most important philosophical arguments of the work. It is here that we are first offered an explanation of why despair is “the sickness unto death.” Up until this point, the focus has been on a psychological account of despair that can emerge from the ordinary—even exemplary—behavior of a human being. A human being is a “synthesis” of precisely the two conditions we were considering in conflict above: inexhaustible desire and limited resources (or, in Kierkegaard’s hyperbolical shorthand, “the infinite and the finite”).67 The tension between these two conditions just about exhausts what Kierkegaard has to say about immediacy—that is, what every human being is without trying and what none can avoid. Everything beyond that has to do with selfreflexivity, or inwardness, as he is so fond of calling it.

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In order to be a “self ”—which is something more than a human being— this relational, “synthetic” being has to turn its relational and synthetic powers back upon itself. Every human being negotiates, almost constantly, the tension between an inexhaustible desire and the finitude of the objects and faculties through which that desire is exercised. Even the smallest child knows the agony of this tension. In fact, it is the child who feels the collision of will and world most singularly as agony, as violence and privation, before it can be cast as “romantic,” “tragic,” “necessary,” “human,” or “useful,” through the many cultural languages we adults have at our disposal. “The self,” by contrast, is Kierkegaard’s term for the human being insofar as she not only experiences the tension of a desire that exceeds the conditions in which it can be realized but further grasps herself at stake in that very experience. It is not simply—to proceed to an example of adolescence—that the girl encounters the choice between obeying the wishes of her parents or sneaking out behind their backs, but that she understands the choice in terms of her own existence, as a productive act, in which something of her “self ” is determined (rebel). If the human being is the relation of concrete, finite conditions and an excessive and inexhaustible libido, the self is what the human being becomes when that relation “relates itself to itself.”68 It is only on the terrain of a “self,” understood as this reflexive relation between desire and finitude, that despair appears. Despair appears because reflexivity offers another dimension to the dehiscence between will and world, but it offers no escape. To grasp one’s own being at stake in each choice does not imply an “inwardness” in the sense of an underlying subject or ego through whose agency this tension could be resolved. In fact, the inward turn actually compounds the original problem. If the inward contained a solution in the form of access to a supervening agent, one might reasonably expect from Kierkegaard a Stoic resolution to this problem. In that case, the individual confronting the unreliability of the outer world might be advised to focus on cultivating her private self instead. Despair would only take hold the one who failed to make this inward turn—who, whether out of ignorance, distraction, or rebellion, managed “not to will to be oneself.”69 But in Kierkegaard’s psychology, the self ’s alienation goes all the way down. Alienation is not merely an effect of the discovery that one lives in a finite world; it describes consciousness at its deepest, most self-reflective layer. This is because in defining inwardness as reflection, Kierkegaard makes of inwardness something like “pure” mediacy—the further “in” one goes, the more mediated one’s world becomes. Appropriation requires that the individual give spiritual meaning to the arbitrary givens of existence by grasping

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his own personal stake and by resolving on the self that these choices generate. But the problem with appropriation is that no matter how resolutely, how single-mindedly one pursues this course of tireless spiritual labor, one can never fully catch up with givenness. The human self is derived. It is not the product of its own labor. It has been “established by another.”70 To turn to appropriation as the way to work out an unconditional desire will just reinstate the risk of loss one faced in making politics or Japanese poetry the object of infinite striving. It is relatively easy to imagine how one might appropriate all manner of concrete givens through the labor of choice and affirmation discussed above. In colloquial terms, this is more or less what we mean today when we say that someone has “owned” his shortness, his ethnicity, his intellect, and so on. But to do so with respect to the fact of existence itself is to will to be oneself (and not only to will to be short, Jewish, intelligent). But that self is derived from something other than itself. Thus, to will to be this self is to will to be what did not will itself. Despair names the tear that opens between (1) the exercise of an inexhaustible will turned “in” on self-appropriation and (2) the absolute condition of that will’s existence, which is that it is derived. In the second half of The Sickness unto Death, this psychological analysis of despair is transposed into a theological register; here the self stands before “God” as the power that established it and despair is redefined in dogmatic terms—as sin. But before this shift occurs, Kierkegaard goes to great pains to make one thing clear: although despair is the byproduct of the self ’s doomed effort to get hold of itself, despair is not a mistake. Despair is an unavoidable consequence of the individual’s struggle to become fully self-conscious, to transform the accidental aspects of existence into the occasions of a spiritual labor in which the self realizes its own passionate stake in what transpires around it—“to see his given self as his task.”71 To show how self-consciousness leads to despair is not to show the error of pursuing self-consciousness, however. As we saw, it was precisely passionate self-consciousness that Kierkegaard found to be missing in secularized Christendom. It is what the “in a way Christian” must acquire if she is ever to “become a Christian.” Thus it is crucial that the “sickness” of despair retain at least a dialectical significance, as one battle within the larger struggle to realize consciousness as a value: “Despair must be considered primarily within the category of consciousness. . . . Generally speaking, consciousness—that is, self-consciousness—is decisive with regard to the self. The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a self; but the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has also.”72

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The fact that the self is “derived,” though stated on the first page of the book, is not something one truly encounters until one has passed through the experience of despair. This discovery is made from within the attempt at a total assumption of one’s given self through the work of self-conscious appropriation, which, in its destined failure, leads to despair. The more and more “itself ” the self becomes, the more it “becomes increasingly obvious that it is only a hypothetical self. The self is its own master, absolutely its own master, and precisely this is the despair.”73 Self-mastery is despair because if one looks more closely, one will find that “this absolute ruler is a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing; his position, his sovereignty, is subordinate to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment.” The same passage in Sickness continues: “In despair the self wants to enjoy the total satisfaction of making itself into itself, of developing itself, of being itself.”74 “And yet”—easily Kierkegaard’s favorite two words—“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.”75 Despair results from this radical freedom, from the inevitable failure of consciousness’s attempt to treat the givenness of existence as the occasion of an active, chosen expression of will. Though the failure of this attempt is inevitable, there is nothing immediate or natural about it. “However much the despairing person speaks of his despair as a misfortune,” we are reminded, despair is not an affliction but a “responsibility,” which the self must shoulder “at every moment of its existence.”76 Despair is distinct from suffering inasmuch as despair “comes from within as an act.”77 There are some types of sickness, the author admits, that one is responsible for first contracting, but whose subsequent stages unfold as a matter of necessity from that first fateful act. But despair is different: “Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It is always in the present tense.”78 So even here, in this “sickness” that expresses the will’s inability to serve as its own master, consciousness and responsibility are essential. The importance of this point cannot be overstated: When the will fails to achieve its goal, it does not get to rest “transparently in the power that established it” by ceasing its labor.79 It can only find its way to this “rest”—a word that for Kierkegaard is always surrounded by quotation marks whether explicit or not—through continued activity, by continuing to shoulder conscious responsibility for itself, however doomed this work may be. Only in this way will the individual come to face what is truly singular about the experience of despair, that which explains its title of “the sickness unto death”: despair will never, ever kill you. “Literally speaking, there is not the slightest

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possibility that anyone will die from this sickness or that it will end in physical death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this inability to die.”80 This is the meaning of the word “unto” in the work’s title—“to be sick unto death is to be unable to die . . . the dying of despair continually converts itself into a living.”81 This is arguably the most radical formula of alienation within all Kierkegaard’s authorship, and it represents the lynchpin of his way of understanding what it means to “become a Christian.” Alienation is not only the starting condition in which the one finds oneself engaged in a world that operates without one’s consent. Nor is alienation exhausted by the fact that the spiritual labor meant to appropriate this estranged world through the deliberate and conscious exercise of will is doomed to fail. Radical alienation appears when the appropriation fails—that is, when the self fails to become itself—and yet still hangs on to life. Radical alienation appears when even the self ’s failure to consume itself, its “impotent self-consuming,” is “intensified” to yield “a new form of self-consuming, in which despair is once again unable to do what it wants to do, to consume itself.”82 Radical alienation can only be discovered through the extreme experience of despair followed through to its inevitable failure. What this experience produces is a demonstration that there is something of the self that the will, raised to its highest power in despair, cannot consume. And because despair is (1) simply the other side of the individual’s inalienable freedom-to-beresponsible for his own existence and (2) always in the “present tense,” the individual will come in turn to despair over his despair as well. He will despair of the impotence of his despair, “that he cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot reduce himself to nothing.”83 All the individual’s work of self-conscious appropriation has been leading to this discovery: that which cannot be appropriated and cannot be thrown away. At the core of the spiritual labor of despair, the most radical form of alienation appears as the encounter with that which is itself inalienable. I think there are strong parallels here with the “radically indexical” forms of first-person awareness Steven Crowell has explored in relation to Heidegger’s “factical” understanding of human existence.84 In the following chapter, we will consider some limits to the analogy between alienation and facticity. But in both cases, what is at stake is a discovery of givenness—of something “irreducible” to world, or any “totality of involvements,” but which is also not quite a “thing.” The Sickness unto Death has claimed alienation as its topic from its very opening lines: “The human self is such a derived, established relation, a re-

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lation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another.”85 But the full meaning of this claim is revealed only in the book’s subsequent exposition of how the “venture wholly to become oneself ”86 ultimately fails. The failure of this venture actually achieves something essential. In revealing that which can be neither appropriated nor avoided, despair yields an experiential knowledge of radical alienation within first-person awareness. And again, it is not that the individual, failing in her attempt to develop a fully self-owned existence, discovers that “other” power in some direct or magical way. The failure is revealing because the failure itself is impotent. Like a bonfire mastering a heap of rubbish, the failure to appropriate the radical givenness of existence, so far from destroying existence, just reveals another layer of givenness yet to be appropriated.87 We could call this discovery an inalienable alienness at the heart of existence, or, less paradoxically, an inexhaustible alienness. Sickness unto Death calls this inexhaustible alienation “the eternal.” When Kierkegaard writes that “to despair is a qualification of spirit and relates to the eternal in man,” we might begin to imagine the eternal as an indestructible “soul,” a metaphysical substrate somewhere “inside” us and to which we might have recourse. We might imagine something like that, that is, were the passage not to continue in the following way: “He cannot rid himself of the eternal. . . . He cannot throw it away once and for all . . . at any moment that he does not have it, he must have thrown or is throwing it away—but it comes again, that is, every moment he is in despair he is bringing his despair upon himself. . . . A person cannot rid himself of the relation to himself.”88 Eternity, in other words, is defined in existential terms as that which can be neither fully appropriated nor given away. Despair’s goal is to will to become oneself in transparency. But the self is not and does not have access to a transcendent perspective—within or without—that could provide access to its being as a whole. There is no “Archimedean point” from which to view existence, to use a more Kierkegaardian metaphor. Every self-conscious gesture that attempts to take stock of existence is itself a new act of consciousness of which to take stock. The eternal of the self is its inalienable relationality, the fact that the self i ethvert Øieblik—“at every instant”—is invested in the existence in which it finds itself, and the fact that it is responsible, if not for existing, for the continued investment existing implies. In one of his latest published works, Kierkegaard characterizes Christian existence in just this way: “To come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged.”89

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T o t h e D o g m at i c Appropriation was put forward as the resolute gesture by which finite and temporal possessions are converted into spiritual property—that is, that which can be accessed at any moment by an individual and which no one can take away. The 1845 discourse on confession puts the search for the inalienable in exquisitely clear terms: “Nothing, nothing in the whole world, even if an earthquake shook the pillars of the church, not the most erroneous words of the most foolish of people, not the foulness of the basest hypocrite  .  .  . nothing except you yourself can take it away from you; just as little as all the world’s power and all its wisdom and the united efforts of all humanity can give it to you, just as little can you yourself take it and give it away.”90 But by taking appropriation to its logical conclusion, trying to “choose” oneself not only in respect of this or that given circumstance but also in respect of being given to choose, at all and in the first place, the search for something that no one can take away has led Kierkegaard’s “self ” to something that she herself does not have. If despair is a “vortex” (Hvirvel), as Kierkegaard sometimes seems to imagine it, this inexhaustibly alien condition lurking behind all selfchoosing and self-knowing is itself the “fixed point” despair desires: “What does a vortex seek?” he asks in a letter from around the same time he would have been working on The Sickness unto Death. “Most people believe that as long as one has a fixed point to which one wants to get, then motion is no vortex.” Kierkegaard will tell us otherwise: “It all depends on having a fixed point from which to set out. Stopping is not possible at a point ahead, but only at a point behind. That is, stopping is in the motion, consolidating the motion.”91 The problem with the vortex is not that it forces one to be in constant motion but that it generates motion of the wrong kind. The goal is to convert the involute and chaotic momentum of a life that rests on an unfathomable point of origin into a movement that brings order. The movement Kierkegaard has in mind is nothing other than that of Christian becoming. To repeat the line I cited at the start of this chapter, “Christianity is that which, from the deepest ground, wants to move existence.”92 If a person or the race should live merely in and for a finite purpose, life becomes a vortex, meaninglessness, and either despairing arrogance or despairing gloom. There must be a weight—thus a clock or the works of a clock need a heavy weight to make them go properly, a ship needs a ballast. This weight, this regulating weight Christianity wants to supply by making this into the

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meaning of life for each individual: that it is decided in this life, whether he will be eternally happy. . . . And this weight was calculated to regulate temporal existence, both its good and its evil days, etc. And because the weight was lost—the clock cannot go, the ship capsizes—and human life is a vortex.93

In the second part of Sickness, the psychology of the first part is restated in theological terms. Despair is “sin.” To be conscious of oneself in relation to the “other” power is to be conscious of oneself “before God.” Despair had no “cure” when conceived in purely psychological terms. As a will to selfmastery always in “the present tense,” every attempted restitution gave rise to a new occasion over which to despair (or to sink ever more “deeply” into despair, as Kierkegaard is fond of putting it). Despair viewed as sin before God, however, finds its adequate answer in faith. “Faith is: that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself is grounded transparently in God.”94 Through Anti-Climacus’s “psychological exposition” of despair, Kierkegaard has opened up a trajectory connecting the ordinary experience of psychological alienation to the deepest fold of Christian dogma. Transparent self-consciousness aimed at the a priori conditions of human existence becomes the instrument of religious cultivation. Faith is not that the self is grounded transparently in God. That is almost always what it has meant to be a Christian. Faith is that the self in being and willing to be itself is grounded transparently in God. This is what it means to become a Christian on Kierkegaard’s “revision” of that term. Kierkegaard has used the philosophical tools of Hegelian phenomenology to uncover an existential a priori: in willing to be itself, the self encounters itself as radically and inexhaustibly alien. He then presents this a priori fact as a problem to which Christian faith is the solution. In what is perhaps the only book more mined by twentieth-century existential thinkers than The Sickness unto Death, The Concept of Anxiety, we have yet another psychological corroboration of this project. Already in the sheer “fact of being derived” lies the root of sin: the “presentiment of a disposition that indeed is not sinfulness but may seem like a hint of the sinfulness that is posited by propagation. It is the fact of being derived that predisposes the particular individual, yet without making him guilty.”95 Guilt requires that one be conscious of sin—and consciousness comes only through the experience of despair. We may be tempted at this point to raise the question of the relation between the psychological and the theological in Kierkegaard’s project. It has long been the subject of debate among Kierkegaard’s readers whether the psy-

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chology is itself religious—that is, whether it is reasonable to understand the dogmatic categories that appear in the second half of The Sickness unto Death as the foundation of the psychological categories, that because Anti-Climacus “believes” that he stands before a God for whom all things are possible, he writes about despair as a kind of psychological apologia for sin. Alternatively, others would have the initial analysis of despair stand on its own as a relatively neutral psychological diagnosis in which it may also be possible to see the reflection of a religious problem but not as logically necessary. Most of Kierkegaard’s existentialist interlocutors would find the idea of a self continually and yet unsuccessfully willing to be itself on the basis of radical alienation a perfectly satisfactory description of human existence. Such a description would neither require nor benefit from an additional translation into the dogmatic register—that is, into the language of “sin,” “God,” and “faith.” There is something to both of these perspectives. We do not need to understand Kierkegaard’s psychological observations as a subfield of theology tackling a theoretically independent set of questions about the interaction between consciousness and will. It is meaningful that Kierkegaard is interested in these particular questions. And the fact that he asks them in such a way that they lead one to the categories of Christian theology should not eclipse the fact that Kierkegaard, in making the conscious experience of despair essential to the task of becoming a Christian, puts forward a highly tendentious view of Christian faith.96 There will be more to say about the relation between theological and philosophical psychology at the end of this chapter. For the moment, let it suffice to observe how fundamentally the two have been interwoven in Kierkegaard’s project—how in the crux of a missionary oeuvre that aims to “introduce Christianity into Christendom,” an ideal of identity, of “becoming oneself ” by virtue of an ongoing movement of self-conscious appropriation, reveals givenness as an a priori condition of existence. It then makes the individual’s active relation to this radical, inalienable givenness a key step in his conversion—in his passage from the sin of ignorance to despair as the spring of faith.

Choice

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Having seen how Kierkegaard builds a psychological path to the idea of sin by highlighting the “derived” character of the self, we are now in position to consider one of the subtlest and most pivotal moves within Kierkegaard’s thought, one that will be of vital importance to twentieth-century existentialism. This is the equation Kierkegaard draws between choice and repentance.

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Choice, as we saw above, is held up in Kierkegaard’s works as the gesture by which an individual appropriates or makes “her own” the given reality by which she is determined. Choice cannot create reality in the way that I can create a sentence or God is to have created the earth, but it does create a complicity on the part of the subject that transforms an alien situation into one for which the subject can take responsibility. For this reason, choice is essential to Kierkegaard’s intramural mission; it represents the missing link capable of turning the “in a way Christian” away from the secularized, cultural form of Christianity prominent in nineteenth-century Denmark toward an intensive religious life. The first thing to note is that the ideas of choice (Valg) and resolution (Beslutning) are not threshold categories for Kierkegaard, helping steer the lost sheep back toward the fold until the dogmatic categories take over. They have been fused into the core description of religious existence itself. The first place to see this is in the extended discussion of choice in the second part of Either/Or, where “to choose oneself ” (at vælge sig selv) is given a peculiar synonym: “to repent oneself ” (at angre sig selv). Kierkegaard’s use of “oneself ” as the object of the verb “repent” is about as unusual in Danish as it is in English. To understand the connection between choice and repentance is to see that what the ethicist means by choice is not primarily that one choose the particular features of one’s personality and circumstance but that one choose oneself “absolutely” and in one’s “eternal validity.” “The power of despair,” he muses, “will consume everything until he finds himself in his eternal validity.”97 To put this point into the terms of my argument here, to choose oneself absolutely is to choose the inexhaustible alienation that despair has revealed—then “he has truly chosen what despair chooses: himself in his eternal validity.”98 We find here an analogue of what The Sickness unto Death described as “the eternal self.” There, “eternal” described that which was inalienable about the self. And what is inalienable, paradoxically, is the self ’s very alienation. This alienation was demonstrated by the fact that every attempt at selfappropriation is haunted by radical givenness, that the self is never fully itself but only continually to-be-appropriated. Here, too, the “eternal validity” of the self is defined as the self seen in respect of what it cannot undo about itself—freedom.99 And just as we saw with despair, freedom is something the self develops only by relating to the more fundamental powers on which this self depends. When “the passion of freedom” is aroused in an individual, “he chooses himself and struggles for this possession as for his salvation, and it is his salvation. He can give up nothing of all this, not the most painful, not the

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hardest, and yet the expression for this struggle, for this acquiring—is repentance. He repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God.”100 The self always has a history, a determinacy that is not its own making, but even this history, this determination from without, must be assumed by the individual in her choice. The debt created by this ever-outstanding, ever-to-be-assumed determinacy is the precise referent of existential guilt: Only when I choose myself as guilty do I absolutely choose myself, if I am at all to choose myself absolutely in such a way that it is not identical with creating myself. And even though it was the father’s guilt that was passed on to the son by inheritance, he repents of this, too, for only in this way can he choose himself, choose himself absolutely. And if his tears would almost wipe out everything for him, he continues to repent, for only in this way does he choose himself. His self is, so to speak, outside him, and it has to be acquired, and repentance is his love for it, because he chooses it absolutely from the hand of the eternal God.101

The ethical perspective of Either/Or is less explicitly religious than the discussion of despair in Sickness. Yet even here we have a complex interweaving of psychological and theological categories. The theological appears when alienation is described as “guilt” and when the appropriative choice by virtue of which one transforms that guilty condition is described as an act of “repentance,” in which the exercise of freedom is also a demonstration of one’s love for God. There are many tensions in the ethicist’s presentation of choice. Is freedom to be a completely “self-posited” being, as he sometimes suggests?102 How does his valorization of self-posited identity actually connect with the valorization of the self forged in “the hand of the eternal God”? Most discussions of the idea of choice in Kierkegaard’s writings focus on the ethical status of choice, leaving aside the way in which choice functions as a part of Kierkegaard’s religious project (and thus marginalizing the way in which choice is described as penitential). I take this tendency to reflect concerns about voluntaristic tendencies in Kierkegaard’s theology and their tension with ideas of grace and love, which populate Kierkegaard’s later work.103 Such concerns become less pressing when we notice, for example, that the equation between choice and repentance is found throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship. We have the fact that repetition, another of Kierkegaard’s synonyms for appropriative choice (particularly transparent in its Danish form, Gjentagelsen, which literally means “retaking”), is supposed to find its truest

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expression in the religious gesture of “atonement.”104 The idea of repentance also shows up in the second part of The Sickness unto Death (somewhat mysteriously): “Every unrepented [uangret] sin is a new sin and every moment that it remains unrepented is also a new sin.”105 But it is here that the explicit equation from Either/Or can help us understand what is going on: once despair over oneself has been defined as sin, choosing oneself comes to serve as a gloss for repentance. Returning to the example of the helmsman cited earlier may help tease out some of the implications of this equation. If accepting responsibility for the ship’s course—“choosing to choose”—is considered an act of repentance, what is implied in the choice is an admission that one is at every instant capable of choosing. The helmsman may take a moment to consider his choice, recall, “but if he is not a mediocre captain he will also be aware that during all this the ship is ploughing ahead.” It is not an act of penance, surely, that the captain chooses to go northeast as opposed to east. But in choosing, the captain also is accepting that he is in the position to choose, which is to accept that at every instant that the choice is not being made he is neglecting to choose. If the captain, in deciding, chooses not only to travel in the northeastern direction but also to accept his ability to choose, he has “chosen himself in freedom.” And this sort of choice is always penitential, for Kierkegaard, because in asserting one’s freedom, one acknowledges that choice is at every moment possible, which means that before the choice, one was responsible for not having chosen. “If he forgets to take into account the velocity—there eventually comes a moment where it is no longer a matter of an Either/Or, not because he has chosen, but because he has refrained from it,” which is just as much as saying, “because others have chosen for him.”106 Velocity is here the metaphorical analogue of history. There is no “blank” moment in which one can keep oneself from determinacy, from already “ploughing ahead.” Choice can be equated with repentance only because in choosing absolutely, in choosing to choose, the helmsman accepts history as his own personal responsibility. Unlike the religious psychologist behind The Sickness unto Death, the ethicist of Either/Or does not have much to say on the subject of sin. He speaks of God and faith and presents himself as an advocate of Christianity, but he is most interested in the problem of cultivating a rich and upright personality.107 Here the individual’s main task is that of “becoming himself.” He achieves this task when he “possesses himself in his entire concretion . . . as an individual who has these capacities, these passions, these inclinations, these habits.” This individual “possesses himself as a task that has been assigned him”

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and then “became his by his own choosing.”108 But in creating an equation between the appropriative act of choosing oneself and the penitential act of taking responsibility for a history that one did not create, the ethicist has also forged the outline of a devotional logic that will take its place at the heart of Kierkegaard’s most religious authorship. To be a Christian, in the Christian Discourses of 1848, is “to be oneself before God.”109 Here, just as when Kierkegaard asks his reader to replace the thought of imminent salvation with the question of when—and, indeed, whether—he first “experienced this decision to become a believer,” he counsels against putting the choice off too long: “To choose God is certainly the most decisive and the highest choice; but ‘alas’ for him who needs long deliberation, and ‘woe’ unto him the longer he needs it.”110 The reason offered is similar to what we saw with the helmsman, that “so long as he is irresolute it appears as if there were no blame attached to it, as if the possibility of choosing the one master were still open to him, as if he were without anxiety and his irresoluteness were serious deliberation.”111 What the “irresolute” Christian forgets is the velocity of his own sin: “The ungodly calmness with which the irresolute man would begin . . . is insubordination; for thereby God is deposed from the throne, from being the Lord. And when one has done this, one has already chosen another master, willfulness.”112 Through the equation between self-choice and repentance, the discourses of personal identity and of Christian conversion are fused at a more fundamental level than we saw earlier, for here it is not only that the value of personal identity is invoked and mined to the extent that Kierkegaard’s audience self-identifies as “Christian.” The conversion—the “conscious experience of the decision to become a believer”—toward which Kierkegaard’s thinking points is itself made dependent on the project of “being oneself ” before God. And this project, as we have seen, is described as the endlessly self-reflective assumption of responsibility for one’s existence as derived. Through its connection with identity and its experiential status as a path by which the self discovers what it is to be a self, Kierkegaard’s account of conversion invokes and stops just short of an ontology of existence.

A Birth You Can Feel Kierkegaard has forged an alliance between the ideal of personal identity and the Pietistic ideal of conscious, resolute conversion. And to the extent that this alliance is compelling, Kierkegaard’s work not only recasts the experiential ideal of conversion as a problem of the Christian’s personal identity; it

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also inaugurates a way of talking about personal identity as formed through labor. Within this new discourse, the pietistic and penitential ideal of ceaselessly “becoming a Christian” functions as a latent but powerful norm. Looking forward to the existential tradition that Kierkegaard’s works will do much to inspire, one aspect of this normativity is particularly worthy of discussion. What is the Christian to do once he can provide a positive answer to the questions of “when” and “whether” he became a believer? Given Kierkegaard’s emphasis on Christianity as an active, conscious, and resolute undertaking to “be oneself before God,” he can hardly recommend to the Christian, whom he has just brought to a reflexive and passionate relation to religion, that once the conversion experience itself is over, he may simply relax back into the ordinary dogmatic business of Lutheran piety. But in order to see what sort of vigilance Christian existence requires, we must first consider that the conscious and resolute conversion, in Kierkegaard’s thinking, is not simply a way to or of Christianity. It is also a way of dealing with the debt of a derived existence. Conversion is the beginning of a new life. But insofar as conversion is an element of my conscious experience, this beginning, unlike the beginning of my natural, immediate life, is a beginning that I myself witness. In this section, I will deal with this aspect of conversion, the beginning of life at which I myself am present. Conscious conversion creates what Kierkegaard at various points calls a “birth within birth,”113 a “beginning in time,”114 a “repetition.”115 This second beginning, or rebirth, is not just one of the ways in which Kierkegaard describes the sanctifying transformation of Protestant piety. It is an idea that gets to the heart of his understanding of existence, as well as his existential definition of religion: “All religion in which there is any truth, certainly Christianity, aims at a person’s total transformation [Omforandring] and wants, through renunciation and self-denial, to wrest away from him all that, precisely that, to which he immediately clings, in which he immediately has his life.”116 If Kierkegaard has a theory of religion, the radical, midlife transformation of the individual is a major part of it. Unlike many theological critiques of “worldliness” as objectively bad or sinful on its own terms, Kierkegaard’s insistence on rebirth is accompanied by an uncompromising insistence on the value of consciousness. Indeed, the individual’s own conscious, spiritual striving is for Kierkegaard the only context in which the categories of sin and salvation have any meaning. Sin—as we will see more clearly in the final chapter—is about the entanglement of the free individual with the givenness of existence. Sin is “hereditary” for Kierkegaard, not in the sense that sin is passed on through biological or cultural

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reproduction, but in the sense that being a human being is passed on through reproduction, and sin is a part of what it is to be a human being.117 If one can put it this way at all, one “ought” to be concerned about a beginning within existence not because life before religious rebirth is wicked and afterward is good but rather because the one who continues in the world “to which he immediately clings” bases his life on a beginning of which he has no experience and no memory. In immediacy, freedom is “entangled” without being aware of that fact.118 When Repetition’s young man complains about having been tricked in to the world by a seller of souls, this is his concern. His is the cry of a derived existence. The beginning of one’s immediate existence is inaccessible to the consciousness of the individual, and the irreducible uncertainty about what in fact made this beginning possible is one of the worries that Kierkegaard describes as a “thought that wounds from behind.”119 To be wounded from behind—this is another way in which the derived, factical character of existence shows up in the orbit of Kierkegaard’s religious language. Conversion, as the “beginning in time,” responds to this wound, substituting a rebirth at which the individual herself is present for the beginning that recedes from all conscious grasp. This substitution is not a pure displacement, of course, since, as we have seen, one only arrives at this conversion by reckoning with the inaccessible beginning and its resistance to every effort at appropriation. Kierkegaard’s “new man” is not born of a lightning bolt; he is born of the alien heart of his own reflective consciousness. He is born of the impotence of his own consciousness, which, even in the abject failure of its project to assume itself in consciousness, still finds itself there, renewed in existence by some power not its own, to carry on being.120 This beginning is distinct from the accidental beginnings of physical life, of cultural Christianity, or of romantic attachment because none of those beginnings requires effort and none arises from pain: “Even if love can give birth to pain, it is not brought forth in pain; lightly, jubilantly, it bursts forth in its coming into existence.”121 “The life of freedom,” by contrast, “requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution [Beslutning], and the resolution has its work and its pain.”122 Having been defined as dependent on pain and labor, freedom appears in the discussion of conversion as the value that motivates suffering. But if we understand “resolution” to mean some kind of promise referring to the future but undertaken at a particular “now,” the distinction between a beginning in nature and in freedom makes little sense. There is nothing very difficult about a resolution, after all—nothing that distinguishes it from inclination or momentary disposition—if it simply refers to my present

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projection of what I will later try to do. What Kierkegaard understands by this term “resolution” is a decision about some concrete course of action. But the decision is not a prediction or an expression of hope. Nor is it just a promise, if by that we understand a present claim declaring what one will do in the future. The work of the decision is to forge out of the present the ground for an inexhaustible dilemma. The decision creates an inexhaustible debt that one’s future self must continually confront either by assuming it or by neglecting it. It is not possible to enter into such a debt, for Kierkegaard, without a lucid grasp of the fundamental character of existence. And as we have seen, this fundamental character can be broken into two parts, namely (1) that consciousness, as “free,” stands in an endless obligation to appropriate or “make one’s own” the natural and immediate circumstances of life by turning those circumstances into the raw materials of a spiritual labor and (2) that there is nonetheless something irreducibly and unproductively alien about this obliged existence, which can only be understood properly through the dogmatic language of a transcendent God for whom “everything is possible.”123 To make a resolution means to enter into a voluntary debt in full awareness of the involuntary debt in which one’s freedom at every instant stands. Though Kierkegaard never addresses this point clearly, a careful reader of his work will perceive that the involuntary debt is not at all absent in his characterizations of the voluntary one. I have said above that the resolution “substitutes” for the first, immediate beginning of existence. But what exactly does the resolution do to the first debt? As we saw, this first debt is an a priori condition of existence, which means that no action or deed within existence can cancel it or repay it in full. My marriage, no matter how rigorously I devote myself to it, cannot stand in for the debt that stands outside my control, since it is only possible to be resolved to love the other, on Kierkegaard’s terms, when the awareness of the first debt is included in the second—that is, with “an actual conception of God’s help, of the necessity for it, and its sufficiency.”124 On my understanding, this inclusion itself is a large part of Kierkegaard’s answer. By making “a true conception of life and of oneself ” the “first condition for a resolution,” the a priori indebtedness of existence becomes the implicit subject of the new commitment.125 So far from being cancelled or alleviated, the burden of the original debt is actually kept alive in the resolution. What the voluntary resolution provides is a form through which the original debt, the inexhaustible alienness at the root of life, can be made into the thread of an intentional existence. The resolution serves as a “beginning” because, on the basis of this commitment, a debt is contracted that opens up the whole space of life through the unifying lens of spiritual labor. And

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since existential debt is the implicit subject of the decision, the ever-renewed resolution can also be described as the ever-repented debt. Resolution is the condition of existential freedom—we will see this idea again in both Heidegger and Sartre—but here it is also explicitly a form of piety and penitence. Kierkegaard begins the analogy himself: “In civil life, of course, when someone wants to travel to a foreign country and is in debt to someone, his adversary applies to the authorities who administer justice, and his journey is halted.” If the debtor flees, he becomes a “swindler.” But with the “sacred covenant” of resolution, Kierkegaard asks and answers the question: “what is the use of fleeing the justice that, judging, watches over existence—no one escapes that.”126 To be resolved is to “leap.” But we still do not understand this word. It is not a matter of “leaping like a lion but of remaining on the spot . . . of enduring a dead calm in which the enthusiasm will expire . . . of perceiving the powerlessness and yet not relinquishing the enthusiasm, of hoping against hope . . . of putting on a straitjacket and of being enthusiastic in it.”127 The resolution turns the original debt of existence into the condition of one’s future conduct. It forges, voluntarily, a new debt out of that which cannot be appropriated. And in so doing, it exposes the vertiginous alienation of life as something capable of receiving form. I E T H V E R T Ø I E B L I K — “A t

E a c h I n s ta n t ”

Kierkegaard’s attempt to formulate spiritual rebirth through the idea of a resolution has two consequences relevant to this study. First of all, it makes it such that the sought-after “beginning in time,” which the individual herself is there to experience, is a beginning for freedom only insofar as it continues to be reactivated. If despair is “the present tense,” so too must be the resolution that transforms it. The resolution is not itself an achievement. Its only effect is to inaugurate a debt that “invites” the individual to fight.128 The resolution is “the beginning of the vigilance.”129 The ethical writer of Either/Or warns of thinking that choice can be undertaken once and for all. If the individual actually chooses himself in the absolute sense of choosing himself as free—namely, if his choice is radical enough to constitute repentance—“then at the very moment he chooses himself he is in motion. . . . In repentance he has ransomed himself in order to remain in his freedom, but he can remain in his freedom only by continually realizing it.”130 The obligation continually to realize one’s freedom is the implication of the fact of being derived. As we have seen, to be derived is not to have been

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once derived; it is to continue to be so in each moment. Because of this, repentance is not an isolated proclamation but a value structuring every movement of consciousness and every gesture: “Not until a person in his choice has taken himself upon himself, has put on himself, has totally interpenetrated himself so that every movement he makes is accompanied by a consciousness of responsibility for himself . . . not until then has he repented himself, not until then is he concrete.”131 Anything short of this approach constitutes a “failure to appreciate temporality,” which “exists for the sake of humankind and is the greatest of all the gifts of grace.”132 The insistence on continual engagement and renewal found in the ethicist’s description of self-choice is intensified in many of the writings most specifically focused on religious existence. The Concept of Anxiety defines the clergyman’s earnestness as the single thing making him “capable of returning regularly every Sunday with the same originality to the same thing.” Faith, indeed, so completely depends on continuous renewal that it can most properly be described as an “eternal youth”: “The one thing truly capable of disarming the sophistry of repentance is faith, courage to believe that the state of sin is itself a new sin. . . . [Faith] does not thereby annihilate anxiety, but remains eternally young [by] constantly developing itself out of anxiety’s glimpse of death [Angestens Dødsøieblik]. Only faith is capable of doing this, for only in faith is the synthesis eternally and at each instant [hvert Øieblik] possible.”133 Here we have a clear, analytic reason for Kierkegaard’s insistence on reducing “being” to “becoming” a Christian. For although it may be possible “by continuous diligence” and over many years to get to “know definitely what it means to be a Christian, whether one oneself is that cannot be known, and not with definiteness either—it must be believed, and in faith there is always fear and trembling.”134 This is also why Paul’s assurance about salvation being “nearer” in Kierkegaard’s hands becomes a test (Didst thou become a believer? Is thy salvation now nearer?). “This saying therefore may serve to comfort,” Kierkegaard tentatively concedes, “but also it may as it were come upon one from behind.”135 Kierkegaard’s idea of faith is most often defined in terms of the paradox of the God-man. This paradox, the fundamental unreason at the heart of Christianity, consists in the “fact” that an eternal God entered history as a human being, chose voluntarily a life of extreme poverty and suffering, and then died. This notion of God is offensive, but offense is not a bad thing in the theo-logic of Christian scandal. In fact, its resistance to the understanding is precisely what gives an offensive religious ideal the power to inspect every instant of

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devotional life: “The possibility of offense is, as we have endeavored to show, every instant present, and constitutes at every instant the yawning gulf between the individual and the God-Man, across which only faith can reach.”136 From Kierkegaard’s earliest writings, spirit is defined as struggle. But after his scarring experience with the satirical review the Corsair, Kierkegaard comes to understand the unremitting strenuousness of Christian faith in particularly agonistic terms. It is not only striving and vigilance but “militancy” and “armament” that religious life requires. In established Christendom, Christianity is considered to be a fait accompli. In a land of reformed Christianity, where even talk of the need for “reform” plays into the proud self-image of the religious establishment, it is not enough to denounce the church openly.137 Kierkegaard’s sensitivity to this relation between establishment (det Bestaaende) and critique (Angreb) could be read as a kind of religious prefiguration of certain insights of the Frankfurt School regarding the pseudodemocratic absorption of dissent.138 Like Marcuse’s “paralysis of criticism,” for example, Kierkegaard was worried about structures of power that try to occupy the voice of the oppressed. Unlike Marcuse, however, Kierkegaard was more interested in exploring the shadows of establishment power than in transforming it, and it is here that returns to the figure of the martyr. Working against the familiar association of the martyr with overt resistance to religious oppression (which would play into the proud self-image of a culture built on “reform”), Kierkegaard reimagines the martyr as an invisible spiritual practice. It is thus that the unremitting strenuousness of Christian faith, challenged by the complacency of bourgeois (spidsborgerlig) religion, is to be pursued: “Being a Christian is neither more nor less . . . than being a martyr; every Christian, that is, every true Christian, is a martyr. . . . The point is this—becoming a Christian is an examination given by God. But for this very reason in every age (year 1 and year 1848) it must continually be equally difficult to become a Christian.”139 Here the martyr, not the “believer” or the “Christian,” is the one who rises to the challenge of “becoming,” posed to the individual “at each instant” (I ethvert Øieblik). Martyrdom is now the name for the attitude that understands Christianity as unrelenting struggle. Kierkegaard’s principle of “contemporaneousness” holds that no generation can improve the religious lot of its successor or make their faith any less of a challenge, that the good Lutherans of nineteenth-century Copenhagen face the same scandal and suffering as did the immediate followers of Christ. One of the peculiar effects of this principle is the way it seeps into the momentto-moment piety of the individual. The idea that “everyone for his own part must learn from the beginning,” must “endure contemporaneousness,”140 is

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not only a reminder to the nineteenth-century follower of Christ in relation to the attitude from which his faith departs; it is an ongoing criterion of religious existence—“for faith overcometh the world by overcoming every instant the enemy within him.”141 Kierkegaard will, at times, describe the prize of this struggle in traditional dogmatic terms, as “salvation” (Frelsen) or “blessedness” (Salighed). Mostly, however, these terms are invoked insofar as they would resonate with the reader who understands himself to be a Christian. By drawing on conventional ways of conceiving the goal or aim of Christian existence, Kierkegaard is better able to reach into the self-understanding of his reader and provoke a crisis: “If thou canst not prevail upon thyself to become a Christian in the situation of contemporaneousness with Him . . . then thou wilt never become a Christian.”142 And the instrument, the wedge that keeps this religious identity crisis from ever being completely resolved, is the understanding of consciousness as a discontinuous medium, in which endurance is always provisional. Every spiritual battle—appropriation, selfchoice, faith, salvation—takes place, insofar as it takes place at all, “at each instant.” Once the conscious experience of conversion is transposed onto the psychological terrain of Christian identity, the requirement that conversion be continual casts the nineteenth-century follower of Christ in a secret and relentless struggle for her own identity and sanctions this struggle for identity in religious terms—the “truth” that is “the way.”143 The second consequence of the idea that renewal is a radical and ongoing spiritual task is the fact that every instant of the individual’s experience becomes available for spiritual cultivation. If one can remain in freedom only by continually realizing that freedom, by choosing oneself in the “straightjacket” of each instant, every instant is mobilized as a spiritual opportunity to become oneself before God (or not). In Kierkegaard’s terms, this means that after the initial break of consciousness in which the individual comes to understand herself as a sinner—as responsible, in each instant, for an alienation that she cannot appropriate and cannot shed—each instant is transformed into an occasion (Anledning) for the struggle with the offense, for the labor of piety:144 “For every instant thou standest still after hearing the invitation, thou wilt in the next instant hear its call fainter and fainter, and thus be withdrawing to a distance though thou be standing at the same spot.”145 For a piety whose target is absolute self-choice before God, “there is only one tense: the present.”146 One undertakes such a piety by undertaking the conversion of each situation in which one finds oneself into a decisive battle within the war for one’s own Christian identity. The responsibility for making this conversion of moments into opportunities for decision lies with each individual. It is only the con-

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fused man who believes that the decision to become himself before God depends on the magnitude and clarity of the external situation. He who thinks “he could easily act if the situation were a great event with only one either/or” is in error: “No such situation exists. The decisive either/or appears when the individual’s own passionate desire is aimed at acting decisively and depends upon the individual’s own skill; a skillful man seeks an either/or in every situation because he does not want to have anything more.”147 If we understand decision as one of Kierkegaard’s values, the currency in which this value is measured is that of waste. An age, such as the present one, which prefers deliberation to action “cannot for that reason be summarily accused of being powerless, for it perhaps has great power, but it goes to waste in the fruitlessness of reflection.”148 The true follower of Christ understands that conversion, “the task of becoming and being a Christian,” requires constant self-reflexivity: “Every instant that he is extraverted is wasted, and if there are many such instants, all is lost.”149 Indeed, as he writes in a discourse on blessedness, “it might be expected that [the audience] would feel concerned lest the moment implied in listening to this discourse might be a moment wasted, since it was not in the strictest sense employed in attaining.”150 The economic language here is deliberate and entirely appropriate, since one fundamental premise of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of spirit is that life is defined by scarcity—scarcity of time, first and foremost, but also of powers, capacities, and feelings. Consider the following quasi-autobiographical passage from the first part of Either/Or: Here at once is the principle of limitation, the sole saving principle in the world. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes. A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement. Think of our school days . . . how resourceful we were then! What fun we had catching a fly, keeping it prisoner under a nutshell, and watching it run around with it! . . . What a meticulous observer one becomes, detecting every little sound or movement. Here is the extreme boundary of that principle that seeks relief not through extensity but through intensity.151

In the most widely read of Kierkegaard’s occasional discourses, “At a Graveside,” he himself draws the analogy with the “merchant” and his supply contingent profits: “Death itself produces a scarcity of time for the dying. Who has not heard how one day, sometimes one hour, was jacked up in price when the dying one bargained with death!”152 This commonplace, in Kierkegaard’s

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hands, gives rise to an existential piety in which continually bringing the thought of scarcity to mind turns “death’s decision” into a source of value: “With the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity so that the year and the day receive infinite worth  .  .  . the earnest thought of [death] has helped to make a long life as meaningful as in a time of scarcity, as watchful as if sought by thieving hands.”153 In his late discourses on the lilies and birds, the labor ideal of this economy is recast from the language of decision and penitence to that of an unconditional religious joy. Joy “wastes not a single instant [spilder ikke et eneste Øieblik], but it would account every single instant wasted in which it was not joyful.”154 Kierkegaard begins by describing the nature of this joy in the negative terms of independence from external conditions—“For he whose joy is dependent upon certain conditions is not joy itself ”155—but what this account is moving toward is a characterization of joy as the absolute presence to oneself before God that we saw above in the descriptions of despair and faith. “Joy is the present tense,” he writes in the lilies discourse. It is being “present to oneself,” or as he also glosses it, “of truly being today.”156 This presence is achieved through the continual conversion in which one casts, at each instant, all of one’s desires, hopes, and cares upon God, in which one’s presence to oneself before God becomes the implicit subject of each and every gesture that the individual makes.157 What is described in Either/Or as entertainment (in aesthetic terms) and in the occasional discourse as earnestness (in ethical terms) and in the lilies discourse as joy (in religious terms) adheres to the same economy of spirit: each moment not transformed into the occasion of spiritual labor is a moment wasted.

The Christian and the Secular In the preceding pages, I have been presenting in somewhat broad strokes the logic of personal conversion that takes shape across the diverse terrain of Kierkegaard’s writings. I have tried in particular to show how, by transposing the elements of a Pietistic prioritization of conscious, resolute conversion into a discourse of identity, Kierkegaard creates the conditions for a convergence between certain normative elements of Christian piety and the idea of what it means to “be oneself.” There are a number of compelling ways to approach the relation between the secular psychological and the Christian devotional elements of Kierkegaard’s work (a truism for most thinkers that is compounded in Kierkegaard’s case due to the complexity of his authorship). For some scholars, the psychological and philosophical content of Kierkegaard’s work

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can be separated from the Christian-religious content. Whether this involves a decision between the “ethical” and “religious” spheres or between what one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms describes as the rational and naturalistic religion of Socrates and the paradoxical, offensive faith of Christianity, this view tends to regard “the Christian” as Kierkegaard’s proposed solution to a fundamentally ethical or psychological problem. If the problem can be solved differently, the thinking goes, then the Christian solution becomes superfluous. One version of this approach was advanced by Hubert Dreyfus and Jane Rubin in their appendix to Dreyfus’s book, Being-in-the-World. Dreyfus and Rubin propose viewing Heidegger’s ontology of existence as an alternative solution to Kierkegaard’s account of the conflicted character of desire in the merely immanent religion of Socrates, one that renders unnecessary his further appeal to the Christian-dogmatic faith of the paradox.158 What Heidegger offers, they argue, is “a secularized version of [Socratic religion] that might actually work as a way of life. . . . In his account of authentic life, Heidegger seeks to salvage as much of [Christianity] as makes sense without faith.”159 Dreyfus’s and Rubin’s procedure can be seen as a particular development of what George Pattison has called the “phenomenological reading” of Kierkegaard. Such readings may draw atheistic, agnostic, or even theological conclusions from Kierkegaard’s writings. What they have in common is that they treat Kierkegaard’s writing as offering a phenomenology of existence, first and foremost, one that can be coherently separated from his discussions of religious life.160 Another approach would see the dogmatic elements of Kierkegaard’s work controlling the psychological and anthropological discussions. David Gouwens, for example, would take issue with what he calls the “apologetic” reading of Kierkegaard that sees the anthropology as logically primary: “Kierkegaard is a thinker for whom the religious and Christian concepts provide the governing concepts for his psychological reflection. He is a specifically Christian psychologist for whom the practice of psychology and of anthropological reflection is logically grounded in the belief in the truth of Christianity.”161 Gouwens’s claim explicates the principle behind a number of influential American readings of Kierkegaard.162 Long before Kierkegaard’s most Christian pseudonym redefines despair as “sin,” it is the voice of faith, not of psychology, that is speaking. It is Kierkegaard’s faith that speaks, on this view, just as much when the aesthete of Either/Or convinces us that boredom is utterly fascinating, as when the young protagonist of Repetition describes beatitude as an “elemental fury” in which “each moment one is staking one’s life, each moment losing it and finding it again.”163 In the one view, the coher-

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ence of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre depends on its naturalization, and in the other, on its thoroughgoing inflection by the dogmatic categories of a supernatural, revealed faith. In the course of this chapter, it has been my express aim to place such debates in the background. In part, this aim issues from my sense that there is something exaggerated about both sides of the disagreement, however important it may be to have explicit arguments about the stakes of an authorship as complex and heterogeneous as Kierkegaard’s. It is entirely possible to stake out a middle ground on this issue, as most readers of Kierkegaard have in fact done. For those who see in Kierkegaard’s work an ethical voice or psychological insights that they would like to bring into the secular conversations of the present, just as for those who see him as a theorist working from within the tradition and experience of Christian faith, it has been important to ascertain systematically the boundaries between the religious and the anthropological in Kierkegaard’s work. This can be undertaken, to some degree, by appealing to what Kierkegaard himself understood his task to be, and to how he himself understood the relation between psychological and dogmatic discourse. It can also be approached as a question of conceptual consistency, of whether the arguments about anxiety and despair can be philosophically developed without the structure of Christian dogma (as Dreyfus and Rubin would have it), or whether, for example, the coherence of Kierkegaard’s ethical argument for marriage depends on a prior, and presumably ongoing, commitment to Christian faith. My interest here has been less to establish or defend the consistency of Kierkegaard’s thought on its own terms, however, than to see Kierkegaard’s thought as a historical and philosophical phenomenon, stretching in a wholly unparalleled way between nineteenth-century Protestant theology—a Pietism charged philosophically by a dialectical understanding of subjectivity—and the increasingly secular intellectual culture of twentieth-century Europe. Among the great Protestant thinkers of his era—Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Ritschl—none had the impact that Kierkegaard has had among secular audiences. Georg Brandes was not slipping copies of Schleiermacher’s Speeches to Rilke and Gide. Neither Baur nor Schweitzer found himself at the spiritual center of Bergman’s cinematic oeuvre. Having written entirely in Danish, Kierkegaard’s writings remained in the nineteenth century something of a local phenomenon. But from the moment his works began to be translated into German, Kierkegaard appeared in the context of European modernism as a strange sort of discovery, intrinsically anachronistic, a figure whose searing “attacks” on the Church were born of an intense personal devotion, who

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explored the “this-worldly” meaning of religious blessedness, who seemed to have gotten nearly everything right not only about Mozart but also about the modern media. He had many powerful theological interlocutors, to be sure, but from the start, the theological interpretation of Kierkegaard was but one among many approaches to the work of this strange Danish author.164 Kierkegaard is the father of existentialism. This is a sentence one will find or find echoed in nearly every work on existentialism and in most works on Kierkegaard. Aside, perhaps, from the paternal metaphor, it is difficult to challenge.165 But what an incredible sentence it is! The Danish boy raised in the strict Pietistic faith of his Jutlandish merchant father—the boy who would grow to dedicate a massive missionary oeuvre to explaining what it means to “become a Christian” so as to introduce “Christianity” into Christendom, and who wrote that massive oeuvre in the chronological space of approximately one decade because he feared that, like Christ, he would die young— becomes the father of an intellectual tradition spanning continents, languages, and centuries, that became synonymous with an image of “man” alone in a Godless universe. The relationship between Kierkegaard’s Christian authorship and this later tradition is familiar, but it is far from clear. It is not possible to bracket a question as crucial as that of the systematic coherence of the relation between religion and anthropology in Kierkegaard’s work without relying on a different premise. In this case, guided by the strange duality of Kierkegaard as the self-appointed reformer of Christianity and, at the same time, posthumous father of existentialism, my premise has been to take the relation between religion and anthropology as a fact rather than a problem to be resolved. In its own way, this bracketing involves a systematic aspect. I am not asking about what existential “themes,” “motifs,” or even “concepts” are derived from Kierkegaard’s work. What I have been trying to show is how—by approaching the problem of religious conversion as the problem of continually “becoming a Christian”—Kierkegaard created the conditions for a convergence between continual conversion and personal identity. Another way to put this claim is to say that, out of the conceptual resources of Protestant piety, Kierkegaard built a normative framework for thinking about identity and subjective reality more generally. His thought constructs a “theological self ” not only in the sense that it places the individual in her task of self-becoming at the center of Christian religious life (as theologians such as Barth would later come to lament)166 but also in the sense that it opens the door for a modern psychological way of thinking about the self as duty, as gift, as the acquired object of spiritual labor, and as the receipt of personal salvation.

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Kierkegaard is not the beginning of this story. But the peculiarity of his historical moment makes of his work a new beginning. Kierkegaard’s authorship commences in the immediate wake of the historical criticism of the Bible, which gave rise to massive changes in the way Christian theology defined its central ideas and goals. His remarkable and enigmatic essay on the difference between Socratic and Christian ideals of truth, Philosophical Fragments, has recently been explored as a tacit response to the claim made by Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity that our idea of an infinite and all-powerful God is actually an alienated form of our ideal conception of the human species. Fragments’s response to this claim is that the alienation described by Feuerbach is the result of an overactive anthropology rather than an underdeveloped one. To consider God from a vantage point where “man as measure of all things” will always end in an “acoustical illusion.”167 This rejoinder made a powerful impression on Barth, who would later develop the inversion argument applied here into a virtuosic tool of neoorthodox theology. Likewise, when Kierkegaard set out to criticize the state church of Denmark in his late “attacks” on Christendom, he chose the medium of the liberal daily newspaper, The Fatherland. He explains this choice—the first foray into journalistic writing of his career—in a journal entry titled, “Why I make use of this newspaper,” from 1855: Luther says somewhere in one of his sermons that properly sermons should not be preached in churches. This he said in a sermon, which surely was delivered in a church, so that he did not say it seriously. But it is true that sermons should not be preached in churches. It harms Christianity in a high degree and alters its very nature, that it is brought into an artistic remoteness from reality, instead of being heard in the midst of real life, and that precisely for the sake of the conflict (the collision). For all this talk about quiet places and quiet hours, as the right element for Christianity, is absurd.168

Here, and with the argument against Feuerbachian anthropology (i.e., at both the theological and the social level), the point of departure for Kierkegaard’s missionary endeavor is the awareness that secularization is already taking place within Lutheran Christianity. This has often been pointed out as the background of Pietistic and renewal movements more generally. On this view, the individualistic and experiential thrust of Pietism, which may appear to later generations as a preparation for the individualism of late modern secular culture in which the self is given to suspect any authority outside its

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own, is itself a response to, and an attempt to reverse the course of, an already operative secularization of Christianity.169 But what the many proponents of “renewal” and “reform” do not understand, from Kierkegaard’s standpoint, is the historical singularity of the present moment, for never before has Christianity had to fight its way out of the worldliness that is not only the worldliness of the secular world but that of the secularized world—that is, the historically specific form of worldliness that has emerged as a result of the social and political triumph of Christianity. Kierkegaard’s answer to this challenge is not just to encourage an “irrational” faith once the historical basis for faith becomes indefensible. His program is rather to develop a new framework for thinking about subjective desire, one whose philosophical and theological contours are drawn so richly and so precisely that, as he describes how the experience of faith emerges from and inflects the basic interplay of human drives, he defines a modern libidinal basis for Christianity. This achievement is distinct, I would add, from the many attempts to ground Christianity in purely anthropological or psychological terms, because it is simultaneously ontological and teleological. To describe a fundamental desire is to describe something that appears to the individual as both a fact and a value. And when Kierkegaard bequeaths to twentiethcentury existentialism his libidinal argument for the complicity between conversion and becoming oneself, what he passes on is an existential account of the self that has been knotted together with Christian values and norms. By focusing on conversion as a latent focus of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, we have been able to see how the logic of repentance and self-choice, of sin and desire, and of becoming a Christian and becoming a self have been fully intertwined in Kierkegaard’s work. In the following two chapters, this picture will allow us to follow how the normative framework of Protestant piety shapes existential thought even in its most exuberantly atheistic form. On this approach, in other words, taking Kierkegaard as the progenitor of twentiethcentury existentialism, far from precluding or marginalizing an understanding of Kierkegaard as a religious thinker, will allow us to see in the ostensibly nonreligious arena of Heideggerian and Sartrean philosophy a dimension in which Kierkegaard’s religious thought was most obscurely influential.

Chapter 3

Philosophical Methodism

The first appearance of the word Eigentlichkeit in Heidegger’s published work occurs in the first chapter of Being and Time: Existence is in each case my possibility; I do not only “have” existence in the manner of a property [eigenschaftlich], as something already present and independent from me. And since existence essentially is in each case my possibility, I can choose myself in my being, acquire myself, and I can lose myself, in the sense of never, or only “apparently” acquiring it. A human being can only have lost itself or have not yet acquired itself insofar as it is fundamentally possible for it to be authentic [eigentliches], that is, insofar as it is capable of being appropriated by itself [sich zueigen ist]. Authenticity and inauthenticity [Eigentlichkeit und Uneigentlichkeit]— expressions which have been chosen in a strict terminological sense—are two modes of being that have their basis in the fact human existence in general is determined by mineness [Jemeinigkeit]. The inauthenticity of human existence does not mean, however, something like “less” being or a “lower” degree of being. Inauthenticity can rather determine human existence in relation to its fullest concretion, in its busyness, stimulatedness, interestedness, capacity for enjoyment.1

Heidegger had been discussing and developing his idea of Eigentlichkeit during lecture courses over the years leading up to the 1927 publication of his magnum opus. In studies of Heidegger’s philosophy, it is often remarked that he accentuates the etymological root of the German word for authen-

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ticity by emphasizing its connection to words of ownership and property.2 But given that Eigentlichkeit did not signify “authenticity” in German until the reception of Being and Time, it might be more accurate to describe Heidegger’s thinking about Eigentlichkeit in the reverse way. Namely, he deepens and theoretically streamlines Kierkegaard’s account of the self as the product of the individual’s appropriative self-choice, but by conjugating the self, the possible, and the proper more pointedly and articulately than Kierkegaard did. And then, most crucially, he notices in this resonant tangle the opportunity to name a new existential value. The semantic field unlocked by this baptism can only be demonstrated in English by entertaining a hypothetical scenario: it is as if the common adjective/adverb for “true,” “really,” or “in fact” were based on the verb “to own”—let us imagine “ownly” were such a common qualifier—such that the formula of historicism would be to study that which happens “as it ownly took place” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist). One must further imagine that there were only one root for English words denoting ownership, so that the common Latinate terms relating to ownership— “property,” “proper,” and “appropriate”—should all be related transparently to this word. This whole semantic network would then be nominalized to yield a new substantive term: “ownliness.”3 For most readers, these “ownership” echoes are a familiar feature of Heidegger’s philosophy. And yet they are either too familiar or not familiar enough, because it is far too possible, still, for those trying to understand Heidegger to approach the subject as though personal authenticity were the topic of a philosophia perennialis to which Heidegger contributed a new chapter. But Heidegger is not a theorist of personal authenticity. His philosophy is not interested in whether you are tapped into your true self or best self or whether you are being sincere. He reinvents the word Eigentlichkeit because he is looking for an efficient way to frame human action, thought, and behavior in terms of an exhaustive ontological distinction without drawing on a metaphysical account of human nature or reality. It is certainly possible to ask what Heidegger has to say to someone in search of an “authentic self ” defined in the more familiar philosophical and moral sense of that phrase.4 But we will better come to understand Heidegger’s thinking if we temporarily bracket the now intuitive sense that authenticity is a moral ideal toward which an individual’s efforts at self-cultivation might be directed and consider instead that Heidegger is bent on devising a new philosophical language with which to bring to articulation our engagement with the world and the kind of reflection that engagement engenders. By distancing Heidegger’s “authenticity” from the moral sense in which

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the term tends to be used today, I am leaving open the question, for now, of whether or not Eigentlichkeit is best understood as a moral concept. The fact that in the very first sentence after defining the terms Heidegger presses to defend the formal and ontological status of these terms from their transparently evaluative meaning is symptomatic of an ambiguity that will persist throughout Being and Time. If there is nothing “lesser” or “lower” about inauthenticity, one might reasonably infer, there should be nothing “greater” or “higher” about authenticity. The point here is simply to say that with these roots in ownership and self-choice, we will do better if we view Heidegger’s term as the theorization of certain aspects of the Kierkegaardian self—and particularly Kierkegaard’s idea that the self comes into its own by reflectively appropriating the given conditions of existence—than if we view Eigentlichkeit in line with contemporary discourses of the “real” me or the “authentic self.” Perhaps the most significant reason the “moral” reading should be called into question, from the outset, is that Eigentlichkeit is part of Heidegger’s systematic attempt to destroy the idea, fundamental to much moral discourse, of the acting “subject.” Of course, not all normative discourse is moral. And the ultimate goal of this chapter is indeed to show how Heidegger’s idea of authenticity is involved in the adaptation of an ascetic norm within the methodological space of phenomenology. Once we understand authenticity as an ascetic concept governing the relation of philosophy to life, the fact that authenticity is involved in the critique of the integral subject, far from being at odds with the idea of authenticity as a normative term, will actually help us understand the specific kind of normativity at work here. In the passage cited above, by inserting the distinction “authentic/inauthentic” between “me” and my “self,” Heidegger achieves two primary objectives: First, he turns the “self ” that I am supposed to be and the “existence” that I am supposed to have into a possibility that I am capable of winning or losing. To say that authenticity [Eigentlichkeit] is a fundamental possibility of human existence is to say that human existence is fundamentally “capable of appropriating itself [sich zueigen ist],” that what is one’s own emerges only through conduct, through the relation of the individual to her own existence. In the language of the previous chapter, this account is loosely analogous to Kierkegaard’s picture of the self as converting from a view of itself as “given” to a view of itself as an ever-possible “task.” But if the language of possibility and capacity inserts a distance between me and my self, the second effect of Heidegger’s authenticity language is to reduce this distance by insisting on the involvement of “me” and the location of what is my “own”—at least as possibilities for me to win or lose—in every act and every gesture. It is not

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only that all reality, insofar as it presents itself to me at all, is a reality in which I am concerned, or in relation to which I am characterized by “care” [Sorge]. It is that all reality is, in each case, “my possibility,” which means that whatever presents itself to me is also an opportunity for me to relate to myself explicitly by “choosing myself in my being” (or not). “Authentic selfhood,” Heidegger writes a bit later in Being and Time, is a personal modification of existence that “must be achieved as making up for a choice. Making up for a choice, however, means choosing this choice, deciding on oneself, from out of one’s own self, as a responsiveness to possibility. In choosing the choice, existence makes possible for itself above all its authentic responsibility for the possible.”5 In some ways, from the passage and discussion above, Heidegger’s theory of authenticity may begin to sound like a scholastic rendition of Kierkegaardian self-choice. As we will see, however, the value of “choosing” or “appropriating oneself ” in authenticity is not expressed in terms of the individual’s labor. Within the pages of Being and Time—and in a less obvious way, too, in the works that followed it—the evaluative criteria that apply to the discussion of authenticity are tied to the methodological mission of philosophy itself. One of the most important changes Heidegger makes in taking up Kierkegaard’s conjunction of the “own” and the “chosen” is that he makes transparent and universal a basis of the conjunction that in Kierkegaard is both ambiguous and occasional—namely, that what is “mine” is not so merely insofar as I have transformed the given situation into an opportunity for selfdefining choice but inasmuch as I have grasped in the situation the latent conditions on which that situation depends. Recall that in Kierkegaard’s writings, the work of appropriation that made something one’s “own” was conceived again and again as the substitution of a kind of rational, essential form of property (“something that no one can take away”) for a merely accidental possession. In Heidegger, too, there is a rationalization of the accidental at work. But Kierkegaard tended to emphasize the work itself as saving, inasmuch as the work of choosing oneself in a given situation created a self capable of standing as responsible for that situation, of punctuating the randomness and givenness of existence with the performance of agency. Heidegger, by contrast, insists that the personalization of the given only actually succeeds in reducing its randomness—that is, in also rationalizing it—to the extent that the choice of oneself is clear about what it is to be a self at all. In Eigentlichkeit, I succeed in making the given my own only insofar as I confront in it the fundamental structure of the “own” itself. The work of personal authenticity depends on

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the work of philosophy—philosophy explicates the a priori structures of existence that the authentic individual appropriates. One would not be wrong in pointing out here that Kierkegaard also found it crucial to build into the account of “absolute choice” or “choosing to choose” a dimension of reflexive, explicative analysis in which the individual was to come to terms with the core of her existence as inexhaustibly alien. It was only on the basis of this demand to come to terms with one’s fundamental condition that Kierkegaard could establish a correspondence between selfchoice and self-repentance. But in Kierkegaard’s texts, the reflexive, analytical dimension of choosing oneself was latent and only occasionally emphasized. It often became an intermediate step—as in the case of “self-repentance”— connecting the existential description of the individual’s labor and the dogmatic interpretation of that labor as blessed and pious. But in the analytical framework of Being and Time, human existence is defined as understanding. To exist, according to Heidegger, is to stand, at each instant, in an understanding grasp of a network of possibilities. This type of understanding is not necessarily theoretical or even verbal; it is simply a fundamental aspect of the mode of being proper to human beings, one that points to the fact that at any point in time the world is disclosed to me as some possibilities in terms of which I am already operating, possibilities of which I am already in some “anticipatory” way making sense. These possibilities are not external to me in such a way that they can be removed or abstracted from, leaving “me” behind as the subject of this relation; on the contrary, they determine my being at every level. Thus if existing means to stand at every instant in an understanding relation to possibilities, it is also to stand in an understanding relation to myself as that which is sustained by these possibilities, as the kind of being that shows up as possible and as a responsibility for the possible (Seinkönnens): “Understanding is the existential structure of the responsiveness to possibility that is proper to existence itself.”6 When a being that has been defined as a priori, anticipatory understanding actually sets out to make sense of something, to articulate a particular thing or event in its relation to some larger totality of involvements that is already implicitly understood—a more active and explicit sort of understanding that Heidegger distinguishes with the term “interpretation”—what happens is that this understanding being becomes more itself. It intensifies its own character as understanding: “In interpretation, understanding appropriates [zueignet] understandingly what is understood. In interpretation, understanding does not become something else; it becomes itself.”7 The interpretive gesture that,

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in appropriating my implicit understanding of the size and shape of a cooking pan, allows me to select a correctly sized lid is not yet the “authentic resolve” by which I “choose” not just whether to leave my family trade but how to make this choice such that it constitutes an affirmation of my own being-free for responsibility, a responsibility in which I shoulder the “guilt” (as Heidegger coyly describes the thrown and irreducibly self-exceeding character of existence) “that is most my own.”8 But in both the choice of a lid, which appropriates my implicit grasp of the culinary-geometrical problem with which I am confronted, and the resolute choice of my own freedom, in which my action appropriates the thrown, concerned character of my own being in the world, the particular actions or gestures are described as “eigentlich” or are said to engage in “Zueignung” to the extent that they explicate the latent, a priori structure of human existence—its “ownmost responsibility for the possible” (eigenstes Seinkönnen). Within the framework of a philosophy that reads human existence as discursive at its very root, Heidegger spies a distinct opportunity to repurpose Kierkegaard’s articulation of the value of “self-owned” existence through choice. Out of the methodological resources of Husserlian phenomenology, which describes the a priori conditions of all appearance, and the idea of selfrepenting choice at the center of Kierkegaard’s account of “becoming oneself,” a new, hybrid idea is created. Heidegger seizes on the reflexive function of choice already present in Kierkegaard’s account of choice as repentance and then expands it, making auto-explicative choice the clear and consistent objective of personal, existential authenticity. What Heidegger achieves here is often described as a formalization, and occasionally a secularization, of Kierkegaardian self-choice.9 According to Hubert Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, Heidegger “seeks a phenomenological demonstration of those structures that are constitutive of human being in general. This repudiation of the Christian-dogmatic side of Kierkegaard’s thought we call Heidegger’s secularization of Kierkegaard.”10 For Dreyfus and Rubin, this “formal, structural” approach to authenticity, which is indifferent to the concrete norms and contents of any particular way of life, is precisely what gives it the potential to be viable as an existential ideal. For others, such as Patricia Huntington and Daniel Berthold-Bond, the formality of Heidegger’s concept of authenticity is the source of its inadequacy as an ethical-existential ideal. Huntington, relying on a tendentious reading of Being and Time from Richard Wolin,11 argues that the “decisionism” that haunts Heidegger’s idea of authentic existence is the result of his having abstracted from all the con-

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crete, normative content of Kierkegaard’s ethical notion of authenticity.12 As I see it and will attempt to show over the course of this chapter, what both of these readings fail to grasp is that in “formalizing” Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious descriptions of becoming, Heidegger does not reduce or abstract from their normative elements but transposes them—or a significant number of them—into the praxis of philosophy. By “normative elements,” I am referring first and foremost to the unwavering pursuit of the “own” and to the identification between the ideals of authenticity and appropriation established through this pursuit. We will see a second normative element emerge in the way Heidegger connects the philosophical ideal of explication (rendering explicit the latent conditions of existence) to the repenting act of self-choice (accepting responsibility for an existence that one did not create and that can never come fully into view). With this move, philosophical authenticity absorbs a penitential logic—that is, it is both compensatory and never finished. Only by endlessly “repeating” (wiederholen) resolute choice, which means in each instant “transmitting explicitly” the possibilities that accrue to an existing human being through her irreducible historicity, can authentic resolve be maintained.13 One cannot maintain authenticity without this repeated choice, because an existing human being is at each instant free and responsible for the past she carries with her. For Heidegger, if it were possible to make a choice now that would appear to me at some later time as something that I was no longer capable of affirming or denying (this says nothing, of course, of the external consequences of this choice, which may indeed be unalterable), my existence would no longer have the character of that which he describes as Dasein, as human existence. The normative aspect of this maintenance arises not from any requirement to repeat authentic choice in order to remain authentic, as we will see, but from the idea that one would want to do so in the first place. It would be fairly silly here to try to demonstrate a far-reaching similarity between Heideggerian authenticity and Kierkegaard’s idea of “becoming oneself,” or to demonstrate that it was Kierkegaard who supplied much of the primary materials out of which Eigentlichkeit and Entschlossenheit are constructed. This much just about every reader of Being and Time who has also studied Kierkegaard already knows. And although it is quite difficult to demonstrate unequivocally the nature and extent of Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger’s early work, because of the indirect and occasionally underhanded way in which Heidegger appropriates him, we have come a long way in understanding it in the last few decades.14 What is at stake in the present

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discussion is the nature of the difference between the two accounts. Two basic interpretive possibilities have been favored in assessing this issue. The first involves interpreting the difference between Heideggerian authenticity and Kierkegaard’s ideal of self-choice as the difference between a philosophical and a religious account of the self. Another possibility has been to see Heidegger’s as a formal description of the conditions of authenticity and Kierkegaard’s as a more concrete account of what authentic existence entails. It is my proposal that the difference in their accounts is best understood by distinguishing between two forms of normativity: one that takes shape explicitly as a form of self-cultivation within the conceptual framework of Christian dogmatics, and one that operates as an ascetic, methodological norm in the context of philosophical procedure. But for Heidegger, the method of philosophy is never just a set of procedural rules for asking questions or analyzing concepts. “Method” in Heideggerian phenomenology, refers to a way of doing philosophy that is always also a way of life: “We do not understand philosophy as a cultural phenomenon, . . . as a science, as a worldview,” he says in a course on Plato from 1931, “nor as a philosophy of existence, but as a questioning that transforms existence, human beings, and the understanding of being, from the ground up.”15 At the end of a very similar long list of the things that philosophy is not, a lecture from a few years later concludes, “Philosophy, rather, is a basic occurrence in the history of human being itself (not just any given human being), which has the character of a wholly singular questioning, a questioning in and through which the essence of the human being is transformed.”16 Thus to say, in relation to Heidegger, that philosophy has absorbed the norms of a Christian thinker who tried to reinvent pietistic conversion in a late modern discourse about personal identity is to make a point about something more than Heidegger’s concepts. Philosophy is work in the world, and method is its guide. The task of the present chapter is to trace critically the role of an ideal of radical transformation in Heidegger’s thought and to show how Heideggerian transformation plays with and against the ascetic, penitential ideal of conversion advanced with Kierkegaard’s account of “becoming a self.” In his early work (until about 1931), the transformative ideal governing Heidegger’s philosophy operates under the name of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). But in the 1930s, Heidegger begins a series of experiments that change not only the language he uses and the genre in which he writes but also the way in which he understands the aim of his thinking, and indeed of thinking in general. At this point, the pursuit of authenticity is reinterpreted, retrospectively, as a preparatory step—the “transformation into ek-sistence [die Verwandlung

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in das Da-sein]” that makes possible the transition (the Sprung, or “leap”) to a new, “other beginning” for the history of the Western spirit. This new model of transformative thinking has two basic variants. In the 1930s—and in a particularly concentrated way during Heidegger’s tenure, in the early phase of Hitler’s rule, as the rector of the university in Freiburg—philosophy is charged with undertaking a comparatively bullish vision of cultural change. In the courses and notes from this period, the individualistic, penitential model of authenticity gives way to a revolutionary apocalypticism that holds that the right sort of questioning would be capable of setting alight the change that Europe, and especially Germany, supposedly requires. But with the full collapse of Heidegger’s sociopolitical ambitions at the end of the 1930s, the sought-after “other beginning” begins to recapture some of the ascetic elements that characterize his early thinking about authenticity. In particular, we see an oblique return of the equation between choice and repentance, since the sought-after transformation is supposed to allow us to assert responsibility for a determinacy of which we are not the authors, which we can never fully overcome but must at each instant (“je,” “jeden Augenblick”) confront. In some sense, my account challenges the idea of the division between “early” and “late” Heidegger that has become familiar in readings of his philosophy. Partly due to the recent publication of Heidegger’s notebooks from the 1930s (the so-called Black Notebooks), which has made it possible to see transitional moments in Heidegger’s thinking with greater detail, we can begin to consider how an ascetic logic links his work in the 1920s to his work in the late 1930s and 1940s. Heidegger’s early philosophy is where we will see the most direct impact of his reading and translation of Kierkegaard. It is also the early Heidegger who had the most significant and systematic impact on Sartre’s philosophical formation. But the use to which the “late” Heidegger himself put his early thinking about authenticity is also of prime importance to this study, for it is here that we will be able to bring into focus Heidegger’s ill-fated struggle to build, out of the ascetic logic of “authenticity” and the “own,” the basis for a more robust sort of normativity and even a politics. In the wake of this failure, the ascetic formation of authenticity shows up again in the context of Heidegger’s new nonsubject—an “owning” (Ereignis) that, unlike Dasein, is never exactly “mine.” In Heidegger’s late work, the ascetic format looks something like this: where the “good” is “impossible” and a utopian project appears untenable or too naïve, the ever-renewed performance of the impossible reappears as a formal way to generate value.

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Throughout Being and Time, Heidegger describes the change that takes place when a person passes from an authentic to an inauthentic stance (or vice versa) as an “existential modification.” He employs this word “modification” in a literal way, because at bottom, authenticity and inauthenticity are not states of being or independent attitudes but modal determinations qualifying the way in which one undertakes a given action or orients oneself toward a particular situation. One cannot be or even become authentic in the logic of Being and Time. One can only do and act authentically. Heidegger’s examples of authentic conduct, accordingly, are as diverse as his examples of conduct: authentic hearing, authentic speech, authentic choosing, authentic planning, authentically relating to one’s mortality, and so on. The major philosophical achievement of Being and Time is contained in its “analytic of existence.” This analytic employs phenomenological method to arrive at a description of human reality in terms of its most basic, a priori characteristics. Heidegger calls these basic characteristics “existentialia.” Here, as throughout his philosophy, Heidegger thinks by proliferating seemingly reduplicative categories. What is in one section of the book described as the “thrownness” of existence is later described as “nothingness” and then also as “historicity.” What is at one point described as “care” is at other times described as “ekstasis” and at other times as “temporality.” But if we were to attempt a vertical slice through this proliferative terminology, the most essential features could be arranged into something like the following description: To exist—dasein, a term reserved specifically for human beings—is to be involved with a world of tasks, concerns, and possibilities. This involvement is so radical that it precedes, phenomenologically, all formations of “self ” and “other” or “subject” and “object.” Existence is concern. And seen in this specific sense of concerned existence, human existence is at its root ecstatic— “standing outside itself ”—in that it is at every moment engaged concretely by its world. Even when it is engaged with itself, as it so often is, by the problem of its own being, it comes to itself not in the direct self-knowledge of an absolute mind but by trailing after itself, as if from the outside, arriving at identity only through the mediation of world, of time, of others. Heidegger wraps up all these characteristics in a further feature, encompassing and complex, which he calls “facticity.” Facticity is meant to designate the “thrown” or inalienable aspect—one version of which we saw already with Kierkegaard—of finite human existence, which is that there is no way out. I have no access to a moment “before” or a point “outside” of my involved, ecstatic engagement with the

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world and my own possibilities such that I could actually get a view of what I am from the outside. Even death is no release. For as the possibility of my own absolute impossibility, death haunts every interaction, every thought, every engagement, while never becoming available to me; every attempt to think death throws me back all the more forcefully on my being in the present. Readers of Husserl will find many points in common here with the work of Heidegger’s former mentor. Husserl spoke insistently of the “intentional”—or relational—character of consciousness, as well as of the distinctive feature of consciousness, that it takes an interest in its own way of being. But shifting the terrain of the conversation from “consciousness” and “intentionality” to “being” and “concern,” Heidegger ripens the highly abstract methodological language of Husserlian phenomenology into a discourse more easily associated with self-cultivation. And it is here that the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity makes such an important difference. If the previous paragraph describes the a priori conditions of human existence—that is, conditions that cannot be transcended and that describe one’s mode of being at every instant—“authentic” and “inauthentic” describe the extent to which a given way of conducting oneself does or does not reflect, explicitly, these a priori conditions. Hearing can be an authentic mode of conduct inasmuch as it reflects the “primary and authentic openness of existence to its own ability for being.”17 “Authentic anxiety” is not a psychological state but that mode of being that discloses the “thrown” freedom of human existence.18 “Authentic temporality” describes the explicit relation to the ecstatic character of consciousness, its always being “thrown” ahead of its present in contexts, possibilities, and plans. To be really authentic, however, that relation will also have to confront the most extreme and yet most ineradicable possibility of a living consciousness—the possibility that I hold open, quietly and at every instant, living out my being-unto-death.19 In all of these cases, authenticity serves as a criterion linking the a priori conditions of existence with the freedom—also an a priori condition—to undertake an explicit relationship to those conditions (or not). It burrows into the place of one of the fundamental ideas of Husserlian phenomenology, that consciousness is so thoroughly intentional that it can at any moment take its own constitutive operation as an intentional object. But it then uses the Kierkegaardian conjugation of the self and the proper to dig out of this theoretical idea a normative distinction between modes of existence that do and do not render explicit or “testify to” (bezeugen) their constitutive structures.20 The most paradigmatic form of authentic conduct analyzed in Being and Time is what Heidegger calls vorlaufende Entschlossenheit, or “anticipatory

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resolve.” Resolve is defined not just as one authentic orientation among others but as the fundamental condition of authentic selfhood, the possibility for the thrown, finite, ever-ecstatic human existence to perform itself as a kind of “whole.” Resolve unites all the features of Heidegger’s analytic in one existential determination: the resolute individual appreciates the thrown, factical, indebted character of her own existence as well as its fundamental ecstasis, its being involved outside itself in possibilities as well as in its utmost possibility, death. But the resolute individual not only appreciates all these features; she does so and nonetheless decides on a particular course of action in the present. It is not an example of authentic resolve to contemplate these features while lying in bed, avoiding the demands of the present. It may, however, be an example of resoluteness to reflect on the conditions of existence while getting up, brushing your teeth, heading out into the world, and doing the ordinary things you do, not knowing what will come of them. To make a choice of this or that present possibility in explicit awareness of one’s own inability to get a lasting grip on oneself is, in this way, to choose oneself as the distracted, thrown, “guilty” existences that one “always already is”: “The authentic coming-to-oneself of anticipatory resolve is at once a return to the self that is most one’s own, that is thrown into its singularity.” Most of the time, of course, one is not engaged in explicating and “retrieving” (wiederholen) the conditions of this “own” but instead “inauthentically” absorbed by possibilities and contexts and concerns. Heidegger interprets this default mode of being as a kind of “lostness” (Verlorenheit), in which what is lost is one’s ownmost freedom.21 Throughout these discussions, Heidegger relies heavily on the idea that existence is always an enactment of understanding. The corollary of this idea, which I discussed in the opening section of this chapter, is that all appearance, insofar as it shows up at all in the relational, understanding arena of an existing human being, is intelligible. It may be that a given appearance never shakes off a form as vague as “unidentified yearning” or “obscure object that is not round,” but insofar as it appears at all, it is already being grasped in some implicit form of understanding in the web of my intentional existence. The intelligibility principle allows Heidegger to assert that those forms of conduct in which one appears to have very little traffic with the question of one’s own existence are actually examples of negligence, since the question can at any time become explicit. In Being and Time, Heidegger defines “anticipatory resolve” as the way in which a human being “authentically comes to oneself.” In one sense, this orientation toward “the self that is most one’s own” is a kind of return, a “reso-

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lute taking-on of the being that it already is.”22 But given that the being that it already is is essentially ek-static, what one “repeats” or “takes on resolutely” is not a past or otherwise established entity but the possibilities in terms of which one’s present being is at every moment determined. To be involved unreflectively with these possibilities is the sole alternative to this “authentic” gesture of resolve. Unreflectively “projecting oneself onto the possibilities created by that which one cares about,” in contrast with the self-appropriating “retrieval” of resolve, is defined as “forgetting oneself.” This forgottenness (Vergessenheit) is a relation to the self not as something once possessed or understood and subsequently lost but as a present positivity—that is, as a present opportunity for authentic self-appropriation that one still, yet, and at every instant is missing.23 That inauthenticity emerges from the individual’s neglect to take himself on highlights a structural parallel between the analytic of existence and a standard Christian logic of devotion. Throughout Being and Time, Heidegger overlays the discussions of “appropriating” one’s condition, taking responsibility for one’s “ownmost” freedom—confronting rather than fleeing the disturbing presence of nothing and absence of being—with quite classical theological language describing the conversion of the self toward God. Throughout the text, Heidegger defines the response to the a priori aspects of existence in terms of an exhaustive binary—abkehrig and hinkehrig/ankehrig, averting and converting.24 In a section on the way in which any human existence is essentially interwoven with the existence of others, Heidegger articulates the ineluctable character of the sociability of existence by explaining that even a turn away from others—that is, a gesture of reclusion or hermeticism— cannot undo the force of this condition: “Even when a given individual does not turn to [kehrt an] others . . . it does so as ‘being-with.’ ”25 In fact, an attempt at aversion turns out to be tremendously revealing. “For the most part,” Heidegger insists, “it is through evasive turning-away that the thrownness of my existence shows up in my disposition.”26 This move becomes especially important in the discussion of anxiety, since by arguing that the apparent absence of anxiety is actually an example of “turning-away from it,” which simply confirms the reality of anxiety as that-from-which one turns, Heidegger can then reinscribe ignorance as a positive moment within the philosophical project: the ultimately self-betraying aversion is what makes it possible to grasp that from which one turns—or, as he reencodes it in the language of Christian theology, that from which one both “falls” and “flees”—as truly fundamental.27 The discussion of anxiety owes a great deal to Kierkegaard.28 Kierkegaard

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also described anxiety as spirit’s self-relation: “Flee away from anxiety, he cannot, for he loves it; really love it, he cannot, for he flees from it.”29 For Kierkegaard, consciousness is able to transform anxiety into the self-repenting choice of freedom only through the religious consciousness (and the dogmatic communication on which it depends) that before God guilt is sin. For Heidegger, no such help is needed; anxiety itself is sufficient to lead one to the freedom to choose (or not). But by naturalizing neglect, Heidegger creates a force that will pull at the seams of his entire project. Unlike Kierkegaard, who understands appropriative self-choice as the religious destiny of the individual, and unlike Sartre, who, as we will see in the next chapter, holds the view that authenticity is in itself a good (while struggling, throughout his work, with the question of what precisely it is good for), Heidegger cannot and will not say that it is “better” to be authentic than inauthentic. He can only say that despite the fact that an individual is inauthentic most of the time, authenticity is a more “fundamental” or “owned” mode of existing in that every inauthentic orientation presupposes and betrays the a priori freedom for which it denies responsibility.

Being and Doing Despite this systematic ambiguity, I think Heidegger actually establishes the groundwork for a far more intensive exercise of self-appropriation than we saw in Kierkegaard’s work. This is because one of the fundamental innovations of Heidegger’s philosophy, central both to Being and Time as well as what follows, is to look at all doing through the lens of being. This is another way of describing Heidegger’s aim to reunite phenomenology with ontology. His ability to propose such a reunion owes a considerable debt to Husserl’s formulation of phenomenology as a fundamental science. But the key element of Heidegger’s proposal is found in his understanding of facticity (Faktizität). “Facticity” refers to the encompassing character of existence, the “fact” that all attempts to understand or reflect on one’s own existence are themselves always already conditioned by the existence they seek to grasp. At no point is there access to a position “outside” existence from which an objective, thirdperson theory of existence could be clearly drawn. There is no free-floating register of essences in which “human being” is attached to a list of its abstract properties. Any theoretical view is a view adopted by a person (in the first person), and the validity of any view of existence that I adopt cannot be inoculated against the existential conditions—my thrownness, my concern, my

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being-in-the-world—to which all my perceptions and cognitions are in each case subject. There is a great deal of agreement with Kierkegaard’s understanding of existence in this portrait, but in Heidegger’s hands, facticity becomes an explicit and fundamental principle of the philosophical analysis of human reality. And since there is no meaning to the word “being” in this view, besides the showing up of something to an existing individual (literally, phainómenon), “being” is freed up from all conceptual opposition with “appearance.”30 This enables his analysis to go back and forth constantly between descriptions of particular engagements with the world (actions, thoughts, fears, moods, etc.) and descriptions of ways of being in the world. Hammering is not just an action “I” undertake; hammering can also be described as my “being-toward” (Sein-zu) the possibility of making this table, or of banging my finger, or whatever the case may be. In conversing with my friend, I am not only talking with her but exercising the fundamental aspect of my being as a “being-with” (Mitsein), as a being always surrounded by and engaged with others. When I feel a pang of conscience about this or that decision, what I am feeling is an echo of my own “being-guilty” (Schuldigsein)—that is, my own radical responsibility for all that happens, which issues from the fact that existence is care.31 Even the past is not immune to this sort of redescription: existentially understood, the past is not the sum total of that which has gone before but is my own present “having-been” (Gewesen-sein). There is nothing that I do or experience that cannot be characterized in terms of a “way of being” fundamental to existence.32 With such a hermeneutic of existence in place, in which it is at all points possible to switch between descriptions of being and doing, all of my actions become available as points from which to conduct an ontological analysis. Every gesture, every mood, every thought and interaction in which I am engaged becomes a way of accessing my way of being “itself.” Recall that Heidegger has defined authenticity as the relation by which one makes explicit in a given situation the ontological conditions of existence in general. Because of this, the conduit between the everyday activities of existence and their ontological structure makes it possible to treat every moment as an opportunity for the exercise of authenticity. Dreyfus and Rubin make this point in their appendix, discussing the limitations of a “formal” approach to authenticity: When Dasein accepts anxiety the temporal structure of its life is transformed. . . . Authentic Dasein . . . lives out the temporality of Dasein in such

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a way as to give a constant form to its activity, no matter how its specific projects come and go. This formal, structural approach, however, does not enable Heidegger to distinguish those public possibilities that promote an authentic life from those that promote an inauthentic one. Any possibility that makes sense given the culture can be taken up in a style in which anxiety is repressed. . . . Likewise, any possibility can provide a unique occasion on which to face anxiety and, having abandoned hope of “eternal” meaning or satisfaction, do whatever I do in the Situation impeccably and passionately simply because it demands to be done.33

Dreyfus and Rubin are correct here—and they are by no means the first to point this out—that the account of authenticity offered in Being and Time is probably too formal to generate a meaningful or useful ethics of authenticity. Assuming that one decides to pursue authenticity as an explicit existential ideal, there is reason to assume that all sorts of antisocial and even malign behavior might be compatible with the self-appropriative act of “passionately facing one’s anxiety.” This point has been one of the most persistent objections to Heidegger’s idea of Eigentlichkeit—if authenticity is a purely formal determination that can be occasioned by any concrete situation (and likewise for inauthenticity), what’s to stop someone from being an “authentic Nazi”?34 There are lots of attempted responses to this question. Some try to counteract the indeterminacy of authenticity by playing up other formal constraints within Heidegger’s analysis, such as the critique of mass-thinking or the view of Mitsein.35 Sartre, who, unlike Heidegger, is explicitly committed to authenticity as a moral ideal, will argue forcefully against this objection as regards his own thinking as he tries to reformulate authenticity in a more one-to-one correspondence with material freedom. But the fact of the matter is that as formulated by Heidegger, as Dreyfus and Rubin acknowledge, there is nothing preventing someone from finding in National Socialism an “occasion” for the passionate, angstbereite explication of the a priori conditions of existence.36 There are surely situations in which the performance of authenticity could be described as ethical behavior. But even in such cases, the moral worth of the performance depends on its in fact being ethical behavior—that is, on something other than its being an example of authentic self-possession. The debate runs in a circle among three main arguments. The first tends to be the negative impression of Eigentlichkeit as an overly formal and therefore inadequate moral ideal. A standard response is to say that this impression cannot be understood as a criticism, since Heidegger never actually intended

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for authenticity to serve a moral function. In fact, Heidegger explicitly and repeatedly rejected the moral interpretation of his work, within Being and Time as well as long after its publication.37 The self-appropriative act of authentic resolve was simply meant to describe in formal, ontological terms one possible way in which existence takes hold of itself—neither “better” nor “worse” than its alternative. This type of defense may draw out a different sort of criticism, however, stemming from an appreciation of the strongly evaluative cast of Heidegger’s terms. It is not easy to argue, after all, that the alignment of authenticity with “resolve” and “being-a-whole” and “wanting to have a conscience,” on the one hand, and inauthenticity with “chatter” and “flight” and the impersonal voice of the “one,” on the other, involves no moral evaluation. And with this, we are back to the starting problem: if authenticity is an ethical category, it’s a deeply problematic one.38 Taylor Carman has framed the tension most precisely, observing that Heidegger’s language throughout Being and Time “systematically blurs the distinction between indifferent ontological conditions and the specifically ontic syndromes they condition,” an ambiguity that is “especially acute” within the categories of authenticity and inauthenticity.39 Carman gives a clear account of why worries about the pejorative connotations of inauthenticity—the idea that there is something fundamentally “wrong” or “incomplete” about human existence—often presuppose the very idea Heidegger’s notion of existence is meant to critique. “Dasein is in principle neither complete nor completable,” Carman writes, “and so cannot be incomplete.”40 Heidegger’s whole point in renaming and redescribing the “self ” as Dasein, in fact, was to make room for a conception of the human self as something that is not “abidingly present to itself.” Thus Carman offers us very good reasons to be neither worried about the unowned or “inauthentic” mode in which we ordinarily find ourselves, according to Heidegger, nor excited about authentic engagement as a form of autonomous self-repair. But when Carman proceeds from the observation that authenticity cannot be formulated as a norm using some prephenomenological language of value (wholeness, wrongness, self-presence, privation, etc.) to the conclusion that there is no normativity immanent in Heidegger’s account of the self—“there is no source of knowledge or normativity purely immanent in the self ’s relation to itself ”41—I think he goes wrong. My claim is that authenticity is a norm, just not an ethical one. Ethics, after all, is not the only language of value at Heidegger’s disposal. However else it may be conceived, ethics treats “the good” as its fundamental issue. But the evaluations involved in Heidegger’s thinking about authenticity do not at any point concern “the good,” either explicitly or implicitly;

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they concern the “own” or the “proper” (das Eigene). To ask what “good” the “own” is is to ask a question outside the purview of Heideggerian philosophy. In fact, it is not often recognized how much confusion this question itself demonstrates, for to ask it is to put into question the basic premise of his thinking—namely, that the “own” is the ground of the good and not vice versa. As a value, the “own” points to the capacity of human existence to express in every particular situation the ontological structures on which it depends, through an act of resolute self-articulation. The analogy here— albeit a formal one—is not with Kantian deontology or Aristotelian virtue; it is with the ascetic, devotional temporality (the “absolute present tense”) of Kierkegaard’s lilies and birds. The lilies and birds are religious instructors to the Christian because, unlike the sinful, angst-ridden human being, they are entirely present to themselves “in being today.” And because of this absolute, ever-renewed self-presence, they have the ability also to rejoice absolutely in the glory of God—not as an abstract cause or object of occasional appeal but as the immediate source of an existential demand for “absolute obedience.” Through their absolute silence, the lilies and birds “express the fact that the Kingdom is His.”42 Of course, this way of characterizing religious contemplation is not Kierkegaard’s invention but part of a long tradition of Christian asceticism. We also find it when Augustine chastises himself for being absorbed by the spectacle of a spider catching flies in the corner of his room, because he did not “use” the spectacle as an opportunity to reflect on “You, the wonderful Creator and Orderer of all.”43 Augustine’s account of concupiscentia oculorum, as John van Buren and William McNeill have shown, influenced Heidegger’s extended discussion of “curiosity” (Neugier) and “distraction” (Zerstreuung) in Being and Time.44 But Kierkegaard’s contribution to this contemplative tradition is distinct and important to appreciate. In his writings, we find a robust theory of appropriative self-choice defined as a gesture by which the lost subject of desire becomes able to reflect on and assume responsibility for her own subjectivity. Through choice, the individual may transform her lostness into a having-been-lost (repentance). In Kierkegaard’s account of appropriative choice, in other words, Heidegger has at his fingertips a normative thinking of “ownness” drawn in the crucible of Christian piety but using a language compatible with modern philosophical notions of the self. Being and Time is famous for the “secularizing” redescription of Christian psychological categories in formal, existential-ontological terms. “Guilt” becomes interpreted as a feature of the fundamental “thrownness” of existence, the fact that an existing individual finds herself at each moment the heir to a

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world for which she is responsible but which she did not create. “Fallenness” describes not the consequence of some moral misdeed but the ordinary way in which human beings are engaged unreflectively with the particular objects, situations, and possibilities of their worlds. “Anxiety” names the fundamental mood in which an existence discloses its own abyssal, groundless character. There is nothing strictly “good” about Heidegger’s idea of Eigentlichkeit, which is nothing more than the self-explicating grasp of these fundamental features of existence. Heidegger thinks that his distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity is not an ethical distinction primarily, I would say, because he regards moral philosophy as a kind of superficial, applied discourse with no access to fundamental questions. He invites us again and again to differentiate authenticity from an ethical concept by seeing how “formally” it has been treated. But we have another reason not to appeal to ethics in explaining the obvious normative cast of authenticity—namely, that this normativity has an ascetic rather than an ethical character. The particular brand of formalism of Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit is borrowed from an ascetic interpretation of the world as worldly—that is, as characterized by a radical insignificance when considered apart from its ultimate, transcendent source. Heidegger’s fundamental insistence that being itself is not an entity implies that the meanings of words like “ultimate,” “transcendent,” and “source” cannot be what they would be in a metaphysical context. But even as the nature of the distinction between “world” and “source-of-world” is redefined to yield an utterly indeterminate second term, or “source,” the valuation of that second term remains in place. In the crossing, which separates “the emerging of being and its truth-grounding in existence” from any “occurring and perceiving of beings,” “what is separated is so decidedly separated, that no common area of differentiation can prevail at all.”45 No difference between this or that project, this or that policy, or between “I and thou” is as important to Heidegger’s thinking as the difference between all those beings taken together and being itself as that which that “enables” them to be. This differential structure remains in place even when, as with Heidegger, the “being” doing the enabling is actually nothing, the sheer imperviousness of a “source” that throws one back on the world. A basic premise of Heidegger’s philosophy is that the difference between entities and whatever makes it possible for entities to be is more worthy of question than any regional differentiation among particular entities or classes of entities. But once this premise is in place, the only criterion that this philosophy yields to distinguish among different situations, possibilities, and things is one of radical penitence, in which the existential significance of a given thing is tied to its ability to ex-

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press the difference between it and its source.46 And it is not difficult to see how in this scheme, just as we saw with Kierkegaardian devotion, all actions are opportunities to grasp one’s existence as the thrown, projected, disclosive site in which things show up at all. Heidegger never says, of course, that one ought to go around doing this kind of appropriative self-explication at all times. The “house of being” is not a monastery. But that may simply be because he has committed to the position that the “own” at stake in authenticity is philosophically more fundamental than the “good” at stake in any “ought.” What he does make clear is that all actions are to be interpreted as “ways of being” and, further, that the explicative grasp of authentic resolve is not durable. If it is to be there, it is to be renewed ever again, with each instant. Thus without any evident theology, and with a total disdain for ethics, the phenomenologist rediscovers asceticism and sets up authenticity as the site of a philosophical reformulation of Christian piety.

T r a n s f o r m i n g i n to DAS E I N ( T h e H i sto r i ca l R e i n t e r p r e ta t i o n o f A u t h e n t i c i t y ) Soon after the publication of Being and Time, which quickly became a kind of sensation in European philosophy, Heidegger began to reflect on the meaning of his great work. Around this increasingly renowned philosopher, the political situation was shifting rapidly, and as his position within the university grew stronger, the form and procedure of his thinking began a quite dramatic evolution. The great scholastic mind, who had spent the 1920s developing a phenomenological ontology capable of describing the formal existential characteristics of everything from anxiety to carpentry to the work of philosophy itself, now began giving entire courses on single poems by Hölderlin and writing in a loose and esoteric philosophical style, which played endlessly with obscure Germanic words and roots to form an original terminology, coining countless new words, each of which seemed to point toward the same idea as all the rest. He became increasingly preoccupied with the connection between philosophy and the cultural and historical situation. Being and Time, by contrast, spoke in a kind of historical vacuum—a product of its time, to be sure, in everything from modernist clear-sightedness to Weimar pathos, but methodologically removed from it, in that it addressed its reader as a human being, but not as a historical subject, not as a citizen of Germany or Europe, not as members of an increasingly fragmentary Christian culture, not as a subject of modernity. The existential structures and comportments it analyzed were equally accessible to any individual, at any moment. Beginning more or

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less with his lecture course on Plato in 1931, Heidegger came to identify the audience of his philosophy in a consistent and explicit way—as the heirs to a problematic legacy called “metaphysics,” of which we are all victims, in which we are all complicit. Heidegger’s notion of metaphysics is not the specialized theoretical discourse of professional philosophers or theologians; it is a (mis) understanding of the primordial logic of appearance that has insinuated itself into the most basic elements of Western culture: language, religion, politics. And yet, despite the broad and deep roots of the misunderstanding, Heidegger was convinced that it would be in philosophy—albeit of a new, somewhat experimental sort—that the possibility of a new cultural orientation would be found. When Heidegger looked back at Being and Time with this new, historically charged perspective, he did not abandon his early work but reappropriated it within the framework of his attempt to seek a radical reformation of Western spirit. It is not the ideal of Eigentlichkeit, of personal authenticity, that Heidegger identifies as particularly conducive to the new objective but the overall achievement of the work itself, which he defines as a “transformation of human being into Da-sein”—that is, into something that exists in his special sense of that term. In the years just after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger explained the transformation to which philosophy is supposed to lead in language compatible with the first-person focus of his early work. His infamous essay about “nothing” from 1929, “What Is Metaphysics?,” answers the question announced in its title by advancing an argument for “nothing” as the central theme of a personal philosophical labor: though it is not possible to say what nothing “is” without turning it into something, what is essential is to continue to ask the question, to “keep the question about nothing truly alive.” And in order to do this, “we must carry out the transformation of the human being into his ex-sistence, which each case of anxiety triggers in us, in order to grasp the nothing that announces itself in anxiety as it appears.”47 This “carrying out,” as Heidegger makes clear in the lecture course from the same year, is the work left to the individual by philosophy, which can only “indicate formally” the transformation at stake: “The issue of philosophy in general only ever appears within and from a transformation of human existence [menschlichen Daseins].”48 And yet philosophical concepts “can never bring about this transformation themselves.”49 They only provide an “indication, a hint into the fact that the understanding person is required by the conceptual context to carry out a transformation of himself into existence.”50 There is, in other words, nothing direct about philosophical communication. To “carry out”

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(vollziehen) what the indication suggests consists not in a “so-called ethical application of the conceptual” but rather in a “preliminary disclosure” meant to “show how our understanding must first twist free from our ordinary conceptions of beings” and to reveal “the Da-sein in us” as the proper “dimension of what can be conceived.”51 Heidegger has put forward a description of human existence in its a priori characteristics. Dasein gathers together the characteristics of this description under one name. At any given moment, Heidegger will emphasize one or two of these characteristics over others; at times, it can be the “thrownness” of existence that concerns him, and at other times, he seeks to draw out its ecstatic, self-transcending character. In the passage on transformation from 1929–30 lecture course, it is the “resoluteness” of existence that he highlights. Resoluteness is not just taking this or that “position” on a given issue. It is not something that “I have” but rather something that “always has me.”52 Considered abstractly, the idea that Heidegger’s philosophy intends to provoke a transformation into that which already has me makes it seem as though I am being asked to use the present to catch up to some kind of antecedent reality. This is the form of life so roundly criticized by Kierkegaard under the name of “recollection.” But it is precisely to avoid this interpretation that Heidegger specifies that philosophical concepts, as he uses them, are not to be “applied” to existence in an ethical manner. They can only offer a language in which the individual either does or does not recognize and come to relate explicitly to herself. Dasein is always “mine”—one of the phrases for which Heidegger is most remembered—means precisely this. Only from the point at which the individual personally and explicitly accepts that her existence is structured in the manner of “Dasein” can her failure to appropriate authentically the conditions of this existence through resolute choice be understood as failure, as “neglect.” Michael Zimmerman has summarized this approach aptly: “An analysis of the ‘concept’ of Dasein is fruitful only if the individual reader becomes open to the truth about himself as Dasein. Hence, while the content of Being and Time is apparently devoted to theoretical issues, the very form of the book requires the reader to undergo dramatic change if he is to understand that content adequately. Heidegger’s existential analysis makes an existentiel [i.e., personal] demand on its readers.”53 The difference being described here—between applying to oneself someone else’s phenomenological analysis of existence, on the one hand, and grasping authentic resolve as the task of life on the basis of a personal, critical engagement with the conditions proper to one’s own existence—is much like the difference Kierkegaard outlined between despair as experienced by an

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individual with and without the consciousness of sin. Without the consciousness of sin, despair is the unhappy struggle of the will to ground itself. From the moment the individual grasps himself as a sinner, despair is experienced as guilt, and the choice of oneself as this sinning individual becomes an act of atonement. One cannot “apply” the concept of sin to oneself deductively, by inferring from the knowledge that all men are sinners and that I am a man that I am therefore a sinner. Repentance can issue only from the intimate identification of oneself as a sinner, and this identification, at least in Kierkegaard’s Christianity, is based in a free, subjective act, or it does not take place at all.54 The consciousness capable of taking responsibility for itself does not predate the transformation. At the same time, once the transformation occurs, the new predicate appears to this new consciousness as that which its former self previously lacked. Indeed, this radically first-person standpoint is what ensures that choice can be described in explicative rather than deontic or heteronomous terms. That there should be a structural parallel with Christian conversion here is not entirely Heidegger’s doing. Husserl, too, writing in the Crisis of the European Sciences, noticed a certain resonance: “Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological attitude and the epoche¯ belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as such.”55 Husserl’s final point about the promise of phenomenological method in relation to the future existential transformation of mankind is echoed in Heidegger’s thinking about transformation from the same period. The difference between Husserl’s metaphor and Heidegger’s practice is that in Heidegger’s case, it is less that the personal transformation engendered by philosophical interrogation can be “compared” to a religious conversion than that Heidegger consistently drew on models of Christian conversion in explaining how the existing human being can be connected with her “ownmost” predicate. The religious authors on whom Heidegger drew most heavily in his early career—Paul, Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard—all approached Christianity as thinkers of conversion. Heidegger never describes the change from “human being” to the thrown ecstasis of “Dasein” as a form of becoming. It is never that the human being “becomes itself ” as existence, the way an acorn becomes an oak. Nor is this existence laid out before the individual as a regulative ideal or bar toward which one might grow ever closer or fall ever farther away. Nor is this existence a lost possession, in illo tempore, to be recovered or restored. It is yours

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and yours alone—but only and just as soon as you claim it. What separates human being from the existence that is its own is not a copula but an essential transformation (Wesenswandel).56

The Secret Agent of SEINSGESCHICHTE ( P r e pa r a t i o n f o r t h e O t h e r B e g i n n i n g , or Philosophical Chiliasm) As Heidegger’s thinking became more historically articulate, his way of framing the transformation he was after changed drastically. Until the lecture course on Plato in 1931, his idea of change had a somewhat stable form. The fact that an essential transformation of my being was required in order for me to access my own existence (Dasein) was not understood as a deficiency or fault on my part. It was part of the a priori structure of existence itself to be thrown, engaged, and absorbed by the world and its possibilities. That the other part of that a priori structure consisted in being caught up, at least implicitly, with the question of one’s own being-thrown, being-engaged and absorbed, via one’s capacity for resolute self-choice meant simply that authentic existence was based in an inexhaustible tension within the human condition. Here the task of phenomenology appears as a perpetual struggle against naturalism. Heidegger describes the ordinary tendency to view things naturalistically as a kind of a priori idleness (our faulen Fleck, or “idle flaw,” as he put it in an allusion to Kant57), which “tempts” us to see the world of things as bearing firm, already-present meanings that we can simply read off. In this posture, we are the students and lexicographers of the world, which requires that we ignore (or suppress) the absolute etiological confusion in which the questioner and the questioned in each case stand. In this sense, what is to be transformed is simply the “ordinary understanding,” which “examines everything it finds expressed philosophically as though it were already and independently present [vorhanden].”58 In one of Heidegger’s earliest lecture courses, when he was most intensively in the thrall of Luther and Kierkegaard, he named the thrown and engaged character of existence the “ruinance” (Ruinanz) of Dasein59 and described the equally radical, self-appropriating capacity of existence as its “counterruinant” (gegenruinante) character.60 But in the 1930s, a different discussion emerged. When Heidegger looked back at Being and Time during this period, he reinterpreted the work as the preparation for a dramatic transformation of Western history and culture. In the 1933–34 course, held while he was the rector of Freiburg University, Heidegger declares that Being and Time “brought to expression” the “great

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philosophical decision” in which “we” moderns have for several years been standing, which “concerns the issue of whether the understanding of being is radically transformed.” “This will be a transformation,” he continues, “that first of all will supply the frame for the spiritual history of our people [unseres Volkes]. It cannot be proven, but is rather a faith, which must be shown through history.”61 In a treatise from the end of the 1930s, Being and Time is cast as that which “begins the other beginning in preparation of the question of being.” It does so by working against “metaphysics and history and thus also by decisively breaking free from all metaphysical determinations of Western philosophy.”62 Similarly, from the Beiträge zur Philosophie, “Being and Time is thus neither an ‘ideal’ nor a ‘program,’ but rather the self-preparing beginning of the essential appearance of beyng itself.”63 Heidegger was still interested, as he was in the twenties, in formulating the a priori conditions of human existence. But in the 1930s, he began to develop a more emphatic diagnosis of what is required of the modern “subject” if she is to be transformed into “ek-sistence”—a being that understands itself as the thrown arena (or “clearing”) in which the showing-up (“beyng”) of the world takes place. It is not only the reflexive, self-explicating consciousness of the individual that creates the path to this existence for herself by relentlessly posing the question of being, by “keeping the question alive,” as he says in “What Is Metaphysics?” In between the subject—conceived traditionally as “person” and “rational animal”—and the thrown and cleared-out arena that is ceaselessly engaged as the site of appearance, appropriated by being (as Heidegger will come to put it), are two-and-a-half millennia of metaphysics. This history has generated perverse theoretical interpretations of the relation between human existence and being—whether by taking man as the “measure” of all things, as an absolute “subject,” or by understanding a transcendent god in this role. Metaphysics has also generated a comprehensive culture that reaches deeply into the everyday business of modernity. The particular formation that most consistently attracts Heidegger’s attention in the 1930s is what he calls Machenschaft, or “machination”—an abstract and encompassing term meant to designate the calculative, instrumental reason of modern technological experience. It is the singular irony of Heidegger’s philosophy that a thinker whose primary aim was to challenge the violence of a way of understanding the fundamental showing up, the “that there is” of being, as having divided the world into subjects and objects should also find himself so powerfully attracted to a political movement that, under the flimsy cover of a rhetoric of geo-spiritual fundamentalism (a return to “Blut” and “Boden”), stands as the most extraor-

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dinary example of instrumentalizing violence in modern history. Here a radical and penetrating philosophical mind was blended with an anti-Semitism of a relatively average sort, considered in period terms, as well as with a more or less delusional conception of the role that philosophy might play in determining cultural reality. As the rector of Freiburg University, Heidegger began to consider the ways in which the university itself, as a cultural institution, might participate in the kind of philosophical-cultural über-revolution he was seeking. The “new University,” as he will describe it in 1933,64 prepares a transformation of knowledge (Wissenswandlung) through “the construction of a new spiritual world for the German people (das deutsche Volk).”65 This seems to be possible only through a transformation of the university from a political institution (in the sense of training functionaries capable of taking on the various professions of a modern, differentiated society) to a site dedicated to Wissenserziehung, an “education of knowledge”—a compound noun whose evident redundancy barely conceals its opprobrium (to what, if not knowledge, has education been devoted until now?). The aim of such knowledge would be “to awaken the innermost existential power of our people, not in order to advance our ‘culture,’ but rather in order to secure the clarity of the will to ex-sist [Daseinswillens].”66 This education itself is a key part of the transformation Heidegger seeks: “The more originary and encompassing a revolution, the more necessary the preparatory knowledge.”67 And since, as he claims in a text from the late 1930s, “no ‘revolution’ is ‘revolutionary’ enough,”68 the knowledge needed to prepare us for the “other beginning” will have to be very necessary. Though Heidegger was still invested in the battle for Dasein as the key piece within this aspirational politics, what is new in this period is that he begins to consider that the transformation of human being into ek-sistence will require something beyond a thorough and clear phenomenological analysis of the existential a priori. As we have seen, 1930s Heidegger considers metaphysics and its proxies to stand between the anthropic subject and her ownmost role as the “clearing of being.” In the 1930s, philosophy is conceived as a “basic occurrence in the history of human being itself ” and as a “questioning that transforms existence.” So what the transformation of human being requires from philosophy is a discourse capable of tackling these interloping metaphysical pressures. The institutional phase of Heidegger’s experiment with such a discourse was comparatively short lived. He resigned from his post as rector a year after having been appointed, and looking back a few years later, he describes his tenure as having been doomed to ineffectuality from the start, insofar as he underestimated the petty and fundamentally conserva-

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tive character of university politics.69 It is impossible to tell from such commentary to what extent Heidegger invokes his own naïve idealism regarding institutional leadership as a way of excusing himself—and whether, indeed, that from which he is excusing himself ought to be understood as his success or his failure. In either case, we can see that Heidegger moved away from the educational premise of transformative thinking and came rather quickly to hold the view that modern culture was so deeply entrenched in a metaphysical misunderstanding that none of its existing institutions—the university, the political system, the Christian church—would be acceptable as a site of this new development. From Heidegger’s writings during this period, one gets the impression that all modern institutions had too deeply “bought into” the tradition he was trying to overturn. How could an institution or tradition predicated on humanism, the “person,” or the “soul” be up to the task of a revolution that would change the nature of the way in which “human being” itself was understood? From the late 1930s onward, Heidegger began to think this way fairly consistently. Yet he did not abandon his revolutionary premise. He maintained that the ideas of his philosophy were not only driving at a transformation of the contemporary individual into his or her “own” Dasein, as he put it in the course from 1929–30, but also and more fundamentally at a larger transformation relating to the “historical and spiritual existence” of the West. “Asking about being”—that is, asking the primary question of Heidegger’s philosophy—“amounts to nothing less than retrieving [wieder-holen] the beginning of our historical and spiritual existence, in order to transform it into the other beginning.”70 This transformation is to be so radical that it departs not only from what has come before but also from all types of transformation that we have seen hitherto: “The time of the ‘system’ is past. The time for constructing the essential form of beings from out of the truth of beyng has not yet arrived. . . . How is this singular task to be achieved? Here we remain without precedent and without evidence. Mere permutations of what has come before, even if they should follow from the greatest possible intermingling of historically known ways of thinking, bring us nowhere.”71 The fact that there is something fundamentally unknown about the new “beginning” toward which Heidegger’s philosophy drives also means that there is something fundamentally blind about philosophy itself. “The ground of history,” he insists, is “still fully concealed, and will for a long time remain alien.” The modification by which I authenticate my own existence, as we have seen, can be undertaken at any moment. Unlike authenticity, however, the transition to the “other beginning” cannot be carried out straightaway—not, that is, while we are still

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encumbered by a culture of instrumental reasoning and by the metaphysical fetishism of the subject-object relationship. This transformation, Heidegger consistently claims, is a kind of “crossing” (Übergang). But there is a problem: “The bridges are lacking.”72 From the 1930s onward, Heidegger dedicated his philosophy to this problem, defining it as the task of “thinking” to prepare the transition, to construct the missing bridge. The once-bright promise of an institutional reform of the university has faded. The hope for a revolution of knowledge now rests in a much murkier domain, in the calling of “the thinker”: “From where should the education in essential thinking come? From a fore-thought and travelling of the decisive path.”73 Of course, Heidegger has himself in mind here. Heidegger’s own lectures, he reflects in the same period, support the “educational will”—the will to develop the power and craft of philosophical questioning— because they ground philosophy in the “authentic movement of thinking” that strives for the “other beginning.”74 Philosophy’s transformative potential in this new sense is neither private nor public in the familiar sense of those words—that is, Heidegger does not conceive of his philosophy to be working principally through the public institution of the university, not as the instigator of isolated individual metamorphoses (as we might consider Kierkegaard to have done, for example). What works within philosophy, Heidegger thinks, is its overall capacity to name things, to shape reality by the creation of words. As Heidegger identifies the rudimentary power of “saying” and “the word” (das Wort) as the keys to philosophy’s creative potential, a special affinity between philosophy and poetry emerges in which thinking becomes “a poetic naming of beyng,”75 or a “thoughtful saying of beyng” made possible by the poet who comes in advance, who “harbors the truth of beyng” through his words and images.76 Heidegger is guided here by Hölderlin—or rather, by his own quite unique reading of Hölderlin, who is never simply a literary artist or one great poet among others. Homer was the poetic forerunner of the first beginning, that is, he who set the terms—the words and the images, the patterns of desire and lust and longing—in which the thinkers who followed would come to form their self-understanding as humans, as mortals, as members of society. In much the same sense, Hölderlin would be the poet of the “other beginning” of the West.77 For Heidegger, even Hölderlin’s name is a revolutionary sign. It stands, along with those of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, as “the harbinger of a change of history, lying deeper and reaching further than all ‘revolutions’ within the compass of the activities of men.” The über-revolution, whose promise Heidegger finds in Hölderlin’s words, is something “for which we

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have no measure and no space—at least not yet—and we therefore force it into disfiguration and disguise if we speak about it by means of language as constituted hitherto.”78 Hölderlin’s unusual way with words, his tendency to dig into the tissue of the German language and find in its everyday structure a mythological and philosophical dimension capable of sustaining intense resonance with the thinking and poetry of ancient Greece, made him a singular figure from the vantage point of Heidegger’s linguistically supercharged philosophy. Heidegger, too, believed that the only way to a truly original formation of existence, a different beginning for the comprehensive cultural history of the West, would involve a long meditation on the “first beginning” of history in pre-Socratic Greece.79 Surrounded, after the First World War, by a Europe that had developed the desire for “newness” into an wide-ranging culture, Heidegger was quick to point out that the desire to innovate simply by departing from what had come before is self-defeating. Setting himself up in contrast with the modernists of his time, Heidegger described the transformation he sought not as the “new” but as the “other” beginning. It is “other” not “because it is merely differently formed than these or those previous philosophies, but rather because it must be the only other from out of the relation to the only and first beginning.” Most crucially, he insists, the two beginnings “refer to one another” (Zugewiesenheit . . . zueinander).80 It is in this context of a curiously mutual or codependent Greco-German rebirth that Hölderlin becomes, for Heidegger, not merely a great poet but “the poet of the other beginning of our imminent history.”81 From Hölderlin, Heidegger learns to conceive of poetry and philosophy as related projects, both of which aimed at working out a kind of soteriological language. The philosopher-poets are one of the three types of “invisible” (Unsichtbaren) benefactors who ground the transformation of the human into Dasein. The poet’s word “finds the most attentive ear, immediately, in the heart,” while the thinker’s saying “tears into what is alien and allows it to stand within the ineffable and ineffectual.”82 To think the question of being constitutes a peculiar kind of “naming,” one that is understood as a venture that “prepares the truth of what is true” and helps “the gods” enter into the relation between being and existence.83 The articulation at the heart of the “thinker’s poieisis” seems to generate words that will accrete in the cultural universe of a people and, over time, give rise to an authentic questioning of existence.84 Language, for Heidegger, is essentially being coming into words. Language is “the proto-poetry in which a people poetizes being.” At the same time, poetry itself—or rather, “great” poetry—forms the language of a people

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and allows them to “enter into history.”85 Through this alliance with poetry, Heidegger finds a way to think about the transformative work of philosophy in a far more vigorous sense than the earlier explicative transformation of authenticity. “Words” do a lot more here than the “formally indicative” categories of Being and Time ever could: “Behind the pedagogical drive to unfold and strengthen the ability to question and to master the craft of philosophy, the authentic movement of thinking stands as the effort to position the other beginning in a fundamental way. . . . My lectures always remain foreground.”86 The philosopher-poets of Heidegger’s later thinking are the “invisibles” who “belong to another history”; they are the secret agents of the history of being (Seinsgeschichte). But what begins in the other beginning? What is the history that begins there? Heidegger is quick to dismiss any demand to specify the nature of this change in concrete terms, repeating that by alluding to previous examples that might “help” us understand what is coming, we will arrive at “mere permutations of what has come before.” A radical, singular transformation such as the one his thinking anticipates will by definition leave us “without precedent and without evidence.”87 The otherness of this other beginning appeals to Heidegger not only as a new “era” or “period” within the chronological record of human life, which would necessarily owe a great deal to all that came before. This transformation stands for the promise of a “completely different domain of ontological determinacy [Geschichte].”88 Heidegger thus resists the demand to specify his goal by affirming the fact that the other beginning is “that which is most unknown” (das Unkenntlichste) and must remain so to the precise degree that it is to represent a radical transformation of what we have known until now.89 The fundamental, “radical” character of the transformation is a direct function of its unknowability. And yet, despite all his talk of “gods” and “secrets” and “going beyond,” Heidegger will never characterize this transformation as purely heteronomous to the “we” and the “world” that stand asking about it today. To seek one’s ground in the relation to being is not figured as a yearning for the absolutely transcendent. It is not the “dream of a purely heterological thought,” to borrow Derrida’s beautiful phrase.90 In fact, it is presented as human being’s “coming into its own,” or “enowning,” as Ereignis is often translated. Thus from within a philosophy of radical transformation, which is now not only the explicative appropriation of an individual taking responsibility for her own thrown, absorbed “ek-sistence” but also the epochal transformation in which a new spiritual world might emerge for the West, Heidegger nonetheless finds a way to return to the vocabulary of property.

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(Owning as the Structure of Reality)

EREIGNIS

In the very late 1930s and early 1940s, this vocabulary became even more conspicuous and elaborate than it had been in Heidegger’s early discussions of authenticity as explicative “appropriation.” In the late 1930s, the “own” moves into the very center of his thinking, referring not only to the existential performance or “choice” of an individual human being but to the transcendental ground of existence itself. Existence is still in each case “mine”—to cite the famous line from Being and Time—but what it is that is mine is more clearly formulated as disappropriating: the shifting, abyssal, ecstatic context of appearing from which I can at no point escape while still continuing to exist. It is at this point that Heidegger writes thousands of pages about “das Ereignis,” attempting to develop a notion of ownership with no basis in the logic of subjects and objects. The ordinary meaning of the German word Ereignis is simply “event” or “happening.” But in Heidegger’s work, it is used to describe the intimate and fundamental belonging together (co-owning) of existence and appearing. The term Ereignis is used almost exclusively to resonate with terms of “appropriation” (An-/Zueignung), “property” (Eigentum), and “expropriation” (Enteignung). Some disagreement exists among scholars as to whether Heidegger attempted to evacuate the ordinary meaning of the word or merely to marginalize the ordinary meaning while emphasizing instead its root in ownership, “eigen-.”91 In this latter view, being itself is interpreted rather mysteriously as a kind of happening or “event.” A better way to understand this term, I would argue, is to consider that Heidegger uses a word that means “event” in order to present “owning” as the underlying structure of any event (Ereignis) and of all that occurs (sich ereignen). Just as we may learn to appreciate that what looks like green or yellow on the leaf is in physical terms light waves of a particular length being reflected off of its surface, Heidegger is asking us to understand “owning” as the deep structure of appearance. A thunderstorm, for example, is not just an interaction of air and pressure and water that I happen to perceive, nor is it the objective correlate of a certain interplay among my subjective categories or affects. The thunderstorm takes place (sich ereignet) by virtue of my having been appropriated (zugeeignet) in advance by the appearing of the world. I have been appropriated as that cleared-out capacity for sense that sustains the world that has drawn me at each moment into its “thrall.” And precisely to this extent, this appropriated existence is also “owned over” to me (mir übereignet), in that I continue serving as its ground,

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preserving it through my ongoing ek-sistence. And again, the “me” that does this preserving is no supervening subject but that same thrown clearing Heidegger has been talking about all along—a being whose only independence is its capacity to resolve upon its dispossession by a movement of “enowning” (Ereignis) that constitutes “the expropriation [Enteignung] of every vain and arbitrary egoism.”92 In describing the conditions of appearance and existence in such a way, it is both obvious and not quite obvious that Heidegger is not addressing a traditional philosophical problem. If what he will come to refer to as EreignisDenken, or the “thinking of enownment,” is addressed to a classic philosophical problem, we should expect it to be connected with a question about the nature of perception or memory, or about the conditions of moral consciousness. Heidegger is indeed offering an account, in his dense and hopelessly interreferential cluster of terms, of the conditions of appearance and existence. And yet his description cannot reasonably be framed as a way of answering the question, “What is the fundamental character of existence?” Despite what Heidegger himself might say on this score, the difference between his description and a more traditional response to the question about existence is not just that the one arrives at a more radical or “originary” issue than the other. The difference is that in addition to answering this question, Heidegger’s description attempts to undermine the very ideas on which the question depends. This means that what he offers is not an answer to the question about the nature of existence but a new conceptual framework—indeed, an entirely new way of using language for articulating the basic questions of philosophy.93 This sort of description is what results from the attempt to write philosophy, within the broad context of an Attically turbocharged German, without a notion of subjectivity. And indeed this “without” is misleading, because one cannot speak in European languages about anything at all and simply omit or bracket the notion of subjectivity. No extra proposition or parenthetical caveat can undermine the fundamental way in which this idea structures Western thinking. Thus to propose a way of considering the real that does not take the subject-object distinction as fundamental without falling quickly into a deep performative contradiction requires nothing short of a constant struggle against the formation of language itself. When Heidegger described in 1928 the “abyssal” connection between being and nothing, he was pointing to the fact that when one inquires deeply into the conditions of appearance, into what enables the showing up of things at all, one will not, philosophically speaking, have recourse to a previously existing being or mind or subject. One will rather end up with nothing, and

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this nothing that surrounds the showing up of things, far from a “negative” conclusion, is itself the way in which things show up for us. “Nothing happens in the history of beyng,” as he will later put it, but not in the sense that nothing happens. It is rather that nothing happens in the history of beyng, because “nothing is beyng,” because to say “nothing happens” is to say that “enowning comes into its own.”94 In this “abyssal” thinking about what gives being, about how it is that being “is,” “no why has a place.” Only the question “to what extent?” is “the singular question of inceptual thinking.” It redounds upon the “pure experience of the inceptual ‘that it is’ of beyng itself.”95 It is in the context of this line of thinking that Heidegger ventures the phrase with which Carnap would load his gun: “the nothing nothings.”96 From the moment the abyssal connection between existence and appearance is identified as “an” abyss, however, it appears separate from that which it connects. Nothing becomes a thing. It is as easy as that to pass from a description of the fundamental question of Heidegger’s thinking to a misunderstanding of it. Insofar as we are using language, there is a constant risk of reification that pushes Heidegger into the rhetorical habit of encasing many of his descriptions with metadiscursive warnings about how not to interpret what is being said. Such warnings are often delivered within an undisguised antimetabole, signaled by the conjunction sondern umgekehrt (“but rather the reverse”). Consider the line about freedom quoted above: “The human being does not ‘possess’ freedom as a property [Eigenschaft], but rather at most it is the reverse: freedom, the ecstatic, discovering ek-sistence possesses the human being.” This structure is Heidegger’s most trusted rhetorical device, but it is also more than a device. As he himself puts it in the Beiträge, which addresses, more transparently than any of the other works from the 1930s, what the new form of his thinking will look like, this rhetorical Umkehrung is part of a conscious philosophical “procedure,” which must, within certain limits, always begin by accommodating the familiar view and must carry on with it for a certain stretch, in order then at the right moment to elicit the reversal of thinking, but under the force of the same word. E.g. “decision” can and should initially be understood as a human “act” . . . until suddenly it means the essence of beyng itself. This does not mean that beyng is interpreted “anthropologically,” but rather the reverse: that the human being is repositioned in the essential context of beyng and the bonds of “anthropology” are torn.  .  .  . This “reverse” is, however, not simply a “formal” trick, changing the meaning of mere words, but rather the transformation of the human being itself.97

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How exactly does a rhetorical reversal bring about a transformation of the human being? How can a semantic bait and switch tear human existence from the enduring bonds of anthropic consciousness? One can perhaps infer here that, for Heidegger, to employ the word decision as a description not of a human act but of the kind of determinacy fundamental to human existence is not to change the meaning of “mere words”—that is, words conceived as existing on their own in some abstract referential system. To the extent that the “decision” is understood as a word to describe the givenness of existence, it is not the meaning of the word but one’s self-understanding that has changed. EIGENTLICHKEIT and EREIGNIS (The Return of the Ascetic)

Heidegger’s Ereignis-Denken conserves the logic of owning and ownness, as well as the imperative for transformation at the heart of the Being and Time– era discussions of authenticity. But to a far greater degree than was the case with the idea of Eigentlichkeit, Ereignis-Denken is developed as a language aiming to think the fundamental inseparability of human existence and being without leading either one into the position of the grammatical-conceptual subject (or one of its metaphysical cognates: animal rationale, anthropos, agent, person). Whereas the “authentic resolve” described in Being and Time involved the act of catching up to one’s own thrownness, “taking on” explicitly the ek-static concern and engagement in which one at every instant implicitly stands, the idea of an “appropriation guided by enowning” (ereignishafte Aneignung)98 is something the human being does inasmuch as she grasps her existence as already “appropriated” (zu-geeignet) by being, as the always-already given site or “instance” of appearance (die Inständigkeit des Da-seins).99 Human existence defined in this way is “the ownership, in which all owning-over and all appropriating and having as one’s own essentially appears.”100 In much the same way, to recognize that the human being does not “have” language but is itself “had” by the word constitutes “the transition from the metaphysics ‘of ’ language to the thoughtful leap into the essential appearance of the word as determined by the history of being.”101 As he looked back at his early work over the course of his career, Heidegger insisted that Being and Time’s primary aim and primary achievement was its preparation of the transformation, of the transition to the other beginning of history: “Being and Time is not the name of a treatise, but a ‘region’ . . . in which the essence of the human being is to be transformed.”102 Or, still more forcefully, “Being and Time is no ‘ideal,’ and no ‘program.’ It is

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the self-preparing beginning of the essential appearance of beyng itself—not what we think up, but rather what forces us, provided that we are ripened for it, into a thinking that neither provides a doctrine, nor prompts ‘moral’ conduct . . . but rather, that can become the safekeeping of beyng.”103 Thinking is defined throughout Heidegger’s philosophy as that which “prepares” the other beginning. By asking “the question of being” and especially by naming the abyssal connection between existence and appearance under the rubric of “enowning,” Heidegger’s thinking understands itself to be in service of a transformation that will depart from all previous ways of understanding the human being, rendering it something that is no longer a type of being among others but an aspect—a site—an essential condition of the showing up of world at all. This is the “transformation of human being into ek-sistence,” the “essential transformation of the human being,” the “transition to the other beginning” pursued by “inceptual thinking” (anfängliches Denken). Heidegger still employs the normative vocabulary of authenticity in this period— eigentliches Denken, eigentliches Fragen, eigentliche Besinnung, der eigentliche Grund des Da-seins. Outside the analytical context of Being and Time, this characterization nearly always points to the sort of questioning, reflection, or ground that understands enowning as the fundamental context in which to grasp the nature of human reality. Here the irreducible codependence of human existence and the showing up of world replaces those more familiar conceptual contexts of subjectivity, animality, rationality. Above, I differentiated the idea of Eigentlichkeit, as advanced in Being and Time, from the notion of Eigentlichkeit that dominates Heidegger’s later thought. The first notion describes the individual’s explication of the fundamental phenomenological features of her existence and can be achieved at any point in time and by any individual, since it merely intensifies the way of engaging that she, in each case, already exhibits. The second notion points to the degree to which a particular comportment or cultural form relates transparently to Ereignis as the basic context of the human. It marks a transformation of Western spirit for which “we” may not yet be ready. The difference between these two discussions of transformation, it seemed, had to do with Heidegger’s turn to a special sort of historical thinking, which increasingly saw its target in the complex and undead patrimony of Western metaphysics rather than the everyday habits of the individual. And yet, as Heidegger sketched the outlines of this coming transformation, which was to remain “that which is most unrecognizable”104 throughout the confused, apparently final phase of metaphysics, an explicative dimension began to reappear in his thinking. In some respects, this reappearance is a

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direct consequence of the type of transformation on which Heidegger had set his sights. Given that the subjective, anthropocentric accounts of existence are what mask the more fundamental connection between human beings and being, overcoming subjectivity cannot simply be assigned to the labor of spontaneous or freely acting human agents: “As long as the human being understands herself as a rational creature, metaphysics belongs, following Kant’s phrase, to human nature. Yet thinking could, if it manages to go back into the ground of metaphysics, help initiate a change in the essence of the human being, with which a transformation of metaphysics would follow.”105 But such thinking, however misleading Heidegger’s tone may be, is not the rhapsodic meditation of a philosophical genius: “ ‘Thinking’ is here not an ‘act’ or form of human conduct that could be marked out in an analysis of the ‘faculties.’ Thinking is defined from out of the en-ownment of the human being, in which the essence of humanity is grounded in Da-seyn.”106 Thinking “prepares” the transition to the other beginning, in which human reality is philosophically and culturally grasped as the thrown or appropriated site of appearance. But it can do so only insofar as it is able to reach back into the metaphysical beginning of Western culture, in which beings were given priority over the more radical questionability of being. This means that the thinker must identify the attitudinal inheritance bequeathed by metaphysics on her present thought and culture. This identification should never be undertaken in the direct manner of a critic or detractor, however. Rather, “it is a matter of grasping the essence of the age, in advance and continually, in terms of its prevailing truth of being; for only in this way can we likewise experience that which is most worthy of being questioned, which bears and constrains a creating into the future taking us beyond what is already present, and which lets the transformation of the human being become one that springs from the necessity of being itself. No age allows itself to be pushed aside through the pronouncement of a negation.”107 Transformative thinking is oriented by the legacy of ancient metaphysics not because we have fallen away from an original condition to which value is ascribed and to which we ought to be restored. Heidegger famously charges Western metaphysics with having “forgotten” being—a condition for which he coins the term Seinsvergessenheit, which begins with pre-Socratic philosophy, reaches its theoretical culmination in the ontotheological hypostasis of Christianity, and reaches its practical culmination in the instrumental culture fostered with modern technology. But this forgetting is not the work of some external, alien power set to work against being, whatever that might mean. There is no room within Heidegger’s way of approaching being as the a priori condition of all appearance for a discrete and opposing

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force. Just as we saw with authenticity and inauthenticity, “enowning” determines even those metaphysical attitudes and cultural formations in which its role has been masked. Modern culture is characterized by a strong system of incentives and opportunities that value engagement with beings and offer comparatively few affordances for reflection on the mysterious, abyssal connection that at each instant sustains such engagement. But this does not mean that modernity has departed from or left behind the essential connection of being and human existence; modernity is simply the cultural elaboration of one more aspect of the “truth of being” properly understood. Heidegger’s fascination with Heraclitus’s statement that “nature loves to hide” is reflected in the principle to which Heidegger so often returns in his later thinking: “being conceals itself ” (das Sein verbirgt sich).108 Indeed, self-concealment belongs to the very essence of being. Heidegger stages this principle lucidly in his 1941 lecture course in a passage that resonates with the 1929 essay on metaphysics discussed above: With beings, the task and the way through is always to trace the given being back to another being that we take to be clearer and more familiar, and through this reduction to explain it, and with such an explanation to reassure ourselves. Where, however, it is a question of grasping being, passage through a being is immediately denied. . . . Around (prater) any being “is” of course always a number of other beings, but outside of being, “there is” no more than nothing. Should we then not attempt to define being in terms of nothing? Nothing, however, is that which lacks all determinacy. . . . In this way being denies itself every concept and every determination and elucidation . . . being utterly withdraws from being grasped in terms of beings. Even saying this, that being utterly withdraws, we are already saying something about being itself. . . . Self-concealment belongs to being itself. If we want to acknowledge this, then we must say: being itself “is” concealment.109

It is not we, the children of Western metaphysics, who have spontaneously conspired to “forget” being. This forgetting is made possible only because it is in the nature of being itself, which is everywhere and from which existence is inextricable, to “forsake” us (Seinsverlassenheit) by also being nowhere at all.110 What we have forgotten is something whose single defining feature is that it hides. On this point, it would be possible to say to those such as Bruno Latour, who will insist that the answer to the question of who has forgotten being can only ever be “No one!,” that this answer is both correct and incor-

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rect. It is incorrect insofar as it presumes the difference between being and human being to be absolute. We have not forgotten being (as other to us) because, as Latour rightly points out, it is not within our power to eradicate the differential trace of being from what is.111 But he is mistaken to think that this is what forgetting actually means for Heidegger. To think that being is “pure” and we have “corrupted” or betrayed it as heteronomous agents is one of the most common ways in which Heidegger thinks the forgetting of being actually occurs. The difference between the forgetting of being that the “first beginning” of Western history made intellectually and culturally habitual and the remembering of being that the “other beginning” is supposed to bring about is thus the difference between forgetting and remembering that nothing—literally, nothing—is behind what shows up in our world. But to take this nothing literally is to acknowledge that we may just as well forget about it. To put it positively, to exist is to be involved with appearance, and what we mean by appearance is nothing more than the context in which existing takes place and makes sense of things. This abyssal intertwining of existence and appearance is “enowning.”112 In one of the notebooks, Heidegger describes “enowning” as human existence encompassed by being as an island is by the sea.113 But if this is the sense of “enowning” that proper thinking is supposed to discover, then whatever is supposed to happen during the “other beginning” cannot be seen as an action undertaken by the human being qua subject. In fact, since the “what” that one is discovering in this beginning is the fact of one’s fundamental, abyssal involvement with being (so fundamental that the discovery itself exemplifies such involvement), Heidegger is driven to formulate this point about agency even more sharply. The “thinking ahead to the other beginning” is not something new but a kind of “remembering” that “emerges from the experience of enowning as that which comes into its own through that experience.”114 Once we grasp that Heidegger’s “essential transformation of the human being” and the hyperrevolutionary transition to the “other beginning” are, without amounting to calls to restore a bygone era of historical chronology, nonetheless tethered to the essential, nonsubjective basis of human reality as characterized by “Ereignis-Denken,” the transformation in question begins to resemble more and more the formulation carved out by the explicative logic of Being and Time with its authentic “modifications” of existence. In both cases, the normative charge of the distinctions—(1) between authentic and inauthentic and (2) between recollecting and forgetting the abyssal essence of being—is tempered by the argument for difference as the core principle of

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existence. If, in the first case, the “mineness” ( Jemeinigkeit) of existence consists in the fact that existence at each instant exceeds and outpaces itself, the appropriative assertion of responsibility for oneself can only be understood as authentic to the degree that it grasps oneself in and as that thrown, distended movement of sense. The differential characterization of existence constrains the theoretical ascription of value to authenticity over and against its counterpart (while leaving the rhetorical ascription of value intact). In the second case, we see something similar. If the forgetting of being is an elaboration of being’s own essential dissimulation, remembering cannot draw being into the light as anything more determinate than that which, by virtue of its preemptive “abandonment” (Verlassenheit) of human beings, continually prompts us to forget it. The remembering and reflection appropriate to enowning are nothing other than attempts to be transparent about this abandonment, to work continually against the grain of our ontological destiny (while remaining ever in its sway) by acknowledging the otherness, the alien pulse and abyssal givenness “proper” to existence. This is an ascetic fissure opening up within Heidegger’s approach to the history of being. While it would be going too far to say unequivocally that the talk of the “other beginning” of Western thought and history is used purely metaphorically, a certain shift does appear, in which the patently instrumental approach to philosophy as a mode of historical-political agitation, dating at least from Heidegger’s tenure as rector, yields not only to the revolutionary poetics discussed above but also to an ascetic account of transformation as the perpetual struggle against oblivion, reification, metaphysics, and so on. Heidegger has clearly not abandoned the idea that the modern epoch as a whole is characterized by a particularly entrenched “obliviousness” with regard to being, one that cannot be overcome through the labor of any given individual but will require a certain indescribable “ripeness” at the cultural level. At the same time, when Heidegger insists on the remoteness of the other beginning, to its radically intractable and unrecognizable character, the work of philosophy begins to seem both necessary and impossible—thinking forever toward a transformation that thinking cannot bring about. Philosophy is both more and less than a means of bringing about the other beginning. In fact, at some moments, Heidegger’s portrait of the beginning sounds almost Sisyphean, suggesting that the beginning may be defined in such a way that it can never arrive: “The beginning [Anfang] is only insofar as it becomes ever more originary [anfänglicher].” This “ever more” cannot point to a progressive or asymptotic approach, in which though we may not arrive at the goal, we may still value the work of philosophy instrumentally insofar as it brings us closer

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to it. The beginning involves “a sporadic, rather than a gradual escalation.”115 But if the other beginning is the sort of thing that “is” only insofar as it is continually renewed, the thinking that opens the way for this beginning becomes more than a preparation for change; philosophy becomes, again, something like an exercise.116

The Meaning of History (The Merger of the Chiliastic and Ascetic) I am not arguing here for a purely reductive approach to Heidegger’s chronological rhetoric. We cannot simply translate the discussion of metaphysics as a historical-intellectual epoch into an idea of metaphysics as a perennial temptation issuing from the essential questionability of being. But I would insist that Heidegger’s philosophy is torn between these two ideals at the deepest level. On the one hand, he wants to maintain the historical inflection his thinking acquires in the 1930s, which takes cultural and institutional formations much more seriously as the decisive contexts in which any act of thinking takes place. None of us are mere visitors in the age of techno-nihilism, and the path out of this age (which Heidegger, at least, fervently seeks) cannot be found by trivializing our complicity in this history. On the other hand, Heidegger is unwilling to grant history any autonomy in relation to philosophy. Throughout Heidegger’s many reflections on history, there is really only one type of question being asked: To what extent does this cultural formation intensify the oblivion of being? To what extent does it remind us that being itself “is” nothing more than the abyssal showing up of a world? There are plenty of grey areas in Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte; televisual culture is involved in a deeper form of oblivion than the work of the graphic artist, and Descartes was more of an obfuscator than Leibniz. But there is only one color. In the way that Heidegger narrates the development of European civilization from out of preclassical Greece, there is only one thing that happened: being hid, as it tends to do, and we, in the wake of this concealment, developed a language that repressed this initial nondisclosure by framing reality exclusively in terms of beings acting on other beings—everything real in terms of subject beings and object beings—a language so encompassing that whenever we reflect on the question about how it is that things come to be, we are unable to shake the feeling that another being, somewhere, must be responsible. Heidegger’s story of being is color blind to just about everything that we would normally understand as history. Heidegger seeks to make sense of Western history using the resources of

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philosophical criticism, but his seynsgeschichtliche monocle makes it very difficult for the history of his analysis to remain in contact with the sort of history in which we ordinarily consider ourselves as taking part. Even where he explicitly flirts with an “epochal” determination of Western thought, this language quickly defaults on any promise it had to distinguish between chronologically and geographically concrete traditions, practices, and institutions. The “epoch,” it turns out, is just one more way to describe the operation of being qua enowning.117 On the one hand, the ability to connect with recognizable formations of culture should be the primary aim of Heidegger’s antimetabolical procedure. By introducing enowning as the latent ground of familiar acts and social practices, Heidegger wants to remind us that enowning is nothing other than the structure of the real—of whatever is and how it is.118 But no number of reminders, no number of “sondern umgekehrt ” incantations, is going to be sufficient to establish an attitude in which the abyssal, self-concealing character of being will appear as the organizing principle of concrete historical reality, from industrial agriculture, to immigration law, to university politics. In the vast distance separating Seynsgeschichte from chronological history, Western metaphysics appears as a philosophical myth, designed to dramatize the risk of wrongheaded methodology. The gulf between the philosophy and the history remains so wide that his epochal distinctions—the various phases of metaphysics and modernity—come to operate in an almost symbolic way. Merely asking the question “How about being?” he claims, “amounts to no less than retrieving the beginning of our historical and spiritual existence in order to transform it into the other beginning.”119 Heidegger will go even further. In the “between” (Inzwischen)— another synonym for the relational condition of “enowning”—it is not only that the other beginning concerns or “refers” to the first beginning, as we saw above: “The first and the other beginning are not two different beginnings. They are the same.”120 The fundamental dependence of the two beginnings, in fact, is signaled already in Heidegger’s choice to refrain from calling the other beginning “second” or “next,” despite the ordinal description of the Greek beginning as the “first.” Moreover, it is not “an” other beginning that Heidegger seeks but “the” other beginning (der andere Anfang). This name reinforces without saying a single word the strict correlation between the two beginnings—the first, and the other. This is not Heidegger’s version of the eternal return; he is not suggesting that in the other beginning, history returns to the place from which it started. His position is simply that beginning and decline are inseparable phenomena, such that the end of the first beginning and the beginning of our “other” his-

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tory appear together: “The essence of the beginning does not lie in the starting point, but rather is hidden as the still undeveloped, forward-reaching decidedness [Entschiedenheit] of the decline. Everything to do with beginnings begins with decline.”121 As Heidegger himself will be the first to remind us, he is using the word decline (Untergang) not in the literal sense of a “decline of the West” or a “decline of the Roman Empire” but in the sense “that beings come crashing down from their dominance over being.”122 The symbolic register creeps into this discussion of decline when we realize that Untergang is yet another term for what being does in dropping back beneath the horizon of appearance, in “rescinding” itself (“Der Untergang ist Abschied ”).123 Here once again we find ourselves looking through Heidegger’s monocle, and the concrete, historical referentiality of Heidegger’s project is thrown into irresolvable confusion as another word is commandeered by the a priori selfconcealment of being. The more detached terms such as beginning, decline, and even history itself become from the concrete history of the West, the more plausible it comes to seem that metaphysics and its overcoming refer not to interlocking historical developments at all but to two a priori ways of determining the relation to being. In the one, being’s self-hiding is suppressed, and only beings are given priority; in the other, abyssal givenness is grasped as the ground of all appearance. On this interpretation, the first beginning would perhaps represent the ordinary, unreflective way of construing the relation to being from which the thinking of enownment wrenches us. Metaphysics, conversely, would be what happens whenever we fall out of an “appropriate” relation to the ultimate groundlessness of what appears. Given the insistent way in which Heidegger draws metaphysics as an encompassing chronological development reaching from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche (and not as a sporadic manifestation exhibited by some and eschewed by others), I suspect it more likely that the distance he places between his apparently historical terms and concrete historical referentiality is motivated by the sense that historical thinking itself belongs to metaphysics. Heidegger wants from the Wesenswandel no “countermovement,” nor anything merely “new”; it must represent a departure from all prioritization of beings, from all attitudes in which what appears is conceived as the result of subject-beings acting on object-beings. This “other”—which is not “second” or “next” or “new” insofar as those terms define the difference between the beginnings as sequential or chronological—is das Unkenntlichste, that which is most unknown. And as long as it remains so radically different from all prevailing ways of organizing the world that we have “no measure” in terms of

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which we might anticipate its significance, the only thing to do while we wait for the new, abyssal grammar of being to catch on is to press into the decline, to continue to appropriate and reappropriate the first beginning and what was decided there. In this metahistorical discussion of the merger of beginning and end, we see a new echo of the equation between choice and repentance that obtained at the level of an individual’s authentic resolve. In Being and Time, it is not out of the Vergessenheit (“forgottenness”) of being but out of the Verlorenheit (“lostness”) of existence that an existing individual “drags himself back to himself.”124 His lostness is represented by his ability to invoke a generic, impersonal ground for his actions (what “one” might do or be). To drag himself back from this estrangement is to undergo “the personal modification of the generic subject into authentic selfhood, [which] must be achieved as making up for a choice.”125 After Being and Time, it is not choice that brings the given into the free space of the present but “remembering” (Erinnerung). The crossing to the other beginning is undertaken by those who “comport themselves towards a beginning that has already been and whose swaying thus surpasses everything. Such preparation is a remembering out of mindfulness.”126 Remembering counteracts the oblivion of being just as choosing counteracts the lostness of existence in the generic “one.” Remembering tackles the a priori element (“that which already sways”) within this epoch and “keeps awake the restlessness of the originary” as a form of “revering questioning.”127 Heidegger’s language in these later texts has become far more elliptical. In Being and Time, he was more or less content with using the language of “resolve” to undermine the traditional logic of subjectivity. Resolve was framed as the individual’s attempt to come to terms with her own thrownness and her a priori entanglement with appearance.128 In the 1930s, however, Heidegger began to speak of a change that would be capable of living out the a priori determinacy of existence without appealing to subjective language at all. Instead of an act of self-appropriation on the part of a self-questioning Dasein, in each case “mine,” he preserves the vocabulary of the proper while depersonalizing it into near obscurity. He speaks of the “decision of the beginning” and the “self-turning” of “enowning,” in which both appearance and existence come into their own. Preserved wholesale in both cases, however, is the underlying ascetic logic: such language reflects the ever opportune reliving, reopening, and reaffirming of that which has been determined. Viewed thus, as an ever-to-be-renewed struggle to remember the selfconcealing origin of appearance, the thinking of enowning bears an almost startling resemblance to one of Heidegger’s earliest characterizations of phi-

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losophy. Philosophy—or as he here identifies it, “the philosophical performance of interpretation” (der philosophische Interpretationsvollzug)—is one of the few performances capable of counteracting the essentially “ruinant” character of human existence. Ruinanz is a term Heidegger took from Luther, who used it in his Latin writings as a key cognate for Sünde, or “sin.” In Heidegger’s hands, “ruinance” has a phenomenological rather than a dogmatic significance, pointing to the fundamental characteristic of existence to be in each instant “dispersed,” engaged “outside” itself with the concrete appearances and impulses of the world, oblivious to the factical character of its own movement as well as to the abyss by which that radical engagement is surrounded. Philosophizing is “counterruinant” in the sense that “it factically appropriates the premise [of existence] more and more radically with each instant, such that the premise comes to be seen—as irredeemable (privation).”129 This term is one of the many theologically sourced names for the “thrown,” “falling,” “distracted” character of existence Heidegger developed over the course of the 1920s. The significance of “ruinance” here is that it occasions, as its counterpart, a definition of philosophy so clearly modeled on repentance. In Christian theology, repentance is a necessary condition for receiving divine grace. But without the theological architecture of sin and grace to motivate this performance, the Kampf of philosophy (as Heidegger calls it in the same course) appears as an ideal, but one with no clear teleology to back it up. It is neither necessary nor gratuitous. Such designations would require an account of human being as possessed of certain fixed qualities (reason, freedom) and thereby reintroduce the very “subject” Heidegger is trying to destroy. How could one then describe the “good” of the philosophical performance that defies the thrust of fallenness in explicating, ever more radically, the basic premise of existence? The word that will soon come to occupy the place of this question is the same one we have been discussing all the while— Eigentlichkeit. In describing the explicative appropriation of philosophical interpretation as that which concerns what is “proper” to existence, “authenticity” comes to bear the full weight of the normative ambiguity surrounding Heidegger’s valuation of philosophical praxis without, as we have seen, offering any simple way to understand what kind of a valuation it is. John Caputo, in discussing the same passage on ruinance, presents Heidegger’s distinction between factical life and the counterruinant struggle of philosophy in a highly appreciative manner: “The downward plunge of factical life is a headlong rush into security. Life turns away from its questionability in order to live with certainty, as if it had all the answers. Factical life constantly defends itself against itself, covers up and covers over its own groundlessness.

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That is why philosophy is always struggling against the very tendency of this being to cover itself up.”130 In Caputo’s view, the key battle is between ousia and kinesis—between a philosophy that treats its objects as static and a philosophy that aims to make sense of life as movement. Under this lens, Heidegger’s “counterruinant” philosophy appears as something radical: “Traditional philosophy—and Husserl culminates this tradition—thinks it can neutralize the disturbance within factical existence, calm its agitatedness, and proceed by means of untroubled intuition of pure givenness. But the young Heidegger sets out . . . to put philosophy in the mode not of neutrality but of difficulty, to make existence tremble with the insecurity of radical questioning.”131 Caputo is able to avail himself of the moral language of an impassioned philosophy in championing Heidegger over Husserl in part because he has preemptively glossed ruinance (which is meant, in Heidegger’s analysis, to describe the a priori engagement of mind with world) as a kind of laziness—a safe, bourgeois alternative to the perilous labor of guerilla philosophy. Caputo is so concerned with the devaluation of static, disinterested philosophy that he overlooks the question of the form of movement this critique correspondingly revalues. The solution to this would-be paradox of authenticity, as we saw above, can appear once we take a step or two back from the charged language of “risk” and “security.” Authentic resolve is not the happy result of an internal struggle between good and bad or true and false conduct but a self-explication and intensification of the same dispersed, falling attitude in which the problematic, abyssal character of the givenness of the things with which we are engaged is initially concealed.132 This explication cannot in itself be consistently described as good; occasioned by an account of existence as fundamentally self-alienated and fundamentally in search of that which is its own, it can only be described, as we have seen, in terms of a rather unfamiliar, postsubjective understanding of the “proper” (das Eigene). Heidegger’s reformulation of authentic self-explication as the noninstrumental end of all thinking reopens an ascetic space within philosophy.

Chapter 4

The Infinite Mission

In his notorious 1945 essay on anti-Semitism, Sartre argues that Jewish identity and anti-Semitic hatred can be understood as two different ways of struggling with the same moral demand: authenticity. As the French preface reminds us, the work was written hurriedly in that brief period of moral renewal that fell between the end of the war and the discoveries of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.1 Sartre approaches “the Jewish question” (the book’s original French title is Réflexions sur la question juive) by analyzing the anti-Semite and the Jew as two distinct social types. The first essay focuses on “the antiSemite,” who is considered as a subject projecting misguided and hateful ideas about religion and race. The second, longer essay treats “the Jew,” who writhes about beneath these projections in the nearly hopeless pursuit of his own independently generated personality. This highly dependent condition is what Sartre ascribes to the consciousness of the Jew as created by European society, but as many have pointed out, by beginning his book with the perspective of the anti-Semite, Sartre reenacts this objectifying gaze at the level of his own argument. Sartre begins by acknowledging the role that large-scale socioeconomic forces played in the escalation of racist violence in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Anti-Semitism was, he admits, exacerbated by the mounting class tensions and political insecurities of an increasingly urbanized, postindustrial society. But in the body of the essay, Sartre generally backgrounds consideration of material-historical factors in order to focus on the issue he thinks he is best positioned to explain: the logic of hate. What does the anti-Semite want? What desire is at the bottom of his choice to hate the Jew against all reason?

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“There are people,” Sartre writes, “who are attracted by the permanence of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable; they do not want to change. . . . What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form of truth itself, that object of indefinite approximation.” These people cannot endure relativity. Rather, “they want to exist all at once and right away. They want no acquired opinions; they desire them to be innate.”2 The anti-Semite’s most elemental flaw, according to this analysis, is not his malice or his irrationality; the deepest problem is his inauthenticity, his maladaptive insistence that people are beholden to fixed essences. In demanding that the Jew—or, correlatively, the Frenchman—be defined by what he is, the anti-Semite denies the ontological significance of what this person does or thinks or values. In Sartre’s essay, the Heideggerian idea of Eigentlichkeit is modified and redeployed to fit the context of a mainstream psychological theory of prejudice. Sartrean authenticité accommodates this German idea by taking a French word habitually used to refer to the self-sameness of a thing and repurposing it to denote, however paradoxically, the superiority of that which changes in response to changing circumstances. The essay has long been a touchstone of social thought, particularly in its opening portrait of the anti-Semite, which introduced many enduring lines of criticism and is still a point of reference in scholarship on anti-Semitism. The second half of the book, which both sketches a critique of Jewish identity formation and offers a formula for authentic Jewish self-affirmation, has been widely criticized for its profound ignorance about Judaism as a religious tradition and, still more damningly, for its reliance on the very stereotypes it sought to undermine. What Sartre gets so fatally wrong, and the critics are in unison here, is the claim that Jewish identity is itself nothing other than the reflection of years of anti-Semitic exclusion and prejudice.3 “Le Juif est un homme que les autres hommes tiennent pour Juif.”4 Where is the Bible? Where are the rabbis? What about community, scholarship, law, tradition? What seem to many to be the most obvious and most familiar elements of Jewish identity factor nowhere into Sartre’s account. The “authentically” Jewish character of Sartre’s Jew is defined as his triumph over particularity—even worse, over a particularity projected by someone else’s racism. Another way to summarize this reception is that critics have challenged the conclusion of Sartre’s analysis while retaining one of its most important premises: Jews do not, as Sartre claims, have a particularly heavy burden to face to overcome their inauthenticity, because their identity is already selfdetermined. Common to Sartre’s essay and his most fervent detractors is the idea that Jewish identity must not be defined negatively—that is, in contrast

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with other social groups or with humanity more generally. The critics simply point out that Jews have always been doing that. Sartre’s case for Jewish authenticity doesn’t get off the ground, in their view, not because they disagree with the idea that the “freedom to be one’s own foundation,” as Sartre so often defines authenticity, is a desirable norm, but because they disagree with the idea that Jews lack that sort of freedom to begin with.5 In this way, we see how a version of Sartre’s deep premise—namely, the normative distinction between inauthentic and authentic existence—remains subtly in play throughout much of the criticism, even where those terms themselves disappear out of contempt for Sartre’s clamorous moralism under the cover of seemingly more generic categories such as self-determination and positive identity. These challenges to Sartre’s text are decisive insofar as we understand the Réflexions to be describing Jewish life in mid-twentieth-century France. But as Sarah Hammerschlag has persuasively argued, Sartre began with anti-Semitic stereotypes of the figure of the Jew not because he believed them to be descriptively correct but because he himself identified with many features of that stereotypical figure.6 Indeed, “the Jew” of Sartre’s text, who struggles for the freedom to choose his own path while being perpetually defined as “other” by the surrounding society, shares a good deal with several of Sartre’s philosophical protagonists: Jean Genet, Lucien Fleurier, the conscript, “Black Orpheus,” and even Sartre himself. For Sartre, the anti-Semite is not only wrong about Jewish identity. He stands in a fundamental metaphysical error, believing in fixed, eternal essences that undergird contingent social differences. But the anti-Semite as Sartre envisions him cannot be convinced of his error, because his choice of hate is not the choice of one rational opinion over another: “The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devalue words and reasons.”7 For Sartre, anti-Semitism is an enduring and endemic phenomenon; it will exist as long as class conflict remains a fundamental social problem.8 “Forcefully attacked, weakly defended,” Sartre writes, “the Jew feels the danger in a society of which anti-Semitism is the perpetual temptation.”9 And in this situation, the Jew is the reflected product of unresolved social tension: “We have created this type of human being which has no meaning except as artificial product of a capitalist (or feudal) society, whose only reason for existing is to serve as scapegoat for a community that is not yet logical. This particular type of human being is a testament to what is human, more so than all the other types, because it is born of secondary reactions interior to humanity itself, this quintessence of man, disgraced, uprooted, destined from the outset to inauthenticity or martyrdom.”10 Here Sartre naturalizes the Christian allegorical

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treatment of the Jew—viewed through the prism of an anti-Semitic society, the Jew becomes a social and political embodiment of the existential condition of humanity writ large. The Jew’s political struggle dramatizes the condition of that being who surges up in the world “without excuse,” who is “condemned” to the free choice between authentic and inauthentic existence. The major difference between the general existential condition and the contingent social one, of course, is that existential deracination cannot be traced to any precedent cause (there is no existential equivalent to an anti-Semitic society). The use of the terms “temptation” and “martyrdom” here are not simply hyperbolic flourishes. Nor are they ironic metaphors chosen to emphasize the limited character of the choices that “the Jew” faces in a world designed in advance by the followers of a hate faith. In fact, the comparison with martyrdom reappears in the Réflexions as a form of sympathy with the Jew: “Authenticity is without doubt more tempting for [the Jew] than for other men because the situation he has to lay claim to and to live is nothing other than that of the martyr.”11 These terms haunt Sartre’s oeuvre wherever he describes the constrained optionality of human freedom: “In war, there are no innocent victims. . . . The nature of historicity is such that one ceases to be complicit only by becoming a martyr. Only those men who have accepted to be the martyrs of peace do not deserve war. They alone are innocent, since the strength of their refusal is great enough for them to endure unhappiness and death. . . . So there’s no way of assuming one’s historicity other than by making oneself a martyr and redeemer.”12 The anti-Semite, for his part, does not have as his primary problem the fact that his position is ideological rather than factual or violent rather than tolerant. The anti-Semite is lazy. He receives his identity passively, as given to him from without, from his white, Christian skin-blood. The anti-Semite has not earned what he has. In other words, we find in Sartre’s formula for Jewish authenticity and his critique of anti-Semitic ideas of identity the outlines of a moral psychology that links appropriative self-choice with merit. Self-choice is sanctifying; everything else is temptation. Sartre will even insist on calling the transformation of authenticity—passingly, casually, without comment, as if to convince us that this choice of words is just a metaphor and itself means nothing—a “conversion.” Readers have often remarked at the parallels between the pathos of decision at the center of both Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s work.13 There is certainly reason to marvel at the resonance of Judge Wilhelm’s ethics of “choosing oneself ” with much of Sartre’s discussion of authentic choice. But in question here is not the similarity of two concepts, however central, but the fact that within Sartre’s not only atheistic and vocally anti-Christian but also

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emancipatory project, we meet again with the ascetic norms for regulating desire that Kierkegaard used to draw lapsed Christians toward a more “religious” form of religion. I will argue that Sartre’s account of authenticity is fundamentally an ascetic ideal and that its relation to the missionary project of conversion goes far deeper than the metaphoric level. Sartre turns the religious psychology of Copenhagen’s most antisocial missionary into the basis for an exuberantly public ethics of identity. What modern Jews need to be Jewish, it would seem from this account, is the same moral muscle modern Christians need to become Christian: the freedom of a conscious, self-chosen identity. In what follows, I will attempt to shed light on the genealogy of this unlikely adaptation: How is it that Sartre came to articulate authenticity as a seemingly neutral humanistic ideal? How did the normative psychology of a Christian missionary become available for a strident atheist and former member of the Resistance writing about the ethical predicament of the Jew in post–World War II France? The purpose of this genealogy is twofold. First, it is to show the conceptual roots of asceticism in Sartre’s early thinking. Beginning with passages from Sartre’s War Diaries (including the more recently discovered first diary, which contains important passages on authenticity and has yet to be translated into English), this approach will shed light on why Sartre was so attracted to the idea of authenticity in the first place. What kinds of questions was he asking, such that “authenticité” appeared as a solution? And what set of ideas did it displace? The second aim is to show how the philosophical categories that Sartre picked up from Heidegger, which reframed the piety of Kierkegaardian self-choice in formal and methodological terms, allowed the ascetic aspect of authenticity to remain implicit and even hidden, to some degree, from Sartre himself.14 Sartre never made a rigorous distinction between theism as an intellectual stance and religion as a more encompassing form of life. The lack of clarity on this subject—indeed, the apparent lack of awareness on the part of Sartre and his circle that the distinction between atheism and antireligion requires original thinking—bears a large share of responsibility for the unhinged set of squabbles that followed Sartre’s collaboration with Benny Lévy, especially after the publication of the Hope Now interviews.15 Sartre’s failure to distinguish theism from religion left his interpreters with a defensive alternative: on the one hand, the party-line atheism that Sartre professes but often complicates, and on the other, an argument for Sartre’s relative “openness” to religion, which resonates with a more apologetic agenda than Sartre ever held.16 By looking at the development of authenticity within Sartre’s work,

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we will gain access to a new perspective on these debates. But most of all, I hope that we will come to appreciate the intellectual path by which an ascetic strategy designed to intensify Christian piety became the cornerstone of a missionary atheism, a moral argument for personal authenticity propagated on a global scale.17

Sartre’s Discovery What seems to be the début appearance of the word l’authenticité takes place early on in Sartre’s work, in his Carnets de la drôle de guerre, which were written between the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940, his first nine months of military service in the meteorological unit of the 70th infantry division. Though they are called “notebooks” (a closer translation of “carnets” than the English translation’s “diaries”), Sartre conceived them from the start as a publication.18 The notebooks are meant, he tells us, to “record” the life of the soldier down to its concrete, everyday texture.19 Accordingly, they are not really about the war or soldiering; they are a document of the thoughts and experiences of France’s most self-conscious wartime typist. We hear about his love life, petty arguments with his fellow soldiers, his reflections about the war and its effects on France, letters he writes to Beauvoir and to others, books he is reading, as well as about the evolution of his thinking on a wide range of philosophical topics. There is plenty of autobiographical information on offer, but for the most part, the notebooks form a kind of experimental philosophy undertaken in the first person. The writing often follows the genre of philosophical meditations, in that Sartre’s own thoughts, self-doubts, and self-criticisms serve as the primary material from which his philosophical analysis proceeds. Part of this is an external constraint: just as Auerbach’s Mimesis built a theory of Western literature from the selection of works he could access in Istanbul, Sartre found himself stationed in Alsace-Lorraine with little in the way of a library.20 At the same time, it never took much to get Sartre to engage in quasiautobiographical philosophy. Of the many topics that cross Sartre’s pages during this period, among the most salient is the story of his own intellectual and political recovery from a position he refers to as “stoicism.”21 The most familiar story about the change Sartre underwent during the war is that he became convinced of the necessity of political engagement.22 This is both true and crucial; the war introduced that characteristic dissonance between Sartre qua poet of self-consciousness and Sartre qua sociopolitical critic and rabblerouser that would both enrich and trouble his work for the rest of his career.

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What tends to be neglected in such narratives, however, is the fact that it is the departure from “stoicism” that forms the philosophical basis of his political transformation. The very first line of the first notebook throws us into center of this story, in medias res: “Curious union of stoicism and optimism. One finds it already with the ancient stoic, who needs to believe that the world is good. More than a theoretical union, it’s a kind of psychological machinery. Yet another ruse to tranquilize oneself, yet another trap of inauthenticity. I used to be [of the] ‘stoic’ party.”23 The notebooks thus open with a kind of confession, with Sartre’s identification of the error of his past ways. This error, moreover, is not presented as what one might call an “honest mistake”; it is not blindness or ignorance that he sees when looking back. Sartre’s erstwhile stoicism gets cast in these opening lines as a kind of self-deception, of hiding from the truth by means of “traps” and “ruses.” But these lines also tell us what it is that has opened the path to Sartre’s newly self-critical stance. He has the beginnings of a new model of virtue in mind, one that appears first in effigy by the way he retroactively redefines his stoicism: a trap of inauthenticity. Much of these war notebooks constitute Sartre’s first sustained attempt to develop the idea of authenticity that will guide his work over the following decade. What stoicism and the philosophy of authenticity have in common is that they are both responses to a person’s limited ability to realize her own desires. It is hardly an accident that the outbreak of the war and Sartre’s conscription should serve as an occasion for these reflections. There are momentous questions in play: Should he resist? Comply? Comply while defending the war? Comply while denouncing the war? On what grounds? And how should he make sense of the choices made by others?24 One of the first things we ought to notice about these discussions is also one of the easiest things to miss: Sartre understands himself to be in search of authenticity. By this, I do not mean that Sartre has come to understand and appreciate the value of authenticity and now seeks to acquire it personally. I mean that he has become convinced that the word “authenticity” conceals something that is going to help him move forward in his thinking. He has a vague idea about what that thing is, and that idea guides him. But at the outset of the Carnets, authenticity is a moving target. When he asks what it is “tobe-authentic-in-this-war,” as he sometimes hyphenates it, he is not applying a principle that he grasps abstractly to the concrete situation of the war. He is not saying, “I know what authenticity involves, but what about during wartime?” He is posing to himself the question of what this “authenticity” that he

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thinks he wants might actually look like, trying to decide what he wants to do with this idea. So how did Sartre come to identify himself with this new idea, which he understands enough to sense that it holds the promise to lead him out of stoicism but not enough to know what it consists in? In the early entries, Gide appears as the crucial guide.25 Sartre had begun reading the first full edition of Gide’s journal just before leaving for the war: “At first I was overcome; I read from August in September, from September in October. So many days lived one by one. I feel his days of war with my days of war.” Gide’s wartime conversations with himself begin to become a kind of ersatz intellectual community for Sartre: “Little by little the commerce with a mind from ‘my party’ restores to me a kind of intellectual lightness which I had all but lost since September 1st.”26 The importance of this text for Sartre in this period is something Sartre makes no attempt to hide. We feel it again and again, as Sartre appears under nearly constant pressure to compare their projects: “Gide’s constant attempts to take upon himself the sorrows of the war, to concentrate his thoughts on them. Empty meditations, and which desire to be empty, since it would be sin to profit from the war, even intellectually. . . . It is a duty for him to have his thought obsessed by the war. My duty [is] inverse—and too easy: to keep my thoughts awake. To think and not to meditate.”27 Gide’s way of handling the relation among thinking, writing, and being-at-war makes a powerful impression on Sartre’s political thinking. Citing a now well-known line from Gide’s journal from 1931, “As soon as one holds man and not God responsible, one can no longer avoid taking sides,” Sartre finds in these words a precise critique of his stoic “acceptance” of the war: “Very true. And this is why, when in leaving on the 2nd of September I compared the war to a sickness one must endure, it was absurd.” He cites Gide again and again as a fount of wisdom, as articulating what Sartre cannot, as a theorist of desire superior to Freud.28 After posing again the question of whether “stoicism and authenticity are compatible,” Sartre responds in the negative and closes with the most deferent of defenses: “Gide, who so often sought authenticity, isn’t he the greatest enemy of stoicism?”29 But there is an important wrinkle in the story we are tracing here: Gide hardly ever talks about authenticity. Among all Sartre’s references to Gide, there is only one in which the word “authenticity” appears. And there, as in the paltry number of others across Gide’s oeuvre, it is used either to denote one of sincerity’s lesser cousins or to describe, in the classic sense of the term, the quality of a document or speech or artifact to adequately represent its own

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source. In a striking passage in the Immoralist, Gide defines “authentic being” in reverse Pauline terms as the “old Adam,” the primary being that is suppressed by “all the books and teachers and parents.”30 Here Gide borrows the traditional Christian figure of conversion and upends it within the framework of a Romantic theory of the self. Here the old man is the authentic one, the new the false. In inverting the Christian figure, Gide sketches authenticity as part of an ontological nostalgia for precultural norms that is now quite familiar to us. But his picture could hardly be further from Sartre, whose interest in authenticity is from the start guided by the sense that it describes a feature of desire and creativity, not a feature of essence or being. Gide talks endlessly about unwinding the false, externally dictated interests from those proper to the given individual, but he frames that process as a restoration of compromised unity, as a return to the “old Adam,” in his subtly sacrilegious humor. Indeed, over the course of the Carnets, Sartre comes to distance himself more and more from Gide, noting that the ideal he finds celebrated in Gide’s journals is actually closer to “purity” than to authenticity, as Sartre understands those terms.31 As he will put it in the Cahiers pour un morale, sincerity concerns what I am; authenticity is a question of what I want.32 The more pertinent impression was supplied by Heidegger, whose German term of art Eigentlichkeit found its only approximation in French with the existing word “authenticité.”33 Sartre is quite clear about the importance that Heidegger had on his basic ideas, particularly that of authenticity: “[Heidegger’s] influence has appeared to me at times, recently, providential, since it had just taught me authenticity and historicity at the precise moment when the war was going to make these notions indispensable to me. If I try to assess what I would have made of my thought without these tools, I am gripped by retrospective fear.”34 Over the course of the notebooks, it is Heidegger’s structure of Eigentlichkeit that will burrow itself more deeply into the indeterminate word-idea-hole opened up by Sartre’s “authenticité.” He is often quite critical of Heidegger, and critical or not, his explicit restatements of Heidegger’s arguments, which at this point are still the fruit of an early engagement that will be strengthened only when Sartre rereads Being and Time a few years later, as a prisoner of war, contain many interpretive errors. Yet even at this time, Sartre has so earnestly immersed himself in the project of Being and Time that his “corrections” of Heidegger often result in an even more faithful interpretation of Heidegger than the one Sartre initially attributed to him. The dichotomy between flight and decision, the idea of authenticity as a “modification of existence,” the way in which action is interpreted as a matter of explication, the basic approach through the “situation,” which is a power-

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ful gloss of Being and Time’s famous “je”—in short, the entire architecture of Heideggerian authenticity finds expression in Sartre’s evolving discourse here. As Sartre goes on to work out his theory of consciousness more carefully in the coming years, particularly in Being and Nothingness, this affinity will only grow stronger. What differentiates the two accounts—and there will be much more to say about this in the coming pages—is that while Heidegger essentially rejects the possibility of an “ethics” of authenticity, Sartre dedicates himself to this project.

Sartrean Authenticity The point of wrangling with these influences is to offer some context to the peculiar tensions structuring Sartre’s ideal of authenticity. The Gidean influence on Sartre’s thinking appears in the fact that Sartre came to reflect on authenticity as a philosophical concept in the context of his own military conscription as well as in the moral character of these reflections—that he reflects on the morality of the choice and on the morality of reflection. Without understanding that such elements are informed by Sartre’s reading of Gide’s own war journals, it can seem mysterious how the insistent formalism of Heideggerian Eigentlichkeit might ever serve as an adequate basis for Sartre’s moral and aesthetic project. Without the Gidean streak, it is difficult to imagine how a distinction that for Heidegger serves as the formal and ontological indication of an existential alternative can come to take on, in and through Sartre’s writing, such an immense and independent normative status, how authenticity can become an overarching value. On the other hand, tracing Sartre’s ideal too neatly to that of Gide risks what is potentially an even greater misunderstanding, for in not distinguishing the existential ideal of authenticity that dominates the work of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre from the notion of a “true self ” buried beneath some or other not-so-true versions (whether these false ones are traced to bourgeois capitalism, conventional morality, theological doctrine, or some other agent of deception), we make a hasty generalization. It lumps existential discourse together with bodies of thought whose basic axioms it attempts to challenge (e.g., Romantic individualism and its idea of the subject as naturally good). It mistakes the fact that it was thanks to Sartre’s encounter with German phenomenology that he could develop a theory of consciousness to support the idea of an ethics without a subject, an ethics that conceived of the authentic self as the product of its labors and not just their presupposition. And in misidentifying authenticity as an individualistic virtue, we miss the

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real normative charge of this discourse, the fact that authenticity is used to generate criteria for an ascetic formation of life. The contrast with Gide will also help us discern the evolution of Sartre’s thinking in the notebooks. Sartre came to realize quite quickly that the criticism of conventional moral categories and the experimental valorization of sincerity in Gide’s work only seemed to be in line with his new ethic of authenticity. Now he begins to frame the superiority of his idea over Gide’s in the same terms that he frames the attitude that the philosophy of authenticity was meant to supersede: religious, metaphysical, capitalist—the sense that there is a reality given in such a way that it alleviates to the slightest degree the burden of absolute freedom. Sartre’s personal point of departure is the “stoic” attitude by which a person reconciles with a historical situation by regarding it as unchangeable. But as he makes clear over the course of his work, stoicism is just one of many forms of “inauthenticity.” What the various forms of inauthenticity share is a diminution of one’s sense of responsibility for the situation one is in: “I can see clearly how this authenticity I’m aiming at differs from Gidian purity. Purity is an entirely subjective quality of the feelings and will. These are pure insofar as they burn themselves up like a flame, no calculation besmirches them. Pure and gratuitous. Hence, they need no justification other than themselves, nor do they seek any other.”35 And in a long entry from December 3, Sartre proposes “a moral code based on authenticity” as the only morality capable of escaping the trap of complacency, of which he identifies four types: resignation, duty, naturalism, and stoicism. Gide is identified with the third: “There’s a certain naturalism in Gide, a certain trust in the virtues of raw nature (to be oneself without compromising; to adapt oneself to the world like the organism to its environment).”36 Sartre’s key point of departure is the idea that the most basic human drive is “to be one’s own foundation” (“être son propre fondement”). What this means is rather simple: To be conscious means to be engaged in projects and to be fundamentally interested, such that those projects and that engagement can—when, for example, we reflect or encounter resistance—come into question. The questioning character of consciousness discovers, when it asks, that it can only go so far. My reflecting consciousness can neither untie itself from my situated, engaged stance in the world to see myself as I am “objectively,” nor can my conscious mind find its way back to any “prior” moment before my having-become situated and engaged. My deeds, the contours of my character, the social world I inhabit and partly sustain, represent an unresolved web of choices and possibilities. There is nothing to explain their existence, nor their being the way they are and not otherwise. And this is what Sartre

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calls freedom, that none of the explanatory factors that present themselves to my questioning mind—when it asks, for example, why I went into my chosen line of work—is sufficient. I became a scholar because my parents were professors. I became a scholar in spite of the fact that my parents were professors. I became a scholar because in junior year of college I discovered my true vocation. I became a scholar because in junior year of college I had a scholarly boyfriend and confused one form of love for another. I became a scholar because I was good at doing the work of a scholar. Another way to put this definition is that freedom, for Sartre, is the fact that there is no absolute distinction, even subjectively considered, between “reason” and “pretext.”37 My project appears to reflection as gratuitous at the deepest level.38 There is always a little gap between the event or the action and the cause that is meant to account for it. This gap is what Sartre calls, following Heidegger, the “nothing” (néant) at the heart of existence.39 Insofar as I am conscious, some part of me is always quietly hunting for a reason capable of closing the gap, a foundation capable of supporting all the stuff—the possibilities and choices and facts and habits—that makes up my world. This drive is something like the principle of sufficient reason, but phrased in the optative mood instead of as a static axiom of metaphysics. And because this drive, fundamental though it may be, drives at something that is inaccessible, there are a variety of responses to its inevitable failure. I could insist that one of the tangible reasons (or the finite set of tangible reasons taken together) is adequate and decide to ignore the gap; I could lament the gap and the decide that my choice of occupation, not being explained fully by any particular reason(s), is arbitrary and irrational; I could acknowledge the gap and insist on some intangible reason for the choice that is necessary and abstract (fate). I could also claim that I am not a scholar, but a teacher, and that any of the professional and educational choices that one makes to become a scholar were merely by-products of my naturally studious disposition. Whatever the response, it is the same here as with Sartre’s comrade Paul, who says one day: “Me, a soldier? I consider myself a civilian in military disguise.” Sartre’s response is defiant: “That would be all very fine if he weren’t making himself a soldier . . . complicit down to his arms that carry the rifle and his legs that march; a soldier in his perceptions, his emotions and his volitions. He thus stubbornly continues to flee what he’s making of himself—which plunges him into a state of wretched, diffuse anguish.”40 When Sartre himself selects a name for the movement that leads from the moral complacency of naturalism or stoicism to an authentic embodiment of radical freedom, he lands on what seems to be a metaphor. Authenticity re-

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quires “a conversion”: “Which is this conversion? The search for a foundation requires that one assume that which one founds.” And lest this sound like the same stoic acceptance from which Sartre considers himself in recovery, he is quick to clarify: To assume does not at all mean to accept, though in certain cases the two go together. When I assume, I assume in order to make a given use of what I am assuming. Here, I am assuming in order to found. Moreover, to assume means to adopt as one’s own, to claim responsibility. Thus the assumptive conversion that presents itself as a value for consciousness is, therefore, nothing other than an intuition of the will, which consists in adopting human reality as one’s own. And by that adoption, human reality is revealed . . . not as it would be known through concepts, but as it is willed.41

Beginning with these discussions from the journals of 1939, the problem of a “moral conversion” percolates throughout Sartre’s writings. In a well-known footnote in Being and Nothingness, Sartre indicates that the ontology he outlines there would need to be complemented by “an ethics of deliverance and salvation” based around the idea of a “radical conversion.” The idea of a “moral conversion” was also the driving idea behind his Cahiers, written over the following few years and published posthumously. It shapes Sartre’s thinking even in texts where his focus is ostensibly not on expounding his own philosophy. An important example of this connection is Sartre’s biography of Jean Genet. There the entire narrative and psychological progression of the book are determined through the logic of conversion: there is the “first conversion” to crime, the “second metamorphosis” to aesthetics, the “third” to the written word, and so on.42 One reason I am claiming this term conversion is more than a religious image or metaphor for change is the degree to which Christian theology helps him articulate the terms of the conversion, as well as what the conversion achieves. Christianity, for Sartre, is the quintessential example of “bad faith” thinking. It encourages an inauthentic stance on one’s own existence by considering human being in general terms, as a “species.” Considered as a species, human beings are possessed of stable characteristics, such as a sinfulness, which the individual receives passively, inevitably. The philosophical error of thinking human existence from the species level down (what he calls chosisme, or “thingism”) is so tied up with Sartre’s understanding of religion that when he finds chosisme in an example of atheistic humanism, he can criticize it as humanism’s “religious aspect.”43 Sartre quotes Jean Cassou’s

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Quarante-huit, approvingly: “ ‘It is by a religious act that man separates himself from his beliefs and his religions, to find his satisfaction in that Religion through which he reveals himself to himself as species.’ . . . This is precisely the basis of humanism: man viewing himself as a species.”44 “There is a sort of racism of humanity here,” Sartre concludes.45 One might imagine that if he were to face a pointed either/or question about whether the chosisme or the religion is the more fundamental problem for authenticity, Sartre would choose the former. But Sartre perpetually resists this choice and is keen to regard the preconversion attitude as theistic, which delivers us to the root of his confusion about religion. An extreme but by no means isolated example of the association between authenticity and atheism appears in a note at the end of the Cahiers, when Sartre addresses the question of why conversion is necessary—that is, why consciousness seems always to begin from a position of inauthenticity: Difficulty: there are two orders. The man in hell and the saved man. Once we allow that freedom is built up on the ground of the passions, this difficulty no longer exists: there is natural man with his determinism, and freedom appears when he escapes the infernal circle. But if you are not a Stoic, if you think that man is free even in Hell, then how can you explain that there is a hell? To put it another way, why does man almost always first choose hell, inauthenticity? Why is salvation the fruit of a new beginning neutralizing the first one? Let us consider this. What we are here calling inauthenticity is in fact the initial project or original choice that man makes of himself in choosing his Good. The man’s project is inauthentic when the project is to constitute himself as a being that exists in-and-for-itself, and to identify himself with this being; in short, to be God and his own foundation, and when at the same time he posits the Good as pre-established. This project comes first in the sense that it is the very structure of my existence. I exist as a choice.46

Indeed, Sartre rather consistently characterizes the a priori orientation of consciousness in theological terms: before submitting to the abyss of reflection, we are inclined to project ourselves as integral, self-sufficient beings— that is, as little gods. If authenticity is designed as a conversion from this initial theological attitude, then authenticity is equally a deconversion from Christian anthropology. The “man” at the center of Sartre’s philosophy is the successor of the “Dieu mort,” the “heir of the mission of the dead God.”47 Sartre tends to interpret

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theological ideas as mythical projections of human experience—stories about a transcendent other woven out of a nexus of our own unresolved desires, neglected obligations, suppressed fears, and possibilities. But unlike other projection theories of religion, Sartre does not seem to think (like Feuerbach) that recognizing ourselves as both the subjects and creators of this externalized image will suffice as an antidote. Nor does he think (like Marx) that the falseness of the projection will go away once we deal with the underlying issues—the pressures, desires, fears, obligations, and so on—that it perversely reflects. Unlike with Feuerbach, there is no philosophy of history in play to rationalize the falseness of the original projection as society’s long-range plan to discover its true nature. And unlike Marx, Sartre finds a species of alienation even deeper than that of the base level of the relations of production, one that even the end of class conflict could not succeed in abating. The idea of an infinite and transcendent God, an all-seeing, all-powerful creator, was not a roundabout auto-didacticism by which human civilization disclosed its secret power to itself. Nor was it, for Sartre, an intrinsically meaningless symptom of an oppressive and irrational distribution of capital. It is neither necessary nor accidental. As modern man’s historical reality, it is contingent (like all historical reality). But for just this reason, Christian theology also seems to function as an inevitable reference in Sartre’s account of finite human consciousness. In life and in death, historically and ontologically, Sartre’s atheistic philosophy cannot do without the idea of God. God’s death in no way attenuates his bearing on Sartre’s project. Sartre contends endlessly with the metaphysics of this expired being, whose ontological irrelevance seems to have been purchased at the price of his rhetorical dominance. The juxtaposition is a stable feature of Sartre’s anthropology. In defining the will, for example, he writes, “An eternal and transcendent existence such as God or the divine will would never know how to be an end for the human will. On the contrary, human reality can and must be its own end because it is always on the side of the future; human reality is its own suspension.”48 Sartre’s idea of human will here appears as rhetorically negative, because here, as so often, Sartre finds himself able to get to the definition of human reality only by passing through a critique of the divine. One might justifiably wonder if the presence of these repeatedly invoked and refuted theologies reflects Sartre’s sociological sense, the knowledge that his contemporaries will be occupied by the claims of theism. Sartre, indeed, would certainly have been aware of this. But this concern appears less pressing when we compare the way religion appears in his work with that of some other members of the Temps Modernes circle. Beauvoir, for example, increasingly tended to

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regard religious themes as a kind of contaminant, complicit in the error and violence of monotheistic civilization, and therefore to be avoided in any attempt to transcend it.49 Sartre, by contrast, played constantly with religious and theological themes, in some cases devoting whole works to the subject (No Exit; The Devil and the Good God ). Thus it seems reasonable to suppose that Sartre’s invocation of religion involved more than a sense of the continuing hold that theology exercised on his audience; he also found something common between the historical idea of a monotheistic God and the ontological stance of inauthenticity. Given the fact that Sartre tends to identify Christianity with the “bad faith” from which authenticity serves as a means of deliverance, we might expect the shadow of Christianity on his work to wane as we enter the dynamic of authenticity itself. His critique of the laicist reforms of the French school system, for example, charges the proponents of laicism with trying to “eliminate God as painlessly as possible,” mistakenly believing “that nothing will have changed if God does not exist; [that] we will encounter the same standards of honesty, progress and humanism, and we will have turned God into an obsolete hypothesis that will die out quietly on its own.”50 At the same time, Sartre, unlike Kierkegaard and even Heidegger, rarely discussed the relation of his work to religion in overarching terms. He often criticized specific doctrines and theological ideas, such as the concept of a divine being in whom knowledge and will were united, or the idea that God serves as witness to the things that no one else sees. To call something “religious” was, for Sartre, to make a philosophical insult. Religion was something with which he wanted nothing to do. Nowhere does Sartre’s anxiety of influence appear more pronounced than when he notices that Gide’s journals, which he so admired and even emulated, were charged by a distinctly penitential ambition, which he derides alternatively as “Protestant” and “religious.”51 It is Gide, after all, who writes, “Je suis un incroyant. Je ne serai jamais un impie.”52 The concern about Gide’s religion surely has something to do with Sartre’s own failure to see the need for a distinction between faith and piety. The deeper stakes of this ambiguity are not in Sartre’s reading of Gide, however. They will only come into view when we look more closely at Sartre’s idea of conversion.

Conversion The best-known example Sartre uses to illustrate his model of authentic choice revolves around a hypothetical individual’s decision to enlist for military service. The example was canonized in Sartre’s 1946 essay “Existential-

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ism Is a Humanism,” in which Sartre describes the situation of a “pupil” torn between the desire to enlist, which might allow him to avenge the collaborationist tendencies of his father, and the desire to stay home and help his mother, who had been abandoned by the wretch. But the example began, as we have already seen, with Sartre’s own personal reflections after his conscription in 1939. In both cases, Sartre is pressed to articulate how authenticity is progressive—that is, how it stacks up against the revolutionary politics of the day in likewise avoiding “stoicism” and “quietism” and in being based on a concern for the freedom of others.53 The Carnets begin with a reflection on Sartre’s changing way of understanding the meaning of the war in his own life and proceed by virtue of a counterpoint with his fellow soldier Paul. Influenced by Max Scheler’s analytical homage to Nietzsche, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, which had been translated into French in 1933 as L’homme du ressentiment (a title more likely to have been taken from Sartre’s own catalog than from Scheler’s), Sartre seems to have first approached the problem of his participation in the war with the primary goal of avoiding resentment. But upon meeting Paul, the socialist corporal, ever discontent with the situation into which they all had been thrown, who passed between fear, disgust, and indignation for his superiors, Sartre declares of himself that he “had begun to see the true situation.”54 What Sartre had begun to see was not the situation as Corporal Paul saw it but the self-deception common to both of their attitudes toward the war. Paul believed simplistically “that authenticity resides in groans and tears,” but, as Sartre grasps immediately, Paul’s complaints were less an expression of his clear grasp of the situation than a performance designed to “justify his pessimistic tendencies.”55 Sartre, for his part, came to recognize that his affirmative stance toward the war, with its “curious link between stoicism and optimism,” was attended by a dangerously confident blindness, “a kind of admiring docility before the military authority on which I depended.”56 The notebooks open in the wake of his discovery that the mobilization had created situations exceptional to life before the war but had not generated new and exceptional values appropriate to those situations, that the criteria to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, desirable from undesirable possibilities, were just as ambiguous and contextual as they had been ten months prior, and that “the army remained in war what it was in peace.” Grappling with such discoveries, Sartre makes a first resolution: “At issue is to dissociate acceptance from admiration.”57 But as he returns to this question over the following months, he begins to see “acceptance” itself as part of the problem. As authenticity slides into the

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place of a moral ideal, Sartre finds himself forced into the defensive crouch of the formalist: to choose authentically is not a matter of which alternative one chooses—to go to war, to protest the war, to champion the war, and so on—but of how. An abstract and objective understanding of the makings of authentic choice will never tell Sartre’s pupil whether to enlist, nor will it tell his Jesuit comrade whether he has chosen well in not becoming a carpenter or a revolutionary.58 Sartre agrees here with Heidegger on authenticity being a formal distinction; he simply adds the claim that formalism has moral promise. But in its origins in Sartre’s thinking, authenticity is neither a response to the question of what Sartre should do in the face of oppressive historical circumstances—Poland is invaded, France goes to war, Sartre is called to serve—nor a response to the question of how he should do it. The question of authentic being-for-war appears to Sartre after he is already at war, after he has already made his choice. The distinction between inauthentic and authentic choice thus appears less as a way to map discrete alternatives than it does as a way to specify the mechanism of revaluation—that is, how something that cannot be avoided can nonetheless undergo a change in value: “If I always pushed off my being-for-war, it’s because it displeased me, just as one pushes off one’s being-for-death. But I could not escape it: only transform it into an inauthentic-being-for war.”59 By saying that he could not escape his “being-for-war,” Sartre does not mean that he could not avoid enlisting. Flight, suicide, protest—such alternatives were always objectively possible. What he could not avoid was the fact of his alternatives being thoroughly determined by the war; his being would have been marked as “soldier,” “draft dodger,” “conscientious objector,” and so on, but he could not have chosen just to be a novelist and not get involved: I thus found myself at a crossroads, between the stoic refusal that all my moral ideas had taught me to want, and authenticity—and I sought to rid myself of one in favor of the other. I believe I am now beginning to understand: the nature of the war is to be hateful and the men who set war in motion are criminals. Moreover it is a historical accident, a contingency that can always be avoided. But once this contingency has occurred, it becomes a privileged point of view for man to realize and understand his being-inthe-world (since this being-in-the-world becomes endangered). Better still, it is the-being-in-the-world of man, it is human reality itself seen under the lens of the fragility, the absurd, and of despair, but at the same time, put into relief. He must therefore live the war without refusal, which does not mean that one does not hate it, since its nature is to be hateful. One must live in

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the hateful and with authenticity. In sum, the change in my views is this: I took the war for an inhuman disorder that struck down upon man, I now see that it is a hateful situation but ordained and human, that it is one of man’s modes of being-in-the-world.60

This passage reveals the hybridity of Sartre’s idea of authenticity in the Carnets. He invokes Heidegger’s “in-der-Welt-sein” repeatedly as the key to a new paradigm for thinking about historical reality—objectively speaking, history is contingency, because it could have been otherwise, and objectively speaking, the war could have been avoided at any moment. But existentially speaking, history, once it has “occurred,” is neither contingent nor necessary; it is simply a fact that cannot be undone. This distinction between necessity and fact is one of the things that Adorno underestimates when he charges existentialists with fighting evil by turning its threat into a necessity, describing war as part of man’s “being-in-the-world.”61 Though one might just as well press Sartre to distinguish more clearly between what has “occurred” and what is “still contingent,” since if war could have been avoided, this should also mean that there was some point in the past when it was capable of being stopped. Nevertheless, by defining authenticity in radically subjective but also situational terms, Sartre sets up a moral criterion that is yoked resolutely to contingencies that have occurred. He can either “assume” the situation, as he will often put it, or evade it; no matter what happens, he will be determined by the war, either authentically or inauthentically. So what ultimately separates “living without refusal” from the complacent, stoic acceptance of “what happens to one” (which, as he will later describe, is both “too hard and too easy”)?62 What stands between these two options is a gesture of moral imagination that Sartre will call “invention.” One “assumes” one’s situation not by accepting it as it is but by taking it on “as if one had given it to oneself by decree . . . turning it into the occasion of new progress as if it was for this reason that one had given it oneself.”63 Sartre appears here merely to have exchanged, in the name of authenticity, a fictive and spontaneous resignation for a categorical and presumed one. His most immediate concern after uttering this phrase, indeed, is to distinguish the “as if ” of this formulation from a mere lie. How can a person generate a sense of personal responsibility for what has been given by decree? Obedience, yes. Duty, perhaps. But responsibility? For what exactly? The point becomes clearer when we see the role that creation plays for Sartre even in an encounter with a reality that one cannot change. One accepts responsibility “not only by recognizing that one is without excuse, but also by

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wanting to be so.”64 Or as he says of Genet—citing Genet’s most famous line, “I decided to be what crime made of me”—“Since he cannot escape fatality, he will be his own fatality; since they have made life unlivable for him, he will live this impossibility of living as if he had created it expressly for himself, a particular ordeal reserved for him alone. He wills his destiny; he will try to love it.”65

C r e at i o n The reason this responsibility is not just a lie, a delusional moral soundtrack meant to drown out the shock of human finitude, is because Sartre is insisting that even in the case of an unchangeable circumstance, the individual is involved in a creative capacity with the reality she so dearly wishes to change. What does the authentic individual “invent” in treating, for example, the war in such a way? Sartre cannot reasonably argue that the conscript is responsible for the outbreak of war; nor can he claim the conscript is responsible for having been called into the fray. Certainly there is a sense in which this individual is responsible for his reaction to this call—in the manner Sartre initially discussed by reflecting on the alternatives among active protest, reluctant acceptance, flight, and patriotic acceptance—but to call this “invention” is to turn the criterion of authenticity again into a choice among objective alternatives, which is precisely what Sartre wanted to avoid. Authentic invention, if it is to mean anything at all, will have to be differentiated from stoic acceptance by the manner in which it is executed, not by the choice upon which it rests. When the conscript accepts his charge authentically, he accepts the situation as it is, along with his own role or choice of roles within that situation. He does not “invent” by selecting between the established functions of “soldier” or “draft-dodger,” nor even by selecting from the singular chain of rationalpretexts he assembles in arriving at that selection (fleeing in thinking of his poor mother, soldiering in thinking of his poor mother, soldiering despite thinking of his poor mother, etc.). In taking responsibility for the situation, what the individual invents is the desire—his own desire—to be a part of that situation. By “assuming” or “taking on” responsibility for the situation, “human reality is revealed to itself in an act of implicit understanding. It is revealed not inasmuch as it would be known by concepts but inasmuch as it is wanted.”66 Personal desire is the site of his creative, inventive act. Sartre reiterates this idea in the remarkable retrospective definition of his own childhood: “I was the bright object of a desire that was still unborn.”67 And again, in relation to Genet:

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The paradox of conversion is that it spreads over years and gathers together in an instant. He decided to be what he was, or, to put it otherwise, the matter was decided within him. He seizes upon the curse which goes back to the depths of his past, of his mother’s past, and which has continued to the very present, and he projects it before him: it will be his future. It was a constraint; he makes of it his mission. He saw it as the raw fact of a tainted heredity; it becomes a value, an imperative.68

When Sartre names this achievement a conversion to authenticity, he is not speaking in metaphorical terms. This, after all, is one of the most classic meanings of conversion throughout Christian literature: the achievement of a new desire. Augustine’s famous line, which succinctly encapsulates the charm he wielded over centuries of poets, rests on just this logic: “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”69 Augustine’s retroactive portrayal of his attitude before conversion is framed as wanting to want a Christian life but not yet being possessed by the desire itself. Like Augustine, moreover, Sartre does not apply the category of desire or will in the same way proactively as he does retroactively. This is evident from his own self-corrective at the start of the Carnets: “If I wish to seek out the specific moral attitude I should take facing this war, I risk constructing it from scratch and distorting my grasp of reality by prejudices. The first thing to do is not to want an attitude facing the war, but to observe and explicate the attitude that I am spontaneously taking in facing it.”70 The desire by which an individual invests in and binds herself to a situation is not the sort of thing one moves toward as one moves toward a target. Such a position would be better described as wanting to want. And the desire for the good (or the authentic), Sartre insists, is not actually as good (or authentic) as it is made out to be, because it turns the good (or the authentic) into a static virtue as opposed to what he wants it to be—a formation of libido: It is customary to consider that this desire for authenticity is “something, after all—better than nothing” . . . [But] a distinction will then be made between inauthentic beings wallowing in their authenticity, those whom an already meritorious desire torments in their mire and, lastly, those who enjoy the authentic. But this detour will bring us back to a morality of the virtues. It must be said, there are just two alternatives: either the desire for authenticity torments us in the midst of inauthenticity, and then it’s itself inauthentic; or else it’s already full authenticity. . . . There’s no room for a third estate.71

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The creative act of authenticity, of inventing the desire for what one is (and for the situation one is in), is the normative core of Sartre’s philosophy. It is a norm with a curious temporality. It is not applied to the initial position of uncreative inauthenticity but rather is unleashed as a possibility that appears to reflection as having been implicit in and intrinsic to that initial position itself (albeit without having been recognized as such). This is because Sartre sees creativity as a structure common to all human action, authentic or not: “All action is creation. Creation of the world, of myself, and of man. . . . Action is creative humanization of inhuman elements, thus appropriation by man of a sector of the world.”72 Or, as he writes some pages later in the Cahiers, “The very structure of the most conservative project is creation—for to conserve is to prolong in existence an institution or an object in conditions that are not easily compatible with the project, the institution, or the object.”73 If all action is creative, we might ask, how active can this sense of creation be? Indeed, Sartre will always insist on the inverse formulation as well: “All technical action is a decision about the human being himself. Man’s action is the creation of the world, but the creation of the world is the creation of man. Man is created by the intermediary of his action on the world.”74 This creative boomerang is not just the result of the fact that human beings are subject to the external world and determined by it from without; situatedness—the fact of never being “oneself ” in the abstract but always being “oneself ” in a determinate situation—is a feature of human being itself. “Even my body,” Sartre insists, “in the contingency of its motoricity, is a creator or at least it throws us into creation since it perpetually modifies our relation to the world that we have to unveil.” This unveiling is part of the work of authenticity, and what it shows is that “we are condemned to create and that at the same time we have to be this creation to which we are condemned.”75 Here we see repeated the logic of fidelity and defection that governed the discussions of personal transformation in both Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s work. Here, like there, we see the untidy marriage between the principle of explication and the principle of change. The authentic stance is one in which the individual takes stock of her condition; in this sense, it is explicative. But this taking stock is not reflective in the contemplative, detached sense. Reflection, Sartre insists, never has the innocence of contemplation. It is either “complicit” (read “defective”) or “purifying” (read “faithful”)76: “Reflection is itself a project: it is a project issuing from the non-reflective project, and a decision to suspend the project or to follow it through.”77 So the judging itself forms part of the condition it evaluates; and in this sense, it is transformative. What seemed like an uncreative response to the person feeling forced into the

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war was not inauthentic because it was not adequately inventive; it was inauthentic because it seemed like an uncreative response. What makes this line of argumentation so maddening, in other words, is also what makes it theoretically significant. Sartre is applying an ideal of authenticity to a being that has no essence. There is no “authentic self ” for Sartre because there is no self—or at least, not in the conventional sense of that term, in which it refers to something that can be isolated from its situation and from its engagement with that situation and viewed on its own: “It is not that one has to do what one is (the presence of the ‘I’) but to be what one does. It is necessary to compare the conduct that one wants to maintain with a certain self-image. But this image should be neither the I nor the psychic me. It should be the Ego insofar as it emerges from the work.”78 Here we strike upon the same ontology of the subject that Sartre will use in Réflexions to map the path of recovery away from anti-Semitism. What is required is that one abandon a view of Jews as having “inner qualities” in favor of a view that holds them to be “entreprises.”79 Racism is to be countered neither by assimilation on the part of the Jews nor by greater tolerance or understanding on the part of the Christians (Sartre alternates interestingly between calling the non-Jews of France on whom he focuses “the French” and “the Christians”) but by a critique of the metaphysics of the subject. No matter what the anti-Semite’s Jew does, it is his Jewishness and not his deed that defines him. Under this analysis, the anti-Semite comes to embody the antithesis of the Sartrean theory of the subject: “The anti-Semite can conceive only of a type of primitive ownership of land based on a veritable magical rapport, in which the thing possessed and its possessor are united by a bond of mystical participation; he is the poet of landed property.”80 When Sartre describes human consciousness as characterized by “transcendence,” he means that consciousness is never defined on its “own,” in isolation from the world. This early lesson from Husserl—that consciousness is always relational, always a consciousness of something or someone—is one he never forgot.81 To be conscious is to be in a relation of consciousness with something—this sentence, for example. But to be making sense of this sentence is to be engaged with much more than that at an implicit level—it is to be making sense of a larger argument, working from a set of background questions, engaged with an entire body of literature and its ongoing interpretation. It is also not to be engaged, at least temporarily, with the sound of construction work going on outside one’s window and the environmental impact of the light one is using to read—or rather it is to be disengaged with those things. Such a prioritization of engagements, in turn, reflects a set of global choices about the kind

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of life one is pursuing and the values that will determine it. But try to focus on those global values themselves, in the abstract, and you will likely end up choosing not between intellectual curiosity and environmental consciousness but between this book and this amount of electricity. Consciousness, on this view, is considered a “moving ensemble” that can be analyzed only in snapshots, each of which contains a unique chiaroscuro of explicit and implicit concerns.82 Sartre is not denying that there are values that apply to specific objective choices viewed in isolation from their place in this larger tissue. In daily life, many value-words only operate on one or two of these levels at a time. We describe gifts made in all sorts of contexts and bearing many different types of opportunity costs as charitable. One can demonstrate bravery in one social performance because one is morally repelled by the alternative course of action or in another because one is driven to imitate a heroic exemplar. At the same time, when we scrutinize the diversity of applications of such normative terms, a kind of implicit demand for purity often creeps into the picture under the guise of healthy suspicion. Can the same gesture really be both narcissistic and generous? Is the act really brave when it provides a way out of some other, perhaps more challenging, situation? Concrete virtues rarely insulate themselves from this sort of scrutiny. But while a demand for consistency (sometimes understood as purity) tends to hang on as a form of doubt or skepticism in ordinary life, it rarely settles into a clear moral principle. Some ethical thinkers have tried to rationalize the psychological complexity of virtue by tying “the good” to a very rigorous standard of dispositional purity. For Kant, a good deed carried out for reasons other than one’s sense of absolute duty to the good would not, in fact, be morally good, no matter its outcome and no matter how benign or even generous those other reasons may appear to be. For Jonathan Edwards, the most virtuous act, if directed toward some end other than benevolence to “being in general”—including benevolence to some beings or many beings—is not “truly” virtuous. Sartre, for all his impatience with Protestant moralism, stands squarely in the line of these Protestant moral thinkers. What he drops—an abstract and absolute criterion of universality, one that traverses all conditions and situations—he replaces with an inverse principle: every action is situated and every situation is singular.83 Given the fact that it can never be determined objectively and even subjectively exists only as a response to singular and everchanging historical situations, authenticity should be of questionable value to moral theory. Moral authority, for one who seeks to act authentically, does not come from abstract reason. It does not come from law or traditional practice. It

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does not come from “strength” or “instinct” or any material-biological valueideal. It does not even come from personal preference, since the preferring subject to whom such authority could be referred does not exist for Sartre. All moral authority is referred to “the situation.” For Sartre, the “situation” that holds so much value refers not to a confluence of entities and events, seen from without, but to the historically, corporeally, culturally, geographically determined horizon in which an individual finds herself at a particular moment of time. Authenticity stands, for Sartre, as a virtue capable of integrating the demand for purity or reflective consistency in one’s disposition with a full and unflinching assent to the finite and situational character of all human action. Sartre achieves this unholy alliance by turning situatedness itself into a kind of purity test. Authenticity is to “live one’s condition all the way down,” for the French Jew as well as for the handicapped athlete.84 If modern French Christians are “for the most part inauthentic” in comparison with their Jewish counterparts, it is because the situated character of their being, the historicalcultural circumstance from which their identity is formed, is not so inescapably thrust onto their consciousness.85 If this were Kierkegaard, the relative “assist” provided by the situation would be lamented to the precise extent that it made the work of authenticity less intensive, more inevitable. It was Kierkegaard, after all, who once argued that Christians who were born at a wide historical remove from the time of Christ’s life have a bizarre advantage, because faith is made harder (and hence more spiritual) when it is not mixed with reasoning from experiential evidence. But for Sartre, this form of asceticism can just as easily lead away from authenticity as toward it, since it has a tendency to turn “effort” itself into an abstract ideal overriding more variable situational cues and conditions. The task is rather to assume one’s situation, in all its unruliness and its unfinished character, through an act of “lucid and veridical consciousness.”86 In a sense, Sartre’s ideal of authenticity, like that of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, has roots in a value-added model of property. He agrees with the old idea that ownership—which means both to profit from the possibilities a thing opens up and to be answerable to other human beings for what develops from those possibilities—is possible only on the basis of a creative relation to what one owns. But no individual created herself in the sense in which we traditionally use that term—with the creator as a being preceding creation, determining its meaning—so responsibility grows from what that individual is in fact in the position to create. The sick athlete, incapacitated by his illness, did not produce the reality in which he finds himself. His sickness is “a condition within which man is once more free and without excuse.” But this

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is not the full story, for “what is not of him (ouk ek humin) is the abrupt suppression of possibilities. What is of him is the immediate invention of a new project by means of this abrupt suppression.”87 It is sincerity, Sartre reminds us, that “had to do with what I am. Authenticity has to do with what I want.” In opposition to the “wanting to want” discussed earlier, “authentic and pure reflection is to want what I want.”88 Corporal Paul’s claim to be a “civilian in military disguise” denies responsibility for the movement of his own desire that every day brings his arms to carry the rifle and his legs to march.89 This latter phrasing is designed to target just the complexity of desire discussed before, in which, for example, a generous act in one arena compensates psychically for a miserly one somewhere else. Sartre often calls authenticity a form of “purifying reflection.” If authenticity is purifying, this cannot be because it demands that the generous be squared with the miserly, for better or worse. That would be to impose a static image of one’s character upon the “moving ensemble” of perpetual questioning, by which one’s engagements and their underlying conditions come into focus, and perpetual surpassing, by which that act of questioning, which is itself an engagement, creates a new point of departure for reflection.90 But this is precisely why authenticity is not a disposition or propensity that can be relied upon passively. Although Sartre admits in the Carnets that “it’s less difficult to preserve authenticity than to acquire it,” he quickly qualifies this statement and questions his own use of the term “preserve”: “In fact, can one even talk about ‘preserving’? The instant that it arrives is novel, the situation is novel: a new authenticity has to be invented.”91 There can be no profiting from “acquired momentum.”92

Waste As you may recall, Sartre distinguished his own theory of authenticity from Gide’s moral project on the grounds that whereas Gide was after purity, which he located in the subjective fervor of “feelings and will” unsullied by “calculation,” Sartre held that authenticity could only be understood in terms of the condition that one is ever “thrown into situation.”93 So what does Sartre mean by “purification”? Authenticity is a possibility, even for the wretched Paul, but “not at all because authenticity is original value, superior to inauthenticity.” It works, Sartre continues, “rather as one corrects a clumsy, ineffective effort by purifying it of all useless, parasitic actions. Thus authenticity  .  .  . suppresses that which, in the search, is flight.”94 To purify, following this passage, is to eradicate the useless, to rid an action of parasites. What we begin to see in this passage, and what will become still clearer as we assemble a few

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related discussions, is that Sartre ties the “purifying” work of authenticity to an avoidance of some kind of waste. By saying “some kind of waste,” I have appealed to a fairly vague concept in response to the question about authenticity. This is because the level at which the idea of waste exerts influence on Sartre’s thought is not a conscious or explicit level. Sartre does not appear to be aware of the fact that a part of the driving force behind the pursuit of authenticity appears, from his own characterizations of it, to be a concern about existential entropy, about energy being poured out into the world with no constructive, self-reflexive element. One of the earliest passages that hint at this principle of waste comes in a rather confessional discussion of the meaning of “life”: Whatever I may have thought at different times about my life—now embellishing its future with romantic colours, now picturing it in a black light—I was, for all that, provided from earliest childhood with a life. Nor have I ceased to be. A life: in other words, a tapestry-frame to be filled, with (already) a throng of rough tacked outlines still needing to be embroidered. . . . To me, an instant did not appear like some vague unit aggregated to other units of the same kind; it was a moment that rose against a background of life . . . . My life, it was an undertaking. But an undertaking favored by the gods. The only risk I ran—through light-mindedness, passion or idleness— was of being diverted from it; of lingering too long here or there in some ill-omened delight. It would be my own fault if I missed my life.95

The tone of this retrospective is a lightly mocking self-criticism. The idea of a “life” preframed en bloc is a common enough juvenile notion, one that leaves no meaningful trace in Sartre’s mature thought, in which concrete actions and concrete situations reign supreme. But in describing this “life” as a target that Sartre risked missing—in fact, in describing his only creative contribution to this life as his shouldering of the risk to miss or not miss it—Sartre formulates a way of thinking about experience that runs through his entire philosophy. Even in this passage, in fact, it is less the category of life itself that interests Sartre than that the fact that he can define life as the risk of wasted opportunity. He is careful to distinguish the term as having “nothing in common with the popular, biological concept of life, in which the ideas of consciousness, lived experience and fate are strangely intermingled.”96 Indeed, one might add, this idea has next to nothing in common with any popular concept of life, and the reason for this is that it was not really a theory of life but the placeholder for a kind of moral thinking that Sartre had yet to invent.

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One way we can get closer to this idea is by attending to the concept of personal progress threaded throughout Sartre’s writings. It has long been clear to Sartre’s readers that a notion of salvation (“salut”) has a considerable purchase on his thinking.97 But as with much of the religious language he uses, Sartre’s atheism can often tempt us to view this language as “rhetoric” or “metaphor.” Even if this were so, it would in no way mean that his interest in religion was superficial. But philosophers tend to have a hard time understanding how to make sense of religion if it is not delivered in proposition-like doses, and this difficulty is only compounded when rhetoric—philosophy’s oldest nemesis—is added to the mix. By looking more closely at Sartre’s idea of progress, we will have the opportunity to get closer to understanding his concept of salvation. Consider again the passage cited above about the distinction between “accepting” and “assuming” what happens to one: To assume, he reminds us, is possible “when one has understood that nothing can happen to you except through you yourself,” and then it is “to take it up exactly as if one had given it to oneself by decree and, accepting this responsibility, to turn it into the occasion of new progress as if it was for this reason that one had given it oneself.”98 Assumption, in other words, converts the contradiction (I did not create my situation, but nothing can happen to me except through myself ) into a counterfactual (by treating the situation as if I had given it to myself, it becomes something other than pure constraint). Earlier we focused on the first part of this quote, on the way Sartre grounds authenticity in the crevasse of freedom (or complicity) that an individual enjoys with all that happens to him. We looked especially at how Sartre interprets this complicity as the individual’s creative responsibility—the transition from “to me” to “through me” to “I decreed that it should be this way”—vis-à-vis the events of his life. But we are now in a position to think through the second part of this definition. Creative power in experience is not valued, following this formulation, simply because it makes me feel freer when I focus on the meager choice I did have in facing my conscription; it is valued because Sartre thinks that the creation of new objective possibilities—not just those from the crevasses of world history of which I have constantly to remind myself in a kind of ongoing autonarrative—is dependent on my conversion from treating an event as externally decided to treating it as the condition, the pretext of present and future action. To accept responsibility for my conscription by treating it as if I had sent down the order myself works, for Sartre, to the precise extent that I can act as though I had sent that order in order that it become the condition of my moral development.

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There is something familiar and folksy about much of this discussion. It resembles a sort of conventional logic of forgiveness, but applied on a cosmic scale. Don’t hold a grudge against history or nature, Sartre seems to be telling us; direct your efforts toward something you can actually change (however surprising his thesis may be about what it is that lies within an individual’s power) and move on. But this is a potentially misleading association because it transplants an argument with disputable norms to a territory in which reflection on norms seems conveniently subjugated to the interest of a benign helpfulness that stands to benefit all. It is likewise easy to forget that the phrase with which every high-school athlete will now be familiar—“what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”—was first formulated by Nietzsche, where it is not a heuristic to help people withstand adversity but a maxim ensconced in a metaphysical valuation of strength and weakness. I am not adding anything to Sartre’s definition by supplying this example. He makes the same connection himself: “Although I repeat and believe sometimes that war overwhelms those who make it, I can’t stop myself from considering it as a source of experience, hence for me of progress.”99 This is part of the “optimism” that he notices at the opening of the Carnets but never really succeeds in shedding. Just a few pages later, he describes the nature of the being-with-others available to the soldier or “l’homme de troupe”: “Everywhere the ground, the walls, the beds, the tables are properties, and everywhere the collectivity is present. Everywhere he feels himself seen, watched, listened to—with nonchalance, moreover—everywhere he is hassled in his solitude and this solitude is blocked from becoming a positive source of profit and invention. It remains simply a negative disorientation of which he cannot become clearly conscious.”100 Privation is only truly negative for Sartre insofar as it blocks the movement of transforming given situations into the occasion for self-invention. Military life at war, with its culture of emphasizing the present moment as something isolated from past life and future possibilities, is particularly susceptible to this sort of negativity. While for the “free man” the mountain cannot be made into something “other than that which I have the possibility of climbing,” for the military man “the mountain is a dead object, décor.”101 Décor here refers to the adiaphora. It is Sartre’s word for that which does not participate in the moral movement of spirit. The source of Sartre’s intensity on this subject appears to be his own sense of exigency. Consider another passage from the same notebook: A consequence of my pride: my constant concern with being moral (according to my principle) does not aim at raising myself up but on the con-

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trary at earning myself. In sum I have the obscure and profound certainty of having attained by nature to a degree of moral perfection that it is subsequently only a matter of earning, through my actions. Every new situation is a trap, a snare that could make me forfeit and in which I must show myself worthy of myself, just like the Castillian gentleman, endowed once and for all with his honor, has no other concern than to remain at the height to which he has been raised since his birth.102

While it is true that the “I” of this passage is more autobiographical than the philosophical “I” of the Cahiers, where Sartre writes repeatedly that “I create myself in acting” and indeed that “I am nothing other than my work,” it is remarkable how well the two agree.103 Life as an undertaking, for Sartre, means that life is a work.104 The only change Sartre will make to his early moral pride is to deflate the givenness of the “I” to be earned and turn it into the result rather than the presupposition of action. But the significance of this change is lesser than Sartre’s pseudoconfessional tone would have us believe. A “self ” that one has but that must be “earned” in each situation and can be “forfeited” in each situation is precisely the kind of “having” that Sartre’s radically temporalized notion of authenticity will later bring him to endorse. The most basic enemy of freedom, in Sartre’s view, is the idea that there is any meaning to the words “once and for all.”105 The idea of a fixed being or nature or value against which the individual—that “moving ensemble,” ever in situation, ever questioning that situation—can measure her conduct is, for Sartre, the reactionary logic common to religion, anti-Semitism, materialism, psychoanalysis, and traditional morality. Sartre builds his idea of the situation out of one of Heidegger’s tiniest but hardest-working words: “je” (“in each case”). In place of the “once and for all” common to all misguided attempts to understand human existence, Sartre’s philosophy unfolds in the temporality of the “at each instant” (“à chaque instant”): “Morality: permanent conversion. In Trotsky’s sense: permanent revolution. Good habits: they are never good, because they are habits.”106 The Heideggerian mark on this import is most detectable when Sartre is speaking about death: “Death plays us if we do not take our precautions against it. This precaution consists in determining ourselves in each instant, such that if our life stopped there, it nonetheless constitutes a totality with an end. At issue here, obviously, is an existential determination.”107 And again, some pages later: “It is true that we are dying at each instant but this perpetual event of our life is masked—or more precisely, it is virtual. We can only realize our death by an existential modification, which is truly a being-to-die

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[être-pour-mourir].”108 This is not a first-rate interpretation of Heidegger, nor the best of Sartre’s attempts to formulate the existential significance of death. What it is, however, is a revealing account of how Sartre’s early reading of Heidegger draws authenticity into a far more soteriological context than it ever enjoyed in Being and Time. Here the continual conversion of authenticity, envisaged as an act of repeated self-determination, is posed as a way to avoid being “played” by death.109 Each instant is an opportunity seized or wasted in the great and lifelong task of self-creation. The model of creation with which Sartre is working here, recall, requires not that one make oneself into something—that is, into any particular thing—but that one consecrate all the resources at one’s disposal to the making. It is easy to see why Sartre remained anxious (long after it would have occurred to anyone to describe him as a “stoic”) to differentiate this ethic from resignation—resignation as a sophisticated and infinitely laborious métier, but resignation nonetheless. Wherever he encounters someone who adopts such an attitude, Sartre’s critique is as swift as it is keen: “For him man’s grandeur lies in his being unsatisfied. In the first case, one relentlessly wills a disaster that one assumes to be inevitable so that man’s death may be identified with the triumph of his will.”110 Authentic conversion means choosing even what cannot be changed or undone, to invent the desire for that condition—to “be” what one “does” and not the other way around.111 But the telos of one’s invention is not the situation as an end in itself or even the inescapability of the situation as an end in itself. The “grandeur” involved in accepting the inevitable is incomplete; “one must only assume one’s destiny in order to change it.”112 Sartre will often describe the conversion of authenticity as a consecrating act: “Existential vertigo: the project appears to reflection in its absolute gratuity. But as reflection wants it, it is regained. . . . It is this simultaneous, double aspect of the human project, gratuitous at heart and consecrated by reflexive recovery, that makes existence authentic.”113 He will go as far as to describe the alienation of the slave as a “consecration” of his own impotence by turning it from a fact given to him by the violence of others into a choice (i.e., over death).114 And in relation to Genet, whose life forms the best example of authenticity Sartre’s gaze ever crossed, Sartre will use this formula readily: “He stole because he ‘was’ a thief; he now steals in order to be a thief. From this point on, to steal means to him to consecrate his thief ’s nature through the sovereign approbation of his freedom.”115

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Mission and Religion What we are witnessing here, as authenticity is defined as the practice of continual conversion of facts into values, is the transformation of the spiritual exercise into a task for training the will. In putting pressure on the question of wanting what one already is and does, either Sartre’s conversion must be trivial or there is something unobvious about what one already is and does. And indeed, in place of the sorts of questions more familiar to ethical philosophy about the nature of the good and how it is realized, one often finds Sartre’s moral thought caught up with the problem of establishing the facts: What am I actually doing? What, in fact, is my project? It is because this reflection is aimed at the highest value of Sartrean philosophy—being the basis for one’s own action—that it has a “consecrating” function. Particularly in the Cahiers, Sartre makes clear that the ethic of authenticity appears in a historical context in which the unreality of God is seen as a lack. The conversion of authenticity is, one might say, itself envisaged as a kind of deconversion.116 This deconversion no more resembles the sudden, lightning-bolt paradigm than does Kierkegaard’s model of conversion to Christianity. One of Sartre’s most-cited remarks about religion comes from the end of his partial autobiography, written in 1963, which, after recounting a youth spent longing for birth and rebirth,117 positions him as a struggling disbeliever: “Atheism is a cruel and long-range affair: I think I’ve carried it through. I see clearly, I’ve lost my illusions, I know what my real jobs are. . . . For the last ten years or so I’ve been a man who’s been waking up, cured of a long, bitter-sweet madness.”118 The idea of a dead, missing God as a historical horizon pervades Sartre’s writings about authenticity. For Sartre, atheism is not the lack of a belief in God or the belief in no god but the lifelong struggle for coherent moral ideas in the situation of unbelief. This struggle is modern man’s “infinite mission”: The presupposition of realism is that God exists and sees. But if God disappears, the things seen disappear along with him. . . . Man finds himself the heir of the mission of the dead God: to draw Being from its perpetual collapse into the absolute indistinctness of the night. An infinite mission . . . consequently to see is to pull Being back from collapsing. And as soon as it is revealed, Being springs into this unveiling with all the reaffirmation of its Being. Perception is the upsurge of Being, the fixed, dizzying explosion of Being into the “there is.”119

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This is Sartre’s elliptical account of the significance of philosophy. In his own work, its clearest signs appear where Sartre addresses his own role as a thinker and, particularly, as a writer. In the Carnets, he comes again and again to the question of why he is writing and what this writing achieves. Particularly in its retrospective moments, there are striking parallels with the description of the mission above. Looking back at his earliest moral constructions, Sartre reflects on the central role of perception: “Perception, carried out ceremonially and respectfully, became a holy act: communication between two absolute substances, the thing and my soul.”120 And this holy act found its ceremonious counterpart in the work of language itself: “The invention of images was, fundamentally, a moral, sacred ceremony: it was the appropriation of that absolute, the thing, by that other absolute, myself.”121 If it should seem strange that Sartre would in the Cahiers of the late 1940s come to assert philosophically an idea he confessed in the Carnets nearly a decade earlier as a moral theory already belonging to his past, then note that it is not the pursuit of sacred ceremonies that Sartre repents here but the realism behind his theory of consciousness. Once he “discovers existence” via the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, the idea that perception entails the interaction of two absolutes is replaced by an intentional theory of consciousness. Instead of “an act of conquest and possession” that “subjugat[es] the world to myself alone,”122 the theorizing function of consciousness describes the relationship of a being that, in “ex-sisting,” is always already engaged with possibilities and people and things beyond itself. Indeed, by the end of the Carnets, Sartre is claiming this drive in the present tense and more hyperbolically than ever: “My ambition is myself alone to know the world. . . . And, for me, knowledge has a magical sense of appropriation. To know is to appropriate. Exactly as, for the primitive, to know a man’s secret name is to appropriate that man and reduce him to slavery. This possession consists, essentially, in capturing the world’s meaning by sentences.”123 But this is just another version of Sartre’s definition of authenticity: “The desire to acquire authenticity, ultimately, is only a desire to see things more clearly and not lose it.”124 And “if it is true,” authenticity is always forced to adapt itself to changing situations, “to conquer new territory.” Authenticity “first presents itself in the form of a desire to revise old situations in the light of this change. It first gives itself as anxiety and critical desire.”125 Sartre offers no better example of an attempt to achieve this ideal than his war notebooks themselves. There is something appalling about these notebooks, about the brutality of Sartre’s hunt. He is not trying to find “himself ” as much as trying to describe

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himself in such painstaking detail that he progressively and performatively rids himself of the illusion that there is a self to find. After a comic and savage account of his comrade Pieter’s habit of sitting down—“just like a child wanting everyone to notice how silent he’s being,” “one can sense how he’s setting himself up in judgment, and giving himself a congratulatory acquittal, for the discreetly successful way in which he has taken the chair,” which he cannot prevent himself from doing “for us, even though we’re absorbed in our reading or writing”126—Sartre admits, “It’s precisely this I’d like to succeed in catching and describing in myself: the style of my actions, as it may appear to someone who has frayed nerves and whom I’ve been irritating for the past three months. I’m afraid it may be impossible, but I’ll try.”127 But just as soon as we think he could not have expressed more perfectly the impact and impression these notebooks have made on their reader, he cuts this understanding off at the knees. It too becomes a gesture to be analyzed: “This morning, when I wrote in this notebook that I’d like to catch the style of my movements, I reminded myself of some maniac for analysis of the Amiel type.”128 It is significant that Sartre chooses Amiel as a comparison here. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, a Swiss Huguenot moralist and author of the posthumously published Journal Intime, had recently been the subject of a debate in the Nouvelle Revue Française. His diary is an unparalleled concoction of liberal Protestantism and Hegelian mysticism. It is filled with passages such as the following: Consider yourself a refractory pupil for whom you are responsible as mentor and tutor. To sanctify sinful nature, by bringing it gradually under the control of the angel within us, by the help of a holy God, is really the whole of Christian pedagogy and of religious morals. Our work—my work— consists in taming, subduing, evangelizing and angelizing the evil self; and in restoring harmony with the good self. Salvation lies in abandoning the evil self in principle and in taking refuge with the other, the divine self, in accepting with courage and prayer the task of living with one’s own demon, and making it into a less and less rebellious instrument of good. The Abel in us must labor for the salvation of the Cain. To undertake it is to be converted, and this conversion must be repeated day by day.129

I am suggesting that the mention of Amiel is not random because it is often in the very moments in which Sartre interrogates the purpose of his own journalistic enterprise that the question of religion comes obliquely to the surface. It is an oblique appearance because Sartre’s habitual gesture, as soon

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as he focuses on his own attempts to come to terms with himself in writing, is to allude to a diarist whom he considers to be a Protestant for the purpose of distancing himself from that genre. Amiel was the example above, but Gide’s Protestantism—from whom Sartre likely read about Amiel in the first place—is the rhetorical collateral that Sartre generally uses to bargain for his own irreligion in the Carnets. Gide’s journals, as we saw early on in this chapter, served as an important impetus and model for Sartre’s Carnets. But before long, Sartre begins to sense a certain spirit at work in Gide’s writing that troubles him. He identifies this as the “religious framework” of the journal, which he starts to see as a “Protestant examination of conscience” that bears a “sacred character”130 insofar as Gide writes as an actor: the journal is an “act of prayer, an act of confession, an act of meditation.”131 Quickly Sartre presses to articulate the difference between his journal and Gide’s. Sartre’s is not an “act” in this sense, he insists; he is simply trying to “record” (enregistrer) his thoughts.132 And if he, like Gide, has the habit of not only recording but also using this technology to “put himself into question,” he does not do so, so he claims, “in moaning and in humility, but coldly and in order to make progress.” A more fitting comparison, he continues, would be to the ceremonies of those “primitifs” designed “to help the living die, to help the soul disengage from the body. My ‘confessional’ notes have the same goal: to help my present being flow into the past, to sink into it a bit, of necessity. There is a bit of illusion in this, since it does not suffice to denounce a psychological constant in order to modify it. But at least this indicates the lines of a possible change.”133 Over the course of this dense, page-long discussion, Sartre invokes Gide’s “religiousness” to highlight the difference between their journals. When he specifies the nature of this religion as a pietistic concern for personal reform, he cites his own aim of pure “enregistrement” as an apparently clear counterexample. His “recordings,” he insists after this bizarre bifurcation, are not “acts.” But then, realizing immediately that he must be recording these thoughts to some end, that his journal is not an untethered set of observations or an experiment in automatic writing, he surreptitiously shifts the terms of the religious–irreligious binary: Now the crucial distinction is between religious confession as humbling and self-chastising and nonreligious confession as serving the goal of a future change in behavior. It is not difficult to stitch together the two ends of this “logic”: Sartre is arguing that his own journal is not religious because, unlike Gide’s, it is record and not an act, but insofar as it is an act, it is not a confession, but insofar as it is a confession, it is not a religious confession—because it seeks not humility but rather progress. In other words,

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Sartre’s journal, in his mind, is not religious because it is aimed at making personal progress! Sartre has not backed himself accidentally into this corner; the notion of progress is echoed throughout the notebooks. At one point he declares, “I in no way believe in the progress of mankind or its culture . . . but in my individual progress, quite. It would be intolerable to me to think that I am less intelligent, less courageous, etc., than I was before and, each time I was left to understand thus, it was a wound and a slight disorder.”134 Sartre’s own fascinatingly confused concept of religion is the subject for a separate essay. Like the fallen, sinful character of existence for the Christian convert, religion is for Sartre simultaneously the pretext of his writing and that which his writing seeks to destroy. At the end of the third diary, Sartre spends several pages outlining the “conversion” of authenticity as an inexhaustible moral task, as the task of a life, in which one faces up to the true nature of human reality through relentless spiritual exercise. The conversion to authenticity—which, as we saw above, is not merely like a deconversion from Christianity but is conceived as a turn away from ideas fundamental to the tradition of Christian metaphysics—demands an ever-renewed responsibility for one’s acts and one’s situation. But then, recognizing the fact that the “obligation to shoulder what happens to me” presents a rather “intolerable” demand to the individual, he muses that “this, no doubt, is what gave birth to the religious notion of trial sent me by Heaven.”135 Sartre’s “inherited mission,” his formulation of responsibility as a lifelong (de)conversion, is here postulated as the historical condition of possibility for the Christian idea of life as a spiritual trial—that is, the historical idea from which Sartre’s own formulation is actually derived. And like so many of the reborn, Sartre is quite interested in invoking his prior attachment—however “faithless” and “cultural” it may have been—to religion in order to demonstrate how far in his atheism he has come. In fact, one of the most common contexts in which Sartre will address religion in personal writings is to ascribe it to his own childhood. This is the genre of religion qua biographical artifact. In The Words, he speaks retrospectively about his “vocation,” his “quest for the absolute” and his attraction to the warrior-martyr as the follies of his youth. All this found extreme expression in his chosen career as a writer: I too would keep the race alive, at the edge of the abyss, by my mystic offering, by my work. The soldier quietly gave way to the priest: I a tragic Parsifal, was offering myself up as an expiatory victim. . . . It all looked so simple: to write is to add a pearl to the Muses’ necklace, to leave to poster-

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ity the memory of a model life, to defend the people against itself and its enemies, to bring down upon men, by means of a solemn Mass, the blessing of heaven. It did not occur to me that one could write in order to be read.136

The young Sartre (he writes of himself in the third person) “had retained the Divine and invested it in Culture.”137 One of the most striking things about such passages is the way they turn Sartre’s religious “past” into the platform for a kind of self-mockery, a metaphor of naïveté. He confesses constantly, but never without irony, and the confession itself always serves the future rather than the past. It co-opts the past and transforms it into an occasion for selfreinvention. The religious misunderstanding feeds his desire for a childhood of metaphysical proportions. Before he was a seeing man, and now he is blind.

R evo lu t i o n In all this discussion of Sartre’s ideal of authenticity, I have focused on his asceticism as a mostly subthematic strategy that spreads across his writing. There are surely those who will find this account incomplete and possibly unconvincing. I have tried to articulate as best I can the contours of a program that emerges most clearly in Sartre’s posthumously published writings— which in addition to being only more recently available and less systematic than many of his published philosophical writings are also his most sustained and developed examinations of authenticity. One reason it may fail to convince is the degree to which the image of Sartre I have been presenting is not an image Sartre is likely to have held of himself and, indeed, is not even really an idea of himself with which he engages systematically. But to those worried about such a tension, I would put the questions that haunted Sartre’s philosophy from start to finish—Why should someone be authentic? What kind of a good is authenticity, if it is a good at all? Bad faith— one title for authenticity’s alternative within the world of Sartre’s thought— was named in order to sound bad. But we can likewise ask, what kind of a bad is it? To describe bad faith as bad—as hiding from oneself, fleeing, deceiving, and so on—is reasonable only on the understanding that goodness, and not hiding and fleeing, and honesty are all things we have already agreed are valuable. But this is precisely the sort of preemptive value judgment Sartre wants to use authenticity against. Authenticity is not just a value; it is a critique of values. Like Heidegger, Sartre sees inauthenticity and flight as fundamental aspects of human reality. Also like Heidegger, therefore, Sartre cannot straightforwardly claim that authenticity is a kind of abstract virtue. At

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the same time, Sartre will distance himself fully from Heidegger’s position in insisting that authenticity can be the basis for a humanistic ethics. This insistence has long puzzled scholars of Heidegger, who tend to take Sartre’s view as a “misunderstanding” of the purely existential significance of authenticity. Rather than get embroiled in the battle over the systematicity and coherence of this idea, I have tried to take Sartre at his word that inauthenticity is both an ontological feature of human reality and a moral concept. It is for this reason that the question about why one ought to seek authenticity has led me to consider the kind of need or desire to which the idea of authenticity promised itself, to Sartre, as a response. It has led me, in other words, to consider a prephilosophical image of existence that Sartre sometimes confronts but most often avoids articulating. This is by no means to suggest, however, that Sartre did not confront the question itself. In fact, it circles his writing in strikingly explicit ways. At the very start of the third notebook, he writes, citing a remark by Beauvoir, “This is where the Beaver’s question is most pertinent: ‘If inauthenticity is consistent, though, what proves it is any less valid than authenticity?’ ”138 Throughout the remaining four hundred pages of extant notebooks, Sartre does not offer a single answer to this question. In fact, if we had only the Carnets and Being and Nothingness to go on, it would be unclear whether Sartre continued to think about this question at all. It will take until the Cahiers pour un morale, written nearly ten years after the Carnets begin, for Sartre to return to the question in a serious way. And when he does so, the problem of religion leaps straight into the foreground. The opening paragraph of the Cahiers achieves an extraordinarily acute sketch of the problem: So long as one believes in God one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral. Morality becomes a certain mode of ontological being, even something metaphysical in that we have to attain it. And since it is a question of being moral in God’s eyes, in order to praise him, to aid him in his creation, the subordination of doing to being is legitimate. For in practicing charity we serve only human beings, whereas in being charitable we serve God. . . . From this comes what I call the ontological individualism of the Christian. He thrives and embellishes himself, he becomes a beautiful, spacious, and well-furnished house, the house of God. It is legitimate to be the most beautiful of all, the best possible. The egoism of the saint is sanctioned. But when God dies and the saint is no more than an egoist, then what difference does it make that he has a beautiful soul, that he is beauti-

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ful, if only to himself ? At this moment, the maxim “act ethically in order to be moral” becomes poisoned. The same thing applies to “act ethically in order to act ethically.” Morality has to transcend itself toward an end that is not itself. Give someone who is thirsty something to drink not in order to give him something or in order to be good but in order to overcome his thirst. Morality suppresses itself in positing itself, it posits itself in suppressing itself. It must be a choice of world, not of a self.139

Here Sartre touches on the familiar trope of what happens once God ceases to act as the source of moral values. But this passage also touches on a more unusual aspect of this problem: the idea of a watchful and just God also served as a way of valuing performance over outcome, habits of behavior over their individual and concrete consequences. A moral pragmatist might not be terribly concerned about the secular saint’s lack of consistency. As long as the drink is given to the thirsty, what difference does it make if this act was born out of a desire to remake oneself as charitable versus a desire to live in a world in which charity is given where needed? As long as the first goes on being charitable, why insist on differentiating between these two? But for an existentialist with as many Kantian tendencies as Sartre in his moral thinking, this lack of consistency is a constant disturbance. The problem of ends shows up again, haunting Sartre’s analysis of the diabolical will of Jean Genet. Here Sartre insists that the act that seeks not just to do something but also to achieve a form of being as its end is in fact not an act but a “gesture”: An act which one performs in order to be is no longer an act, it is a gesture. . . . But Genet does Evil in order to be evil. Evil is therefore not the unconditional end of his undertakings, it is the means which he has chosen of being presented to his “nature.” . . . At times he changes himself into a pure and unconditionally evil will—he then does Evil-for Evil’s sake, in all sovereignty, in all gratuitousness—and at times the presence within him of his ontological obsession taints his will to Evil, degrades it, transforms it into pure play acting and changes his acts into gestures. Like the mad needle of a compass, he oscillates perpetually from act to gesture, from doing to being, from freedom to nature, without ever stopping.140

The Cahiers will go on to argue that the act ultimately being carried out by the one who develops herself authentically is an act of a social revolution. “One

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cannot undertake conversion alone,” he writes in the first few pages. “Otherwise put, morality is only possible if the entire world is moral.”141 But if this makes it sound impossible, notice how ready Sartre is to reverse the relation of dependence: “Historical revolution depends on moral conversion. Utopia lies in the fact that the conversion of all at the same time, always possible, is the least probable combination (owing to the diversity of situations).”142 All action is creation for Sartre, discussed above,143 and yet at the same time, authenticity differs from its old foe of stoic acceptance because it only “assumes” its situation in order to transform that situation: “I cannot divest myself of my situation as bourgeois, as Jew, etc., except in assuming it in order to change it.”144 Likewise, Sartre continues a few lines below, extending this seeming paradox into a chiasmus, “I do not conserve what I am except by the movement in which I invent what I am going to be, I do not surpass what I am except in conserving it. I have perpetually to give myself the given, that is, to take my responsibilities in relation to it.”145 Returning to his example of the authentic invalid who has to want his illness, Sartre continues: “But for my living life of sickness, [sickness] is no more an excuse, it is only a condition. Thus I am without rest: always transformed, sapped, exhausted, ruined from without and always free, always obligated to reprise on my account, to take responsibility for that which I am not responsible. Totally determined and totally free. Obliged to assume this determinism in order to set beyond it the goals of my freedom, to make of this determinism yet another engagement.”146 Sartre has tried to disengage act from gesture in his own account of authenticity, to insulate the performance of authenticity from the “egoism” of the secular saint by emphasizing its role in socialist revolution and in the liberation of the oppressed, but the teleological, performative element of this ideal always creeps back in. Note a passage near the end of the Cahiers in which action itself is tied back into the idea of efficacious performance: If God does not exist, we alone have to decide the meaning of being. But precisely because “making it that there should be of being” and “giving a meaning to being” are one and the same thing, it is not in contemplation that being will be revealed as endowed with meaning: it is in effort, in order that man should have a meaning, that is, in action. . . . To act is to posit that being has a meaning: through the instrumentality of action, being is revealed as endowed with meaning. If the action succeeds, the meaning is inscribed. And fundamentally one acts in order that being should have a meaning. This is the aim of all aims. To act and to succeed in one’s act

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would be to prove at once that being has a meaning and that man has a meaning. To act and fail is to prove that the meaning of being is to make human life impossible.

Sartre seeks to divert his own reconstruction of an ascetic life-formation under the terms of authenticity by turning it into the basis of a social morality. Even after making this diversion, he favors the term “conversion” to describe the movement of authenticity, because he is still concerned with distinguishing his moral philosophy from those that trade in abstract virtues and duties. What the term “conversion” captures, for Sartre, is the idea that authenticity stands for a responsibility to be ever renewed.

Chapter 5

Ascetics of Presence

In Christian theology, conversion is predicated on sin. Only the sinful have need of conversion. In his seminal study of conversion in late Greek and Roman antiquity, A. D. Nock postulated a distinction between “adhesion” and “conversion” in order to explain the unique sort of transformation that membership in the “prophetic” religious communities of Judaism and Christianity required. The prophet, for Nock, was first and foremost a critic: “a man who experiences a sudden and profound dissatisfaction with things as they are, is fired with a new idea, and launches out on a new path.”1 While shifting allegiance from one religious sect or form of worship to another was apparently a common feature of pre-Christian antiquity (and thus, we may infer, not a distinctive mark of the secular age of religious “optionality”), new practices were generally taken up as “useful supplements” rather than substitutes. Adhesion, as Nock terms such shifts in religious affiliation, “did not involve the taking of a new way of life in place of the old.”2 What the prophetic religions cultivated was a sense that initiation involves a choice. To convert in the sense of these new religions was not only to turn “toward a positive ideal” but to turn away from something, guided by dissatisfaction or a distinct sense of “present wrongness” (a term Nock borrows, tellingly, from William James).3 On this score, Christianity shared much with dogmatic philosophical schools such as the Pythagoreans and the Stoics, in which initiates underwent an attitudinal change (metanoia) that exposed past and present conduct to the light of a new ethical ideal.4 What distinguished Christian forms of initiation from their religious and philosophical counterparts, however, was the fact that Chris-

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tian preaching emphasized attitudinal change (metanoia)—which we tend to translate now as “repentance”—while simultaneously unhinging this change from the ethical cultivation that it would normally have invited and implied. Christianity socialized salvation precisely to the degree that it radicalized sin. Given what I have been arguing in this book about the influence of Christian theological ideals of conversion on existential ideals of authenticity, we ought to expect that some concept of “wrongness” might fill the role, in the philosophical picture, that sin plays in the Christian one. We have seen with both Heidegger and Sartre how the ascetic format of authenticity, when isolated from any clear theological and soteriological context, bears with considerable difficulty the question of whether and how authenticity can be described as a “good.” But we should still wonder what this difficulty means for assessing the absence of authenticity as a deficit (“bad”). To put the question another way, if existential authenticity has been molded on the pietistic basis of Christian conversion, what is the underlying condition that authenticity addresses? The intuitive reply to this question is that authenticity addresses inauthenticity just as repentance addresses sin. Inauthenticity is as presupposed by the idea of authenticity as sin is by the idea of repentance. Moreover, as Heidegger defines it, Uneigentlichkeit is considered the “default” (zunächst und zumeist) way in which I relate to my existence. When I am trying to get this pen to work, I am not reflecting on the contingent context of possibilities in which this pen is currently assigned meaning; when flirting with the attractive bartender, I am not thinking about the death this desire will eventually meet or the depth of isolation our words and gazes are trying to smother. Authentic self-explication is at every instant possible, but in the space of any given life, it will also be exceptional, since acting in full grasp of the a priori conditions of existence requires a good deal more of me than simply acting. As if to seal the association with sin, Heidegger will even term the pitch of existence—that is, the fact that one is continually tipped toward inauthentic self-understanding and its existentially opaque forms of conduct—the “falling” (Verfallen) of existence.5 With the notable exception of Adorno, the unfounded “goodness” of authenticity appears to have troubled comparatively few of Heidegger’s readers. Rather, it is far more often this intuitive association of inauthenticity with sin that has prompted several generations of scholars to try to disentangle the moral and the ontological language in Heidegger’s discourse of Eigentlichkeit. If inauthenticity can be shown through clear phenomenological argument to

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be morally neutral, the resemblance between inauthenticity and sin or “falling” and “the fall” will be philosophically irrelevant; it will be, at most, of interest to those biographers seeking to trace the peculiar path by which Heidegger happened to come to his idiosyncratic terminology. Sin is a word whose emotional “colors” tend to rush quickly toward the ear, often arriving ahead of its precise theoretical meaning. Before we know what it is we are talking about, the mere presence of the word “sin” in conversation is enough to generate a stream of overwhelmingly negative moral associations: “bad,” “wicked,” “depraved,” “weak.” On the scale of spiritual power, the sinner is even lower than the criminal, since the criminal is both subject to and a potential agent of the law he violates.6 The sinner, however, has no court of appeal and no chance of amendment. He will never relate to the law as an author. The sinner is impotent, but also guilty. Sin resonates with theological and secular audiences alike as a composite image of negative moral qualities. If this is what sin means, it is hardly any wonder that philosophers seeking to defend Heidegger’s category of authenticity in secular terms tend to find themselves searching for a tool to scrub the veneer of moral contempt from the discussion of everyday, inauthenticated existence (or searching for a less threatening, biographical alibi: his moody Weimar rhetoric, his provincialism, his Catholic upbringing). I will here present the case that there is more than rhetoric and biographical contingency to the relation between sin and existential authenticity. This additional dimension can be difficult to see when sin is considered as a moralreligious concept pointing first and foremost to the corruption of humanity, and authenticity is defined as the affirmation of existence in all its finite and contingent detail. In this sense, authenticity resonates with naturalist conceptions of existence such as those of Emerson or Ruskin. Existential thinkers after Kierkegaard do tend to reject the idea that there is something meaningfully “deficient” about human nature. But this is not because they are “naturalists.” In fact, they reject the idea of a natural deficiency by rejecting the idea of a nature itself. Husserl’s influential 1911 essay “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” defines naturalism as the primary target of contemporary philosophy and makes a passionate argument for phenomenology as a “radical critique of naturalistic philosophy.”7 And as Hans Jonas points out, “No philosophy has ever been less concerned about nature than Existentialism, for which it has no dignity left.”8 To be worried about whether or not human nature is being defined as essentially corrupt presupposes that human nature is being characterized qualitatively in respect of its essence. But this is just

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what Sartre’s famous maxim—“existence precedes essence”—was meant to undermine. To mistake existentialism for a naturalist philosophy is to forget that authenticity was conceived for the express purpose of materializing the distinction between being and wanting to be. It is to forget that the affirmative potential borne by the concept of authenticity runs in an ascetic loop. For if authentic existence is based not in the referentiality of a faithful reproduction (“in fact existing” or “existing as one ought to exist”) but in choosing to exist and grasping that choice as a choice that can never be fully grounded, the value added by existing “authentically” cannot be untied from the act of choosing and simply referred back to existence itself. In existentialism, it is not existence that bears value but the act of choice. This is the teleological circuit from which the Sartrean philosophy of authenticity never quite exits: laboring as the formal object of labor. There is indeed an existential analogue of sin. But sin’s analogue is not the “inauthentic” comportment considered by thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre to be a fundamental mode of encountering the world. Rather, as we will see, the idea of sin becomes the catalyst for a rethinking of the nature of existential temporality. To see how this is the case, we will need to bracket the intuitive idea of sin as a negative moral evaluation. Indeed, we will first need to bracket the idea that sin is first and foremost an evaluative concept at all. We will need to think about sin as an indication of something positive (i.e., concrete) about the human condition. The chief aim of this chapter is to show how, beginning with Kierkegaard and Heidegger, the idea of radical sin provides a framework for valuing rupture and discontinuity in existence and thereby suggests a new way of thinking about time. Sometimes described as “ecstatic,” sometimes as “differential,” this new, existential understanding of time had a major impact on twentieth-century thinking about the subject and about personal identity.9 It is here, in the rethinking of time as characterized by fundamental discontinuity, that existentialism waged its most theoretically effective war on “essences.” The word “essentialism,” now so familiar, emerged in the reception of existentialist thought and its critique of closure, particularly that of Sartre. But the nonessentialism of the existentialists depends on a different ontology of time, which takes rupture rather than continuity as its point of departure. And as I will try to show, the arguments—offered by the existentialists as well as by their heirs—that work against essentialism by undercutting the idea of a full, substantial “present” are the same arguments that create the theoretical conditions for a return of asceticism to the philosophical project.

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Sin as Positivity The existential interpretation of sin begins with Kierkegaard’s 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, which he published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. The book is set up as a psychologist’s examination of the Christian doctrine of hereditary sin, and it begins by posing the question of whether the dogma of hereditary sin is identical to “the concept of the first sin,” which of course refers to “Adam’s sin, the fall.”10 Heidegger mentioned The Concept of Anxiety with unusual esteem in the footnotes of Being and Time, where he described it as the most penetrating investigation of the phenomenon of anxiety as well as the most philosophical of Kierkegaard’s writings.11 This anecdotal appreciation actually masks Heidegger’s more considerable debt to the Danish author, since the psychological approach advanced in Kierkegaard’s book, seeing sin and guilt as the categories that “posit precisely the single individual as the single individual,” directly anticipates Heidegger’s theorization of existence as “factical” and “in each case mine.”12 Without the notion of sin, Kierkegaard’s text points out, the individual is charged with nothing; he has nothing—no matter, no surface area, no domain—over which to be responsible. It is this nothing that anxiety discloses, burrowing tacit unease into all the finite plans and projects of everyday life, which presuppose an agent but cannot serve as the explanatory basis for agency. Sin’s offensiveness is also its achievement: it creates responsibility out of nothing. Or putting it more precisely, sin theorizes the individual’s ability to treat the given—that of which she is not the author—as the materialization of a debt for which she is responsible. Formulating an asymmetrical relationship between power and responsibility, sin creates the possibility of the “own” that Eigentlichkeit actualizes. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym sets his sights on the cosmic myth, propagated “especially in Catholicism,” that sin as an a priori spiritual condition of mankind came into the world and was passed down over generations through one man’s sinful action.13 He first attacks this idea on logical grounds—how could one sinful act give rise to sinfulness as a state? How could that first act have been a sin, in fact, if the state of sinfulness did not already exist? The point of this lightly scholastic criticism is to make room for a new, psychological interpretation of the cosmic myth. In place of the metaphysical cosmology of sin, we are offered a theory of sin based on a notion of experiential presuppositions. The truth behind the idea in Genesis that “sin first came into the world by a sin” is simply the psychological fact that once sin has been posited, it presupposes itself:

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Sin presupposes itself [forudsætter sig selv] . . . sin comes into the world in such a way that by the fact that it is, it is presupposed. Thus sin comes into the world as the sudden, i.e., by a leap; but this leap also posits the quality [of sinfulness], and since the quality is posited, the leap in that very moment is turned into [a sin] and is presupposed by the quality [of sinfulness] and the quality by the leap. To the understanding, this is an offense; ergo it is a myth. As a compensation, the understanding invents its own myth, which denies the leap and explains the circle as a straight line, and now everything proceeds quite naturally. The understanding talks fantastically about man’s state prior to the fall, and, in the course of the small talk, the projected innocence is changed little by little into sinfulness, and so there it is.14

The repetition of the phrase “once sin has been posited” appears as a gesture of methodological modesty. As a sort of empirical scientist, the psychologist wants us to know that he cannot speculate about how a human being comes to stand under the metaphysical determination of being a sinner. But once a given individual has adopted the framework of sin within his own selfunderstanding, the psychologist can explain how sin aggravates that individual’s understanding by appearing circular and self-presupposing and how it inspires him to create a story capable of explaining to himself in pseudorational terms how he came to be in such a state. At the discursive level, in other words, the psychologist is telling us that his explanation of sin should not be interpreted dogmatically; it can only serve to elucidate sin as a framework of individual consciousness. But we must not fall under the spell of literary realism too quickly. Kierkegaard has invented this psychologist and has chosen to write the entire work from his perspective. At the broadest level of the text, the restriction to individual psychology appears as a theoretical choice rather than a discursive limit. And from this perspective, it is possible to observe the way in which the text’s layered authorial frame quietly shifts the center of gravity: the psychologist’s inability to address questions of speculative theology appears as Kierkegaard’s refusal to do so. And with each caveat about sin’s “having been posited,” historical givenness becomes rhetorically habitualized as the point of departure for the analytic of sin. Moreover, this interpretation fits together with an idea commonly found in Kierkegaard’s writings—namely, that no beginning is “presuppositionless,” including the beginning of religious consciousness itself. On the one hand, Christianity stipulates that in matters of faith, historical “progress” is as im-

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possible as “decline.” In this sense, with each generation, “everyone for his own part must learn from the beginning.”15 On the other hand, as Kierkegaard will insist, “Christianity has never assented to giving each particular individual the privilege of starting from the beginning in an external sense. Each individual begins in an historical nexus, and the consequences of nature still hold true.”16 One traditional way of explaining Kierkegaard’s embrace of history would be to point to the fact that at the center of the Christian religion is a God who defines himself as a historical actor. The historical existence of the Christ serves as the foundation for any Christian to become conscious of his sin and thus as the ground for any possible faith. But this is not the full story. It is not just that Christianity, by basing an eternal spiritual demand on a historical event, has found in sin a way of thinking about the historicity of existence. Kierkegaard’s psychologist emphasizes that sin “presupposes itself ” in order to show that sin cannot be passed on as a form of genealogical contagion; the experiential basis of an individual’s own “sin-consciousness” is sin’s only point of departure. Adam’s sin was “original” in the sense that he was the first human being and he sinned. But for all human beings, even for Adam, it is with the subjective consciousness of sin—with sin’s having been posited in the consciousness of that given individual—that the history of sin begins, in each case. Kierkegaard’s much-vaunted “leap” would seem, on its face, to present us with a relatively straightforward temporality of conversion. First one “is not”; then one “leaps”; and then presumably one “is” or “is becoming” a believing Christian. But the idea of sin as self-presupposing asks us to see the progression of becoming a Christian in a new light. If we consider Christianity in terms of the temporality of self-presupposition, the leap is not the movement by which one passes from ignorance of sin to sin. The leap is the psychologist’s (the psychologist being the one who speaks neither from faith nor with authority) scratch lyric for that which separates him from the first-person, embodied form of self-consciousness presupposed by repentance. The idea of the “leap” is a projection, the dream of a consciousness trapped by religious anxiety, of one who desires but lacks the faith to see himself as a sinner. The unconscious sinner has never “leapt” and is not “leaping”; the sinner is simply the one for whom sin has been posited. Sin is based in the experience of sin-consciousness; this is the only starting point. There is a “not yet” and a “once one has,” but no becoming. (“Hast thou become a believer?”) “To think sin,” as David Kangas puts it, is “to confront a diachrony: the concept

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is either too early or too late. Thinking stands either prior to its possibility, in which case an anticipative insight is impossible; or after its irruption, in which case the thought of sin finds itself entangled in an abyss of origin.”17 Kierkegaard’s psychologist is also relying on the idea of a self-presupposing beginning to point to a hermeneutic aspect of sin. Once sin has indeed been posited and the individual recognizes sinfulness as the true subject of the anxiety she feels, the preceding period of her life, in which she either did not yet feel anxiety or did feel anxiety but understood its subject differently, is reinterpreted as a sinful response to sin. Once the individual has become conscious of her sinfulness, the ignorance that went before is recast as guilt. It now becomes legible in only two ways—either self-denial or rebellion. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard ascribes this analysis to the psychologist’s specialized gaze, but it conforms to a relatively standard way of describing conversion. Augustine’s indelible prayer, which we saw in the last chapter— “Give me chastity and continence, only not yet”—sets this pattern by retroactively recaptioning his youth as a selfish deferral of redemption: “For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied, rather than extinguished.”18 What is distinctive about Kierkegaard’s presentation of this change is that he insists upon the absolute first-person perspective of sin: “Sin presupposes itself, obviously not before it is posited (which is predestination), but presupposes itself, in that it is posited.”19 Even though the sinner, once sin is posited, sees his past existence as a form of sinfulness, he was not in sin until he is in sin. In a signed discourse from the following year, Kierkegaard makes the curious temporality of sin-consciousness still more explicit: “The seeker was to be changed, and he was changed, alas—in this way it goes backward. And the change in which he is we call sin. Therefore, what was sought is; and the seeker is the place, but is changed, changed from once having been the place where the object of his seeking was.”20 The “change which we call sin” is not conceived as the actualization of a latent or temporarily unavailable possibility. This change reorders the chronological differentiation of conversion along modal lines; “before” and “after” are redefined as alternate modes of relating to the truth that encompasses all of existence. But the sinfulness that encompasses all of existence is only encompassing once sin has been posited in the individual’s consciousness. This positing creates an asymmetrical relation to the past, in that sin becomes the total hermeneutic criterion under which the past “in itself,” as it appeared as it was experienced, vanishes. This intricate chronological magic has tremendous consequences. Sin appears here as a biblical concept that reinterprets the experience of existential

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anxiety as a form of unacknowledged guilt and then assigns this experience a place within a larger story about the relation of human beings to that power which gives them life. Through this reinterpretation, an ordinary experience of anxiety becomes intelligible to the individual as anxiety over “the fact of being derived.”21 And accordingly, the fact of being derived is transformed from the unacknowledged source of anxiety into an occasion for penitence. Anxiety is not only redefined here; it is redeemed—in the convergence of the religious and economic senses of that word—as an ontological mood revealing the fundamental truth of human reality. It turns the psychological trauma of derivation—which anxiety expresses as an experience of bottomlessness, of dispossession without beginning—into the positive condition of spiritual labor. “Sin is not a negation, but a position,” as one of the arguments of The Sickness unto Death runs: “Sin is—after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is—before God in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself.”22 Sin frames the bottomlessness of anxiety in religious terms and thereby makes it possible for the individual to grasp his dispossession as one moment within an ongoing spiritual struggle. Through this appropriation, what was experienced as a lack is recast in the privileged terms of Christian identity: “Insofar as he is a Christian he is not like the bird, for the bird is what it is. But it is not thus one can be a Christian; if one is a Christian, he must have become such.”23 That human beings are sinful, on my reading of these passages, should not be interpreted to mean that human beings have a corrupt nature. Sin is a dogmatic concept that allows the individual to grasp more easily the fact that naturalism is a wrongheaded way of thinking about human life. This is a crucial distinction at the center of the existential rethinking of time and sin.

Heidegger’s Present Perfect Heidegger agrees with and follows much of what Kierkegaard does with the concept of sin in the work leading up to Being and Time. In an entry on “sin” appended to his 1920–21 lecture course on the phenomenology of Christian religious experience, Heidegger cites a passage from The Sickness unto Death that immediately precedes the section on sin as a “position.” The passage describes the Christian doctrine of sin as individualizing, but only insofar as it is defined as a corruption of will (defiance), not defined as a corruption of knowledge (ignorance). Heidegger then makes two comments of his own: “That the sin is before God is precisely what is positive about it. The category of sin is the category of individuality.”24 This interpretation of sin is

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taken directly from Kierkegaard, and it is the key to Heidegger’s reading of the Augustinian notion of sin appearing some pages later.25 Heidegger criticizes Augustine’s deployment of sin as a privative moral concept (as privatio boni ) and a privative aesthetic concept (as blemish and distortion) in favor of the third sense in which sin is defined, as a willful and doomed “flight” from God—that is, as defiance. Only this lattermost sense concerns the “performative” (vollzugsmäßig) response of the individual to her condition. And only the performative sense of sin, which describes sin as a positive feature of the individual’s self-comportment, “is the decisive conception.”26 Scholars have often turned to Heidegger’s 1920–21 lectures on religion in attempting trace the genesis of his later ontology of existence, particularly his thinking about temporality. A key focus of such studies has been to connect what Heidegger calls Paul’s discovery of “Christian facticity” with Heidegger’s own notion of the facticity of existence, as it will be developed in the years leading up to Being and Time. Both forms of facticity are marked by a fundamental relation to the future—in the Pauline eschatology, defining Christian life as anticipation of the parousia, and in the phenomenological picture, the a priori “aheadness” (Vorlaufen) of human existence, which extends all the way to an implicit a priori anticipation of the individual’s own death.27 Both forms of facticity are characterized by their concrete, performative (as opposed to theoretical) dimensions. Yet a feature that seems to drop out in readings of this lecture course is the idea that “factical life,” in the context of early Christian religious experience, begins with the sinner’s conversion. In his reading of 1 Thessalonians, Heidegger zeroes in on Paul’s repeated use of the aorist forms of the verb “to become” (γενέσθαι). The aorist form implies a completed and discrete action, with an identifiable beginning and end. Paul relies on this verb extensively at the start of the letter to identify the Thessalonians as Christians, which in this period also meant to identify them as converts. To the Thessalonians, Paul directs his acknowledgment: “You became [ἐγενήθητε] imitators of us and the Lord, for you welcomed the message. . . . You became [ἐγενήθη] an example to all the believers. . . . You turned [ἐπεστρέψατε] to God from idols.”28 Heidegger is drawn in by the fact that the changed, interrupted nature of this life, which might easily fall into the background in a speech directed primarily to those who have already joined the fold, continues to frame Paul’s proclamation as well as his description of the ongoing character of Christian existence. Heidegger creates an analytical calling card for this framing device by translating Paul’s aorist verb into an abstract perfect infinitive: das Gewordensein, or the Christian’s “having become.” For Heidegger, “having become” is the basis of the Pauline

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community. Paul does not, in writing to the Thessalonians, simply address them in their present. Rather, “the context of the event is emphasized here in a particular way. The ἐγενήθη is drummed in again and again. In writing, Paul sees them as those whose life he has entered. Their having-become is tied to his entrance into their lives. . . . These passages emphasize that the Thessalonians are there, for Paul, since he and they are linked through their having-become.”29 Heidegger’s analysis follows swiftly: “Having-become is not just any occurrence within life, but is constantly co-experienced in such a way that the Thessalonians’ having-become is their being in the present.”30 An event whose being-past (Gewesenheit) defines the present goes right to the core of Heidegger’s developing thinking about temporality. The line connecting Pauline Gewordensein with the ontological category of Geworfensein—the “thrownness” of existence—is short and relatively straight. And as Thomas Sheehan has shown, there is an equivalence between the “thrown” and “enowned” character of human existence (Ereignetsein), which means that it is but another small step from the fascination with the Pauline perfect to the central category of Heidegger’s later philosophy.31 The significance of Paul’s repeated aorist verb is partly that he draws thematic attention to facticity. More important, for Heidegger, is that this repetition seems to trace a link between conversion as an experience of rupture and conversion as the condition of possibility of self-knowledge on the part of the individual. For Paul, Heidegger observes, the Thessalonians appear in two distinct determinations: “1. He experiences their having-become (γενηθῆναι). 2. He experiences, that they have a knowledge of their having-become.”32 Having-become and the “knowledge of one’s own having-become” are, for the Christian, “experienced together from the outset.”33 It is difficult to miss the echoes here of Kierkegaard’s insistent correlation between Christianity and the self-consciousness of becoming a Christian.34 Here, too, the rupture of having converted appears within experience as a form of self-knowledge. But with Heidegger, the continual, ongoing relation to this break in Christian life is articulated as a generic practical ontology—a living grasp of the shape of one’s own existence. This aspect of Christianity bears first of all a methodological significance for Heidegger: it confirms his phenomenological view of existence as fundamentally tied to understanding. On this view, the understanding of what one is doing, in any given situation, is never completely divorced from the doing itself. Prereflective self-consciousness, as this latent form of understanding tends to be called, is an implicit part of any engagement, and it can at any instant be explicated. Husserl’s comprehensive notion of intentionality was

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aimed at making much the same point.35 But Heidegger adds to this picture a methodological corollary: philosophy ought to take a cue from its subject matter. A phenomenology of human existence, Heidegger was convinced, cannot be a second-order theory applied to its object but should be an extension of and elaboration of first-order know-how and self-understanding proper to existence itself. “Factical life experience has its own genuine explication, which is proper to it,” as Heidegger adds in one of the appendices to his lectures on Paul. The self-explication intrinsic to everyday experience is precisely what philosophy ought to develop. Paul is an inspiration here, inasmuch as Paul speaks not about the fundamental experiences his converts face but from out of the experience of conversion itself: “What came to language between [Paul and the Thessalonians] developed as the explication proper to factical life-experience—this explication, indeed, in its facticity itself, not didactically about it, in the slickness and detachment of theory, but taking on the turns and breaks of factical life in its affliction and no more.”36 Heidegger’s methodological interest in Paul helps explain why the discussion of conversion in Heidegger’s lecture course appears not only in his reading of the epistles but also in the lengthy discussions of phenomenological method that introduce and frame these readings. Without seeing Paul as a methodological inspiration (an archivist as well as an archive of religious experience), we might find Heidegger’s way of interspersing methodological and analytical discussions within this lecture course to be quite arbitrary. The analytical target of Heidegger’s philosophy is factical life experience. What he wants to show is that factical life experience in itself generates selfunderstandings, which tend toward objectification and abstraction. Life itself can thus be said to “fall” in the world of significance, “covering up” its deeper philosophical tendencies. In the attempt to get at the texture of human experience more directly, Heidegger identifies this falling as the protophilosophical posture that philosophy proper radically reorients: “Factical life experience contains motives of a purely philosophical posture which can be isolated only through a peculiar turning around [Umwendung] of philosophical comportment.”37 The term Umwendung is the same that he later uses to describe the “conversion” to Christianity that is being posited and reposited as the basis of Paul’s address.38 Heidegger takes Paul to be speaking with the express purpose of encouraging his listeners to feel the need to personally appropriate the proclamation. He takes Paul to be searching for a mode of communication that would realize itself as revolution of life (Umsturz des faktischen Lebens).

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And phenomenology, in parallel fashion, is “to look around in factical life experience in order to obtain a motive for its turning around [Umwendung].”39 The fact that personal appropriation is being discussed as a methodological dimension of the proclamation underscores the fact that Heidegger’s reading of early Christianity in the lecture course is being tacitly guided by Kierkegaard.40 The focus on personal appropriation as fundamental to Christianity is certainly not coming from Heidegger’s background in medieval scholasticism. And by focusing on the problem of communicative method, Heidegger comes to the novel reading of Pauline discursivity as continuous with the phenomenon it appears merely to speak about. This continuity has two dimensions: First, the epistle’s proclamation is formed by explicating and developing the self-knowledge of having-become proper to the religious experience itself. Second, the epistle is designed by Paul to intensify this experience on the part of each of the converts it addresses. Paul’s method of addressing and intensifying religious experience, seen through the lens of Heidegger’s contemporary interest in Protestant thought, helps Heidegger articulate a new methodological vision of philosophy: “Philosophizing is the performative sense of its own intended content.”41 What we see here is a crude telegraph of the idea that Heidegger will come to develop with increasing precision in the years following this course: philosophy is but an intensified and explicated formation of the self-awareness and self-concern implicit in every engagement. Heidegger also has a half-formulated theory about why Christian discourse, in particular, finds a way into the problem of the relation among experience, implicit self-knowledge, and explicit reflection. Paul’s letters invent Gewordensein as what Heidegger elsewhere calls the “performative basis” (Vollzugsbasis) of Christian existence.42 Christian existence requires such a basis because, as Paul defines it, it requires an oppositional relation to the world. Heidegger’s reading focuses for several paragraphs on the ὡς μή (“as though not”) of 1 Corinthians, by virtue of which Paul articulates the fundamental tension of the Christian’s relation to the surrounding world: “From now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.”43 Heidegger goes to great lengths here to distinguish Paul’s ὡς μή from what he considers the modern sense of “as though” (als ob). Whereas “as though” in contem-

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porary parlance signals a potential counterfactual distinction from what is or is known objectively to be the case, Paul’s distinction operates solely at the level of first-person performance.44 That is to say, whether the Christian has a wife or is as though he had none is a distinction that exists only in the individual’s own way of relating (Bezug) to his spouse. The Christian’s relations to the surrounding world, as Heidegger puts it, “remain unchanged and yet are radically changed.”45 It is crucial to see that this “and yet” does not refer to a difference between seeming and being. In fact, it is irrelevant whether or not the man’s relation to his wife is changed in an objective sense—for example, through divorce or adultery or neglect. The difference that this “radical change” makes lies in the fact that the relation has been reconstituted spiritually (or “existentially”). To see the stakes of this interpretation, we can examine it in theological terms: the difference between flesh and spirit is so radical that the death to the world does not appear as an event within the world. Heidegger’s Paul is a Paul interpreted through the rigorous subjective piety of a Kierkegaardian incognito.46 At this point, it should come as little surprise that Heidegger’s attempt to theorize the Pauline transformation also occasions what appears to be the first instance of the term “authentic” (eigentlich) in the sense that will later come to prevail in Being and Time. The “as though” in which the Christian now stands toward the relationships that were previously natural to him involves a personal reconstitution of the meaning of those relationships. When Heidegger says that Paul “develops performance into a theme,”47 he means that Christian existence, defined as “having become,” and living that definition in each moment by continuing to reconstitute all worldly relationships in its light, is a form of conduct that sees the interpretation of the world as the individual’s religious responsibility. The injunction to interpret worldly relations and possessions as worldly itself implies that the individual is and has been responsible—whether or not she has perceived this responsibility and whether or not she has accepted it—for determining the meaning of the world she inhabits. This performed reconstitution of the relational meanings of the world is the movement by which the worldly is “first authentically appropriated [erst eigentlich zugeeignet].” “It is through having-become,” Heidegger writes, “that the significations of the surrounding world appear as temporal possessions. The meaning of facticity is determined in this way as temporality.”48 Philosophically, the most important words of this line for Heidegger are “appear as.” Heidegger is not interested in the metaphysics of Diesseits, of this-worldliness; he is interested in how basing the significance of one’s life on an experience of rupture brings the Christian into a confrontation with factic-

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ity through a kind of reflective praxis. The reflexive praxis of Christian life is the philosophical comportment that Paul “develops into a theme.” “As though not” is the fundamental frame through which Paul’s listener reminds herself of the difference between the world as it is given and the world as it appears under the light of Gewordensein: “All relations to the surrounding world must go through the performative-complex of Gewordensein.” This filter gives a distinct sort of temporality to Christian life: “At each moment in the performance, all of these relations undergo a retardation, such that they spring up from the source of the Christian context of life. Christian life is not linear, but broken.”49 Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger will insist that despite the fact that we may normally hear the word “broken” as something lamentable, the discontinuity of Christian life only sounds negative.50 Properly understood, what the Christian performance of brokenness yields is a way of asserting constitutive responsibility for the meaningfulness of the world: “In Christian life experience, the meaning of the surrounding world appears in such a way that the world does not just happen to be there. The world is no adiaphoron [matter of indifference]. Through the retraction of the relational complexes in authentic performance [der eigentliche Vollzug], the significance of the world—even that of one’s own world—is acquired and experienced in a peculiar way.”51

T h e I n s ta n t As a thinker of temporality, Kierkegaard is perhaps most known for his idea of the “instant.” The Danish word he uses, Øieblik, literally means “flash of an eye,” and like Luther’s Augenblick seems to have first entered the language as a translation of the well-known passage from 1 Corinthians: “In a flash, in the twinkling of an eye [ῥιπῇ ὀφθαλμοῦ]  .  .  . the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”52 Also like its German cognate, Øieblik came to be a standard word for “instant” or “moment” throughout secular, literary, and colloquial contexts. It is the word’s combination of biblical poeticism and ordinary time-measurement that fascinates Kierkegaard. Retaining the rhetorical power of both established meanings, Kierkegaard throws it under a new spotlight. In his work, Øieblik describes the time in which spiritual transformation takes place, but it does so neither as a poetic image of otherworldly grace nor as neutral way of measuring a small amount of time. Here the “instant” is a theoretical term of art used to distinguish the peculiar temporality of Christian experience from that of an immanent life.

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In the Philosophical Fragments, we find a defining use of the “instant” in the hypothetical statement that frames the book’s argument: “If the instant is to have significance . . .” The hypothesis invokes a contrast—“If, by contrast, the instant is to have,” it might as well read—with the Socratic model of truth, in which all learning, all spiritual gain, is understood as a recollection and reactivation of something eternally possessed but forgotten. If the Socratic theory of truth is correct, the Fragments tells us, the time of any individual’s experience becomes a matter of indifference (recall Heidegger’s adiaphoric reading of Paul above).53 Socrates’s great achievement, according to Kierkegaard, was that he discovered the principle of martyrdom: the inalienable character of the individual’s relation to himself. Like the author of the Fragments, Socrates knew that the one thing that was his and his alone was the ability to say, “I can stake my own life.”54 But in Socrates’s hands, the category of the individual evaporates just as soon as it is discovered. It becomes a kind of “read-only” document, inasmuch as nothing that happens in the space of an individual’s life will have the capacity to alter an eternal truth. Kierkegaard does not assess the correctness of this view in metaphysical terms; instead, he deploys “the instant” to develop a competing view. The instant, for Kierkegaard, is defined as the time of significance. To the extent that we think of time as a material relation, symbolized by the movement of celestial bodies and capable of being represented by clocks and almanacs, it would be necessary to say that the instant is not a measurement of time. The instant is a unit, but what it measures is decisiveness. It measures decisiveness, which it expresses in terms of time. And if time is to bear any significance, as the Fragments works so hard to demand, then truth must be determined in time. With this syllogism, Kierkegaard has constructed the instant as a philosophical figura of Christian revelation.55 Kierkegaard is by no means the first to argue for a metaphysical revaluation of history. Hegel, too, saw history as the register of absolute reality and asked us to consider historical events of sufficient magnitude (“world-historical” magnitude) as moments in the self-articulation of the real. The problem with this characterization, for Kierkegaard, was that it left the time of an ordinary individual’s life in a position almost as precarious as that of the Socratic view. Assuming that I am not Buddha or Napoleon, Hegel offers no language in which I might articulate the absolute significance of the events of my life. I may witness and partake in the self-becoming of absolute spirit. But such participation is abstract, based on the sheer fact that I am human and therefore conscious. It makes no big difference, ultimately, whether I am kind or hardworking or ugly or interesting. Unless I have a great deal of power or influence

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over the course of history, nothing of me in particular is going to make it into the final cut of spirit’s self-presentation. Here, as with the Socratic model, Kierkegaard protests. Time gains a metaphysical significance, but only at the expense of the individual.56 At the root of Kierkegaard’s opposition is a deep conviction that the lack of any register of “absoluteness” in which my life in particular could be expressed would render existence an intolerable burden. And here, as with the argument against Socratic recollection, the defense of the individual also serves an oblique apologetic purpose, fortifying the psychological basis of the Christian-religious notion that God sees into and cares about the state of each individual soul. Within Kierkegaard’s metaphysical protest, the “instant” functions proleptically as a name: it denotes the time in which something absolutely decisive happens for the individual. But as the individual is spirit, this decisive thing is itself a decision. Kierkegaard’s instant is the temporal materialization of an eternal decision, one capable of anchoring the ongoing ethical and religious identification of the individual. Such a decision is what Dreyfus calls a “defining commitment,” which, by making all other commitments relative to it, “gives you your identity.”57 However, we must qualify the sense of the word “give” here. The instant is the grounding event of identity insofar as it serves as that bottomless angst around which the identity crisis circles: “When did you become a believer? Did you become a believer?” The labor that goes into making and anxiously sustaining the choice by which one’s existence is defined is itself Kierkegaard’s answer to the question of what it is about the single individual that cannot be expressed in an antecedent eternity or in an abstract, speculative reconciliation with absolute spirit. Through this labor, the existing individual enters into an active relation to eternity, “in time comes to relate to the eternal in time.”58

Eternity Is Insecure When Conversion Is a Value That eternity is the currency in which Kierkegaard expresses the value of the instant may suggest that a somewhat mystical dimension is operating in his work. The force of such an impression is strengthened by his insistence on the experiential character of the collision between time and eternity and, further, by the visionary resonance of the Danish word for “instant,” Øieblik. We might think of criticizing Kierkegaard’s attempt to value the time of individual experience as a merely delayed devaluation (on the Augustinian formula “Our heart is restless until it rests in thee”).59 This is especially tempting given that

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he describes human spirit as a “synthesis” of the eternal and the temporal, realized through the instantaneous decision in which a finite choice (between this or that) becomes an eternal obligation.60 “The [instant],” we read in The Concept of Anxiety, “is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other.”61 The instant is an “atom of eternity” and the “fullness of time.”62 What does this mean, if not that there is some part or aspect of human existence that is not subject to finite temporality—that is, that there is something about the human being that continues “after” time or, at least, that in some way already transcends it? And yet, I would argue, Kierkegaard uses the rhetoric of eternity to paradoxical effect. On the one hand, the eternal signifies the plenary. As The Concept of Anxiety has it, “The eternal is the present, and the present is full.”63 On the other hand, inasmuch as the instant is defined as the atom of eternity, the “fullness” of the present is not delivered as an experience of oceanic or otherworldly extratemporality; the instant appears as something fundamentally fragile and insecure. It is the temporal experience of “annulled succession.”64 And given that Kierkegaard defines this insecure atom as the time of decision and of spiritual action, we should not be surprised to find a direct corollary of this theory of eternity-as-time at the practical level: he who has decided “can remain in his freedom only by continually realizing it. He who has chosen himself on this basis is eo ipso one who acts.”65 The decision is simultaneously “the point of consummation” and “the very beginning.”66 To see this structure in relation to a more concrete example, we can turn to the resolution involved in the commitment of marriage. The commitment to marry, Kierkegaard insists, is eternal. It is tempting to think that what Kierkegaard means here is that marriage is “for” ever. But marriage is eternal not inasmuch as it lasts forever but inasmuch as it must be eternally—inexhaustibly— renewed: “The wedding ceremony is like a wreath of eternity, but love weaves it, and duty says it must be woven—every day from the flower of the moment. Here eternity is not finished with time, but the covenant is eternity’s beginning in time.”67 An eternal commitment is defined as eternal as a function not of objective duration but of love, which converts each moment into the basis of the commitment’s renewal. Even Kierkegaard’s confrontational essay on the nearness of salvation testifies to the ephemerality of this present. It stages a crisis of religious identity in order to reactivate the instant of decision in the present of the discourse—When did you become a believer? Are you essentially conscious of having experienced the decision to become a believer? And where are you now?68 For temporal beings, the plenary presence of the

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instant dissolves, just as it appears, into one of two senses: as having passed by (Forbigaaende) and as yet to come (Tilkommende). There is in this approach to temporality a certain accentuation of what is perhaps the most fundamental formula of conversion within Christianity—the figure of rebellion and return represented by the prodigal son. The story from Luke 15 is one of Kierkegaard’s favorites, and it appears throughout his authorship in both explicit and implicit ways. Crucial to his reading is the line attributed to Jesus, which connects the sinner’s conversion with “heaven’s joy”: “I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance.”69 The line appears as a rejoinder to the criticism of the Pharisees and scribes, who observe that Jesus has been welcoming and sharing food with “tax collectors and sinners.” Jesus’s reply inverts the evaluative assumption behind the complaint: not only is it the case that sinners, too, merit the concern of God, but those who are sinners elicit more concern than those who are not. This comparison poses a potential theological problem. It expresses the value of conversion, but it does so in socially relative terms, tacitly accepting the premise of the Pharisees and scribes, positing that there are those who stand in no need of repentance. Luther’s interpretation of this passage, which it seems Kierkegaard would have read,70 overcomes the relativity problem by changing the target of the address: “The learned and idle may determine the meaning of the ninety-nine in the desert,” but you should forget about them, for it is in just this way “that you come to God. You are already the sheep placed upon his Shoulders. You have found the Shepherd. You are the piece of silver in the hand. You are the one over whom is joy in heaven in the presence of all the angels.”71 For Luther, the goal here is to universalize the value of repentance. The only Christian way to approach the parable is through the eyes of the sinner. In a very early journal entry, Kierkegaard agrees, writing, “I will turn away [vende fra] from them, they who simply lie in wait to discover that one has in one way or another committed offense—to him who rejoices more over one sinner who converts [omvender sig] than over the 99 wise men who have no need of conversion [Omvendelse].”72 The choice of the ironic “wise men” here can be read as an accentuation of Luther’s suggestion that the “ninety-nine” may not actually exist. Kierkegaard is pledging his personal allegiance to the God for whom conversion is a value. One of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms takes this subjective intensification one step further and in so doing reveals the fundamental instability that results from treating conversion as a religious norm. The narrator of Repetition—

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who also doubles as a kind of missionary within the story, intent on helping the protagonist achieve a religious transfiguration of his failed romance— paraphrases the parable with a slight shift of verb: “Heaven loves [elsker] one sinner more than ninety-nine who are righteous.”73 The narrator closes the implied loop of Luke’s parable’s by substituting “love” for “joy,” thus turning the abstract and invisible consequence of conversion into a clear, personal motivation. The sinner is not just the occasion of heaven’s joy but the direct object of heaven’s love. Kierkegaard’s reinterpretation presents another theological problem. If sin brings love, can sin be sinful? That the narrator’s next move is to qualify this substitution demonstrates the precariousness of the valuation going on here: “The sinner, of course, does not know this from the beginning; on the contrary, he is aware only of heaven’s wrath until he finally, as it were, forces heaven to speak out.”74 The sinner cannot simultaneously understand himself as a sinner and think that being a sinner is better than some other way of being. While we have seen throughout this work how an affirmative discourse can work ascetically, what we are witnessing now is the way in which ascetic ideals can work affirmatively. In a sense, we are seeing the tension of energetic asceticism operating in reverse. Luther and Kierkegaard’s protestantizing of the parable of the prodigal son reveals an attempt to maintain the normativity of conversion while eliminating the comparative frame through which that normativity is originally articulated.

The Missing Present A curious pattern emerges when we consider together all the ideas discussed in this chapter until now. One of the features of the Pietistic notion of conversion at the center of Kierkegaard’s thought, as I have been arguing, is that it must be consciously experienced by the individual. Whether or not one can pinpoint the precise day and time, having-become-a-Christian must be part of the individual’s own conscious experience. Without this consciousness, it would not be possible for conversion to serve as a Vollzugbasis of Christian life—that is, as an anchor for the performance of Christian piety. If the vividness of this experience should ever be diminished or the experience itself thrown into doubt, Kierkegaard will demand that it be reactivated by throwing the individual again into crisis. Living one’s conversion as a task creates an inexhaustible demand, one that claims presence—in both the temporal and phenomenal senses of that word—at every instant. The Christian is at no moment among the ninety-nine; sin is, insofar as it is, a total reordering of life.

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This way of thinking about sin claims the present as an eternal (inexhaustible) task. But it also carries with it a characterization of temporality in which the present seems to vanish. Kierkegaard’s attempt to describe the “selfpresupposing” character of sin theorized the sinner’s present as a present that does not belong to itself but is the materialization of a debt whose origins lie beyond the will of the individual. The present for the sinner is a debt that tugs at the corners of all her experiences and to which each finite attempt at repayment serves as a witness (for the prosecution). Heidegger examined with lapidary attention the way in which an aoristic consciousness serves as the point of departure for Christian existence in the Pauline community, such that each form of being and each instance of doing gets its meaning from havingbecome. The Pauline present is curiously “retarded.” It first appears in the perfect tense, in the context of an attempt on the part of the Christian to live not in but toward presence (parousia). Most of all, we have Kierkegaard’s “instant”—which, far from bestowing upon experience a plenary, eternal present, seems to be designed to remind the individual of the present’s intrinsic inconsistency. In treating the “instant” as a unit of decision rather than of chronology, presence is continually transformed into a task, something one has to be rather than something one has. This is not as antithetical to the theological formulation of Pietistic conversion as one might imagine. Despite a reputation for insisting on precise, chronological knowledge of the moment of conversion, Pietist preachers often spoke with considerable nuance on this point. Zinzendorf, for example, in the sermon on “the essential character of the Christian,” quoted in the first chapter, writes that the moment of conversion “may be an indivisible point of time which cannot be compared with any measure of time that we have, including moments themselves.” And “when a person becomes a Christian,” it happens this way: for a moment the Savior becomes present to him in person. . . . I do not pretend that we see a body with our corporeal eyes. . . . But I do ask for the essential in this, and that is that a person who has seen abstractly and purely must in the next moment realize that he has actually seen; that a person must know as certainly that his spirit has seen, that his heart has seen and felt, as when in ordinary human life one can be certain that he has seen or touched something. In the moment when this happens he does not need to have a sense experience or see something visible (this cannot be excluded with any certainty, but neither is it essential); it is only necessary that afterward the essential effect remain.75

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Here Zinzendorf accepts the language of indivisibility and presence. He does not question, in other words, that conversion involves a metaphysical action of grace. But he does propose that temporal experience is the authoritative (“certain”) registration of divine presence. What’s more, this “present” is described retrospectively: the present is nothing other than the dawning consciousness of what has just become past. Zinzendorf ’s qualification is a pastoral one, aimed at disabusing penitent Christians of the idea that conscious conversion requires them all to become original religious visionaries. The philosophical destabilization of the present coming from the Kierkegaardian tradition, on the contrary, has a distinctly critical function. The target of this criticism is the passive, cultural relationship to religion that issued from the historical blending of the Christian community with the bourgeoisie. It has long been observed that Kierkegaard and Marx, both heirs and critics of Hegel, represent two fundamental directions of attack against bourgeois culture, the one Christian and the other atheist.76 Whatever one may make of the cultural (rather than economic-material) definition of the bourgeoisie underlying such comparisons, it is true that a concern about the nature and right of property is at the core of both authors’ work. Kierkegaard’s staunch opposition to infant baptism and emphasis on “becoming a Christian” were attempts to prove to the Christian that righteousness—the thing he most desires—is not a possession. Such is the consequence of his radicalized notion of sin (simil justus et peccator). Obscured in a view of Kierkegaard as the lost Young Hegelian, however, is the fact that in Kierkegaard’s hands the critique of possession also gives rise to a new way of thinking about existential temporality. The concept of eternity operates at the center of this development. The eternal, recall, was defined in The Concept of Anxiety in an equation with the present: “The present is the eternal, or rather, the eternal is the present, and the present is full.”77 This would certainly seem to work against my claim above that there is something fragile about Kierkegaard’s notion of the present. Yet as this passage continues, the meaning of “fullness” is subtly twisted. The “fullness” of eternity is defined as the vanishing of the present. “What we call the moment,” the psychologist specifies, “Plato calls τὸ ἐξαίφνης [the sudden].”78 The equation between the eternal and the present masks the fact that the eternal is actually being defined as that which cannot be present. On first examination, Kierkegaard’s account here may seem to resemble certain classical theological characterizations of eternity. In the Confessions, for example, Augustine defines eternity as an “all at once,” or “ever-present” present, which is not present to us while we are “still” temporal, but is pres-

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ent to God.79 But what we find in Kierkegaard’s text is the inverse of this view. Here, there is no possibility of shifting into God’s point of view. When an Augustinian view of eternity appears in Kierkegaard’s texts, in fact, it is generally ascribed not to God but to the pastoral figures of immediacy, the “lily and the bird.”80 This is a critical difference, because the lily and bird are explicitly deployed as models of piety that human consciousness can never actually adopt. There is no moment in which the Christian’s mind acquires the unity of the bird’s, as Augustine’s confessing subject, once “purified and molten by the fire of [God’s] love,” flows into the divine sempiternal.81 The lily’s perfect presence can never be our end. The conjunction to which Kierkegaard’s thoughts on eternity are subordinated is not “while” we are temporal but “given that” we are temporal. But this creates a problem, for if temporality is not bracketed and eternity is to be experienced, then eternity’s present must appear to a temporal being in her temporal existence. Zinzendorf addressed this problem indirectly by proposing that the Savior’s presence dissolve so quickly that one might only register its experience retrospectively, as the having-been-present. With his theorization of the “instant,” Kierkegaard offers the eternal a more rigorous alibi. It is not that the eternal touching the present may not involve sense experience as it is happening, but that it cannot. The instant is the experiential registration of this absent experience. This is why Kierkegaard’s psychologist finds it so appropriate that the word for “instant” (Øieblik: lit., “the flash of an eye”) is based on movement of the eye, which, unlike a “sigh or a word,” does not translate the invisible into a temporally determinate expression.82 It is the least material of expressive metaphors. Eternity, on this determination, is the experiential registration of a missing present, not the anticipated presence of a postexistential epilogue. In fact, Kierkegaard’s psychologist speculates—here trying his hand at a philosophy of religion—it may be because eternity names that which shows up to an experiencing subject as resisting presence that eternity has often been imagined as something outstanding, via the “incognito” of the future.83 To see how the notion of a missing present is involved in the critique of possession, we must reflect briefly on the language of “loss” and “gain” that pervades Kierkegaard’s writings. One key example comes from the wellknown distinction between faith and resignation in Fear and Trembling. At the most basic level, faith and resignation are differentiated according to their relation to the gain and loss of temporal goods. The virtuosic “knight of resignation” is capable, on the basis of an infinite commitment, of relinquishing his relation to the finite but not of holding onto the absurd belief that would allow him to get the finite back: “By my own strength I can give up the prin-

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cess  .  .  . but by my own strength I cannot get her back again, for I use all my strength in resigning. On the other hand, by faith, says that miraculous knight, by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd.”84 The Sickness unto Death offers us another classic formulation of loss and gain in stating that the dialectic of despair takes hold between the “loss of the eternal” and the “gain of oneself before God.”85 Throughout his work, Kierkegaard plays loss and gain off of one another in complex conjugation with the opposition between the temporal and the eternal. Loss of the temporal is generally correlated with gain of the eternal, but not in the sense of an eternal uncanny, not in the sense of an “afterlife” in which the contents of temporal experience reappear in indestructible form. The thread appears throughout, but it is not until the Christian Discourses that we find a more systematic and concrete expression of these concepts. In a discourse entitled “The Anxiety of Abundance,” Kierkegaard develops the Christian valuation of poverty into the point of departure for a poignant psychological theory of time. The discourse begins with the Christian moral commonplace that “riches and abundance,” far from being a security against anxiety, “become then the object of anxiety”—indeed, of “the” anxiety.86 The commonplace sets up an antithesis: The Christian lacks this anxiety of abundance. Why? Not, Kierkegaard makes clear, because the Christian is poor in the material sense: “Certainly there are Christians who are poor; but about that we are not talking here.”87 The point is that the wealthy Christian, despite his wealth, is not anxious. The reason the wealthy Christian is not anxious is because he is possessed of one particular thing that continually deprives him of all his other possessions: “What power then is this? It is thought and the power of thought.”88 Just as the thought of retribution can destroy the desire to acquire goods unlawfully, Kierkegaard writes, “the thought of eternity removes the thought of possession from riches and abundance, even when rightfully possessed.”89 It is not that the Christian, because of an assurance of what will come after this life, loses interest in the world. Resignation is only an achievement—a matter of knighthood and strength—if the object of the relinquished desire continues to be viewed as desirable. What the thought of eternity brings the Christian to understand is that all he possesses has its origin as a gift—“not to the intent that he should retain it, but as a loan, as a trust.”90 The loan also marks a debt. This is why the thought of eternity, far from representing a plenitude that makes the present meaningless, introduces into the present a fragility that undermines the notion of property itself. In fact, the thought of eternity is in this sense indistinguishable from the thought of finitude: “When I do not know what I am to live on tomorrow,

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I evidently possess nothing. But when I reflect that I might die tonight, ‘this very night’; then I possess nothing however rich I may be. To be rich I must possess something until the morrow, etc., must be secured for the morrow . . . but take away the morrow and then too, alas, I can no longer be called rich.”91 Every human being knows this, but the Christian alone keeps it in mind—he keeps in mind “that he does not know . . . whether perchance he will die ‘this very night.’ ”92 We are now in a position to grasp something more systematic about Kierkegaard’s notion of eternity. Eternity is not the “other” of time in the sense of an objective complement. You gain eternally by losing temporally, in this view, not insofar as eternity promises a deferred compensation for what has been lost. Rather, there is a kind of identity operating between eternity and time. Through this identity, the present can be seen as the nothing of time. The gain occurs because the thought of eternity occasions—right now—the appropriate relation to temporal possession. Or to put it in less Sartrean terms, the thought of eternity reveals temporality as a condition of fundamental dispossession. When Kierkegaard goes on to describe joy as the holiest, most pious disposition, because “joy is the present tense,” he is not speaking of beatitude.93 He has to keep italicizing and particularizing the word “present”— “the present,” “the present,” “this present today”—because what joy actually names is the disposition in which, on the basis of an absurd faith, one views every vanishing instant as the occasion of an infinite commitment. To define devotion to God as a matter of “the present” is to define it as something inexhaustibly pressing and yet incapable of being possessed. This is why, in Kierkegaard’s parlance, the instant is both the unit of eternity and the unit of iterability (i ethvert Øieblik). The “bourgeois-philistines” believe that they can be Christians. But the temporal expression of sin is to lack a present tense; thus any Christian is a Christian precisely to the extent that he becomes Christian again and again, in each instant.

The Present Is Not We have looked at ecstatic time in Heidegger and at the “nothing” of time in Kierkegaard. The distance between a conception of the present as nothing and a theory of time based on the idea that the present is essentially “ecstatic”—that is, always outside itself, constituted by inheritance and possibility—is shorter than Heidegger himself might have liked to imagine. Even as he appropriates the term “instant”—Augenblick in the German translations of Kierkegaard and in Heidegger’s work—Heidegger criticizes Kierkegaard’s

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understanding of temporality, claiming that the Dane “remains attached to the vulgar concept of time and determines the instant with help from ‘now’ and ‘eternity.’ ”94 Despite Heidegger’s criticism, we should note that the texts of Kierkegaard’s that Heidegger seems to have read most carefully and to have most absorbed are the very texts that do the most to undermine the conventional sense of the concepts of time, presence, and the instant—The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness unto Death, the signed religious discourses. Legitimate in Heidegger’s criticism is the claim that Kierkegaard does not achieve a formal recharacterization of time. But it is not hard to see that when Heidegger develops “anxiety” (Angst), to take one example, as a disposition capable of bringing the individual into an active and explicit relation to her own condition insofar as it “brings one back to one’s thrownness as something possible which can be repeated [als mögliche wiederholbare],” he is creating a phenomenology of existence from that which Kierkegaard’s religious psychology left implicit.95 As his famous characterization of temporality runs, human existence is in each case “stretched out” between birth and death, a priori “distracted,” such that its present (Gegenwart) always exhibits an ecstatic “rootedness in the future and having-been [Gewesenheit].”96 The active explication of this temporality is described as a form of authentic performance, which Heidegger calls “resolve” (Entschlossenheit): “The authentic coming-to-oneself of anticipatory resolve is at the same time a return to the ownmost self that has been thrown into individuation. This ecstasis makes it possible that existence take on resolutely the being that it already is.”97 What resolve holds onto is nothing other than the distracted present, which “is not only brought back from the distraction with immediate concerns, but is grasped in the future and in having been. The present that is grasped in authentic temporality, and that is thereby authentic presence, we call the instant.”98 Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger makes clear that the “authentic presence” of the instant merits the term “authentic” only insofar as this present is not actually present. “The phenomenon of the instant fundamentally cannot be explained in terms of the now,” insofar as the “now” refers to a unit “ ‘in which’ something occurs, passes away, or is around.” The “inauthentic present” is the present that has, well, presence (das Gegenwärtigen). The only presence to which the instant has access “must be understood in the active sense, as ecstatic.”99 Sartre absorbs this view of temporality wholesale, and it becomes the basis of his ontology of existence. The human being is not the being that is itself but rather the being that has to be its self—that is, to sustain its self actively through the constant assumption of responsibility for its past and future:

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“Only a being which has to be its being instead of simply being it can have a future.”100 Such is the internal structure of a being that “is its own void” and that is characterized by an ontological “ecstasis,” or “diasporatic form of temporality.”101 Sartre will go further here than either Kierkegaard or Heidegger does in describing the implications of this structure: “Everything happens as if the present were a perpetual hole in being—immediately filled and perpetually reborn.”102 Simply put, “the present is not.”103 Through Heidegger and Sartre, this idea would go on to be an important influence on deconstructive and poststructuralist thinking about difference.104 In Derrida’s hands, for example, the critique of presence made it possible to reimagine the basic habits of historical consciousness, to shift the terms on which we approach events and texts, to look at structure as rupture, to see the sign as the supplement of a lack.105 For Kierkegaard, the missing present became the objet petit a of piety, pursued through an inexhaustible joy and through a permanent identity crisis that made conversion itself into the supreme Christian vocation. Among Kierkegaard’s Weimar heirs, it is for the most part not the inexhaustible “joy” of becoming a Christian but authenticity that is deployed in the ascetic pursuit of the present. Even Camus, in opposing his concept of “absurdity” to Sartrean authenticity, ended up recommending the cultivation of absurdity, which he defined as the “unceasing effort” for a “silent joy.” One must imagine Sisyphus happy.106 It is not too far a leap, I think, to hear an echo of Kierkegaard’s joyous lilies and birds when reading this appalling line. In its purest expression, Heideggerian authenticity adapts the inexhaustible task of becoming a Christian within a philosophical method designed to explicate existence and an account of existence designed for philosophical reflection. In authentic resolve, a person can at any moment explicate and “own up to” the thrown ecstasis of her existence; she can also avoid doing so at any moment. Whatever resolve a person demonstrates, she demonstrates “in each case” rather than enduringly. Whether we are able to articulate the moral character of Heideggerian authenticity depends on how clearly we are able to describe ontology itself as a form of moral praxis. Sartre saw this ambiguity as an opportunity to develop authenticity as the sole moral ideal capable of being grounded in a transcendental philosophy. Sartre both adopts the ecstatic temporality of existence shared by his forerunners and seeks expressly to develop authenticity as a normative response to this condition. Because of this dual affirmation, Sartre’s thinking about authenticity is marked by an ascetic normativity in even more complex ways than Heidegger’s or Kierkegaard’s. The Cahiers opens with a lucid account of

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the problem facing any attempt to propose a nonobjective criterion for moral action—that without “doing” good, “being” good in a universe in which God is not watching can only be understood as egoism. Without God, the saint is just being selfish. Yet as aware of the problem as Sartre is, he does not find a way to solve it in the six hundred pages that follow. He does make a fascinating attempt to address “asceticism” at the end of the work. Here “ascetic” functions in much the same way that “stoic” functioned at the start of the War Diaries—that is, as the name for a disposition of which he feels his own thinking capable and from which he seeks absolutely to distinguish himself. What Sartre offers by way of critique is most revealing: the problem with the ascetic is that the ascetic actually betrays his purely formal exercise by becoming a chosiste about effort itself. Existential morality is different from asceticism, Sartre posits, because with authenticity “everything is always anew. Hero today, coward tomorrow if he doesn’t take care.”107 There is a likeness here to Kierkegaard’s critique of Pietism; both have a touch of the contempt for idolatry and both claim to complete more faithfully what their target tried but failed to achieve. Just as Kierkegaard felt that the Pietists were liable to be too caught up in objective-social demonstrations of faith for their own spiritual ends, Sartre rescues asceticism from what he sees as a perverse form of instrumentalism, in which the effort itself serves as the goal of the act. The first person to see a connection between Christianity and this existential philosophy of time was one of Heidegger’s students from Marburg, Hans Jonas. Like many among his cohort, Jonas was simultaneously participating in Heidegger’s courses in philosophy and in Rudolf Bultmann’s New Testament seminar. In the crosscurrents of this formation emerged Jonas’s singular book on Gnosticism, which aimed to present Gnostic thought in such a way as to demonstrate its relevance to contemporary philosophy. Jonas was guided in his initial composition by what he understood to be striking similarities between Heidegger’s philosophy and the Gnostic religion. In particular, he tells us in the epilogue, he noticed a parallel in the description of temporality: “A famous formula of the Valentinian school . . . epitomizes the content of gnosis: ‘What makes us free is the knowledge of who we were, what we have become; where we were, wherein we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what is birth and what is rebirth.’ ”108 Jonas continues and draws the point still more sharply: “In its temporal terms [the formula] makes no provision for a present on whose content knowledge may dwell and, in beholding, stay the forward thrust. There is past and future, where we come from and where we speed to, and the present is only the moment of gnosis itself, the peripety from the one to the other in a supreme crisis of the es-

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chatological now.”109 Jonas then recalls his own experience as an early reader of Being and Time. As so many students do, he began to assemble a classic philosophical “table of categories” outlining Heidegger’s basic concepts. He was confronted with a “striking discovery”: “The column under the head of ‘present’ remains practically empty—at least insofar as modes of ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ existence are concerned. . . . For the existentially ‘genuine’ present is . . . wholly defined in terms of the self ’s relation to its ‘future’ and ‘past.’ ” Without detecting, it seems, the Kierkegaardian roots of the term, Jonas continues: “Moment, not duration, is the temporal mode of this ‘present’—a creature of the other two horizons of time, a function of their ceaseless dynamics, and no independent dimension to dwell in.”110 Initially, Jonas ascribed this resemblance to the universal validity of existential philosophy. He believed that he had found, in existentialism, an interpretive “key” capable of unlocking the door to “any human ‘existence’ whatsoever.”111 For many different reasons, Jonas came to see existentialism more critically in the years following the publication of the first edition of the work. Still convinced that the parallels between these two traditions were more than coincidental, however, Jonas found himself entertaining a different sort of hypothesis. Existentialism and Gnosticism both promoted an idea of man poised on the “razor’s edge of decision” and excluded from any robust or restful form of “presence” because they emerged in comparable moments within their respective civilizational histories. Drawing on Spengler, Jonas suggests that their similarity stems from their shared background of cultural and intellectual collapse, which prompts an analogous form of “cosmic nihilism.” Whether Jonas’s self-acknowledged weakness on the history of Christianity hindered him in this respect, or whether it was more that his immense admiration for the “magician from Messkirch” prevented him from seeing at the time what might have appeared as a narrow or parochial element at work in this otherwise universal philosophy, it is not possible to say. Nonetheless, there is a far simpler explanation for the similarity that Jonas observes: existentialism is a response to and development of the same tradition of Christian eschatological asceticism of which Gnosticism is, among other things, a major part. Why Jonas felt pressed to posit a kind of cyclical philosophy of history to explain such a straightforward relationship may actually have to do with his own closeness to existentialism. It is more than plausible that the tremendous influence Heidegger was having on Bultmann’s theology at the time of Jonas’s studies, coupled with Jonas’s relative lack of familiarity with the works of Kierkegaard and Luther (who were instrumental influences in Heidegger’s early years), obscured from him the degree to which Heidegger’s

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basic approach to existence—and not just the names of his categories, such as “fallenness” and “dread”—had itself been shaped by Christian theology. Jonas does not seem to realize, for example, that his felicitous phrase for this temporal ideal, of remaining on the “the razor’s edge of decision,” is almost a direct restatement of the account of repentance in Either/Or—as keeping oneself “on the spear tip of the moment of choice.”112 Whatever the case may be, Jonas’s initial observation points directly to the key element I have been tracing here. Once the “instant” becomes the normative measurement for parsing existence, an ascetic logic of value as generated by ever-renewed labor is not far behind. This is because the account of a radically ruptured present stands in tension with many other philosophical languages of value. Authenticity cannot be a state to which right action will allow access; it cannot be a skill deepened over time as one learns the habit of certain virtues; it cannot even be a regulative ideal toward which one may steadily approach without ever reaching. Heidegger’s adverb “je” (in each case) is arguably the most important word in Being and Time. It appears more than four hundred times and is used primarily to undercut the idea that the description of existence being offered in those pages is an overarching, constant set of features that human beings generally exhibit. Existence does not belong to me as an abiding property. To say that existence is in each case “mine” is also to say that it is only through the “case” or “instance” that my existence appears to me at all. It makes present something fundamental about human existence, but using an iterative rather than an abiding notion of presence.113 In Heidegger’s philosophy this “in each case” is attached to a priori conditions of existence. These conditions—finitude, involvement with possibility, concern about the question of being—are, as I have tried to emphasize, neither good nor bad. They are simply facts. But one of the a priori “conditions” Heidegger describes is that we are also responsible for our facticity. Through authenticity, we are capable of assuming an explicit relation to our fundamental condition. And as soon as the ruptured, iterative temporality signaled by this “je” describes a value rather than a fact, the critique of totality may also be the point of departure for a new asceticism. If “every action is a creation,” which means at once “creation of the world, of myself, and of human being,” every action is an opportunity to gain or to lose myself.114 Thus when Sartre invokes a morality of “permanent conversion,” he is not radicalizing or altering in any formal sense the ideal of self-choice presupposed by Kierkegaard’s ascetic accentuation of Christianity; he is simply stating the only sort of moral ideal that would be consistent with an approach to existence for which the present is at best a metaphor or conceptual conceit and at worst a form of inauthenticity.

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A later echo of this ascetic thinking can be found in the work of Camus. Camus famously distanced himself from Sartrean existentialism on many occasions. He rejected the idea of authenticity as wholeheartedly as he rejected the idea that existence is intrinsically meaningful. Camus may be right that metaphysical rebellion—striking out against the prevailing disorder of the universe in the name of a higher value—is a phenomenon as old as any in human history. There is nothing particularly Christian about this form of protest. But when one describes this gesture in isolation from the social circumstances and the concrete goal at hand—when one makes the assertion that human existence is not created or ordained in any way but radically contingent and devoid of sense not into a claim about the truth of existence but into an example of “metaphysical rebellion”—then one transforms the rebel from a historical phenomenon into a transhistorical vocation, a form of life. And here one is adding to the toolbox of the radical by borrowing from that of the ascetic. In articulating the virtue he hoped would displace Sartrean authenticity—the rebellion of the absurd man—Camus finds himself caught up in a distinctly Sartrean problem. Many of those we would be tempted to call “rebels” would be perfectly happy to describe their opposition in a finite and largely instrumental way. But for Camus, revolt is a principle. In fact, it is an absolute principle, and as such demands an absolute fidelity: “When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition.” This is the moment of greatest danger for the rebel—victory. To the extent that he assumes his former ruler’s place, he “forgets his original purpose, tires of the tremendous tension created by refusing to give a positive or negative answer, and finally abandons himself to complete negation or total submission.”115 The Bolshevik’s first allegiance may have been to the destruction of feudalism, leaving him in need of a new paradigm once his enemy was gone. For Camus, at his most “existential,” the rebel’s first allegiance is to being a rebel.116

Conclusion

Personal authenticity is a compound ascetic ideal that performs identity by fusing acts of explication, choice, and appropriation into a reflexive exercise that may be enacted at every instant. Where most scholars reach back to Romantic notions of an integral, expressive self in presenting the history of authenticity, I have emphasized the break between Romantic and existential models of the self. In fact, as I have tried to show, the moral-philosophical ideal of authenticity was constructed by the existentialists in their search for a way in which consciousness, whose fundamental distinction is a lack of any stable substrate capable of independently anchoring its projects—“self,” “God,” “nature”—may nonetheless get hold of itself in action. Though it may seem impossible to believe given our use of the term today, the modern project of an authentic existence began within a philosophy aimed at debunking the myth behind expressivism—that is, the myth of a “true self ” capable of being expressed or suppressed. The existentialists did not merely seek to correct this myth or to demonstrate its inadequacy in theoretical terms. In fact, they recognized that there was no such thing as a purely theoretical correction—if by that we mean one that could be rigorously differentiated from a revaluation of the terms in play. To claim that debt and ecstatic temporality are a priori structures of consciousness is also to neutralize features that once had a negative moral meaning (guilt, distraction) by reinterpreting them as the conditions of possibility for any human existence whatsoever. Here temptation becomes a sign of radical freedom. And sin comes to describe a positive aspect of existence, a

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symbolic expression of one’s capacity to assume responsibility for a situation one did not create.1 With every “theoretical” correction, a revaluative move is not far behind. This is a formal point, which in many cases amounts to little more than a trivial extension of the first law of normativity (nothing is neutral, including this claim). But existentialism is not one of those cases. For the existentialists, the lack of a clear distinction between truth and value was seen as an opportunity to rethink the boundaries between philosophy and life. They are the ones who insist on interpreting every philosophical proposition in the context of a particular historically-situated-subject-who-proposes. The existentialists are the ones pushing the view that theory is a kind of practice and that all practices are implicit ontologies. Through these sets of equations, the performance of existential philosophy absorbs the normative potential of each of the values it theoretically neutralizes, each of the myths it pulls out of circulation. It is at this juncture—the opportunity created by the intersection of facts, values, and practices—that a “religious question” begins to emerge for the philosophy of existence. From the Romantics, existential thinkers do inherit a deep investment in the standpoint of the single “individual.” That much the historians of authenticity have right. But the existentialists also descend from the Enlighteners and, like them, have a taste for unmasking axiomatic investments, including those involved in the idea of personal identity. Authenticity is born from the attempt to hold together these two discoveries: first, that there is no such thing as a stable “me,” and second, that the very absence this discovery reveals is never just a neutral, objective fact but is in each case “mine.” Or putting it in reverse, truth is grounded in subjectivity, but the subject itself is groundless, is a fertile abyss. Pietism, too, bears the marks of both Enlightenment and Romantic anthropologies. With its emphasis on firsthand religious experience, it defends the standpoint of the individual; with its account of radical sin, it rejects the basic freedom on which modern individualisms usually depend. To be sure, Protestant notions of human sinfulness have a very different correlate from existential reinterpretations of this doctrine. The idea of a superhuman being in whom all agency is concentrated is by no means equivalent to a philosophical interpretation of human existence as a “thrown project.” But a focus on the theistic difference can obscure the fact that the significant analogy here is a practical rather than theoretical one. Within the devotional system of Lutheran piety, conversion resolves the tension of the central anthropological paradox by opening up a dimension of spiritual labor. Conversion converts

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the powerlessness of the individual human being vis-à-vis God into an experience capable of anchoring the individual’s life as a scene of ongoing penitence. The new life appears as life’s work. It is a short step from here to the post-Pietistic oeuvre of Kierkegaard and his religious reinvention of personal identity. As the critique of the subject accelerates among Kierkegaard’s heirs, who search even more intently for a new intimacy between the ideas of philosophy and the practice of thinking, the promise of a philosophical ascetology grows and takes on new directions. The authentic self of the existentialists is not Rousseau’s artifactual personhood, a good and natural relic buried beneath the debris of time and culture. Authenticity is the reflexive grasp, intrinsically unsustainable and at every instant possible, of one’s own existence at the intersection of thrownness and responsibility. Much as the Pietists developed the ascetic potential of a paradoxical anthropology through conversion and repentance, the existentialists develop the ascetic potential of an irreducibly inconsistent existence through choice and philosophical explication. And the more the methodological norms guiding reflection enter into a continuum with practical norms guiding action, the more closely existential philosophy resembles a religion of existence. Embedded in this claim is a particular way of understanding the difference between religion and philosophy. As I am using it here, the word “religion” helps demarcate the shift that occurs when, out of a softened distinction between fact and value, a praxis emerges. It is a fact that an individual human being does not come into existence through an act of her own will or choice. But to decide on the meaning of this fact—to decide whether this dependence is to be regarded as a deficiency, a boon, or a neutral condition of possibility— involves a judgment of value more robust than those involved in establishing the fact itself. And when this fact-cum-value gives rise to a particular sort of normative praxis—corresponding to the three cases listed above: repentance, affirmation, or reflection—then we are dealing with a phenomenon that exceeds the province of philosophy, conventionally understood. Of course, philosophy may deal with practices; there is such a thing as “practical philosophy,” after all. But it is another thing entirely when the analytical work of philosophy itself becomes wrapped up in a normative procedure, when philosophy itself aims to become the basis of a particular way of forming one’s life, as we have seen in the case of existentialism. To see this dimension of normative praxis is to acknowledge that philosophy itself does not always have the skill set to analyze its own project, that sometimes when we zoom out from the specific claims on the table, we can see how disputes about given

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facts of the matter are fastened together within a larger evaluative and practical framework, one for which some of the best analytical tools—still, alas, you see, nonetheless, sometimes—come from the history of religion. What I have offered here, it should be said, is less a definition of religion per se than a third-order principle indicating when the category of religion might be analytically relevant. This principle is of greatest use in studying secular and postsecular modernity, since the moments in which new normative practices emerge are often the nodal points of concentrated religious retrieval. So the Saint-Simonians turned artists into priests and Comte saw the need for a Positivist form of prayer.2 Darwinians drew on the visual norms of religious iconography in disseminating the many sober, bearded portraits of the great naturalist, casting him as a kind of “secular saint.”3 In genres of discourse not conventionally understood to be religious, these fragile moments of normative invention and experimentation are some of the contexts in which historically dominant religious traditions exert their most powerful influence. Everyone who reads Sartre’s essay on the authentic Jew or his biography of Jean Genet walks away with the simultaneous impression of Sartre’s atheism and his piety. Only by attending to an interpretation of religion such as the one I have outlined can we come to see why this impression obtains and the depth that it masks—that is, only thus can we come to see why Sartre’s piousness is much more than a style. If we continue to describe the transformation from a Kierkegaardian philosophical frame to a Sartrean one through familiar modernist rubrics—the “death of God,” rationalization, secularization, de-Christianization—we will continue to find ourselves puzzled by the complex and stubborn circulation of religious ideas within twentieth-century thought. These modernist stories underestimate the implications of existentialism’s engagement with religion and leave us ill equipped to explain the more explicit appeals to religion within subsequent streams of twentieth-century thought.4 From the perspective of such secularizing, “death of God” narratives, these appeals can only be seen as a “return” of religion, which is either illegitimate or trivial. Sartre’s distinction between religious and atheistic existentialism is one of these modernizing narratives. And it should be clear now why I have insisted that as a theory of the role of religion within existential thought, that distinction makes very little sense. The distinction between religious and atheistic forms of existentialism only makes sense, we might now specify, if we first come to terms with the way in which the broader existential-philosophical tradition—from its basic approach to human existence to the way it conceives of its own analytic task—can also be seen as a chapter in the history of religion. I have traced

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existentialism’s participation in this history by following the progressive adaptation of a Pietistic-Protestant ideal of religious conversion within three secular-philosophical paradigms: first a discourse of personal identity; then the formal, methodological domain of phenomenology; and finally a moral philosophy pointing to concrete human freedom and the good. But what, we should ask, does it really mean to introduce Christianity as a normative and ideational context for interpreting existential thought? Does existentialism become a religion? Does it become Christian? Or perhaps it is the reverse? Perhaps religion itself might at last become less “religious”? Such are the anxious questions of our times. They are questions that traverse the study of religion and, remaining unresolved, bleed into the problem sets of other fields. The historical consciousness that did so much to weaken the hold of Christian ideas over the people of Europe in the nineteenth century seems today determined to remind us how very Christian the late modern West continues to be. Instead of attacking illusions, we point to problems with the implied premise that one can do without illusions. But there is something intrinsically distressing about this development. When Feuerbach argued that the secret of Christianity is atheism and that humanity is the true subtext of all theology, it appeared as a kind of emancipation. Indeed, it helped facilitate, with Marx, one of the most powerful social and political formulations of liberation ever to have grown out of philosophy. But today the extension of this very claim—that Christianity, and particularly Protestant Christianity, should be unmasked as the secret of secularism—meets with a discomfort verging on claustrophobia. If secularism is all just Protestant religion turned inside out, then what are really doing here? On what basis do we consider ourselves qualified to evaluate Christianity? As we press into these lines of dependence, a kind of methodological paranoia casts its shadow: if Christianity has become part of our collective unconscious, then are we all not like the patients in the bad Freudian joke, infected precisely insofar as we consider ourselves to be healthy? And what would the alternative be—to watch out for and “confess” our historical bias? As a way of getting out of the Christian circle? This is a complicated place for the study of religion to inhabit. To begin with, we lack a common language to discuss the diverse ideals in play in this situation. The subtext of many genealogical projects on religion these days is that unearthing an unacknowledged relation to Christianity is a worrisome finding. But it is rarely clear what attitude this finding is meant to worry. Is it the predictive claim about secularization, which sees the West pushing religion further and further into the margins of public life? Is it the programmatic claim that the ideas and values of modern society are legitimate only insofar

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as they are independent of religion? And must they be independent of any religion, or just of Christianity? The confusion goes back at least to Blumenberg, whose magnificent attempt to defend the legitimacy of the modern age against the genealogists of suspicion like Löwith and Schmitt never calls into question the criteria of legitimacy that such genealogists propose. If modern culture is to be legitimate, Blumenberg accepts, tragically for his larger argument, its basic ideas must have an independent origin from the Christian culture that preceded it. This is a problematic approach to the question of secularization, and not just because it limits the impact of Blumenberg’s work. More than this, it offers us, as Enlightened heirs to the so-called secularization debate, an illusory either-or (legitimacy vs. dependence), one that we are only now beginning to unthink. Even if we agree that there is something worthy of criticism in the ongoing relationship between Christianity and modern culture, our critiques risk adding to the confusion unless they can say something compelling about what aspects of our lives, if any, this relationship threatens to undermine. One possibility, we might suppose, is metaphysical: with Christian theology so deeply hardwired into the linguistic and cultural imagination of the West, we must be ever careful not to fall into the magical thinking of classical theism, with its preference for the timeless, the spiritual, and the supernatural. Another danger might be framed politically: given how central Christianity has been to the history of Western colonial projects, we may risk reactivating imperialistic categories and attitudes to the degree that Christian ideas remain a part of our common cultural background (violence without metaphysics, to play on Derrida’s phrase).5 From contemporary anthropologists of religion such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood we have learned many ways in which the rules of secular modernity are not as rational and neutral as they might seem. One of the deep lessons of their work, I take it, is not that secular modernity is therefore illegitimate but that its values and institutions must always be either argued for and defended or thrown into question, that they cannot simply be taken for granted. Pointing out that the available forms of contestation are themselves products of a particular history does nothing to change this fundamental situation; what are required are still new arguments and new forms. The contemporary world offers a great number of examples of the confusion that develops when we blur questions of legitimacy and history around the problem of religion. It is worth dwelling on a few of them here, if only to shed light on the stakes of a story such as the one I have been telling about existentialism in this book. I will focus briefly on the work of two thinkers whom I take to represent opposite poles within the debate we are currently hav-

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ing about the meaning of Christianity as a cultural legacy for the West. The first is the work of Gil Anidjar, particularly his 2014 book Blood: A Critique of Christianity; the second is Peter Sloterdijk’s 2009 book Du mußt dein Leben ändern (You Must Change Your Life). In its own way, each of these works exemplifies a pervasive but not always articulate anxiety about the relationship between Christianity and secular criticism. I begin with Anidjar. Anidjar is one of Asad’s prominent intellectual heirs, and he has made several attempts to build on Asad’s work on the historical intertwining of Christianity and secular modernity by thinking further in the direction of a theory of Christianity itself. Anidjar is right to draw attention to the “highly plastic institutions” that characterize Christianity and that have allowed it to evolve and influence culture at so many levels.6 And although he is not the first to name it, there is an important insight at the heart of his work: the way in which the Christian religion relates to Western culture more broadly is not analogous to the way in which other religions relate to other cultures, nor is it paradigmatic of the way in which “religion” relates to “culture,” considered in abstract terms. Anidjar follows this asymmetry to a thought-provoking conclusion: if we take seriously the unique combination of intellectual, political, and aesthetic power at the heart of Christian history, if we notice the way in which it constantly struggles to define itself in comparative terms with its secular and religious others, we will find that we may have grossly overestimated the degree to which we know how to think about this curious historical object—not only what kind of work it is doing but also what kind of thing it is. I think this is right, and an urgent question. But Anidjar’s critique comes sharply against its limits when this curious plasticity becomes the basis for a new definition of Christianity as a singular agent in history—indeed, as the agent of Western secularization, both originally and today (a move Asad always refused): “Munchausen-like, [Christianity] attempted to liberate itself, to extricate itself from its own conditions; it judged itself no longer Christian, no longer religious. Christianity (that is, to clarify this one last time, Western Christendom) judged and named itself, it reincarnated itself as secular.”7 Here Anidjar overlays the history of secular reason with the history of Christianity. In the nineteenth century of Hegel and Feuerbach, this move would have registered as a kind of theology. Yet for Hegel and Feuerbach, the “essence” of Christianity, the active substance behind the appearance and reappearance of “truly” Christian forms across time, could be defined in metaphysical terms. Without something like the metaphysics of Geist to back them up, Anidjar’s claims leave us to wonder who, or what, is involved in the reincarnational work of Christianity “itself.” Is it the ghost of Paul? Of Charlemagne? Of

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Luther? How could we possibly evaluate such a claim? The qualification “Western Christendom” is presumably made to dampen the sense that Anidjar has conjured up this chimerical subject, “Christianity,” to serve the needs of his critique. But to add historical and geographical specificity in such an arbitrary way only reveals the extent of the mess he is in. Anidjar’s attempt to recast Christianity in the role of a singular historical agent is, I would like to suggest, a symptom of modernity on life support. Modern thought knows what it is doing when it has Christianity to criticize. The critique of Christian ideas is one of the most coherent ways of connecting the figures of European modernity and of viewing them as a tradition, from Luther to Descartes, Montesquieu to George Eliot, Hume to Heidegger. But to see this criticism not only in the context of the Christian civilization from which it emerged but further as the self-reincarnation of Christianity is to deny that there is anything with agency in the West that is not Christian. All contact with that sticky, plastic “thing” becomes legible as transmission (emphasis on “mission”), and Anidjar offers no analytic criterion capable of distinguishing the two. Here Anidjar’s postmodern reveals itself as a disguised hypermodern, resurrecting Christianity in mythical rather than historical form in order to ensure that the politics of postcolonialism have a clear rhetorical structure in which to operate. In Blood, Anidjar tries to materialize this myth through a sort of critical “history” of the idea of blood. “What I wanted to show,” Anidjar writes in his conclusion to the work, “was how liquidity, ‘how instability, rather than undermining’ Christianity ‘as a regulatory political and social ideal, actually lent it its force.”8 Anidjar means blood to be the not-quite-materialization of this liquid essence.9 The conceit that this is a book about blood, a “hematology,” as he puts it, allows Anidjar to insinuate his way to a definition of Christianity as pure contagion—as that which creates bonds beyond physical borders, as that which “circulates” and “spills.” As a history, the work is difficult to evaluate. He moves from the Crusades to the Renaissance to Homer to Bram Stoker with minimal direct engagement with the primary sources he marshals to serve his narrative.10 But throughout, Anidjar scrambles to hold onto one key historical argument: the idea of blood—as that which marks the act of violence and as that which identifies familial and communal bonds—is a distinctly Christian invention. It is this “blood”—the materialization of a spiritual identity and a spiritualization of matter—that carries Christianity to its fighting weight of plastic indestructibility. He describes one implication of this reading aptly when he explains, near the end of the book, that he wants us to consider “that Christianity is not a religion, by no means exclusively, not

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even primarily so.”11 Indeed, the integrity of the idea of Christianity at the bottom of this sort of critique is primarily a political one: Christianity is a name for the essence of Western hegemony. In stark contrast with this attempt to treat Christianity as the ens realissimum of Western history, we find Sloterdijk’s 2009 opus, translated into English in 2013 as You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. The book is a philosophical exposition of what Sloterdijk calls the “practicing life.” Here, practice is not just another name for work. It is repetitive and ameliorative, but it is not fundamentally productive.12 Indeed, practice is not even one form of human life in contrast with others. Practice is what life is, from the level of our cells to the level of our culture. “The time has come,” Sloterdijk writes in his opening salvo, “to reveal humans as the beings that result from repetition. Just as the nineteenth century stood cognitively under the sign of production and the twentieth under that of reflexivity, the future should present itself under the sign of the exercise.”13 Though they appear to have visited the same naming salon, Sloterdijk’s “general ascetology” is a very different kind of project from Anidjar’s theory of “generalized hematology.”14 It stands as a philosophical attempt to reimagine the basic operations that constitute human life: “Even a simple maintenance of bodily—or rather neurophysical— form can only be comprehended as an effect of undeclared training. This comprises routines whereby the standard movements of an organ complex are, through inconspicuous procedures, employed often enough to stabilize the complex at its current fitness status.” What seems like mere self-identity is in fact a “continual repetition of undeclared practice, culminating in a ‘mute autopoiesis.’ ”15 And if life is rethought as a practicing life, human history is to be rethought as the progressive explication of practice. The emergence of explicit exercises, such as Indian yogic asanas or Christian spiritual exercises, constitutes a “secession of the practicing [that] places the entire ecosystem of human behavior on an altered foundation.”16 Asceticism in this more familiar sense is actually just one explication of the ascetic behavior taking place in our organs and cells at all times. In fact, human culture, writ large, can be understood as a “de-automization” of “the blindly reproducing” nexus of life.17 If it were not clear already, this is a philosophy of history. The implications of this argument for our understanding of religion are by no means anecdotal, and Sloterdijk is good enough to spell them out in advance: “Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language . . . for a group of phenomena that tradition tended to refer to with such words as ‘spirituality,’ ‘piety,’ ‘morality,’ ‘ethics’ and ‘asceticism.’ If the manoeuvre succeeds, the conventional concept of religion, that ill-fated bug-

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bear from the prop studios of modern Europe, will emerge from these investigations as the great loser.”18 Here Sloterdijk’s position cozies up to a postcolonial critique of the category of “religion.” The marriage, of course, is one of convenience: Sloterdijk’s real project is a reduction of the whole scope of Western “religious, spiritual and ethical material” to modalities of repetitiveameliorative practice. Its main target: “faith in the existence of ‘religion.’ ”19 In the world mapped out by general ascetology, there can be no such thing as a “return of religion” or a “postsecular” age. All the renewed talk of religion today is rather to be understood as just one more attempt at bringing “exercise” into focus as the basic element of organic life. Religion is but a coarse if durable misunderstanding, a legend haunting our efforts at seeing the element of life for what it really is. Like Anidjar, Sloterdijk presents us with historical claims that are difficult to evaluate. I leave for another moment questions such as whether he has overemphasized the synonymy between “religion” and “faith” and whether the history of “religion” can be adequately reinterpreted along the lines of latent realities being progressively explicated. What is crucial here is that when faced with the dilemma I described before about how to react when secular criticism unmasks its own basic values as beholden to Christianity— the same dilemma that prompted Anidjar to give Christianity all authority in Western culture, including over the secular—Sloterdijk decides to explode the concepts on which the dilemma rests. There can be no dependence on Christianity—and hence no threat to the legitimacy of the modern—if Christianity itself never really existed. If all we have is one form of deautomized practice alongside another, the very terms in which we might identify a debt—let alone a “hegemony”—are missing. On the planet of the practicing, Christianity has no agency whatsoever. There is something compelling about Sloterdijk’s sweeping picture of human life. It certainly offers much to think about as we search for new ways to formulate what connects the historical with the material, the conscious with the mechanical, and the cultural with the natural compositions of human beings. But in zooming past religion, what Sloterdijk sacrifices has nothing to do with concepts like “faith” or “spirituality,” which often seem to be his real targets. He sacrifices one of the most coherent ways we have to talk about how values have been formed and transmitted in the West. He sacrifices, in other words, our ability to clearly identify and theorize the ways in which regimes of practice are developed in the context of multilayered contexts of power. What differentiates the change occurring at all levels of our bodies from the religious ideal of conversion is not only that one is explicit whereas the other

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is “undetected.” Conversion is religious—in my sense of the term—because it is above all a particular way of defining and valuing change. Does it really make more sense out of yogic meditation to understand it in continuity with organic regimes of autopoiesis than to understand it as a performance of virtue taking shape within specific territorial, political, and conceptual contexts? Whatever release we might feel when the burden of historical consciousness is lifted, when the Geistesgeschichte of Europe is demystified as a perennial, self-explicating “practice,” the category of religion still does important analytical work, capturing patterns in how specific practices and ideals take hold of specific communities across time and space. In fact, given the extent to which Sloterdijk is a direct product of the tradition I have been analyzing in this book (and especially of Heidegger), we should also ask of him what Hans Jonas came to ask of himself—that is, to what extent this global vision of the relation among theoretical explication, ascetic practice, and life is itself is grounded in the historical and intellectual background of existential (and, yes, Protestant) experiments in energetic asceticism.20 A principal aim of this book has been to present existentialism as a fertile context in which to think through the problematic status of religion in modern thought. Existentialism asks us to think about the secular—in contrast with projects like Sloterdijk’s and Anidjar’s—in terms of engaged historical agents. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre belong to the existential tradition not simply because they talk about quasi-religious themes such as anxiety and guilt and finitude. Rather, we might say that such themes appear as identifiably existential because through them we gain access to the way in which each of these authors felt responsible to reimagine their relationship to Christianity as a horizon for thinking up new ideas and norms in the present. Kierkegaard cannot be “unveiled” as a Christian inasmuch as his writing pursued Christianity with unqualified ferocity. Heidegger explicitly treated Christian authors and ideas as the sources for his developing philosophical project. Sartre built Christian monotheism into the frame of his ethics as that which the responsible and authentic individual must continually struggle against to realize her own freedom. Even where the manner or scope of the religious elements I have identified remain textually implicit or only partially acknowledged by the authors in question, it is not a language of “haunting” or “crypto-Christianity” that applies here but rather one of engagement. Putting it another way, we might say that one of the material objects of existential philosophy is history itself—and in particular, the complex burden of Christianity as a cultural legacy for the West.

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But if secular existentialists are not just in the history of religion but are also agents in the history of religion, this should have consequences for more than the boundaries of modern philosophy. It should also bring us to call into question what is meant by the word “religion” and whom we consider to have privileged access to it. Anidjar looks at the plastic, mutable formations that characterize Christianity and sees a hegemon using mutability to maintain its power in the face of overt critique. But just as we cannot have both Sloterdijk’s pride and his nonchalance, neither can we have both Anidjar’s curiosity and his indignation. The more we learn from historians of religion about where our “secular” and “modern” world came from, the more we come to accept that “we seculars” are always in some sense Christian, as well as or in spite of whatever else we may be, the more we undermine the grounds for our own outrage about this history (the more dependence, the less illegitimacy, so to speak). In other words, recognizing the complex, asymmetrical relations of Christianity to the secular should also mean that we allow the meaning of Christianity itself to change (without needing to round up to the totalizing view that Christianity is change). To put the matter more locally, to spot the Christianity in Sartre’s philosophy need not mean trading the Sartre we thought we knew for a “Christian Sartre,” a hitherto unrecognized instance of that self-identical thing called Christianity. Rather (at least, this is my hope) it should bring us to see that Sartre tells us something new about the Christianity we thought we knew—in fact, he does something new with it, something that was not there before.21 One important consequence of this view is that theology becomes subject to the same sorts of extramural analysis as I proposed for philosophy above. One hears often, in some theological circles, that many of the theoretical problems of Heidegger’s or Sartre’s philosophies stem from their selective appropriation of religious ideas—authenticity without grace, anxiety without faith, theological anthropology without the theology to back it up. In this book, I have argued for a far more substantial connection with Christian ideas on the part of such atheistic existentialists than most of these theological critics have usually imagined. Yet I do not think that the problems with which existential philosophy has left us will be resolved by reaching back to the conclusions the existentialists rejected, to the theological distinctions that secular philosophers “forgot.” So while religious genealogies of the secular may invite modernist apologetics such as Blumenberg’s on the one side, on the other, they open the door to heresiological critiques. Heresy may seem like an absurd notion to apply in this context. The premise of heresy is a

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shared and relatively stable traditional identity, which is precisely what the secular age tends to lack. But this is slide of our situation: in the orbit of the protestant-secular, nothing is universal, and we are all “insiders.” To consider secular thinkers as agents with respect to Christianity is to take a break from the ironic spiral of unmasking favored by life-support modernism. Yet it does not mean that old hermeneutic criteria such as authorial intention should return from their well-earned place at the margins of historical evidence. To be capable of doing something new certainly does not entail that one knows what one is doing. Kierkegaard did not see that he was preparing the conceptual frame for an atheistic asceticism. Heidegger did not perceive the degree to which his philosophical formalization of Christian piety would impact the kind of life-work that philosophy would be fit to do. Sartre, the first to begin this work as the missionary of authenticity, did not grasp how carefully his brand of atheistic existentialism had been prepared by Protestant theologies of choice. In his 1951 play The Devil and the Good God, set during the German Peasants’ War, one of Sartre’s most memorable characters (a protocommunist militant called “Nasty”) improvises on the Lutheran adage: “All men are prophets or God does not exist.”22 If Nasty had been a better Sartrean, he would have said “and.”

Abbreviations

GA

Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 102 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976–).

SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Anne Mette Hansen, and Johnny Kondrup, 55 vols. (Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret and G.E.C. Gads Forlag, 1997–2013). SZ

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967).

Translations are mine wherever no other English translation is cited. In cases where comparison with an existing translation may be of particular interest, I cite the source in the original language first, followed by “Cf. [alternate English translation].”

Notes

Introduction 1. Walter Kaufmann, introduction to Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1956), 46. 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, tr. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 20; Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1970), 17. 3. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 22; Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 22. 4. For contemporary reactions, see, for example, Otto Fr. Bollnow, “Deutsche Existenzphilosophie und französischer Existenzialismus,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 2, no. 2/3 (1948): 233f.; Nicholas Berdyaev, “Russia and the New World Era,” tr. Marie-Louise Hall, The Russian Review 7, no. 2 (1948): 11. 5. See Calvin O. Schrag’s point in the introduction to Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), xiv: “There are Christians who are existentialists” but there can be no such thing as “Christian existentialism,” because he defines existentialism as a formal ontological account of existence that is indifferent to the question of whether “religious experience” is “valid” or not. This is a rather midcentury way of putting this issue. 6. If I am right that key philosophical concepts of existentialism were shaped by Protestant-Pietistic ascetic traditions, a very interesting question emerges relating to the extent to which this Protestant ascetic normativity inflected religious existentialism of other traditional and confessional orientations. Boris de Schloezer will emphasize Kierkegaard’s singular role in Lev Chestov’s trajectory from a secular to postsecular Jew, to take one example. See de Schloezer, preface to Chestov, Les Révélations de la mort: Dostoïevsky–Tolstoï (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1923), xxix–xxx.

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7. Camus writes, at the start of his essay on Sisyphus, “From Jaspers to Heidegger, from Kierkegaard to Chestov . . . Whatever may be or have been their ambitions, all started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish, or impotence reigns. And what they have in common is precisely the themes so far disclosed.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, tr. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 23. 8. Helmut Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness: An Essay on Existentialism (Hinsdale, IL: Henry Regnery, 1949), 34. 9. Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 11. 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux 1951–1962, ed. Jacques Prunair (Paris: Verdier, 2000), 254–57. 11. Jean Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1938), 455–76. 12. For a discussion of this reception, see Heiko Schultz, “A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, vol. 1, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 307–420; Vincent McCarthy, “Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and in Full View,” in Kierkegaard and Existentialism, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 95–126; and Noreen Khawaja, “Heidegger’s Kierkegaard: Philosophy and Religion in the Tracks of a Failed Interpretation,” Journal of Religion 95, no. 3 (2015): 295–317. 13. “Troens Autopsi.” Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 70, 102; SKS 4, 270f., 299. This is Kierkegaard’s startling gloss on the Schleiermacherian trope of “seeing with one’s own eyes.” Most people need a mediator or religious leader to offer them an “initial direction,” Schleiermacher writes, but after this intervention, “a person should then see with his own eyes and should himself make a contribution to the treasures of religion; otherwise he deserves no place in its kingdom and also receives none.” Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, tr. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 50. The connection with Husserlian insistence on “direct intuition” is not anecdotal, though it cannot be treated here. See especially “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, tr. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 146f. For an analysis of this idea in Husserl and its connection to the responsibility of the philosopher, see Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 86–100. 14. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 20. 15. Pierre Arnaud, “Aftermath—A Young Philosopher’s View,” Yale French Studies 16, no. 110 (1955):107. 16. Of course, for Luther, living as a Christian means dying to the world, hence “vivendo inmo moriendo et damnando fir theologus, non intelligendo, legendo aut speculando.” (Living, nay dying and being damned, is what makes a theologian, not knowing, reading, or speculating.) Luthers Werke, vol. 5 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1892), 163. For a theological reflection on Luther’s legacy in this regard, see Oswald

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Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, tr. Thomas H. Trapp (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 42f.; and Miroslav Wolf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially 70ff., 105ff. Nietzsche, anticipating what Weber will later make of Luther’s notion of Beruf, goes as far as to credit Luther with having opened the way for an “unchristian vita contemplativa in Europe” and having set a limit to “contempt for worldly activity and the laity.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 51. 17. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, tr. Terrence Tice (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 1ff. 18. Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” tr. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 45–50; GA 9, 55–61. See also Heidegger’s early impromptu “lecture” on Schleiermacher’s second speech, which concentrates on the close relation between “thinking” and “acting” in religion. The lecture has been edited and translated in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927, eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 88–91. 19. Heidegger also points to Schelling as part of the prehistory of this new sense of the term. See GA 49, 75ff. 20. Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, ed. and tr. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 88. 21. Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, 116. 22. Joseph Ratzinger and Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church, tr. Salvator Attanasio and Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), 180. 23. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 283. Emphasis mine. 24. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 275. 25. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, volume 2 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975), 26. 26. David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 154ff. 27. Ratzinger, Faith and the Future (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 59f. 28. John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, Protestant Christianity Interpreted through its Development (New York: Scribner’s, 1954), 42. 29. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 18, as well as 29, 126, 158, 170. 30. See chapter 3 for an extended discussion of these views. 31. Tillich, Systematic Theology, volume 2, 25f. Schrag offers another classic example of this view: “A philosophy of human finitude, by its very nature and program, can

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provide no assertions on the validity or non-validity of religious experience. Every religious experience, however, presupposes certain universal human possibilities which arise from the nature of existence itself. It is the task of an existentialist ontology to clarify these universal human possibilities, presupposed not only in religious experience but in other regions of ontic experience as well. Such an ontology, already suggested in the existential reflections of Kierkegaard, has received one of its most powerful contemporary expressions in the philosophy of Heidegger.” Existence and Freedom, 142. 32. Tillich, Systematic Theology, volume 2, 27. Emphasis mine. 33. Leszek Kolakowski, Is God Happy? Selected Essays, tr. Agnieszka Kolakowska (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 185. 34. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 321. 35. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 325–28, 330ff. Tillich, too, is in agreement on this score: “England is the only European country in which the Existential problem of finding a new meaning for life had no significance, because there positivism and the religious tradition lived on side by side. . . . It is important to note that the one country without an Existential philosophy is that in which during the period from 1830 to 1930 the religious tradition remained strongest. This illustrates once more the dependence of the Existential philosophy on the problems created by the breakdown of the religious tradition on the European continent.” Paul Tillich, Main Works/Hauptwerke, vol. 1, ed. Carl Heinz Ratschow et al. (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1987), 373. 36. Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness, xix. 37. Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness, 35f. Kuhn recapitulates the main arguments of Jonas’s monograph, though without citation. 38. Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness, xviii–xix. 39. Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes, 467. 40. Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 261. 41. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Vintage, 1999), 14, 35. 42. Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 46. 43. Philippians 2:12. 44. Sartre was in large part raised by his Alsatian Protestant grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, through whom he was the first cousin of Albert Schweitzer, the great Lutheran theologian and later medical missionary. For a recent account of this connection, see Annie Cohen-Solal, Une renaissance sartrienne (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 68ff. Cohen-Solal, remarkably, cites the traces of Sartre’s Protestant background as a possible reason for his greater popularity in American than in France (the exact inverse of Kaufmann’s explanation, in other words). 45. Cf., for example, Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 172–210. 46. Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes, 467.

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47. Jürgen Habermas, “Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason belong?” tr. Peter Dews, in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 131f. 48. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 167f. 49. See also Dominique Janicaud’s much-debated attempt to put secondgeneration phenomenology “on trial” for having reintroduced God into a philosophical discourse that is and should remain atheistic. Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 50. Attempts to formulate a theory of values within sociology have often treated values as surrogates for implicit beliefs. See, for example, Talcott Parsons, “The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory,” International Journal of Ethics 45, no. 3 (1935): 282–316. This approach is quite different from mine in that it follows a roughly Weberian aspiration that the interpretation arrive at a picture that the subject herself might reasonably be expected to endorse. The values I am targeting are not “ultimate concerns” but implicit habits of mind and discourse. It is not relevant to my argument whether any of the authors being considered would affirm this interpretation should it be presented to them as an interpretation of existential philosophy. 51. Importantly, this is the case already with Kierkegaard, as I will show in the second chapter. His lifelong interest in Christianity took the cultural marginality of religious devotion in late modern Europe as its essential presupposition and point of departure. While in Luther’s time, “a reformation was required,” since Luther was more religious than the establishment, Kierkegaard scoffs at the idea that his “purely secularized generation” would attempt to reform the church. See his marginal note at SKS 24, 198. 52. For an account that takes such an approach to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, see Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 53. Michel Foucault, Care of the Self, vol. 3 of History of Sexuality, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, tr. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 54. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, tr. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 6. I am grateful to Mélissa FoxMuraton for pointing me to this text. See her essay, “Election or the Individual? Levinas on Kierkegaard’s Challenges to Judaism,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (2012): 367–86. 55. A study focused on the Catholic dimensions of existential thinking about the body might shed considerable light on the arc stretching from Marcel to Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Similarly, a Jewish genealogy of existentialism might have a great deal to say about the way in which religious tropes impacted philosophical discussions

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of alterity in the twentieth century. There is something still surprising and worthy of thought in the parallels Peter Gordon drew between Rosenzweig’s idea of redemption and Heidegger’s notion of authenticity in his 2003 book Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press 2003), see especially chapter 4. Gordon shows, on the one side, the extent to which Rosenzweig’s theological work in the Star of Redemption can be interpreted phenomenologically. He also anticipates some of what I am saying here about the religious resonance of Heidegger’s formal distinction between Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit. What follows from his argument is not that we ought to interpret Heidegger’s philosophy in light of Jewish soteriology but rather that “Judaism, Christianity, and paganism belong together in the field of Weimar thought” (307). This is an important point. I would want to underline, however, that to see the connection between these traditions in broad terms does not imply that any particular concept within this milieu is best understood ecumenically. And in relation to authenticity, I would emphasize the difference that Gordon himself notes: while Rosenzweig requires that the force that brings me “into my own self ” (im eigenen Selbst) must be one that “manifests itself as a call from God,” for Heidegger authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) is possible only “as a call from the finitude of the self ” (259f.). This difference is more significant for the “confessional” question than it may appear. The attempt to generate responsibility from literally nothing, from finitude, does not just define Heidegger’s position as “atheistic” in contrast with Rosenzweig’s theological (or Kierkegaard’s, for that matter) way of understanding the self. The nothing also links Heidegger’s position to Protestant radicalizations of the doctrine of sin. As I will show in chapter 5, the finite, ruptured, “nihilated” self of existentialism reflects an adaptation of Protestant radicalizations of the notion of sin in the context of a thinking about temporal rupture. The paradox at the heart of existential notions of responsibility gives rise to an unusually affirmative form of asceticism—and it is here that Protestant models of ascetic devotion are best equipped to help us. 56. It has long been common practice to see in the Christian tradition a handful of “protoexistential” thinkers (Augustine and Pascal are the usual citations) who offered powerful articulations of spiritual anxiety, doubt, and the sense of isolation that came to be such prominent themes in the works of the later existentialists. But there is a crucial difference here relating to the element of choice. Where Augustine and Pascal will treat the restlessness of the human condition as an affliction, legitimate only as the pretext of a cure, Kierkegaard sees a norm. Kierkegaardian faith does not offer rest; it demands restlessness. It underwrites restlessness by rephrasing it as an injunction. This is the deeply ironic gesture of Kierkegaard’s religious thought that will come to appeal so strongly to the young Karl Barth. With a marvelously precise shift of emphasis, doubt becomes devotion, and offense becomes pious practice. 57. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, tr. Philip Mairet (New York: Haskell House, 1977), 27; Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 24.

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Chapter 1 1. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17. 2. Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (London: Verso, 1970); Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 3. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 92f. 4. Bellah, who used the phrase prominently in Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), also alludes to a secondary American genealogy for this idea via Walt Whitman. See “Is There a Common American Culture?,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 3 (1998): 13–25; Taylor discusses it in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 275, as well as in The Ethics of Authenticity. Most likely through Taylor, this phrase was picked up by a number of more recent critics of liberalism as a quick way to designate “Protestant” and “Enlightenment” theories of subjectivity. See Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 11, 192; José Casanova’s “subjective-expressive” is another version of this. See Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 33. 5. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 333f. 6. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 19; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979) 166f.; see also Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984), 200, 286n. 7. “The moral ideal behind self-fulfillment is that of being true to oneself, in a specifically modern understanding of that term. . . . The distinction is expressed in the title of the book, Sincerity and Authenticity, and following him I am going to use the term ‘authenticity’ for the contemporary ideal.” Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 15f. 8. Taylor deepens his critical stance in A Secular Age, which names a chapter—and an era—with the concept: “The Age of Authenticity.” 9. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 93. See, for example, George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Ann Fulton, Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999); Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 10. In his early work, Husserl occasionally used the terms Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit. The use does not appear to be fully systematic—sometimes a perception is defined as “authentic” in function of its adequateness, at other times it describes the

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relation between “empty” and “full” intentions in imaginative perception, at other times it describes the difference between intentional relations that are more or less explicated. Husserl picks up the term as a descriptor of imaginative presentation from Brentano. However, it is really only with Heidegger that Eigentlichkeit takes on a central and systematic place within philosophy as a transcendental thinking about the “own.” For some of Husserl’s discussions of the term, see Ding und Raum, ed. Ulrich Claesges, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 16 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 18, 22–24, 33. See also Husserl, Phantasie und Bildbewußtsein, ed. Eduard Marbach (Hamburg: Meiner, 2006), 47–59 and passim. 11. Some commentators have proposed a more literal translation—one that would preserve the neologistic quality of the term—as “ownedness.” See my note about John Haugeland’s use of this term (chap. 3, note 3). Also cf. Emad and Kalary’s peculiar variant on this idea—“ownmostness”—in the translation of GA 66: Mindfulness, tr. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 1997), 118ff. 12. Too much has been made about the isolated application of “echt” to “eigentlich” in Being and Time, which amounts to a passing observation. See, for example, Martin Jay, “Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness,” New German Critique 97 (2006): especially 17, 24. 13. See, for example, SKS 3, 214. Also see the remarkable line from a letter to Regine in 1841: “Den, der eier sig selv, eier den største Riigdom, og om Een end eiede al Verden, kunde han dog ikke være saa ødsel som den, der bortgiver sig selv.” (He who owns himself owns the greatest wealth, and even if there was one who owned all the world, he still could not be as wasteful as he who gave himself away.) SKS 28, 238. 14. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 5; SKS 8, 121. 15. Joachim Ringleben, Aneignung: die spekulative Theologie Søren Kierkegaards (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983), 99. Ringleben is careful and correct to point out at the end of this passage that appropriation characterizes both the realization (SichVerwirklichen) of the subject by means of the appropriated object and the act that allows the appropriated object to be effective (Wirksamwerdenlassen) on the subject. 16. See Translating Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, special issue of Studia Phænomenologica 5 (2005), which deals with the translation of the work into seventeen languages. 17. Even with its distinctive language, it would take until Theodor Adorno’s 1964 The Jargon of Authenticity, tr. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003), for a powerful critique of Eigentlichkeit to emerge in German. And even here the critique is far more concerned with the jargon and the way it functions than with the values packed into the idea of authenticity itself. 18. Simone de Beauvoir, “Jean-Paul Sartre: Strictly Personal,” tr. Malcolm Cowley, Harper’s Bazaar (January 1946), 113, 158, 160; Bernard Frizell, “Existentialism: Amid Left-Bank Revels, Postwar Paris Enthrones a Bleak Philosophy of Pessimism Derived by a French Atheist from a Danish Mystic,” LIFE (June 17, 1946), 59f., 62, 64, 66.

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19. Sartre, “The Situation of the Jew—Reflections on the Jewish Question I,” Commentary (April 1948): 306–16; “Portrait of the Inauthentic Jew,” Commentary (May 1948): 389–97; and “Gentile and Jew,” Commentary (June 1948): 522–31. 20. For one important source on this reception, see Robert Misrahi, “Sartre and the Jews: A Felicitous Misunderstanding,” October 87 (1999): 63–72. Also see Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-Semitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 21. It is curious and lamentable that Ann Fulton’s book on the American reception of Sartre never mentions his essay on anti-Semitism. She seems to chalk up the year 1948 as a turning point in the American reception of Sartre because of mounting Cold War fears about the loss of individuality. See Fulton, Apostles of Sartre, 73. 22. See Harold Rosenberg, “Does the Jew Really Exist? Sartre’s Morality Play about Anti-Semitism,” Commentary (January 1, 1949): 8–18; and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1976), xv. For a more expanded discussion of Sartre’s essay, see chapter 4. 23. It is telling that German management literature tends to rely on the Latinate Authentizität/authentisch in a sense retranslated from the English cultural discourse of authenticity. At the time I am writing this, the number-one book in the “Branding” section of Amazon.de is called Meine Marke: Was Unternehmen authentisch, unverwechselbar und langfristig erfolgreich macht, by Hermann H. Wala (Munich: Redline Verlag, 2011). 24. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 11. For the discussion of Sartre, see pp. 100, 105, 144ff. 25. Trilling cites a passage from this chapter quite prominently in his work and refers to the chapter itself as “well-known,” but he neglects to credit Sartre for having inspired his central thesis. See Sincerity and Authenticity, 144. 26. Berman, Politics of Authenticity, xvii. 27. Berman, Politics of Authenticity, xvii. 28. Berman, Politics of Authenticity, xiii. 29. Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground was the first text excerpted into Kaufmann’s anthology, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1956). 30. Rossinow, Politics of Authenticity, 53–84. 31. Rossinow, Politics of Authenticity, 349–50n9. 32. Rossinow, Politics of Authenticity, 6. 33. James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 44. 34. See also Cotkin’s Existential America for a long and helpful description of the existential background and interests of the Port Huron authors, especially Hayden. 35. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 105; Sartre, L’Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 97.

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36. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 27; SKS 4, 123. Another possible source for this connection among labor, value, and the proper within Kierkegaard’s thinking is Kant. In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, tr. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)—incidentally also the text where Kant’s Pietist background appears most prominently—he weaves a moral tale of the relation among striving, responsibility, and radical evil, whereas Kierkegaard will weave a devotional one. Kierkegaard is thought to have studied this work carefully. See Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 17f. 37. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 129. Cf. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, tr. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 122. 38. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 515; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 530. To the extent that they engage with Sartre at all, this move has been widely misunderstood by American philosophers working on the concept of authenticity. Appiah, for example, describes authenticity as the idea that there is “meaning for one’s life that is already there, waiting to be found,” while what he calls the “existentialist” picture of identity says that “we have to make a self up, as it were out of nothing.” Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 17. Appiah does not acknowledge that authenticity is also the name for the existentialist ideal of identity he is describing—let alone that it is the original context in which authenticity was thought in moral terms. Moreover, in place of the unsatisfying either-or between passive discovery and creation ex nihilo, Appiah proposes that identity be constructed “as a creative response to our capacities and circumstances” (19)—in other words, precisely the tension that Sartrean authenticity was supposed to capture. 39. Frederic Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 14. 40. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 107; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 114. 41. Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War 1939–40, tr. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1999), 219; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre: Septembre 1939– Mars 1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 447. 42. Sartre, War Diaries, 219; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 447. Sartre is here citing Gide. Berman, who is the closest to the existentialists among the three Anglophone critics considered earlier, also allows this principle to penetrate his political ethic: “For the politics of authenticity, any final solution would be a dissolution” (Berman, Politics of Authenticity, 318). 43. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, tr. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 54. Sartre applies the same term to authenticity in chapter 4 of Cahiers pour un morale. 44. Helmut Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness: An Essay on Existentialism (Hinsdale, IL: Henry Regnery, 1949), 39.

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45. “L’arbre existentialiste.” Emmanuel Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes (Rennes: PU Rennes, 2010), 17. 46. Emmanuel Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies: An Introduction, tr. Eric Blow (London: Salisbury Square, 1948), 2; Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 16. 47. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 21. 48. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 25. 49. Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 54; Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 58. 50. Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 59. 51. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on Conversion (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981), 46. 52. See Judaken’s discussion in “Sisyphus’s Progeny: Existentialism in France,” in Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context, ed. Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 96ff. 53. Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 4; Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 16. 54. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 494; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 510. Emphasis mine. 55. For the former, see my discussion of Sartre’s anxieties about Gide and Amiel in chapter 4; for the latter, see Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, tr. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 17, 22, 36, 40. For the French see Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1970), 9, 32, 55f. 56. Sartre, The Words, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Vintage, 1981), 253; Sartre, Les Mots et autres écrits autobiographiques, ed. Jean-François Louette (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 138. 57. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 244, 262–65. 58. For a sense of the professional consequences of this turn, see Husserl’s letter to Rudolf Otto in 1919, translated in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927, eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 363–65. 59. GA 56/57, 134. 60. See Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, eds., Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), especially part 4. While “retrieval” cannot be used in the same way to describe Heidegger’s work from the 1930s onward, it is worth noting that more than half of his lectures and essays from this later period are devoted to readings of German thinkers and poets, many of whom were grappling with the moral and cultural impact of Lutheran piety (Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche). What has often been ambiguously described as Heidegger’s “mystical” turn could in this sense be characterized more accurately as one element within Heidegger’s overall and lifelong engagement with Christian piety. See also August Langen, Der Wortschatz des deutschen Pietismus (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1968).

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61. George Steiner makes this case in his monograph, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 62. See also William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde’s introduction to Heidegger’s What Is Philosophy? (New York: Twayne, 1958), 12. Rudiger Safranski has an important analysis of the turn toward “pietistic” theories of personal truth in Heidegger’s youthful days. See Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, tr. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 19ff. 62. See Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism, and Holiness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), for a detailed and illuminating account of this background. 63. Gerhard Schreiber, “Christoph Schrempf: The Swabian Socrates as Translator of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology, vol. 1, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 275–320. “In 1879, a 19-year-old Schrempf—strongly influenced by his mother’s Pietism—matriculated in theology at the University of Tübingen” (Schreiber, “Christoph Schrempf,” 277). Schreiber cites in note 10 on the same page a self-referential line from Schrempf ’s works in which Schrempf looks back on his early attitude (before several crises of faith) as a “zealous Biblicist and Pietist.” The reference is to Schrempf, Akten zu meiner Entlassung aus dem Württembergischen Kirchendienst (p. iii), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1930), 101. There is also a significant connection to Abraham a Sancta Clara. Sancta Clara was a Swabian mystic who had an influence on both Heidegger and Kierkegaard. See Peter Šajda’s excellent discussion in “Abraham a Sancta Clara: An Aphoristic Encyclopedia of Christian Wisdom,” in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, vol. 2, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1–20. 64. See especially Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism, and Holiness; Stewart, Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions (esp. the chapters on Arndt, Brorson, Francke, and Tersteegen); as well as Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Kierkegaard og Pietismen (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1967). It has actually been relatively recently that scholars have taken up the question of how Lutheran theology exerted concrete and systematic influence on Kierkegaard’s thought. For two recent examples of this, see Simon Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), especially chapter 6; and see Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 65. José Casanova, Public Religions, 53. 66. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. 2, tr. Olive Wyon (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 718. 67. Karl Barth, “Dank und Reverenz,” Evangelische Theologie 23, no. 7 (1963): 341. See also Lee Barrett, “Karl Barth: The Dialectic of Attraction and Repulsion,” in Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology, vol. 1, 1–41. H. M. Kuitert takes Barth’s criticism somewhat further but limits himself to an account of existential theologians such as Bultmann and Bultmann’s student Ernst Fuchs. The meaning of “pietism” in Kuitert’s work is essentially the emphasis on personal appropriation. By this measure,

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Isaiah Berlin would be a pietist. See H. M. Kuitert, The Reality of Faith, tr. Lewis B. Smedes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1968). 68. Karl Barth, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Brian Cozens and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 2001), 19. 69. Harry Yeide, Studies in Classical Pietism: The Flowering of the Ecclesiola (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973). 70. This critique is drawn from twentieth-century discussions, beginning with the influential critique by Karl Barth. See also Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth and the Pietists: The Young Karl Barth’s Critique of Pietism and its Response, tr. Daniel W. Bloesch (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). Stoeffler points out that even Luther, who emphasized the absolute power of grace, tended to focus on the individual’s responsibility to work at her faith. Stoeffler makes a compelling argument that the fact that Pietists such as Francke wrote mostly sermons—as opposed to systematic theological treatises on Luther’s model—may be partially responsible for their reputation for compromising a more traditional emphasis on the absolute power of grace. See Stoeffler, German Pietism, 15f. 71. Martin Schmidt, Wiedergeburt und neuer Mensch: Gesammelte Studien zur Geschichte des Pietismus (Witten: Luther-Verlag, 1969), 184. 72. See Stoeffler, German Pietism, especially 10–23, for a comparison of Luther and Francke on the relation between conversion and justification. 73. Markus Matthias, “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 58. 74. Stoeffler, German Pietism, 21. 75. Johannes Wallmann, “Eine alternative Geschichte des Pietismus: Zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion um den Pietismusbegriff,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 28 (2003): 32. Markus Matthias also uses this term in “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” 50. 76. Johannes Weiss, Earliest Christianity: A History of the Period A.D. 30–150, tr. Frederick C. Grant, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 442f. 77. Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire (Paris: Beauchesne), “Conversi” entry. 78. Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, London (1875) vol. 1, “Conversi” entry. 79. Saint Benedict, Holy Rule, 58.17–18. Emphasis mine. There was some controversy about Benedict’s use of conversatio as opposed to conversio, and especially about whether to attribute a discursive connotation to the term conversatio, but it appears that the terms were used somewhat interchangeably in the period and both referred loosely to a “turn” or “reorientation,” often in a spiritual and/or ethical sense. See Edward Cuthbert Butler, for example, Benedictine Monachism: Studies in Benedictine Life and Rule (London: Longmans & Green, 1919), 135–39. 80. Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 284.

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81. Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, tr. Adam Kotsko (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013). 82. For the influence of Pietism in Denmark, see Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, “Hallischer Pietismus und Herrnhutertum in Dänemark,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 29 (2003): 134–47; Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), especially part 2; and see Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism, and Holiness, chapter 2. Shantz writes, “The Danish-Halle mission and exchanges between Halle and Denmark led to establishing an orphanage in Copenhagen in 1727. This foundation followed the Halle model and included a printing press. Copenhagen became a center for Pietist influence in Denmark. Under Christian VI (1699– 1746), a form of state Pietism came to dominate the Danish court and society.” Shantz, An Introduction, 142. 83. August Hermann Francke, “A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Most Useful Way of Preaching,” in Pietists: Selected Writings, ed. Peter C. Erb (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983), 117. 84. Francke, “A Letter to a Friend,” 122. 85. Matthias, “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” 58. 86. Hartmut Lehmann, “Zur Charakterisierung der entschiedenen Christen im Zeitalter der Säkularisierung,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 30 (2004): 14. 87. Nicholas Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf, Nine Public Lectures on Important Subjects in Religion Preached in Fetter Lane Chapel in London in the Year 1746, tr. and ed. George W. Forell (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1973), 80f. 88. On the one hand, I am using the word “authenticity” here in a slightly punning way, given that I asked us to distinguish in this chapter between authenticity as genuineness or veracity and authenticity as an existential ideal. But the deeper point is that in connection with the phenomenon of Protestant conversion, this distinction can begin to unravel, yielding a set of complex relationships among conversion, authentic conversion, and the conversion to authenticity. For a fascinating study of this dynamic in the Indian colonial context (focusing on Protestantism as well), see Rupa Viswanath, “The Emergence of Authenticity Talk and the Giving of Accounts: Conversion as Movement of the Soul in South India, ca. 1900,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 1 (2013): 120–41. 89. Cited in Matthias, “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” 63. His reference is to Francke, Lectiones paraeneticae III.382. 90. Matthias, “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” 50. Emphasis mine. 91. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this demand will have helped give rise to the “inner mission,” a new ecclesial formation in Germany and other Protestant countries (especially strong in Denmark), which reinterpreted the Christian mission as a domestic enterprise. 92. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 224; SKS 10, 225. Emphasis mine. The term Afgjørelse was translated as “Entscheidung” in Schrempf editions and onward. When citing from

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the English translation of Christian Discourses, I am using the Lowrie translation unless otherwise specified. 93. See SZ §60ff. 94. See, for example, Karl Löwith’s pseudonymously published article on Schmitt and Kierkegaard under the name “Hugo Fiala”: “Politischer Dezisionismus,” Revue internationale de la théorie du droit / Internationale Zeitschrift für Theorie des Rechts 9, no. 2 (1935): 101–23. 95. Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 170. 96. Busch, Karl Barth and the Pietists, 60ff. 97. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 494; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 510. See chapter 4 for my discussion of this phrase. 98. Camus’s critique of the existentialists, which took special aim at Sartre, ran along these lines: “They deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them.” Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 32. For more recent examples of this reading, see Frank Schalow, Heidegger and the Quest for the Sacred: From Thought to the Sanctuary of Faith (Dordrecht: Springer, 2001), 37; Jill Graper Hernandez, Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope: Evil, God, and Virtue (London: Continuum, 2011), 37. 99. Nicholas Hope has a discussion of the polarizing effect of this “precisionism,” as it was sometimes known, in his German and Scandinavian Protestantism, especially 369ff. 100. Hartmut Lehmann, “Engerer, weiterer und erweiterter Pietismusbegriff. Anmerkungen zu den kritischen Anfragen von Johannes Wallmann an die Konzeption der Geschichte des Pietismus,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 29 (2003):18–36; also see Martin Brecht et al., eds., Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). 101. Matthias, “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” 52. 102. Matthias, “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” 53. 103. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 13. 104. See, for example, George Leamann, “Strategies of Deception: The Composition of Heidegger’s Silence,” in Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996); and, more recently, Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, tr. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 105. Jean Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1938), 489. Emphasis mine. This last line, Wahl’s summary of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, prefigures nearly word-for-word the definition of existence that will percolate through Sartre’s writings. 106. The language of this attribution comes explicitly from Nietzsche and is used with particular frequency in readings of Nietzsche. Deleuze, for example, famously reads the notion of the eternal recurrence as Nietzsche’s way of turning being into

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becoming: “From the perspective of the constitution of the eternal return, the labyrinth is becoming, the affirmation of becoming. Being comes from becoming, it is affirmed of becoming itself, in as much as the affirmation of becoming is the object of another affirmation. . . . The true thread is the thread of affirmation.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2005), 177. Charles Guignon considers the affirmation of becoming to be a central feature of Heidegger’s idea of the self in “Becoming a Self: The Role of Authenticity in Being and Time,” in The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, ed. Charles Guignon (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 119–32. 107. George Pattison, Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (London: Macmillan, 1999), 6. 108. Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 3. 109. For Schopenhauer’s discussion of asceticism, see The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), §68ff. 110. Bernard Reginster has a helpful discussion of this distinction in The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 143–47, 260f. 111. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, tr. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 86. Tyler Roberts has a helpful discussion of the distinction between the “ascetic ideal” as articulated by Nietzsche and “asceticism,” which Nietzsche himself often demonstrates, to the confusion of many of his interpreters. See Tyler T. Roberts, Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), especially 78–82. Roberts makes a persuasive case that this confusion about the distinction between “otherwordly” and “ascetic” ideals has stopped us from asking more nuanced questions about the broad role religion plays in Nietzsche’s work. 112. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 59. 113. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 109ff. 114. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 18. 115. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 101. 116. Nietzsche will go as far as to say that the will to truth at work in modern atheism not only is not opposed to the ascetic ideal but is the ascetic ideal itself “in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, completely esoteric, totally stripped of externals, and thus not so much its remnant as its kernel.” Genealogy, 118. Albrecht Ritschl’s three-volume study characterized Pietism as a monastic-ascetic movement descending from medieval mystical theology, largely on the basis of an analogy between asceticism and renunciation (Weltflucht). This analogy would be thrown into question by Weber, who studied Ritschl’s work carefully. See Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus in der reformierten Kirche (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1880–86), vol. 1, “Prolegomena,” and vol. 2, chapters 34–35.

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117. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 111. 118. The word he uses is unbefangen, which has a range of possible translations, including “unbiased,” “impartial,” “unconscious,” “natural,” and “ingenuous.” See Weber, Protestant Ethic, 18, 73, 101, 111, and passim. 119. This calls to mind Nietzsche’s point about asceticism as the will to dominate turned on the self: “The material on which the formative and rapacious nature of this force vents itself is precisely man himself, his whole animal old self.” Genealogy, 59. 120. On this interpretation, it should become unnecessary to distinguish, as Tilottama Rajan does, between affirmative and ascetic tendencies in deconstruction. She gives an important reading of the relationship among existentialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction but leads us down a problematic path when she treats the ascetic and the “negative” tendencies within these traditions as synonymous. Her differentiation between deconstruction and poststructuralism might be reformulated to show connections between the affirmative and ascetic heirs of existentialism and phenomenology, however. See Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially chapter 2. 121. Weber’s account of Puritanism has a further point of relevance here. Where Nietzsche sought to explain the counterintuitive pursuit of suffering on the part of the modern ascetic as a search for “meaning”—specifically, the attempt to find meaning in suffering—Weber favors an economic framework: “Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins” (Protestant Ethic, 104). Weber’s view is more helpful in the present context, considering that many existentialists will develop an account of the radical meaninglessness or absurdity of existence, while nonetheless being guided by a normative connection among givenness, labor, and waste. 122. “There is no second in which he strives for the posture but in the leap itself assumes the posture” (SKS 4, 135). Cf. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 41. 123. Stoeffler, German Pietism, 20. Stoeffler is referring to Francke here. 124. Stoeffler, German Pietism, 126. 125. Stoeffler, German Pietism, 154. 126. See, for example, Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies; Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes; and Michael Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, tr. Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Illbruck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 127. See George Pattison, “Kierkegaard on the Lilies and the Birds: Matthew 6,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible, ed. Michael Lieb et al (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and see Clare Carlisle’s interesting discussion of themes common to later Heidegger and the more joyful sides of Kierkegaard’s work in “Kierkegaard and Heidegger,” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 128. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 40 (my emphasis); SKS 4, 135. Our approaches are different, but I am particularly grateful to David Kangas on this point, whose work got me thinking about joy in new ways. See especially his “Danger-

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ous Joy: Marguerite Porete’s Goodbye to the Virtues,” Journal of Religion 91, no. 3 (2011): 299–319. 129. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 40; SKS 4, 135. 130. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 348; SKS 11, 41. 131. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 352; SKS 11, 45. 132. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 349f.; SKS 11, 43. 133. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 156; SKS 10, 160f. 134. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 158; SKS 10, 162. 135. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 296; Sartre, War Diaries, 95. 136. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 31. 137. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 60. 138. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 60. My emphasis. 139. Matthias, “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” 50f. 140. See, for example, Michael Warner, “The Preacher’s Footing,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 368–83. 141. In fact, there is an argument to be made that secularism is itself constituted through conversion. See Matthew Scherer, Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 142. Yeide, Studies in Classical Pietism, 35. 143. Lehmann, “Zur Charakterisierung der entschiedenen Christen,” 23. 144. Joachim Wach, Understanding and Believing (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 151f. 145. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1976), 132. 146. Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 133. 147. Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 133.

Chapter 2 1. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 353; SKS 3, 332. 2. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 56; SKS 16, 36f. 3. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourself!, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 61; SKS 13, 84. This is Kierkegaard’s amendment to Matthew 7:14. 4. I owe this phrase to Clare Carlisle. See Carlisle, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 78. 5. Jean Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1938), 429. 6. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2005), 68–72, 175–80. Deleuze has most likely gotten this clue from Wahl, who was

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a key influence and who singled out Nietzsche’s “eternal return” and Kierkegaard’s religious “instant” as the most important link between the two thinkers. 7. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 12. 8. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourself!, 66f.; SKS 13, 89. 9. This is the position of David Gouwens, for example: “Whereas the ‘apologetic’ account of Kierkegaard tends to see his anthropological reflection as controlling his religious thought, the opposite is actually the case: Kierkegaard is a thinker for whom the religious and Christian concepts provide the governing concepts for his psychological reflection. He is a specifically Christian psychologist for whom the practice of psychology and of anthropological reflection is logically grounded in the belief in the truth of Christianity.” Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69. 10. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 284; SKS 13, 407. Emphasis mine. 11. SKS 26, 95. Emphasis added. This late journal entry is echoed by a line from one of Kierkegaard’s final publications, written in the summer of 1855, just months before his death: “All religion in which there is any truth, certainly Christianity, aims at a person’s total transformation [Omforandring].” The Moment and Late Writings, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 248; SKS 13, 304. 12. The closest thing to an exception may be Murray A. Rae’s Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 13. For a rich study of the influence of Pietism in Kierkegaard’s milieu, see Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden-Age Denmark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), especially 28–44, 120–30, 214–20. Christopher Barnett’s Kierkegaard, Pietism, and Holiness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011) discusses the differences between Halle and Moravian strains of Pietism and compares their influence on Kierkegaard’s father and on Kierkegaard’s own upbringing. Pattison gives a very interesting analysis of Kierkegaard’s possible “conversion experience” (following Joakim Garff ’s suggestion in Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, tr. Bruce H. Kirmmse [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], 127f.) that brings together many Pietisic and mystical sources that were important to Kierkegaard. See George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology (London: Routledge, 2002), 56–63, for this discussion. 14. See Martin Schmidt, Wiedergeburt und neuer Mensch: Gesammelte Studien zur Geschichte des Pietismus (Witten: Luther-Verlag, 1969), 184. 15. See Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 11f. 16. See, for example, the following notebook entry from 1847: “Den Enkelte; denne Kategorie er kun een Gang før (dens første Gang) brugt afgjørende dialektisk, af Socrates for at opløse Hedenskabet. I Christenheden vil den ligeomvendt anden Gang blive at bruge—for at gjøre Mskene (de Christne) til Christne. Det er ikke Mis-

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sionairens Kategorie i Forhold til Hedninge, som han forkynder Xstd., men det er Missionairens Kategorie i selve Christenheden, for at inderliggjøre det at være og at blive Christen.” (The single individual; this category has only been used once before (its first time) in a decisively dialectical sense, by Socrates, in order to dissolve paganism. In Christendom it will come to be used for the second time, in a precisely inverse way—in order to make human beings (the Christians) into Christians. It is not the category of a missionary who preaches Christianity to heathens, but it is a missionary’s category in Christendom itself, in order to intensify being and becoming a Christian.) SKS 20, 282. For another discussion of “missionary” nature of this project, see Kierkegaard, Point of View, 47; SKS 16, 29. 17. A worthy avenue for thinking through the relation of Pietistic theology and philosophical discourse about the self might be pursued in the problem of the adiaphora. It is surely important for the interdisciplinary history of the “spiritual exercise” that the question of the possibility and scope of the “indifferent” appears at the center of Stoic and Pietistic traditions as well as in the philosophical models most indebted to these traditions. Sartre, as we will see in chapter 4, will struggle with the way his concept of authenticity seems to verge on Stoic and Pietistic notions of virtue. But perhaps the clearest and most revealing thinker to inhabit this intersection is Immanuel Kant. We could understand his rational religion of morality as an attempt to synthesize Stoic virtue and Pietistic devotion into a radical and interminable philosophical performance. See the long note about rigorism in Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, tr. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 48. However, given the asymptotic nature of the good, for Kant, his moral religion would not meet my criteria for asceticism, described at the end of the previous chapter. 18. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 285; SKS 13, 408. Emphasis mine. 19. For Kierkegaard’s critique of the “new,” see Fear and Trembling/Repetition, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 132ff.; on the “interesting,” see Either/Or II, 86, 233f., 290. 20. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 279; SKS 13, 399. For the Pietists’ critique of this, see, for example, Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 510f. 21. Kierkegaard at first courted the critiques via one of his pseudonymous writings, but the situation soon spun out of control. See Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 411ff., for a discussion of the fallout. 22. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and tr. Alexander Dru (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 28; SKS 27, 207. 23. Scholars of Pietism have been eager to point to the ways in which the idea of singular, sensuous “experiences” of conversion was less crucial to the leading Pietist theologians than many have believed. This was nonetheless a common impression of Pietism spread among many followers as well as critics. See, for example, Stoeffler, German Pietism, 15; and Markus Matthias, “Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt,” in

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Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 62–64. 24. What the Danish edition, as with Luther’s and many English translations, renders as “became believers” (bleve Troende) is an aorist of the verb “to believe” (ἐπιστεύσαμεν). This translation—which turns the verbal form “came to believe” into a nominal one, “became believers”—surely would have contributed to Kierkegaard’s ability to use this passage as a point of departure for a Pietistic discourse on the subject of “becoming a Christian.” 25. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 221; SKS 10, 222. 26. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 223; SKS 10, 224. 27. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 218; SKS 10, 226. 28. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Hong and Hong, 217; SKS 10, 225. 29. “Test yourself, then, with the help of this saying.” Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Hong and Hong, 220; SKS 10, 228. 30. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 227; SKS 10, 228. 31. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 227; SKS 10, 229. 32. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 227; SKS 10, 228. 33. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 224f.; SKS 10, 226. 34. Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 284f.; SKS 13, 406f. 35. In this sense, it makes little sense to debate the relative priority of Kierkegaard’s ideas of “becoming a self ” and “becoming a Christian.” The lesson of both is that an individual’s identity becomes the frame of the religious project. 36. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 27; SKS 4, 123. Kierkegaard later makes this line into a theological criticism of Luther (for having marginalized James in order to emphasize the importance of grace). Like Luther, Kierkegaard did not see works and grace in competition when they were understood properly. He simply felt that in a Protestant culture the denigration of work had come at the expense of emphasizing the importance of struggle and spiritual labor to Christianity. 37. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 13; SKS 12, 24f. See also the editorial commentary to SKS 12 in connection with this line, which Kierkegaard has reworked from contemporary sources. 38. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 7 (emphasis mine); SKS 12, 15. 39. Kierkegaard, Either/Or I, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 222; SKS 2, 216. 40. Luther’s Works, vol. 31 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1958), 297. 41. For example, see Kierkegaard, Works of Love, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Harper Collins, 2009), 259; SKS 9, 276. 42. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 132; SKS 3, 131. 43. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 27; SKS 4, 123.

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44. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 200 (translation altered); SKS 4, 68. 45. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 55; SKS 5, 430. 46. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 65; SKS 5, 438. 47. Kierkegaard, Either/Or I, 41; SKS 2, 50. 48. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 164; SKS 3, 161. Second emphasis mine. 49. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 164; SKS 3, 161. 50. Kierkegaard, Two Ages, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 81; SKS 8, 78. The most penetrating account of chance in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre belongs to the figure of the seducer. As he himself recognizes, chance is the material out of which he has fashioned his moral and spiritual existence: “Cursed chance, I am waiting for you! I do not want to vanquish you by means of principles or what foolish people call character—no, I shall be your poet ( jeg vil digte Dig)! I do not want to be a poet for others; make your appearance, and I shall be your poet. I shall eat my own poem, and that will be my food.” (Either/Or I, 327; SKS 2, 317. Emphasis mine.) Johannes’s promise here could stand as an interpretation of “The Seducer’s Diary” itself. 51. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 73; SKS 5, 444. 52. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 73; SKS 5, 444. 53. Slight paraphrase. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 95; SKS 5, 462f. 54. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 100; SKS 5, 468. 55. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 84. Emphasis mine. SKS 5, 453. 56. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 33; SKS 4, 339. 57. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 32; SKS 4, 339. 58. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 260; SKS 3, 248. 59. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 103, 155f.; SKS 4, 406, 454f. Kierkegaard will also explore this idea of resolution through the paradigm of marriage. What the case of marriage demonstrates is how paradoxical the demand for a free resolution actually is: “The difficulty is this: erotic love or falling in love is altogether immediate; marriage is a resolution; yet falling into love must be taken up into marriage or into the resolution: to will to marry . . . must also be the freest resolution, that which is so inexplicable in its immediacy that it must be attributed to a deity must also come about by virtue of deliberation, and such exhaustive deliberation that from it a resolution results. Furthermore, the one must not follow the other; the resolution must not come slinking along behind [the erotic attachment] but must occur simultaneously; both parts must be present in the moment of decision. If deliberation has not exhausted thought, then I make no resolution; I act either on inspiration or on the basis

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of a whim.” Stages on Life’s Way, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 102; SKS 6, 97f. As Beauvoir points out about this passage, the demand for an inexplicable union between erotic love and duty is what grounds the appeal to a divine solution. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011), 455f. 60. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 250; SKS 3, 239. 61. Here we can see that alienation has a material meaning as well, for while an infatuation can emerge and dissolve with a coarse remark, a change of mood, a shift in context, the decision to marry or not to marry is inalienable. Kierkegaard can continue to live under the sign of his decision not to marry Regine no matter what happens to him (or to her). 62. Facticity is not just the fact that one’s existence was at one point set into motion by a heterogeneous power but the fact that every attempt to grasp oneself—every attempt to grasp the ways in which one has been determined—is haunted by that heterogeneity. Facticity thus designates an ongoing complicity with one’s own alienation and serves as a key link between the discussions of dependence and temporality. David Kangas has a rich reading of the Repetition passage and anticipates my connection of it to Heideggerian ideas of facticity and thrownness. Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant: On Beginnings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 115. 63. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 164; SKS 3, 161. 64. For a discussion of this, see Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 387–431; SKS 7, 352–92. 65. This is one crucial point where Heidegger will depart from Kierkegaard’s notion of commitment. There is no such demand, in Heidegger’s thinking, for the kind of formal integrity that is presupposed in many of Kierkegaard’s writings. The fact that Dreyfus and Rubin elide this point in attempting to use a Heideggerian analytic framework to complement Kierkegaard’s notion of becoming a self may explain some of the inconsistencies in their account. Heidegger will pick up from Kierkegaard the idea that all resolving must be repeated in each case (and cannot be carried over from one moment to the next), but Heidegger makes openness to change an essential condition of authentic resolve. In a way, this addition is just the result of following Kierkegaard’s point to its logical conclusion: if all resolve must be repeated, what can this mean if not that I must, with each resolving, also be open to the possibility of going back on my choice? Kierkegaard would not dispute this point. But if the commitment were in fact broken, Kierkegaard’s writings would have the resources to describe the commitment as failed and as a misrelation, whereas, for Heidegger, the language of “failure” does not follow. (See SZ 308 for Heidegger’s discussion of the relation between Wiederholung and Zurücknahme.) John Haugeland’s reading of Eigentlichkeit is especially illuminating on this point. See Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger, ed. Joseph Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Har-

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vard University Press, 2013), 212ff., 217 (especially the footnote, where he comments on Dreyfus/Rubin’s reading). 66. Kierkegaard, Either/Or I, 20; SKS 2, 28. (Also see the notebook entry from a few years before, SKS 19, 209.) 67. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 13; SKS 11, 129. 68. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13; SKS 11, 129. 69. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 14; SKS 11, 130. 70. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13; SKS 11, 129. 71. “i det ham givne Selv see sin Opgave.” Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 68; SKS 11, 182. 72. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 29; SKS 11, 145. 73. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 69; SKS 11, 183. 74. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 69; SKS 11, 183. 75. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 69f.; SKS 11, 183. 76. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 16; SKS 11, 132. 77. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 51; SKS 11, 165. Emphasis mine. 78. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 17; SKS 11, 132. 79. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 14; SKS 11, 130. 80. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 17f.; SKS 11, 133. 81. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 18; SKS 11, 134. 82. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 18; SKS 11, 134. 83. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 18f.; SKS 11, 134. 84. Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 179ff. Crowell also notes a potential comparison with Kierkegaardian “inwardness,” but this remark seems more like a way of distancing Heidegger from Cartesian subjectivity than a substantive claim. 85. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13f.; SKS 11, 130. 86. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 5; SKS 11, 117. Emphasis mine. 87. “If that inward power that rules us be true to Nature, it will always adjust itself readily to the possibilities and opportunities offered by circumstance. It asks for no predeterminate material; in the pursuance of its aims it is willing to compromise; hindrances to its progress are merely converted into matter for its own use. It is like a bonfire mastering a heap of rubbish, which would have quenched a feeble glow; but its fiery blaze quickly assimilates the load, consumes it, and flames the higher for it.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. Maxwell Staniforth (London: Penguin, 1964), 63. 88. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 17; SKS 11, 133. 89. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourself!, 104; SKS 16, 160. 90. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 11; SKS 5, 393. 91. Letter to J. L. A. Kolderup-Rosenvinge (before August 20, 1848), in Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, tr. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 260–62. Emphasis mine; Niels Thulstrup and Carl Weltzer, eds.,

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Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1953), 206f. 92. SKS 26, 95 (NB 31:126). 93. SKS 25 442f., no. 71; translation here expanded and slightly modified from Dru’s partial version in The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 515. Emphasis mine. 94. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 82; SKS 11, 196. Translation altered. 95. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 47; SKS 4, 352. 96. See, for example, Dalferth’s theological objection to Kierkegaard’s treatment of despair as fundamental: “Kierkegaard’s whole argument is tied to a particular Christian view of human life before God that is, at best, one possible view among others” (281). See Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Becoming a Christian According to the Postscript: Kierkegaard’s Christian Hermeneutics of Existence,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2005, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 242–81. More recently, there has been a push to see Kierkegaard’s emphasis on despair and self-consciousness as forming a hyperrational account of Christian faith. See Richard McCombs, The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); and see Anthony Aumann, ed., Kierkegaard on Rationality, special issue of Res Philosophica 90, no. 4 (2013): 439–628. 97. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 209; SKS 3, 201. 98. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 213; SKS 3, 204. 99. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 214; SKS 3, 205. Though it requires an interpretation of the meaning of the word evil as the Judge uses it, which would take us too far afield here, he speaks about the equation between repentance and absolute choice in precisely these terms of the inalienably alien: “Repentance specifically expresses that evil essentially belongs to me and at the same time that it does not essentially belong to me. If the evil in me did not essentially belong to me, I could not choose it; but if there were something in me that I could not choose absolutely, then I would not be choosing myself absolutely at all, then I myself would not be the absolute but only a product.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 224; SKS 3, 215. 100. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 216; SKS 3, 207. 101. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 216f.; SKS 3, 208. 102. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 222f.; SKS 3, 213f. “Nu eier han da sig selv som sat ved sig selv, det vil sige, som valgt af sig self, som fri.” (And now he owns himself as posited by himself, that is, as chosen by himself, as free.) SKS 3, 214, emphasis mine. 103. See especially Edward Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), 119ff.; Jamie Ferreira, “Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap,” chapter 8 in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastiar Hannay and Gordon Daniel Marino; and Steven Emmanuel, Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), chapter 5. (Many of these discussions are responding to Macintyre’s reading of Kierkegaard, which views the latter’s notion of choice retrospectively through Sartrean models.)

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104. See the drafts of Repetition excerpted into the Hong edition of Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 312, 320, 324. 105. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 105; SKS 11, 217. See also the earlier passage: “The adult despairs over the past as a present in præterito [in the past] that refuses to recede further into the past. . . . But if repentance is to arise, there must first be effective despair, radical despair, so that the life of the spirit can break through from the ground upward.” Sickness unto Death, 59; SKS 11, 174. 106. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 154; SKS 3, 161. There is a strongly Stoic resonance to these analogies between the helmsman and the self. See Seneca, Moral and Political Essays, ed. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), 44, 136, 226; and Aurelius, Meditations, 58, 114, 175, 179, 187. 107. Or, as he puts it negatively, of avoiding an “atrophy of personality.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 163; SKS 3, 160. 108. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 262; SKS 3, 250. Kierkegaard uses three propriative verbs more or less interchangeably throughout Either/Or: “eier sig selv,” “har sig selv,” and “besidder sig selv.” Here the verb is “har” (“has”). See also the following: “[The self-chosen individual] does not become someone other than he was before, but he becomes himself. . . . Just as an heir, even if he were heir to the treasures of the whole world, does not possess [eier] them before he has come of age, so the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself. . . . The greatness is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and every human being can be this if he so wills it.” Either/ Or II, 177; SKS 3, 173. 109. The exact quote is “The lowly Christian is himself before God.” Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 43; SKS 10, 51. 110. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 90; SKS 10, 96. 111. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 89; SKS 10, 95. 112. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 90; SKS 10, 96. 113. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 97; SKS 4, 295. 114. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 44; SKS 5, 420. 115. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 17n; SKS 4, 324. 116. Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings, 248; SKS 13, 304. 117. “Sin constantly enters by the qualitative leap of the individual.” Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 47; SKS 4, 352. See chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of Kierkegaard’s notion of sin. 118. “Anxiety is entangled freedom [hildet Frihed].” Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 49; SKS 4, 354. 119. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, part 3. 120. Some theological readers deemphasize the voluntaristic elements by focusing on the role of grace. But there is a point Kierkegaard will never shy away from making: “That which distinguishes the Christian narrow way from the common human narrow way is the voluntary. Christ was not someone who coveted earthly things but had

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to be satisfied with poverty—no, he chose poverty. . . . The common human sufferings are not in the strictest sense the narrow way, although the way can indeed be narrow and you can also strive to walk Christianly the narrow way of human sufferings.” For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourself!, 67; SKS 13, 89. 121. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 47; SKS 5, 423. 122. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 47; SKS 5, 423. Emphasis mine. 123. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 38–41 (SKS 11, 163ff.). See Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 50ff. (SKS 4, 425ff.), for the discussion of resolution’s dependence on clear understanding of God’s help. 124. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 50; SKS 5, 425. 125. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 52; SKS 5, 427. Emphasis in original. 126. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 49; SKS 5, 425. 127. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 52; SKS 5, 427. 128. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 47f.; SKS 5, 423. 129. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 65; SKS 5, 438. 130. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 232; SKS 3, 222. 131. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 248; SKS 3, 237. 132. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 250; SKS 3, 238f. 133. SKS 4, 419. My translation. The Hong translation is misleading in this passage, but cf. Walter Lowrie’s translation, The Concept of Dread (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 104. The uncertainty described here anticipates a position that will be taken up by twentieth-century Protestant theology. For Bultmann, even the subject’s own perception of his transformation is uncertain: “It can be said in terms of Paul’s basic concept of justification that sin is not something that can be perceived empirically. And the same holds true for righteousness. This means that the identity of the one justified with the empirical man is something that is believed.” Bultmann, The Old and New Man in the Letters of Paul, tr. Keith R. Crim (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1967), 25. 134. “Armed Neutrality,” in Point of View, 141. Emphasis altered. 135. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 227; SKS 10, 228. 136. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 139; SKS 12, 142f. 137. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 206; SKS 12, 207. 138. For example, see Kierkegaard’s late notebook entry, “The establishment— and I,” at SKS 24, 390. Marcuse spells out his idea of a society without opposition in the introduction to the first edition of his 1964 work One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced and Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002), xxxix–xlviii. 139. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 190 (no. 481); SKS 20, 392.

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140. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 69; SKS 12, 77. Passages in inverted order. 141. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 80; SKS 12, 88. 142. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 68; SKS 12, 76. 143. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 204; SKS 12, 205. 144. For complicated theological reasons, which it would not serve to explore here, Kierkegaard maintains that the initial break of consciousness is not merely an occasion but a decisive rebirth that allows for the integration of subsequent moments in its wake. See the first chapter of Philosophical Fragments for a discussion of this point. 145. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 22; SKS 12, 33. 146. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 67; SKS 12, 75. 147. SKS 8, 65; Cf. Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 67. Emphasis mine. 148. Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 66; SKS 8, 64f. 149. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 220; SKS 12, 220. 150. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 228; SKS 10, 230. 151. SKS 2, 281f.; Cf. Kierkegaard, Either/Or I, 292. 152. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 84; SKS 5, 453. 153. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 84; SKS 5, 453. Emphasis mine. 154. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 348; SKS 11, 41. 155. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 348; SKS 11, 41. 156. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 349f.; SKS 11, 43. 157. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Lowrie, 352f.; SKS 11, 45. 158. What I here distinguish as “immanent” and “paradoxical” (or “Socratic” and “Christian”) is meant to correspond to what Johannes Climacus calls “Religiousness A” and “Religiousness B.” 159. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, “Appendix: Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” in Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 299. 160. Calvin O. Schrag’s Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961) can be seen as agnostic example. See also George J. Stack’s Kierkegaard’s Existential Ethics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1977). Michael Theunissen (in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, tr. Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Illbruck [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005]) has attempted to bridge the phenomenological and the theological (in phenomenological terms). Pattison mounts an important and multifaceted critique of such readings inasmuch as they attempt to make sense of Kierkegaard’s project on its own terms. See his Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 70–85. 161. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 69. 162. See in particular C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006); and Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s

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Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 163. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 221; SKS 4, 88. 164. For two excellent accounts of the early reception of Kierkegaard in Germanlanguage, see Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of his Thought (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), chapter 8; and Heiko Schultz, “A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, vol. 1, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 307–420. 165. That being said, in recent years, scholars of Kierkegaard have made an effort to distinguish Kierkegaard’s work from existentialism. Behind this effort were a number of valid concerns. Even before considering the fact that Kierkegaard died almost a century before the terms “existentialism” and “existential philosophy” were coined, existential interpretations of Kierkegaard were prone to several misconceptions. They often abstracted him from his historical place within Danish literary and philosophical culture, neglecting his immediate interlocutors in favor of seeing his work in the pan-European constellation of writers from Dostoevsky to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Camus. In portraying Kierkegaard as the unwitting progenitor of a movement whose primary aims and scope had been defined by a French philosopher in the immediate aftermath of World War II, many existentializing interpretations also had a hard time making sense of Kierkegaard’s devotion to Christianity. To the extent that he could be interpreted as a thinker of absurd freedom, responsibility, and radical self-choice, his work was celebrated. Where, however, he would speak of paradoxical faith and historical revelation, a serious disconnect emerged. This often led to Kierkegaard’s work being cast as a historically important but less decisive version of what would later be polished and rationalized in the hands of philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre. Finally, existentialist interpretations of Kierkegaard often tended to approach his work through the lens of “negative” themes and motifs. Kierkegaard became a thinker of melancholy, boredom, despair, anxiety, and impotence; the “upbuilding” and “joyful” writings of his later years were almost entirely marginalized. George Pattison’s work has been a powerful corrective to this last misunderstanding, particularly by drawing philosophical attention to the late discourses. See especially Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses; and “Kierkegaard on the Lilies and the Birds: Matthew 6,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible, ed. Michael Lieb et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 529–41; as well as Kierkegaard’s Pastoral Dialogues, tr. George Pattison and Helle Møller Jensen (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012). Jon Stewart’s work on Danish Hegelianism and its relation to Kierkegaard has gone a long way toward correcting the first sort of misconception. See particularly his Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a view that focuses more on Kierkegaard’s theological milieu, see Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden-Age Denmark. My chief task

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here is to work against the second misconception, but to do so while emphasizing the connection with twentieth-century existentialism. 166. The term “theologiske Selv” appears at the start of the second part of Sickness unto Death (SKS 11, 193). For Barth’s critique of Kierkegaard’s prioritization of subjectivity, see “Dank und Reverenz,” Evangelische Theologie 23, no. 7 (1963): 340f. 167. See the appendix to Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, for this discussion. On the role of Feuerbach in Philosophical Fragments and this “inversion” argument, see Jonathan Malesic, “Illusion and Offense in Philosophical Fragments: Kierkegaard’s Inversion of Feuerbach’s Critique of Christianity,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 62 (2007): 43–55. 168. Lowrie includes an excerpt from this passage as a preface to the published articles in Attack upon “Christendom,” 2. 169. See, for example, Stoeffler, German Pietism, 52, 166; and Hartmut Lehmann, “Dechristianisierung, Säkularisierung und Rechristianisierung in neuzeitlichen Europa,” in Lehmann, Religion und Religiosität in der Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 278–85.

Chapter 3 1. SZ 42. 2. Derrida often noted the peculiar way in which the idea of the “own” or “proper” operates as an unexamined value throughout Heidegger’s writings. At the same time, Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s “metaphysics of the proper,” as he sometimes called it, owed much to Heidegger’s own critique of the understanding of being as presence. For Derrida’s most lengthy discussion of das Eigene in Heidegger, see Derrida, Aporias: Dying–Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth,” tr. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 3f., 30ff.; for his most critical discussion of this idea, see Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 30ff. 3. John Haugeland’s essays on Heidegger translate eigentlich/uneigentlich as “owned/unowned” instead of “authentic/inauthentic.” This strikes me as the best approach for a systematic reconstruction of Heidegger’s idea of Eigentlichkeit. Because my aim here is not only to make philosophical sense of Heidegger’s use of the term but also to show how it became the basis for Sartrean “authenticité,” as well as a later, largely American, conversation about “authenticity,” I have retained the usual translations here. For Haugeland’s discussion of the terms, see Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger, ed. Joseph Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 90. 4. See, for example, Michael Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1986); Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: Existentialism from Kierkegaard to Camus (New York: Routledge, 1995); Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (New York: Rout-

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ledge, 2004); and Alessandro Ferarra, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1998). Ferrara and Golomb, it is worth noting, also blame Heidegger for not developing a full and concrete enough account of the self. 5. SZ 268. (Dieses Zurückholen muß jedoch die Seinsart haben, durch deren Versäumnis das Dasein in die Uneigentlichkeit sich verlor. Das Sichzurückholen aus dem Man, das heißt die existenzielle Modifikation des Man-selbst zum eigentlichen Selbstsein muß sich als Nachholen einer Wahl vollziehen. Nachholen der Wahl bedeutet aber Wählen dieser Wahl, Sichentscheiden für ein Seinkönnen aus dem eigenen Selbst. Im Wählen der Wahl ermöglicht sich das Dasein allererst sein eigentliches Seinkönnen.) 6. SZ 144. (Verstehen ist das existenziale Sein des eigenen Seinkönnens des Daseins selbst.) 7. SZ 148. 8. SZ 297. 9. Patricia Huntington, “Heidegger’s Reading of Kierkegaard Revisited: From Ontological Abstraction to Ethical Concretion,” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 43f., 47, 53; Daniel Berthold-Bond, “A Kierkegaardian Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity,” Man and World 24 (1991):119–42. Berthold-Bond’s account misrepresents several key issues in Heidegger’s thought. In particular, his claim that the Kierkegaardian self has access to a “concrete” survey of possibilities, whereas Dasein does not, fails to take into account the vor- structure of existence. Also see Calvin Schrag for an early and influential articulation of this view in Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), especially chapter 6. 10. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, “Appendix: Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” in Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 299. This secularization reading has also had many critics—mostly because no one really agrees on what “secularization” means. Hermann Philpse denies that it is a secularization because he sees a great deal of Christianity in Heidegger’s project, and secular, for Philipse, means independence from religion. See Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 172–210. Jean Beaufret denies it is a secularization (responding not to Dreyfus but to early impressions of Heidegger’s work) because that implies too much dependence on Kierkegaard. Beaufret, Les Philosophes de l’Existence (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1971), 96f. 11. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), especially chapter 2. 12. Huntington, “Heidegger’s Reading,” 56ff. This critique is misguided in large part because of her reliance on Wolin and her peculiar equation between the “ontological” and the “social.” 13. SZ 385, 391.

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14. See Clare Carlisle, “Kierkegaard and Heidegger,” in Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 421–39; Samuel Moyn, “Anxiety and Secularization: Søren Kierkegaard and the Twentieth-Century Invention of Existentialism,” in Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context, ed. Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 279–304; Vincent McCarthy, “Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and in Full View,” in Kierkegaard and Existentialism, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 95–126. 15. GA 34, 115f. Partial emphasis added. 16. GA 36/37, 208. 17. SZ 163. 18. SZ 189f. 19. SZ 348, for example. 20. Husserl’s early use of the Eigentlichkeit to refer to acts of predication that are fully “explicated” (explizit) may anticipate Heidegger’s connection between the phenomenological ideal of explicitness and the Kierkegaardian ideal of a self “won” through the mediating work of consciousness, though he uses it in a rather marginal and inconsistent way. For one example of this use of the term, see Edmund Husserl, Phantasie und Bildbewußtsein, ed. Eduard Marbach (Hamburg: Meiner, 2006), 168. 21. SZ 308. 22. SZ 339. 23. SZ 339. Cf. the discussion of sin as positivity in chapter 5. 24. SZ 135f., 184ff., 163, 340. See, for example, Augustine, De Libero Arbitro, II.19.53, and Aquinas, Summa, II.20.1, for classic theological formulations of this relationship. There is also a strong resonance with Luther here, as Heidegger himself points out in his 1924 lecture discussing Luther’s commentary on Genesis: “The true [eigentliche] sin is incredulitas, that is, disbelief, aversio Dei. Inasmuch as man, in this movement of being averted or turned away from God, is being put into the world, true sin is accompanied by pavor [fear].” Heidegger, “The Problem of Sin in Luther,” tr. Brian Hansford Bowles, in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings 1910–1927, eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 192. 25. SZ 123. 26. SZ 136. 27. SZ 184ff. 28. This is the one topic on which Heidegger unequivocally credits Kierkegaard’s philosophical insights. See SZ 235n. 29. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 44; SKS 4, 349. 30. A passage that states this relationship succinctly is found in the 1923–24 lecture course “Introduction to Phenomenological Research”: “The expression phainome-

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non is not a perceptual category but a way of being, a how of the encounter” (GA 17, 14). 31. SZ 286. 32. Heidegger has a few ways of referring to this “way of being.” There is die Seinsart des Daseins: GA 20, 217, 222f., 325, 362; GA 64, 29f., 38, 102. A more frequent term is Seinsweise, which is threaded throughout Heidegger’s early writings, including Being and Time. See especially SZ 13, 60, 291f., 299. 33. Dreyfus and Rubin, “Appendix,” 327. 34. This objection is behind Huntington’s turn to Kierkegaard in “Heidegger’s Reading.” She finds in Kierkegaard a less ethically compromised notion of authenticity. 35. Julian Young takes such an approach in an effort to demonstrate that Heidegger’s concept of authenticity can still have ethical potential despite being formal enough to describe violent political stances. Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 19, 84ff. He wants to show that Being and Time actually has the resources to reject Nazism not as inauthentic, exactly, but “as the institutionalisation of authenticity” (108). 36. Dreyfus and Rubin, “Appendix,” 361n65. Angstbereit (“ready for anxiety”) appears at SZ 297, 301, 382, 385. 37. One can turn here to the well-known remarks about displacing ethics with an “ethos-” thinking in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” tr. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 269ff.; GA 9, 353ff. 38. More recently, a few scholars have developed a transcendental account of normativity in Heidegger’s work that breaks with this characterization. Particularly, Steven Crowell’s most recent work, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), can be seen in this light. Haugeland’s “Truth and Finitude” (in Dasein Disclosed, 187–220) would be another example (depending on how one reads his idea of “responsibility”). The common argument is basically that Heidegger’s language sounds normative not because authenticity is a norm but because it accounts for the a priori conditions of normative stances such as commitment and responsibility. 39. Taylor Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in Being and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 270. 40. Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic, 300. My emphasis. 41. Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic, 307. 42. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 355; SKS 11, 47. My emphasis. The analogy I am drawing here is a formal one. Heidegger’s commitment to the essentially ecstatic character of temporality means that the kind of absolute presence Kierkegaard mentions here cannot serve as a relevant ideal. That said, it is important to note that for Kierkegaard,

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the lilies and birds are not models of religious existence to be imitated. We do not and cannot have their immediacy. Thus the pedagogical purpose these pastoral figures serve is not a mimetic one. George Pattison has clarified this point by linking the lilies and birds to the position of “first immediacy.” See Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life: Between Romanticism and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22–29. 43. Augustine, Confessions 10.35. 44. SZ 170–73. He cites the same chapter from Book 10 of Confessions. See John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 186ff.; William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 246ff. 45. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 124; GA 65, 177. 46. If penitential seems a strong way of characterizing the expressive relation to the source, recall Heidegger’s gloss Aristotle’s of four causes as four ways of “guiltiness” or “indebtedness” (die vier Weisen des Verschuldens). See GA 7, 10–12. 47. GA 9, 113. 48. GA 29/30, 423. 49. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 296; GA 29/30, 429. 50. GA 29/30, 430. 51. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 296; GA 29/30, 428f. 52. GA 29/30, 427. 53. Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self, 2. 54. This is where I object to Zimmerman’s argument, in that he identifies Heidegger’s notion of “choice” as a “de-mythologization” of theology. On the one side, his approach underestimates the religious dimension of self-choice, which is particularly salient in the Protestant-Pietistic context of Kierkegaard, and on the other, it exaggerates the religious character of Heidegger’s critique of egoism. 55. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 137. 56. GA 36/37, 118f., 206, 303; GA 65, 4; GA 66, 108, 159, 322; GA 76, 100. 57. This allusion is somewhat ironic, given that one of his primary criticisms of transcendental idealism is that it merely shifts the presumption of self-abiding presence (of Vorhandenheit) from the thing to the mind. GA 29/30, 423. 58. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 292 (translation altered); GA 29/30, 422. Emphasis in original. 59. See Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, xxiv, 439; and Christian Sommer, Heidegger, Aristotle, Luther: les sources aristotéliciennes et néo-testamentaires d’Être et Temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 147–50, for discussions of Luther and ruinance.

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60. GA 61, 153, 160f. 61. GA 36/37, 255. Emphasis in original. 62. GA 69, 134. 63. GA 65, 243. 64. GA 94, 111. 65. GA 16, 84. 66. GA 94, 144. Also note, “Das Umwälzung zum Da-sein als Erwirkung der Wahrheit des Seins—mein einziger Wille” (The radical change into Da-sein as the coming into effect of the truth of being—my single aim.) GA 94, 259. 67. GA 94, 127. 68. GA 69, 23. 69. See discussion of this period in GA 94. 70. “Fragen: Wie steht es um das Sein?—das besagt nichts Geringeres als den Anfang unseres geschichtlich-geistigen Daseins wieder-holen, um ihn in den anderen Anfang zu verwandeln” (GA 40, 42). 71. GA 65, 5. 72. GA 65, 32. 73. GA 65, 19. 74. GA 66, 420. 75. “eine dichtenden Nennung des Seyns” (GA 65, 36). 76. GA 65, 19. 77. GA 71, 159. 78. Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, tr. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 182; GA 45, 216. 79. “Wann aber und wo viel die erste mit einzige Entscheidung zur Grundfrage der Philosophie und damit zu dieser selbst? Damals, als das Volk der Griechen, deren Stammesart und Sprache mit uns dieselbe Herkunft hat, in seinen großen Dichtern und Denkern sich aufmachte, eine einzigartige Weise des menschlichen volklichen Daseins zu schaffen. Was da anfing, ist bis heute nicht eingelöst: Aber dieser Anfang ist noch, und er verschwand nicht und verschwindet nicht dadurch, daß die nachkommende Geschichte immer weniger seiner Herr blieb. Der Anfang ist noch und besteht als ferne Verfügung, die unserem abendländischen Schicksal weit vorausgreift und das deutsche Geschick an sich kettet” (GA 36/37, 6). 80. GA 65, 5. 81. GA 66 426. 82. GA 66, 55. 83. GA 65, 460. 84. GA 94, 242. 85. GA 40, 80. 86. GA 66, 420f. 87. GA 65, 5f. 88. “Mit dem Anheben der Bereitschaft für den Übergang aus dem Ende des ers-

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ten Anfangs in den anderen Anfang tritt der Mensch nicht etwa nur in eine noch nicht gewesene ‘Periode,’ sondern in einen ganz anderen Bereich der Geschichte. Das Ende des ersten Anfangs wird noch in langer Zeit übergreifen in den Übergang, ja sogar in den anderen Anfang” (GA 65, 227). 89. GA 65, 227. 90. Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 151. Derrida was probably the first to observe and criticize Heidegger’s reliance on a logic of the “proper” (see note about Derrida above). He found a key inspiration in Heidegger’s pursuit of a nonsubjective starting point for philosophy but chose to define that new starting point in differential terms rather than in those of an impersonalized “owning.” 91. Polt argues for the latter view against Thomas Sheehan, who suggests forgetting the resonance with “event” altogether. See Richard Polt, “Meaning, Excess, and Event,” in Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 1 (2011): 26–53. His main points are directed against Sheehan’s article “A Paradigm-Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 34, no. 2 (2001): 183–202, especially 196ff. 92. GA 66, 330. Merleau-Ponty, in citing a passage from Heidegger’s 1930 essay on truth (in which Heidegger writes that “the human being does not ‘possess’ freedom as a property [Eigenschaft], but rather at most it is the reverse: freedom, the ecstatic, discovering ek-sistence possesses the human being”), describes this complex condition well: “Dasein becomes a movement of being that traverses the human, that ‘possesses’ him—which is not to be understood as passivity.” Merleau-Ponty, Notes de Cours au Collège de France 1958–1959/1960–1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 99. The passage he cites is at GA 9, 190. 93. See Heidegger’s appeal for a Verwandlung der Sprache, GA 65, 78. 94. GA 71, 171f. 95. GA 71, 240. 96. GA 9, 114. See Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” Erkenntnis 2 (1931): 228f. 97. GA 65, 84. 98. GA 71, 153. 99. GA 65, 324, 349, 487. 100. “Das Eigentum, worin alle Übereignung und alles Zueignen und Zueigenhaben west, ist das Da-seyn” (GA 71, 212). 101. GA 85, 3. 102. GA 70, 143. 103. GA 65 243. 104. “das Unkenntlichste” (GA 65, 227). 105. GA 9, 367f. 106. GA 71, 247. 107. GA 5, 97. Emphasis mine. See Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,”

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in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and tr. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 73. 108. GA 51, 60f.; GA 71, 17. 109. GA 51, 59f.; Cf. Heidegger, Basic Concepts, tr. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 50f. 110. On the distinction between Seinsvergessenheit and Seinsverlassenheit, see GA 65, 112ff. 111. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 66. 112. Thomas Sheehan has a lucid discussion of Ereignis as the relation of existing and appearing. He would likely disagree with most of my translations, but my account here been shaped by early drafts of his Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 236–247. 113. GA 94. 114. GA 71, 30. 115. GA 70, 103. 116. What I am referring to here as Heidegger’s ascetic thinking could be seen as an alternate interpretation of some of the same tensions that Bourdieu finds in Heidegger, which he analyzes under the rubric of Heidegger’s “conservative revolution” in philosophy. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, tr. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), especially chapter 3. 117. See, for example, GA 67, 84, 244, 254; GA 5, 265, 337f. 118. Here I am using “whatever is” as a gloss on Heidegger’s das Seiende, and “how it is” for das Sein selbst. 119. GA 40, 42. 120. GA 71, 28. 121. GA 66, 253. 122. GA 70, 86. As he puts it in one note, “≠ Untergang eines Ozeandampfers” (GA 71, 271). 123. GA 70, 24. 124. SZ 268. 125. SZ 268. 126. Heidegger, Mindfulness, tr. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 1997), 326; GA 66, 367. 127. GA 66, 233. Cf. Heidegger, Mindfulness, 207. 128. Cf. hildet Frihed—SKS 4, 354. 129. GA 61, 160. 130. John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 48. 131. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, 49. 132. Worth considering here is the following passage about the Seinsfrage: “Die

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Seinsfrage ist dann aber nichts anderes als die Radikalisierung einer zum Dasein selbst gehörigen wesenhaften Seinstendenz, des vorontologischen Seinsverständnisses.” (The question of being is thus nothing other than the radicalization of the preontological understanding of being, which is an essential tendency belonging to human existence itself.) SZ 15.

Chapter 4 1. The editor relies on a quote from Jankélévitch here, who reflects back on the same period in 1948: “In these singular days, everything was possible; we were promised although everything would be new and true, that all would recommence from the beginning, as if Vichy-the-Shame and its horrible bawdiness had never existed, that this happy morning of liberation would be our rebirth.” Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Dans l’honneur et la dignité,” Les Temps Modernes 33 (1948): 2249–61. Quoted in Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, “Présentation,” in Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), i. 2. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, tr. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1995) 18f.; Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 19f. 3. See Harold Rosenberg, “Does the Jew Really Exist? Sartre’s Morality Play about Anti-Semitism,” Commentary (January 1, 1949): 8–18. Also see the analysis of this essay and of its reception in volume 87 of October. Sarah Hammerschlag frames the debates clearly and puts them in the context of the Beauvoir-Benny Lévy conflict. See Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), especially 68–73. 4. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 74f. Hannah Arendt’s critical comment about Sartre’s monograph is most economical. Her critique is essentially a paraphrase of this line from the Réflexions with one word in italics: “Sartre’s ‘existentialist’ interpretation of the Jew as someone who is regarded and defined as a Jew by others.” See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1994), xv. Richard Bernstein has pointed out how, despite this criticism, Arendt’s distinction between the Jew as “parvenu” and as “pariah” actually closely parallels Sartre’s distinction between inauthentic and authentic Jewishness. Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 195–97. 5. Thus Benny Lévy’s supposed victory in getting Sartre to recant involves him admitting that there is such a thing as “Jewish history” after all. See Sartre and Benny Lévy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, tr. Adrian van den Hoven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103ff. Bernard-Henri Lévi makes the same point at the end of Le Siècle de Sartre (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2000) in the section entitled “Juif comme Sartre,” 648–52. 6. Hammerschlag, Figural Jew, 68, 70. She cites the Lévy interview as well as a passage from Sartre’s autobiography The Words.

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7. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 19 (translation altered); Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 22. 8. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 159. 9. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 70. Emphasis mine. 10. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 135; Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 145. Emphasis mine. 11. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 97. 12. Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War 1939–40, tr. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1999), 128; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre: Septembre 1939– Mars 1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 338. 13. See, for example, George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 171; Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 185, 217; Alasdair Macintyre, A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 171. Mooney criticized Macintyre’s reading as being unfair to Kierkegaard. See Edward Mooney, Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), 119ff. George Pattison offers a very clear discussion of the differences in Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology (London: Routledge, 2002), 106–13. 14. Ethan Kleinberg rightly emphasizes Wahl’s role on this score, since “Wahl saw Heidegger as compatible with Kierkegaard in every aspect except Kierkegaard’s religiosity.” Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 85. 15. See Ronald Aronson’s “Introduction” in Sartre and Lévy, Hope Now; Stuart L. Charmé, Vulgarity and Authenticity: Dimensions of Otherness in the World of JeanPaul Sartre (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); see also Hammerschlag, Figural Jew, chapter 2 for a discussion of these debates. 16. Charmé’s account in Vulgarity and Authenticity, but also in the article “Normative and Religious Elements in Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis” ( Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50, no. 4), makes sweeping and ambiguous claims based on “resonance” and “analogy” (560) with “mythic symbols” (559) that could have been avoided if such a distinction had been clearer in Sartre’s work proper. (Cf. Thomas King, Sartre and the Sacred [Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1974].) Charmé is one of the only scholars exploring the “religiousness” of Sartre right now (unlike with Heidegger, who has a great many on his trail), but his notion of religion is rather vague. At the root of the problem may be his reliance on Eliade’s account of “formulaic religious stories”—and especially heavily on readings of Erik Eriksson—to develop an idea of “religious biography,” on the basis of which he concludes that Sartre’s thought is characterized by an “inevitable theologizing of the self ” (571). But it is not really clear what all these terms mean or whether there are any stakes to the difference among the mythic, the theological, the theistic, and the religious.

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17. In an incredible passage in her recent monograph Une Renaissance sartrienne (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), Annie Cohen-Solal proposes an explanation for the fact that had long puzzled her about Sartre’s reception—the fact that it seemed that Sartre was much more difficult for the French to appreciate than for the Americans: “Beginning from my first intuitions, by an obsessive reading and rereading of his texts, I discovered some subtle elements, and I was soon convinced that it turned, surely, on a religious divide” (69). The section begins with her astonishment at Sartre’s intuitive grasp of American culture. She quotes two passages from Sartre—one in which he mentions the connection between Puritanism and universalism, another in which he connects money, optimism, and Puritan morality. While Sartre is clearly in these passages just recycling some secondhand Weber, Cohen-Solal’s astonishment suggests she is not aware that there is already a rather famous theory connecting Puritan ethics to capitalism: “How to explain this empathy, if not by [Sartre’s] familiarity with Protestant ethics, transmitted through the education by his Schweitzer grandfather?” (68f.), and “Is it not in fact his Protestant education that could explain Sartre’s affinities with the basic values of American democracy, which allow him to perceive the people and the institutions of this country with such rare subtlety?” (69). Just after posing the question to herself, “Am I in a position to prove it by reading Sartre’s American texts?,” she demurs and turns back to a biographical approach. Sartre was marked by the Protestantism of his grandfather, “one of the great progressive educators of the French nineteenth century” (70). I agree with Cohen-Solal’s intuition about Sartre’s Protestantism, but I think we can put the argument in much stronger terms by reading Sartre’s work itself. 18. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 26n2. He worries (very faintly) about the impression the notebooks will give his future readers: “Those who read [the little black notebook] after my death—since you all will only publish it posthumously— will think that I was a villainous character unless you should accompany it with explanations and well-intentioned notes.” Several of the notebooks were destroyed. 19. “Enregistrement.” Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 264. 20. Gide is especially important, as is Henri Frédéric Amiel. Sartre is at this point writing L’Âge de raison, which will not be published until 1945. When people ask Sartre what he is working on during this period, he discusses the novel. 21. Stoicism, like authenticity here, is a kind of shifting, ambiguous target. At its greatest level of coherence, what Sartre understands by stoicism is an attitude in which one deals with the tension between the historical situation and one’s own will by viewing the historical situation as unchangeable (as “fate”) and inferring from this that it is best to renounce any countervailing will. 22. See Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: 1905–1980 (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 248–72. 23. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 19. 24. Sartre has a protracted debate with himself about how to distinguish coherently between “supporting” the war and “accepting” the war. See Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 68f.

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25. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 214, for example. See Pierre Masson, “Sartre lecteur de Gide: authenticité et engagement,” in Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide 82–83 (1989): 189–214. 26. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 34. 27. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 34. 28. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 105, 112, 116. 29. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 69. 30. Gide, L’Immoraliste (Paris: Mercure, 1930), 83. 31. Sartre, War Diaries, 53; Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 244. 32. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 496; Cf. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 479. 33. It is notable here that Henri Corbin was Heidegger’s first French translator. He was the one responsible for first rendering eigentlich and uneigentlich as authentique and inauthentique. Sartre credits Corbin’s translation in a remarkable way (as having satisfied an antecedent need, previously unacknowledged) at Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 402. See also Ethan Kleinberg on Corbin’s translation of Dasein as “réalitéhumaine” in Generation Existential, 70f. 34. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 403. We should also see the connection with Kierkegaard here, based on Sartre’s earlier observation about the connections between Being and Time and The Concept of Anxiety: “L’influence sur Heidegger est nette; le recours à la phrase topique: «Nous sommes angoissés pour rien», se trouve mot pour mot dans Sein und Zeit.” (The influence on Heidegger is clear; the turn to the pertinent phrase: “We are anxious about nothing”: is found word for word in Being and Time.) 342. Wahl is a key source here, though Sartre also reads Wahl critically, questioning his way of distinguishing between Kierkegaard and Heidegger as between psychological and philosophical accounts of “nothing.” Kleinberg offers a brief discussion of this passage in Generation Existential, 130f. 35. Sartre, War Diaries, 53; Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 244. 36. Sartre, War Diaries, 94; Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 295. 37. See the crisis of conscience Sartre stages in Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 148f. The fact that it never, as the editor points out (149n), took place underlines that this diary cannot be read autobiographically without also taking into account that the “person” whose “life” is being observed is, in a certain sense, just a byproduct of the philosophical meditation that Sartre is pursuing in this work. 38. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 497. 39. See Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” tr. David Farrell Krell, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82–96, for the best version of this argument. 40. Sartre, War Diaries, 112; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 318. 41. Sartre, War Diaries, 112f.; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 319. 42. Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1963). 43. Sartre, War Diaries, 27; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 211.

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44. Sartre, War Diaries, 21; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 203f. A few lines later in the same passage, Sartre indicates Heidegger as the source of thought beyond this idea: “Nothing shows better the urgency of an undertaking such as Heidegger’s, and its political importance: to determine human nature as a synthetic structure.” 45. Sartre, War Diaries, 27; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 211. Sartre quotes the passage twice within a few pages and makes nearly the same commentary. 46. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 559 (translation altered slightly); Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 577f. 47. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 494; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 510. 48. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 312. 49. Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, tr. Patrick O’Brien (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 119, 150, 380. Also see Charmé, Vulgarity and Authenticity, 229–31. 50. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, tr. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 28; Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1970), 34. 51. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 260ff. 52. “I am an unbeliever. I will never be impious.” André Gide, Journal, vol. 2, ed. Martine Sagaert (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 57. Entry dated 6 November 1927. 53. See Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 17, 27, 36f., 40, 67; Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 9, 32, 55f. Also cf. Charles Taylor’s description of the proximity of neo-Stoicism and Protestant asceticism in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 95ff. 54. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 20. 55. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 21. 56. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 19. 57. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 20. 58. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 33f.; Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 47f. 59. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 160. Emphasis added. 60. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 90f. 61. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, tr. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003), 129f. 62. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 295. 63. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 296; Cf. Sartre, War Diaries, 95. 64. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 320. 65. Sartre, Saint Genet, 60f. For the original see Sartre, Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 55. 66. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 319. 67. Sartre, The Words, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Vintage, 1981), 171; Sartre, Les Mots et autres écrits autobiographiques, ed. Jean-François Louette (Paris: Gal-

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limard, 2010), 92. Also cf.: “I had been born in order to fill the great need I had of myself.” The Words, 11; Les Mots, 60. 68. Sartre, Saint Genet, 61f.; Sartre, Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr, 56. 69. Augustine, Confessions 8.7. 70. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 77. 71. Sartre, War Diaries, 219; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 447. 72. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 129. 73. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 515; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 530. 74. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 129. 75. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 515; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 530. 76. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 494f. 77. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 494f. 78. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 417. 79. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 100. 80. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 23; Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 26. 81. See Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, tr. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), for an exuberant interpretation of this idea; see also the discussion at Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 11ff.; Sartre, L’Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 17f. 82. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 494f. 83. It should thus not be surprising that Kant tends to appear in Sartre’s Cahiers pour un morale in discussions of duty and moral universalism. See especially 28, 169f. 84. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 97; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 447f. 85. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 97. 86. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 97. 87. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 448. 88. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 496. Emphasis mine in last quote. 89. Sartre, War Diaries, 112; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 318. 90. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 494f. Sartre’s definition of existence here is an almost word-for-word paraphrase of Wahl’s Kierkegaardian definition: “L’existence sera une incessante mise en question et une incessant transformation de soi” (Études Kierkegardiennes [Paris: Aubier, 1938], 489). 91. Sartre, War Diaries, 219; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 447. 92. Sartre, War Diaries, 219; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 447. Here Sartre is citing Gide. 93. Sartre, War Diaries, 53; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 244. 94. Sartre, War Diaries, 112; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 318. 95. Sartre, War Diaries, 79f.; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 277. 96. Sartre, War Diaries, 79f.; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 277.

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97. Sartre elsewhere describes “faire mon salut” as his single most important task. For one example, “What I like about my madness is that it has protected me from the very beginning against the charms of the ‘elite’: never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a ‘talent’; my sole concern has been to save myself—nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeve—by work and faith.” Sartre, The Words, 255; Sartre, Les Mots, 138. 98. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 296; Cf. Sartre, War Diaries, 95. 99. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 26. 100. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 29f. 101. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 31. 102. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 129f. 103. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 114, 129. 104. See Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 492, for an example of him sliding back and forth between “exercise” and “entreprise.” 105. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 280. 106. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 4; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 12. 107. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 48. 108. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 118. 109. I think here of the imperative repeated in Luke 13: “Repent or perish.” 110. Sartre, Saint Genet, 380; Sartre, Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr, 324. 111. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 433. 112. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 448. 113. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 497; Cf. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 481. 114. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 276; Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, tr. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 266; see also Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 280; Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 269. 115. Sartre, Saint Genet, 82; Sartre, Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr, 73. 116. For one take on this issue, see John D. Barbour, Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), especially chapter 7, “Sartre’s Ambiguous Atheism: ‘A Cruel and Long-range Affair.’ ” 117. Sartre, The Words, 70, 110; Les Mots, 37, 60. Two further passages from this text are particularly worth citing: “When I examine my life from the age of six to nine, I am struck by the continuity of my spiritual exercises. Their content often changed, but the program remained unvaried. I had made a false entrance; I withdrew behind a screen and began my birth over again at the right moment, the very minute that the universe silently called for me” (113). And a few pages later, a bit more morbidly: “Viewed from the height of my tomb, my birth appeared to me as a necessary evil, as a quite provisional embodiment that prepared for my transfiguration: in order to be reborn” (194). For the latter two passages in the French edition, see Les Mots, 62,105. 118. Sartre, The Words, 253; Les Mots, 138.

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119. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 494; Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 510. 120. Sartre, War Diaries, 83; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 281. 121. Sartre, War Diaries, 84; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 283. 122. Sartre, War Diaries, 84; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 282f. 123. Sartre, War Diaries, 251; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 487. 124. Sartre, War Diaries, 221; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 449. 125. Sartre, War Diaries, 220; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 449. 126. Sartre, War Diaries, 135; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 347. 127. Sartre, War Diaries, 136; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 348. 128. Sartre, War Diaries, 138; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 351. 129. Frédéric Amiel, Amiel’s Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel, tr. Mrs. Humphrey Ward (London: Macmillan, 1889), 70. Reading Amiel’s journal at the age of fifteen seems to have been the inspiration behind Gide’s own journal. See also Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 47. 130. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 262. 131. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 263. 132. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 264. 133. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 264. 134. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 126. 135. Sartre, War Diaries, 113; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 320. 136. Sartre, The Words, 179f.; Les Mots, 97. 137. Sartre, The Words, 178; Les Mots, 96. 138. Sartre, War Diaries, 14; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 196. 139. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 3; Cahiers pour un morale, 11. 140. Sartre, Saint Genet, 84; French at Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr, 324. 141. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 16. 142. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 54f. 143. See above and Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 129ff. 144. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 447. 145. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 447. 146. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 449.

Chapter 5 1. A. D. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 2. Apart from Judaism and Christianity, Nock discusses Orphism as a Greek example of prophetic religion, albeit one with limited historical influence. 2. Nock, Conversion, 7. 3. Nock, Conversion, 8. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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(New York: Penguin, 1982), 209. The word “wrongness” is James’s quick attempt to generalize accounts of conversion that invoke and emphasize the consciousness of sin. The distinction between “turning toward” and “turning away from,” with which Nock begins his study, also derives from James, who suggests in the same passage that “with most of us, the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at.” I think it is plausible to see Nock’s entire project in Conversion as an attempt to demonstrate the Greco-Christian genealogy of James’s view—that is, to explain why and how there is a “we” that feels this way about “wrongness,” how that feeling came to dominate a notion of conversion framed in more positive terms. 4. Though Nock’s basic claim remains forceful, the extent of this similarity has been called into question by later scholars. See, for example, Eugene V. Gallagher, “Conversion and Community in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Religion 73, no. 1 (1993): 1–15; Abraham J. Malherbe, “Conversion to Paul’s Gospel,” in The Early Church in its Context: Essays in Honor of Everett Ferguson, ed. Abraham J. Malherbe, Frederick W. Norris and James W. Thompson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 230–44; and Andrew S. Jacobs, “Matters (Un-)Becoming: Conversions in Epiphanius of Salamis,” Church History 81, no. 1 (2012): 27–47. 5. SZ 175. 6. This is a principle enshrined by Kant: “To the extent that the person is subject to the moral law, there is no sublimity in him, but there is to the extent that he is at the same time legislative in regard to this law, and is only for that reason subject to them. . . . The dignity of humanity consists precisely in this capacity for universal legislation, although with the proviso that it is at the same time itself subject to this legislation.” Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and tr. Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 57f. 7. Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 25, ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Ranier Sepp (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 8. 8. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 337. 9. See, for example, Tilottama Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially chapter 4. 10. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 25; SKS 4, 332. 11. SZ 191n, 235n. 12. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 98; SKS 4, 401. 13. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 25; SKS 4, 332. 14. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 32; SKS 4, 338. 15. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 68f.; SKS 12, 77.

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16. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 73; SKS 4, 376. The chimera of a “presuppositionless” beginning—criticized heavily throughout The Concept of Anxiety as well as a number of Kierkegaard’s other works—is associated with a central claim of Hegel’s logic: philosophy must begin without presuppositions. This aspect of Kierkegaard should complicate attempts to see Kierkegaard’s subject as removed or independent from a social-historical nexus. 17. David Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant: On Beginnings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 173. 18. Augustine, Confessions 8.7. 19. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 62; SKS 4, 366. Translation altered and emphasis mine. 20. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 27; SKS 5, 406f. 21. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 47; SKS 4, 352. 22. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 96; SKS 11, 208f. 23. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 44; SKS 10, 52. Emphasis in original. 24. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, tr. Matthias Fritsch and Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 199; GA 60, 265. 25. I think there is much more Protestantism in Heidegger’s reading of early Christianity than has been previously acknowledged. Schleiermacher, Troeltsch, and Kierkegaard are all floating around in the 1920–21 lecture course and shape Heidegger’s approach to Paul and Augustine at several key junctures. 26. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 215; GA 60, 284. 27. See, for example, Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 189; John van Buren, “Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther,” in Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, eds., Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 163ff.; and John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Also see the discussion of facticity in Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 83ff. 28. 1 Thessalonians 1:6–9. 29. GA 60, 93f. Emphasis mine. 30. GA 60, 94. Emphasis mine. 31. Thomas Sheehan, “Dasein,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 213n69. For Ereignetsein, see GA 66, 312. 32. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 65; GA 60, 93. 33. “ursprünglich miterfahren,” GA 60, 94.

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Notes to Pages 209–212

34. See the discussion of sin and the “intensification of consciousness of the self ” in the passage Heidegger cites from The Sickness unto Death (99f.); as well as the discussion of conscious conversion in chapter 2. 35. For a discussion of this, see Dan Zahavi, “Inner Time-Consciousness and Prereflective Self-awareness,” in The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 157–80. 36. GA 60, 145. 37. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 11; GA 60, 15. 38. GA 60, 95. Note also the following passage: “The conversion [Umwendung] to Christian life experience concerns the enactment . . . . Paul develops enactment into a theme” (GA 60, 121). On this point, we might also consider a connection with Husserl, who at times appeals to the figure of conversion (Umwendung) in explaining the way in which phenomenological analysis transforms ordinary perceptions—first philosophy, for example, as a “phänomenologische Umwendung” of the ordinary factual sciences. See Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 134. 39. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 13; GA 60, 18. 40. See the contemporary essay on Jaspers for what essentially amounts, in Heideggerian terms, to a panegyric to Kierkegaard’s understanding of appropriation and method. GA 9, 41ff. 41. GA 61, 60. 42. This is discussed in a contemporary lecture course on expression. See GA 59, 32. 43. 1 Corinthians 7:29–31. Heidegger’s interest in this term has inspired a number of recent discussions. See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, tr. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 34ff.; Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 195–203. 44. GA 60, 120. There is here a parallel with the earlier discussion of the claim that sin is not privatio boni but a positive comportment “before God.” 45. GA 60, 119. Heidegger is building from a terminological triad here—Gehalt, Bezug, and Vollzug. For a discussion of these terms, see, for example, van Buren, Young Heidegger, 30–35. 46. Consider the following passage from Kierkegaard’s Two Ages, which was translated as into German as “Kritik der Gegenwart” and published in Der Brenner in 1914: “Like plainclothes policemen, they will be unrecognizable, concealing their respective distinctions and giving support only negatively.” Kierkegaard, Two Ages, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 107; SKS 8, 101. The first motto of Heidegger’s lecture course from the following year—in which Heidegger more fully developed his new, methodical approach to phenomenology—is taken from Kierkegaard’s most extensive meditation on the incognito, Training in Christianity. The passage concerns the difference between

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“doubt” and “offense” and criticizes modern philosophy for basing itself on the former. For the passage, see Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 83n. Heidegger cites the passage in GA 61, 182. We could also connect this reading of Heidegger’s text with the distinction I offered at the start of chapter 1—namely, that an authentic self is subject to failure and not merely negation. Negation versus failure, in other words, is another way we might understand the distinction Heidegger makes between als ob nicht and ὡς μή here. 47. GA 60, 121. 48. GA 60, 119. 49. GA 60, 120. Passages in reverse order. 50. GA 60, 120. 51. GA 60, 122. Emphasis mine. 52. 1 Corinthians 15:52. 53. This interpretation of the Socratic is found in Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 9ff.; SKS 4, 220ff. 54. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 185; SKS 4, 217. 55. This discussion in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments proceeds straight into the argument for “the teacher.” 56. There is also an extraordinary characterization of the “world-historical individual” in Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, under the alias of “the genius.” The genius, the “omnipotent Ansich [in-itself ],” whose will seeks to determine the whole world—to the precise degree to which he is independent of the will of others— becomes dependent on the will of “nothing,” which he then renames as “fate”: “Fate is nothing. It is the genius himself who discovers it, and the more profound the genius, the more profoundly he discovers fate.” Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 99; SKS 4, 402. 57. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self,” in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: Philosophical Engagements, ed. Edward F. Mooney (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 12. 58. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, tr. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 478; SKS 7, 518. 59. Augustine, Confessions 1.1. 60. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13; SKS 11, 129. Also, “at the first moment of choice the personality seemingly emerges naked as the infant from the mother’s womb; at the next moment it is concrete in itself, and a person can remain at this point only through an arbitrary abstraction. He remains himself, exactly the same that he was before, down to the most insignificant feature, and yet he becomes another, for the choice penetrates everything and changes it. Thus his finite personality is now made infinite in the choice, in which he infinitely chooses himself.” Kierkegaard, Either/ Or II, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 223; SKS 3, 213. Emphasis mine.

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61. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 89; SKS 4, 392. 62. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 88, 90; SKS 4, 391, 393. 63. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 86; SKS 4, 390. 64. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 86; SKS 4, 389. Insofar as the fragility and nonabiding presence of the present is just an aspect of temporality, properly understood (rather than some special subcase of temporality or exception to temporality called the “instant”), the instant can be understood as an experiential registration of temporality itself. In a sense, the instant might be the chronological representation of the experience of time, insofar as that experience breaks down and allows the nature of temporality to become present explicitly as what it is—and that means, in the case of temporality, as nonpresent. Ryan Coyne has a rich and original discussion of Heidegger’s evolving thinking about temporality, which I take to be pointing toward a similar point about the eternal. See Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 177–83. 65. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 232; SKS 3, 222. 66. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 251; SKS 3, 239f. 67. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 44; SKS 5, 420. Further evidence of this connection can be found in the fact that repetition, the category that is designed to explain the way in which a person can continually reaffirm a commitment as if for the first time, is glossed as “eternity in time.” Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 221, 327; SKS 4, 88. 68. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 224f.; SKS 10, 225f. 69. Luke 15:7. Kierkegaard makes reference to this particular line at least fifteen times throughout his published works and journals, and to the story itself more than twice that number. 70. For a discussion of Kierkegaard’s devotional practice of reading Luther’s sermons, see David Yoon-Jung Kim and Joel D. S. Rasmussen, “Martin Luther: Reform, Secularization, and the Question of his ‘True Successor,’ ” in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, vol. 2, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 173–217. 71. Martin Luther, The Sermons of Martin Luther vol. 4, Sermons on Gospel Texts for the 1st to the 12th Sundays after Trinity, ed. and tr. John Nicholas Lenker (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), 65f. Lines in reverse order. For Kierkegaard’s reference, see SKS 21, 151. 72. SKS 17, 53. Translation mine. 73. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 227; SKS 4, 93. 74. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 227; SKS 4, 93. 75. Zinzendorf, Nine Public Lectures on Important Subjects in Religion, ed. and tr. George W. Forell (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), 80f. Emphasis mine.

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76. See, for example, Karl Löwith, “L’achèvement de la philosophie classique par Hegel et sa dissolution chez Marx et Kierkegaard,” Recherches Philosophiques 4 (1934–35): 232–67. Löwith later writes, “Kierkegaard’s critique of the age (1846) corresponds so precisely to the Communist Manifesto that Marx’s critique of the bourgeois capitalist world and Kierkegaard’s critique of the bourgeois Christian world complement each other like the front and back sides of the same thing” (Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, tr. Gary Steiner [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], 201). 77. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 86; SKS 4, 390. 78. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 87f.; SKS 4, 390. 79. “totum esse praesens” (Augustine, Confessions 11.11); “semper preasentis aeternitatis” (Augustine, Confessions 11.13). 80. One exception to this general pattern is found in “The Changelessness of God,” a discourse first delivered in 1851 and published in the final months of Kierkegaard’s life. Here Kierkegaard deploys all the conventional metaphysical epithets of God: unchanging, omnipotent, omnipresent fount of love. But here, as in many of the theological passages of Kierkegaard’s writing, the characterization of God is driven by pietistic concern. The significance of God’s changelessness is not that to be changeless is a marvelous way of being but rather that “there is fear and trembling in this thought of God’s changelessness.” Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 276; SKS 13, 334. God’s changelessness is important to the degree that thinking about it sets off a devotional circuit of fear and comfort. 81. Augustine, Confessions 11.29. 82. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 87f.; SKS 4, 390. 83. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 89; SKS 4, 392. 84. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 49; SKS 4, 143. 85. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 41, 57; SKS 11, 176, 193. 86. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 27; SKS 10, 35. 87. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 29; SKS 10, 37. 88. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 30; SKS 10, 38. 89. SKS 10, 39; Cf. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 31. 90. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 32; SKS 10, 40. 91. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 30f.; SKS 10, 38f. 92. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 31; SKS 10, 39. 93. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 350; SKS 11, 43. 94. SZ 338n. 95. Heidegger, Being and Time, 394; SZ 343. 96. SZ 373, 129, 360. 97. SZ 339. 98. SZ 338.

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99. SZ 338. 100. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 180; Sartre, L’Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 159. 101. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 202 (translation altered); Sartre, L’Être et le néant, 178. 102. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 208; Sartre, L’Être et le néant, 182. 103. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 178; Sartre, L’Être et le néant, 158. Throughout the Being and Nothingness citations, I have made Barnes’s “Presence” lowercase. 104. See Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology, especially chapter 3. 105. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–93. 106. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, tr. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 123. 107. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 574. 108. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 334 (quoting Clement of Alexandria). 109. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 335. 110. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 336. 111. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 321. 112. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 163. 113. Though it is perhaps less salient, this interpretation can hold whether we translate je as “in each case” or as “always,” for, even in the latter case, one could say that the repeated specification of “always mine” is either a pleonasm or an indication of iterability (i.e., that existential analysis works at the level of each moment). 114. Sartre, Cahiers pour un morale, 129. 115. Albert Camus, “Metaphysical Rebellion,” in The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1991), 25; Camus, Œvres complètes d’Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 51. 116. It is worth noting that Beauvoir is concerned with a precisely parallel problem: “In one sense the negative attitude is easy; the rejected object is given unequivocally and unequivocally defines the revolt that one opposes to it. . . . In the moment of rejection the antinomy of action is removed, and means and end meet; freedom immediately sets itself up as its own goal and fulfills itself by so doing. But the antinomy reappears as soon as freedom again gives itself ends which are far off. . . . It has often been observed that revolt alone is pure. . . . [Revolutionary humanism] accepts only rarely the tension of permanent liberation.” The Ethics of Ambiguity, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1976), 132f.

Conclusion 1. By positive, I do not mean that sin is seen as something “good.” It is positive in the sense that it is viewed as factically given, and nothing factically given can have

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an objective and abstract moral value as negative within existential thought. See my extended discussion in the previous chapter of sin as “position” rather than negation within the works of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. 2. Emile Barrault, Aux Artistes: Du passé et de l’avenir des beaux-arts (Paris: Alexandre Mesnier, 1830), 84; Auguste Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion, tr. Richard Congreve (London: John Chapman, 1858), 105–9, 124–27. 3. See Janet Browne, “Looking at Darwin: Portraits and the Making of an Icon,” Isis 100, no. 3 (2009): 542–70, especially 557f. 4. To cite a few examples, from Jean-Luc Marion to Richard Kearney, from John Caputo to Merold Westphal, and from Gianni Vattimo to Jean-Luc Nancy. 5. See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 6. Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 58. 7. Anidjar, “Secularism,” 60. 8. Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 248. The puzzling quotation marks in this passage are Anidjar’s, not mine. Their use is revealing: Anidjar is citing Judith Surkis’s work on masculinity in Belle Époque France. Surkis’s sentence reads, “Sexing the Citizen, by contrast, demonstrates how instability, rather than undermining masculinity as a regulatory political and social ideal, actually lent it its force” (Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006], 8). Anidjar has replaced the word “masculinity” with “Christianity.” He does this with citations on a fairly regular basis throughout the work. 9. Anidjar insists throughout that the “blood” he has in mind is based not in the physical matter of blood and its medical interpretations (which long predate Christianity) but in the “idea” of blood. Even if Homer talks about scars and Leviticus talks about ritual blood, Christianity invents blood as an ideology. What results is a system of double bookkeeping in which he privileges a spiritual interpretation of blood, so as to keep the critical spotlight on Christianity, while relying on the materiality of blood to create links in what is otherwise a very spotty historical argument. 10. Jonathan Sheehan has a helpful discussion of the historical claims of Anidjar’s book in Marginalia: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/christianity-jonathan -sheehan/ (accessed December 2015). Sheehan points out the “subjunctive hesitation” of many of Anidjar’s definitional attempts (“Christianity is, as it were, . . .”). 11. Anidjar, Blood, 247. 12. He defines practice as “any operation that provides or improves the actor’s qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is designated as practice or not.” Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, tr. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 4. 13. Sloterdijk, Change Your Life, 4. 14. We might say that Sloterdijk’s book is an attempt to depoliticize ascetic practice

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by philosophizing it, whereas Anidjar’s work seeks to clarify the political life of ideas and embedded concepts. For some of the references to these phrases, see Sloterdijk, Change Your Life, 6, 35, 48, 110; and Anidjar, Blood, 18, 30, 97. 15. Sloterdijk, Change Your Life, 407. 16. Sloterdijk, Change Your Life, 406. 17. Sloterdijk, Change Your Life, 405. 18. Sloterdijk, Change Your Life, 4. 19. Sloterdijk, Change Your Life, 5. 20. A similar note is possible regarding the work of figures such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot. Like Sloterdijk, Foucault and Hadot argued for an understanding of ascetic practices as traversing (and to some degree uniting) the history of Western religion and philosophy. All three figures, moreover, were deeply impacted by the works of both Heidegger and Sartre. It is worth considering that their systematic insights into the role of the exercise in human life may reflect the historical moment of their philosophy and its relation to the existential tradition, particularly as I have been describing it here. See, especially, Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1988); and Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, tr. Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 21. As a matter of principle, I am indifferent to the question of whether we should continue to use the term “Christianity” to describe this adaptive process. In the case of the three figures studied in this book, the historical impact of Protestant traditions of piety is so proximate and intense that the moniker “Christian” makes more sense of existential norms and concepts than they make on their own. Such, at least, is the wager of this book. But it would be easy to imagine that for readers and interpreters of the existential tradition further removed from those sources, the specifically Christian or Protestant dimensions of authenticity may be adequately described by terms like “ascetic,” “redemptive,” or “penitential.” 22. Sartre, Le Diable et le bon dieu (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 33.

Index

accident, 80–85, 88, 100, 116 adiaphora, 186, 213–14 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 35, 56, 176, 200 affirmation, 54, 57, 63, 70–72, 83, 201–2, 218, 259n106; denial, ambiguity between, 61 Agamben, Giorgio, 51 alienation, 78–81, 83, 87–91, 96, 102, 172 Amiel, Henri-Frédéric, 191, 284n20, 289n129 Anidjar, Gil, 236–41, 297nn8–9, 297n14 antimetabole, 145, 153 anti-Semitism, 138, 159–61, 180, 187; inauthenticity, as form of, 56; Jews, as distinct types, 158 anxiety, 83–84, 125–26, 206–7, 224 “Anxiety of Abundance, The” (Kierkegaard), 222–23 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 254n38 appropriation, 81–88, 90–91, 95, 97–98, 117, 146, 190 Aquinas, Thomas, 23 Arendt, Hannah, 24, 35, 282n4 Aristotle, 130, 278n46 Asad, Talal, 235–36 asceticism, 61–62, 130–32, 151–57, 162, 194–98, 238, 260n111, 260n116, 261n119, 298n20; ascetic ideal, 58–63; and authenticity, 22, 27, 58, 167–68, 182; energetic

asceticism, 26, 63–69, 121, 215–18, 240; and existentialism, 227; normativity, as form of, 60; paradox of, 59 as though not (ὡς μή), 211–13 “At a Graveside” (Kierkegaard), 106–7 atheism, 15–17, 19, 162, 171, 189; and authenticity, 171; and conversion, 44–45 Auerbach, Erich, 163 Augenblick, 213. See also instant; Øieblik Augustine of Hippo, 23, 42, 46, 130, 135, 178, 206, 215, 250n56, 291n25; eternity, defining of, 220–21; and sin, 208 authenticity, 19, 24, 26, 66, 69, 113–14, 225, 228, 242, 254n42, 258n88, 298n21; and alienation, 37–38; as ascetic ideal, 162, 230; and asceticism, 22, 27, 58, 167–68, 182; and atheism, 171; “being oneself,” 39; and conversion, 28, 37, 53–54, 68, 170, 178, 200; criticism of, 30–32; as critique of values, 194; existentialism, connection with, 35–36, 38–39, 62, 202, 232; and inauthenticity, 200; individual, critique of, 38; and individualism, 30–32, 35, 61; Jewish identity, 158; moral appropriation, 40; originality, desire for, 31; possession, illusions of, 62; and purification, 183–84; as religious concept, 37–38; Romantic

300

Index

authenticity (continued ) ideologies of individual, roots in, 30–32; self-choice, 39–40; and sincerity, 31, 36; as spiritual labor, 40–41. See also expressive individualism Barth, Karl, 5, 9, 19, 48, 54–55, 110–11, 256n67 Bayle, Pierre, 21 Beauvoir, Simone de, 3, 29, 69, 163, 172–73, 195, 249n55, 266n59, 296n116 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 33, 36, 167, 170, 195 Being and Time (Heidegger), 3, 46, 54, 115– 16, 118–19, 122–23, 126, 128–29, 132–34, 136–37, 142–43, 146, 155, 166–67, 188, 203, 207, 212, 227–28, 277n35, 285n34; anticipatory resolve, 124–25; authentic individuality, 36; Christian categories, secularizing of in, 130–31; Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) in, 113–14; Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) and Uneigentlichkeit (inauthenticity), distinction between in, 32, 150–51; human existence, as understanding, 117; one’s condition, appropriating of, 125; translations of, 33–34 Bellah, Robert N., 31 Benedict of Nursia, 51, 257n79 Berger, Peter, 19 Berman, Marshall, 30–31, 36–37, 39, 254n42 Bernard of Clairvaux, 42–44 Berthold-Bond, Daniel, 12, 118, 275n9 Biran, Maine de, 42 Blondel, Maurice, 2–3, 43 Blumenberg, Hans, 235, 241 Bourdieu, Pierre, 281n116 Brandes, Georg, 109 Buber, Martin, 3, 6, 42 Bultmann, Rudolf, 3, 8–9, 13, 17, 37, 50, 226– 27, 256n67, 271n133 Cahiers pour un morale (Sartre), 45, 166, 171, 179, 187, 189, 195–97, 225–26, 287n83; moral conversion in, 170

Calvin, John, 10 Camus, Albert, 3, 13, 17, 24, 29, 37–38, 45, 64, 69, 246n7, 259n98, 273n165; absurdity, cultivation of, 41, 66, 225; metaphysical rebellion, 229; Sisyphean battle, of existence, 41, 225 capitalism: and asceticism, 60; identity formation, 30; and liberalism, 36; and Puritanism, 284n17 Caputo, John D., 71, 156–57, 297n4 Carlisle, Clare, 57, 262n4 Carman, Taylor, 129 Carnap, Rudolf, 145 Carnets de la drôle de guerre (Sartre), 66, 162– 64, 166, 174, 176, 178, 183, 186, 190–93, 195, 226, 284n18, 285n33, 285n37 Cassou, Jean, 170–71 Catholicism, 23, 69, 203 “Changelessness of God, The” (Kierkegaard), 295n80 Charmé, Stuart Zane, 283n16 Chestov, Lev, 3, 6, 42, 245n6, 246n7 choice, 81–84, 96, 98, 115–18; and repentance, 94, 97; and resolution, 95 Christian asceticism, 60–62, 130 Christian Discourses (Kierkegaard), 54, 98, 222 Christian existentialism, 2, 37 Christianity, 2, 16, 19, 23–25, 55, 67, 69, 70, 74–75, 92, 95, 97, 99–100, 104, 108, 110–12, 148, 199, 204, 209, 211, 217, 227–28, 234– 35, 240–42, 298n21; and asceticism, 60; as bad faith thinking, 170, 173; becoming, idea of, 71–72; Christendom, distinction between, 53–54, 79; and conversion, 72, 135; as existential, 8, 10–11, 18, 21; existential Christianity, 17–18, 226; existentialism, as ally of, 12, 44; as hollow, criticism of, 49–50; and modernity, 236–37; monastic movements within, 50–51; and philosophy, 14–15, 21; secular criticism, relationship between, 236; self-reflexivity, 106; self-reincarnation of, 237; and sin, 200, 205; as singular agent, in history, 236–37;

Index spiritual labor, 78–79, 265n36; Western hegemony, 238–39; and “wrongness,” 200, 289n3 Christian VI of Denmark, 47, 258n82 closure, critique of, 57–58, 62, 202 Cohen-Solal, Annie, 248n44, 284n17 Cold War, 37, 253n21 Commentary (magazine), 34 Comte, Auguste, 233 Concept of Anxiety, The (Kierkegaard), 82, 93, 103, 203, 206, 224, 271n133, 285n34; eternity in, 216, 220, 291n16, 293n56 Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard), 86, 269n96 Confessions (Augustine), 220 conscious conversion, 48–54, 76–78, 98–102, 218–23 conversatio morum, 51, 257n79 conversion, 70–71, 73–75, 77–78, 101–2, 112, 125, 135, 161–62, 171, 173–77, 197–98, 210, 220, 228, 231–32, 240, 292n38; and adhesion, 199; and atheism, 44–45; and authenticity, 28, 37, 53–54, 68, 170, 178, 200; and becoming, 72; Christian identity, 76, 98–99; conscious experience, 48–49, 52, 54, 99; in existential thought, 43–44, 67; of individual, 45; and Jews, 56; and joy, 65; life-formation, 51; monastic movements, 50–51; and Pietism, 48–51, 54, 61, 218; and rebirth, 52, 100; rupture and possibility, 209; and sin, 199, 201, 217; and witnessing, 99 Corbin, Henri, 3, 285n33 Corsair (magazine), 75, 104 cosmic nihilism, 227 creation, 10, 40, 140, 177–83, 188, 195, 197, 228 Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl), 135, 246n13 Crowell, Steven, 90, 268n84, 277n38 Darwin, Charles, 233 Dasein, 127–29, 133–34, 136, 138–39, 141, 148, 155

301

Daumier, Honoré, 14 death, 82, 86, 89–90, 106–7, 123, 187–88; to the world, 211–13 debt, 96, 99, 101–2, 124, 126, 222; and secular, 239; and sin, 219 decision, 10–11, 40, 52, 57, 68, 77–78, 84, 100– 102, 145, 215–16, 219, 227 decisionism, 54–55, 118–19 deconversion, 46, 171, 189, 193, 288n116 Deleuze, Gilles, 70–71, 259n106 Derrida, Jacques, 142, 235, 274n2, 280n90; critique of presence, 225 Descartes, René, 21, 152, 237, 268n84 desire, 59, 61–62, 81, 86–88, 106–8, 112, 130, 162, 164, 166, 178–79, 190, 222; and invention, 66, 176–77, 179, 183, 186, 188, 197. See also will despair, 87, 89, 96, 107; and eternal, 91; present tense, 102; as sin, 88, 93–94, 97, 108, 134–35; spiritual labor, 90; as vortex, 92 Devil and the Good God, The (Sartre), 173, 242 differential, the, 27, 131, 150–51, 280n90 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 273n165 Dreyfus, Hubert, 12, 108–9, 118, 127–28, 267n65; “defining commitment,” 215 Eckhart, Meister, 23 ecstatic, 40–41, 122–24, 134–35, 143, 223–25, 277n42, 280n92 Edwards, Jonathan, 181 egoistic individuality, 38 Either/Or (Kierkegaard), 43, 79, 81, 83, 85– 86, 95–97, 102, 106–8, 228, 270n108 Eliade, Mircea, 68, 283n16 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 201 energetic asceticism, 63–69, 121, 215–18, 240 Enlightenment, 21, 36, 231, 235 Eriksson, Erik, 283n16 essentialism, 202 eternity, 81, 84, 91, 103, 172, 214–16, 220–24, 294n64. See also temporality existential, 7–11 existential a priori, 93, 138

302

Index

existentialism, 6, 8, 94, 110, 112, 201, 230–31, 235, 245n5; and anxiety, 83–84; and asceticism, 227; and authenticity, 25, 29, 32, 35–36, 38–39, 61–62, 200, 202, 232; Christianity, as ally of, 12, 19, 21, 45; conversion, focus on, 43, 67; as critique of closure, 57–58; existential, difference between, 9; Gnosticism, kinship between, 13, 227; identity, and transformation, 41, 61; Mounier’s genealogy of, 41–42; personal authenticity, 2; personal conversion, pessimism of, 64; and Pietism, 25, 54–58, 61; pietistic Protestantism, connection between, 24, 28, 45–48; positive thread in, 64; and religion, 3, 12–13, 22, 44, 233–34, 240; and romanticism, 36; as secularizing translation, 19–20; as tradition, 4 “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (Sartre), 1, 45, 173–74 explication, 117–19, 124, 128, 131–32, 135, 142– 43, 147, 150, 156–57, 166, 178–79, 200, 209– 11, 224–25; and Husserlian Eigentlichkeit, 276n20; Sloterdijk’s theory of, 238–40 expressive individualism, 31, 230. See also authenticity Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 40, 78– 80, 221 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 109, 111, 172, 234, 236 Fondane, Benjamin, 3 form, 101–2, 128 Foucault, Michel, 22, 298n20 Francke, August Hermann, 10, 49, 52–53, 63, 73–74, 257n70 Frankfurt School, 104 Frederick IV of Denmark, 47 Freud, Sigmund, 31, 165 Genet, Jean, 160, 170, 177, 188, 196, 233 Gide, André, 46, 109, 165–68, 173, 183, 192, 254n42, 284n20, 289n129 Gnosticism, 226; existentialism, kinship between, 13, 227 Gogarten, Friedrich, 3

Gordon, Peter, 249n55 Gorski, Philip, 55 Gouwens, David, 108, 263n9 Greece, 141, 152 Guignon, Charles, 259n106 guilt, 96, 118, 124, 126–27, 130–31, 135, 203, 206–7; and alienation, 172 Habermas, Jürgen, 19 Hadot, Pierre, 22, 298n20 Haecker, Theodor, 5 Hammerschlag, Sarah, 160, 282n3 Harnack, Adolf von, 45–46 Haugeland, John, 274n3, 277n38 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 8, 21, 83, 93, 191, 214, 220, 236, 255n60, 291n16; metaphysics of spirit, 80–81 Heidegger, Martin, 2–10, 12–18, 20, 24, 27, 29, 31–34, 36, 39, 42–45, 55–57, 61, 64, 102, 108, 112, 162, 169, 173, 175–76, 179, 182, 187–88, 190, 194–95, 202, 204–6, 219, 226– 27, 237, 240–42, 267n65, 274n2, 276n24, 277n38, 283n14, 285nn33–34, 286n44, 291n25, 292n46, 294n64; absolute occasionality, 40; and agency, 150; anticipatory resolve, 123–24; and anxiety (Angst), 4, 125–26, 224; authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), concept of, 4, 26, 35, 113–17, 119–22, 126– 29, 131–33, 136, 139–40, 143, 147, 156–57, 159, 166–67, 200–201, 203, 212, 225, 274n3; averting and converting, 125; being and nothing, 144–45; “Black Notebooks,” 121; and conversion, 209–10; Ereignis-Denken (thinking of the own), 121, 130, 142–44, 146, 150; explication, philosophical ideal of, 119; facticity, 85, 90, 122, 124, 126–27, 156–57, 203, 208, 210, 212–13, 228, 267n62; forgottenness, 125, 149–50; history, meaning of, 152–54; Kierkegaard, influence on, 211; Machenschaft (“machination”), 137; metaphysics, notion of, 133, 137–38, 147– 49, 154; method, importance of to, 118–20, 209–11, 232; “mystical” turn of, 255n60; “other beginning,” 140–42, 146–47, 150–

Index 53; Paul, interest in, 208–13; philosophy and poetry, affinity between, 140–42; primitive Christianity (Urchristentum), 46; “proper,” logic of, 113–18, 124–26, 130, 142–44, 146–50, 280n90; and remembering (Erinnerung), 155; and “ruinance,” 136, 156–57; self-appropriation, 126, 128; self-choice, 26, 119, 136; self-knowledge, 209–10; and sin, 207–8; and temporality, 208–9; transformative thinking of, 120–21, 135–42, 146–48, 150–51; über-revolution, 140–41; understanding, 124, 209; world, as worldly, 131–32 Heraclitus, 149 heresy, 241–42 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 132, 140–41, 255n60 Homer, 140, 237, 297n9 humanism, 138–39, 170–71 Huntington, Patricia, 12, 118 Husserl, Edmund, 5, 66, 123, 135, 157, 180, 190, 201, 209–10, 251n10, 276n20, 292n38 identity, 76–78; crisis of, 105, 216, 218, 225 immediacy, 80, 82–84, 86, 99–102 inalienable, the, 90–92, 94–95, 122, 214, 267n61, 269n99 incognito, 104, 141–42, 212, 221, 292n46 individualism, 4, 25–38, 47–48, 67, 111, 167, 195, 231 Inner Mission, 47, 74, 258n91 instant, 187–88, 213–19, 221, 223–24, 228, 294n64; as unit of iterability (“at each instant”), 39, 41, 82, 91, 102–7, 117–19, 121, 132. See also Augenblick; Øieblik; time James, William, 199, 289n3 Jameson, Frederic, 40 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 282n1 Jaspers, Karl, 2, 5, 8, 10, 18, 29, 42, 48, 246n7; transcendence, notion of, 3 Jonas, Hans, 13–14, 201, 226–28, 240 joy, 63–69, 107, 225 Judaism, 2, 159, 180, 199; as authentic, 35; and conversion, 56; Jews, as “other,” 160

303

Judaken, Jonathan, 44 Jutland, 47, 73 Kangas, David, 205–6, 261n128, 267n62 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 21, 130, 136, 148, 181, 196, 254n36, 264n17, 287n83, 290n6 Kaufmann, Walter, 1–2, 4, 6, 16–17 Kierkegaard, Søren, 8–10, 12, 15, 17–19, 21, 23–24, 27, 29, 32–33, 39, 42–43, 45, 49, 53, 116, 121–23, 127, 132, 136, 140, 161–62, 167, 173, 179, 182, 189, 201–2, 211–12, 227–28, 232–33, 240, 242, 245n6, 246n13, 249n51, 250n56, 254n36, 265n36, 267n61, 270n108, 270n120, 273n165, 285n34, 295n76; and alienation, 80–81, 83–84, 87, 90; anxiety, 83–84, 125–26, 222; and appropriation, 87– 88, 92; becoming, 57, 70–72, 78, 267n65; “beginning in time,” 102; and choice, 83, 94–95, 97–98, 293n60; contemporaneousness, principle of, 104–5; and conversion, 65, 70, 72, 74–76, 98–100, 105–6, 110, 112, 120; Danish church, “attacks” on, 111; on death, 82; and despair, 86–90, 92–94, 102, 107–8, 134–35; eternity, 215–16, 220–23; existentialism, as father of, 110, 112; faith, 103, 221; God-man, paradox of, 103–4; immediacy, 80–83, 86; infinite and finite, tension between, 86–87; the “instant,” 213– 16, 219, 221, 224; leap, 72, 102, 204–5; lilies and birds, 65, 107, 130, 221, 225, 277n42; martyrdom, attitude toward, 75–76, 104; missionary work, 73–75; Nietzsche, kinship between, 70–71; and Pietism, 73–74, 109, 226; present, notion of, 220–21, 223, 225; rebirth, insistence on, 99–100, 102; and recollection, 134; religious joy, 107; religious upbringing of, 46–47, 73; and repentance, 96–98, 103, 112, 135; repetition, idea of, 71, 81, 99; and resignation, 221–22; and resolution, 100–102; and salvation, 105; and scarcity, 106–7; seducer, figure of, 266n50; self-choice, 112, 114, 117–19, 130; on sin, 82, 94, 97, 99–100, 108, 112, 134–35, 203–8, 218–19; spiritual labor, 78, 110; tem-

304 Index Kierkegaard, Søren (continued ) porality, 223–24; time, theory of, 222, 224; translations of, 109; and vortex, 92–93; and waste, 106 Kleinberg, Ethan, 283n14, 285nn33–34 Kolakowski, Leszek, 13 Kuhn, Helmut, 3–4, 14, 41 Kuitert, H. M., 256n67

mission, 19, 25, 50–53, 73, 75–76, 94–95, 111, 162–63, 171, 178, 189–90, 218, 237, 263n16 modernism, 71, 109 modernity, 132; and Christianity, 236–37; and metaphysics, 137, 235; and Pietism, 67–68 Mounier, Emmanuel, 41–42, 45; philosophical revival (réveil), 43–44 Murdoch, Iris, 16

laicism, 173 Laing, R. D., 3 Lasch, Christopher, 31 Latour, Bruno, 149–50 Lehmann, Hartmut, 52, 68 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 152 Levinas, Emmanuel, 23 Lévy, Benny, 162, 282n5 Locke, John, 40 Löwith, Karl, 235, 295n76 Luther, Martin, 7, 23, 45–46, 63, 79, 111, 135–36, 156, 213, 217–18, 227, 236–37, 242, 246n16, 249n51, 257n70, 265n24, 265n36, 276n24 Lutheranism, 49, 104, 111, 231; conversion in, 73; and Pietism, 64; revival movements, 47

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 297n4 natural, 99–101, 108–9, 136, 168, 201–2, 207 Nausea (Sartre), 4 Nazism, 35, 128, 277n35 New Left, 30, 37–38 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 48, 140, 154, 174, 186, 246n16, 255n60, 259n106, 273n165; and asceticism, 59–61, 260n111, 260n116, 261n119, 261n121; eternal recurrence, 71; Kierkegaard, kinship between, 70–71 Nishitani, Keiji, 3, 24 Nock, A. D., 199, 289n3

Mahmood, Saba, 235 Marcel, Gabriel, 2–3, 15–17, 42–43, 249n55 Marcus Aurelius, 91, 268n87, 270n106 Marcuse, Herbert, 104, 271n138 martyr, 75–76; as invisible spiritual practice, 104, 214; Sartre’s concept of, 160–61 Marx, Karl, 5, 172, 220, 234, 295n76 Matthias, Markus, 53, 56, 66 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 15–16, 249n55, 280n92 metanoia, 199–200 metaphysics, 15–16, 18, 55, 57–58, 70–72, 133, 138, 147, 149, 153–54, 169, 180; critique of, 62–63; and modernity, 137, 235; transformative thinking, 148 mineness, 113, 151, 203, 296n113 “Misfortune Is Good Fortune” (Kierkegaard), 65

Øieblik, 82, 91, 213, 215, 221, 223. See also Augenblick; instant ordo salutis, 49, 73 ownness. See proper paradox, 103–4 Pascal, Blaise, 12, 23, 42, 45, 250n56 Pattison, George, 57, 108, 273n165, 277n42 Paul, 23, 46, 50, 52, 76–78, 135, 211–13, 219, 236, 291n25, 292n38; aorist form, significance of, 208–9; and conversion, 210; justification, concept of, 271n133; “old Adam,” 166; and salvation, 103; and sin, 271n133 permanent revolution, 41, 66, 69, 187, 296n116 phenomenology, 25, 115, 120, 122, 126, 135–36, 167, 210–11, 234 Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard), 111, 214 philosophy, and religion, relation between, 11–16, 232–35 Pietism, 5, 26, 28, 30, 66, 73, 76, 109, 111–12,

Index 219, 226, 232, 257n70; adiaphora, notion of, 264n17; conversion, emphasis on, 48–51, 53–54, 61, 75, 78, 83, 218, 264n23; critics of, 49, 54–55; existentialism, connection between, 47–48, 54–58, 61; experience, emphasis on, 49; joy in, 63–64; modernity, as response to, 67–68; as monastic-ascetic movement, 260n116; self-consciousness, as value in, 83 Port Huron Statement, 38 proper, 24, 32–33, 78–81, 97–98, 113–18, 124– 26, 130, 142–44, 146–50, 220–23 Protestantism, 7, 22–24, 68 Rahner, Karl, 3, 19 Rajan, Tilottama, 261n120 Ratzinger, Joseph A., 8–9, 11 Refléxions sur la question juive (Sartre), 34, 56, 158, 160–61, 180, 282n4 Reformation, 23, 67, 69, 73, 104, 249n51 religion, 232, 235, 238; death of God, 13–14, 171–73, 189–94; and existentialism, 15, 20, 22, 233–34, 240; Kierkegaard’s work, in relation to, 107–12; and philosophy, 11, 20, 232, 241; Sartre’s relation to, 193–94 repentance, 94–98, 112, 118–19, 121, 130–31, 135, 155–56; and choice, 103 Repetition (Kierkegaard), 80–81, 84–85, 108, 217–18, 267n62; derived existence, 100 resolution, 100–101; existential freedom, as condition of, 102; spiritual rebirth, 102 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 109 Ringleben, Joachim, 33, 252n15 Ritschl, Albrecht, 47, 50, 109, 260n116 romanticism, 4, 230–31; Romantic individualism, 167 Rossinow, Doug, 37–38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21, 30–31, 36, 232 rupture, 27, 202, 209, 212–13, 225, 228 Safranski, Rudiger, 256n61 Saint-Simonianism, 233 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2–4, 6–7, 9–10, 12–15, 18, 20, 24, 31, 36–39, 42, 61–62, 64, 102, 112,

305

121, 126, 192, 200–201, 223, 229, 240–42, 282nn4–5, 283n16, 285n34, 288n97, 288n117; anti-Semitism, 158–61, 180; and asceticism, 162, 182, 194, 226; atheism of, 1, 185, 189, 233; and authenticity, 25, 33–34, 40–41, 44, 55–57, 66, 159, 162, 163–75, 177–80, 182–83, 185, 189–90, 194–95, 197– 98, 202, 225, 264n17; and Buddha, 16–17; childhood of, 177, 248n44; Christianity, as bad faith thinking, 170, 173; Christian piety, influence on, 46; and conversion, 170–71, 173–77, 189, 198, 228; conversion, and atheism, 44–45; conversion, to authenticity, 178, 188, 193; creation, act of, 40; and creativity, 179, 185, 188; on death, 187–88; and desire, 177–78, 183; and freedom, 168–69, 185, 187; and inauthenticity, 171–73, 175–76, 178–80, 194–95, 228; invention, 176–83; on Jewish authenticity, 34–35, 158–61; moral thinking, 181–82, 186, 189, 195–96; ownership, 180, 182, 190; personal progress, 185; political transformation of, 164; Protestantism of, 284n17; and purification, 183–84; and reflection, 179; and religion, 193–94; and responsibility, 176–77, 185; revaluation, mechanics of, 175, 177; and revolution, 194–98; salvation, understanding of, 185, 191; and stoicism, 163–65, 168, 174, 188, 226, 284n21; theory of consciousness, 167, 171–72, 180–81, 190; war, meaning of, 174–75; waste, avoidance of, 183–84 Scheler, Max, 174 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 5, 255n60 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 5, 7, 45–46, 109, 246n13, 291n25 Schloezer, Boris de, 245n6 Schmidt, Martin, 49 Schmitt, Carl, 5, 235 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 59–60 Schrag, Calvin O., 245n5 Schrempf, Christoph, 49, 256n63 Schweitzer, Albert, 248n44

306

Index

Schweitzer, Charles, 17, 46, 109, 248n44, 284n17 secular, 48, 58, 107–12, 233, 235–36, 239–42; and secularism, 234, 262n141 secularization, 12–13, 19–22, 47, 88, 95, 111–12, 236, 275n10; debate over, 235; and religious reform, 68–69 seducer, 82, 266n50 Sheehan, Thomas, 209, 280n91 Sickness unto Death, The (Kierkegaard), 86, 88, 92–94, 207, 222, 224; alienation, as topic of, 90–91; despair in, 96; eternal in, 91; eternal self, 95; repentance in, 97 sin, 82, 103, 112, 156, 204, 218, 223, 230– 31, 271n133, 296n1; and anxiety, 206–7; confessing and affirming, ambiguity between, 27; and conversion, 199, 201, 217; and despair, 88, 93–94, 97, 108, 134–35; first-person perspective of, 206; and guilt, 93, 126, 201, 203, 206–7; as hereditary, 99– 100, 203; and inauthenticity, 200–201; as moral-religious concept, 201; performative sense of, 208; radicalized notion of, 202, 207, 220; as self-presupposing, 205; and temporality, 202, 219 Sloterdijk, Peter, 236, 238–40, 297n14, 298n20 Socrates, 42, 74, 108, 215; and martyrdom, 214 Soloveitchik, Joseph B., 3, 19 Spener, Philipp, 49, 73; renewal, idea of, 56 Spengler, Oswald, 227 spiritual labor, 39–41, 61–64, 78–81, 88–89, 99, 101, 105–6, 115, 215 Steiner, George, 256n61 Stoeffler, Ernest, 10–11, 49–50, 63–64, 257n70 Stoic, 22, 42, 62, 87, 168–69, 171, 175–76, 199, 264n17 subtraction narrative, 13–14 Surkis, Judith, 297n8 Tauler, Johannes, 23 Taylor, Charles, 13, 30–32, 36, 39, 251n4

temporality, 70–72, 102–7, 122–23, 205–9, 213–15, 217–20, 224–28, 294n64; as finite, 57–58, 61, 182, 216, 221–23. See also eternity Tillich, Paul, 3, 9, 12, 19, 37, 248n35 time: and becoming, 54–57, 63, 70–72, 135, 205, 214, 259n106; “a beginning in,” 99– 102; and eternity, 223; existential understanding of, 202–3; and instant, 213–16, 223–24; metaphysical significance of, 215; and poverty, 222; the present, 89–90, 93, 102, 105, 107, 130, 219, 223–24; radical sin, 202, 207; and scarcity, 84, 106–7; truth in, 214. See also instant Tracy, David, 9–11 Training in Christianity (Kierkegaard), 292n46 Trilling, Lionel, 30–32, 35–36, 39, 253n25 Troeltsch, Ernst, 47–48, 291n25 Trotsky, Leon, 187 Wach, Joachim, 68–69 Wahl, Jean, 5, 15–16, 57, 70–71, 259n105, 283n14, 285n34 waste, 61–62, 65, 106–7, 183–88, 252n13, 261n121 Weber, Max, 22, 47, 246n16, 260n116, 261n121, 284n17; on asceticism, 59–61 Weiss, Johannes, 50, 77 Welch, Claude, 10 Westphal, Merold, 297n4 “What Is Metaphysics?” (Heidegger), 133, 137 will, 59, 80, 82, 89–90, 135, 138, 170, 172, 189, 219, 260n116, 261n119, 293n56. See also desire Wolin, Richard, 118 Words, The (Sartre), 193–94, 286n67, 288n97 Wordsworth, William, 31, 36 Zimmerman, Michael, 134, 278n54 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus Ludwig von, 48–49, 52–54, 63, 73, 219–20, 221