Kierkegaard: Hegel's antithesis

General Philosophy
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Let’s do a little overview of the ways Kierkegaard compares and contrasts with Hegel, with the aim of seeing the way Kierkegaard consciously sought to express an antithesis. We’ll end up revolving around an issue described in the SEP describes this way:

“There is in Kierkegaard’s view of the human self as spirit one other fundamental difference from Hegel’s concept of spirit. Hegel’s dialectic (at least on some interpretations) comes to rest when the conflicting moments are reconciled in a final, higher unity. For Kierkegaard, however, the human self is fundamentally temporal and (at least prior to death) is always an unfinished project. The task of balancing the elements of human selfhood (necessity and possibility, eternity and temporality) so as to avoid despair is never completed short of the grave.”

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It’s easy to see why Kierkegaard and Nietzsche present as philosophical twins when we look at the way Kierkegaard imagined selfhood. Kierkegaard imagined an individual human as ever evolving, growing out of itself toward something. That goal is selfhood.

Compare this to the way a tree, which is basically a large bush, starts out as a sprout and then progresses. Each sprout has many different potential outcomes, and since it’s a plant, this is entirely a matter of DNA and circumstances, none of which are in the control of the tree.

Humans are much like this except there is an added ingredient: consciousness, anticipation, aspiration, desire, hope, fear, and of course, despair.

The SEP mentioned above puts it this way:

“Kierkegaard does not think of the human self predominantly as a kind of metaphysical substance, but rather more like an achievement, a goal to strive for. To be sure, humans are substances of a sort; they exist in the world, as do physical objects. However, what is distinctive about human selves is that the self must become what it is to become, human selves playing an active role in the process by which they come to define themselves. This idea is familiar from existentialist thinkers such as Sartre, and we can thereby understand why Kierkegaard is often described as the “father of existentialism” (however unhelpful that label may otherwise be). However, as we shall see below, one important difference from Sartre is that for Kierkegaard the idea of existentialist “self-creation” (or, perhaps better, “self-shaping”) needs to be synthesized with “self-acceptance:” a recognition that the self is in some sense given by our limitations and certain facts of biology and history (for this terminology, see Rudd 2012).”

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I look forward to seeing where you go with this. Another important difference between SK, Nietzsche, and Sartre, however: SK’s context is thoroughly Christian, and much of what he writes is impossible to understand without that framework. Depends on which of the “pseudonymous” writers you look at.

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My knowledge of Kierkegaard comes from reading Sickness Unto Death, Repetition, and Fear and Trembling. The ideas in those three books have been important to me for a while, but not for reasons having to do with religion. But then, I’m not allergic to the Christian framework the way some people are. Maybe that renders the Christian aspect of his works transparent to me. Anyway, it would be sad if someone lets that sort of thing keep them from taking the SK ride, which is astounding in its own right.

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Oh sure. I consider his engagement with Christianity to be a plus, not a minus. You might take a look at the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and the Philosophical Fragments, as well. But the three you mention are great.

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In Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, obeying the command to love the neighbor changes a person. This seems related to the claim in Philosophical Fragments that truth must provide a change of condition for a person.

Or the alternative stated in Fragments is that a person already possesses the condition, an opinion deemed Platonic.

I am not sure how that conflict relates to the arguments against Hegel.

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Yes, the Fragments start with questions concerning Socrates, and the type of inwardness he exemplified.

I know the general anti-Hegelian thrust of SK’s works, but I’ll be interested to see what @Frank has to say about it.

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Imagine a growing tree that has been endowed with self-consciousness. On the one hand, it knows it’s bound to grow like a pine if that is its species. But because it’s conscious, it knows about possibilities and potential. It knows about things like the perfect tree.

These two images, the self as it is, and the self as it could be, are the source of dynamic tension in the mind, the spirit, the psyche. An individual can fall so deeply in love with the potential face, that she denies necessity. Instead of surrendering to necessity and accepting her distance from the eternal, she becomes deluded.

She won’t accept what Jung would call her Shadow. Most people are like this.

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For Hegel, the self results from a sequence of reactions. Self consciousness first develops as a reaction in an organism capable of cognizing objects in the world.

If I look out at the world, the concept of myself and the concept of the world emerge simultaneously. This first fall from silent unity is the advent of the bounteous domain of the Mind. But at this stage, there is no unique identity. That comes later.

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Well said. This reminds me of the balancing act of the self which leans one way or another into despair covered in Sickness unto Death. One can have an overabundance of possibility due to lack of necessity, as well as necessity with a lack of possibility. This also applies to infinitude/finitude. The example I would use, although it likely needs some fine tuning is the person who is “frozen” in their options, and therefore never makes any at all (Someone who never chooses a career because all the potential choices paralyze them). On the other end we can think of someone who is totally fatalistic in life (I must be a plumber, my Dad was one, so I will be, there are no other options that even appear to me.)

This is my first post here so hopefully it goes through! Not entirely sure how to directly quote a specific portion of your post. Sorry!

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I think you nailed it. The rudder of necessity meets the sail of possibility.

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So for Kierkegaard, the self is collection of oppositions. The dramas that play out always involve other people, but where there is a journey of reconciliation, what is unfolding is recognition of the self in relation to the ground of its being.

Hegel’s narrative also involves recognition, but it’s a kind of lust to be recognized. Hegel’s self doesn’t exist at the level of the individual. If humanity was an ant colony, selfhood is a property of the activity of the whole colony.

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This relation to the ground of being is of course for Kierkegaard, a relation with God, but perhaps also includes other people on some level, as implied in this quote from SUD Chapter 1:

“…this relation (the third term) is in turn a relation relating itself to that which constituted the whole relation. Such a derived, constituted, relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another.” Emphasis mine.

Although Kierkegaard of course often emphasizes the individual, likely due to his suspicion of the Hegelian project subsuming just about everything, there seems to be room for the Other (Captial O as in God, and lowercase o as in fellow humans) within his thought.

There is of course a suspicion of mass society / mass man, and its impact on self-realization. Kierkegaard influences a lot of other existentialist thinkers like Heidegger or Sarte, but the distinction between the self (typically tied to the philosopher) and mass society (those who go with the flow without critical thought) seems to go back to even the pre-Socratics.

@Frank I would be curious to hear if you think Kierkegaard has room in his thought for others as a part of one’s journey through self-creation, or is his focus too isolated and individualistic?

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In the back of my mind when I started this thread was that Kierkegaard and Hegel are actually the same in some fundamental ways. I read Kierkegaard first and Hegel second, and to me there’s a continuum. The contrast is a matter of focus or priorities. Hegel’s system wouldn’t really work if the subject is just hollowed out and all that exists is the collective. Collective and individual are one concept in the Hegelian sense (do you agree with that?)

Likewise, Kierkegaard’s thesis wouldn’t make any sense if he was a solipsist, talking about psychic entities going through some eternal dance, alone in the dark. I think he would say that other people are vitally important to the journey toward selfhood.

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How does that description square with the following?

Just as the individual self-consciousness does not find itself in this universal work of absolute freedom qua existent Substance, so little does it find itself in the deeds proper and individual actions of the will of this freedom. Before the universal can perform a deed it must concentrate itself in the One of individuality and put at the head an individual self-consciousness; for the universal will is only an actual will in a self, which is One. But thereby all other individuals are excluded from the entirety of this deed and and have only a limited share in it, so that the deed would not be a deed of the actual universal self consciousness. Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 589

Recognition of other individuals is the result of a process that began with negating other people in the struggle to the death that established Lordship and Bondage. The arc of Phenomenology of Spirit ends with the ascendancy of Conscience as the highest form of community.

Kierkegaard objected to this story of the World Spirit for many reasons. But both Hegel and Kierkegaard regarded Christianity as necessary for the emergence of such a community.

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The section called “The Task of Becoming Subjective” in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript is helpful here. SK says that “every human being has a strong natural bent” to flee from subjectivity, to try to become something else. He says that the “wisdom of the age” (by which he means Hegelianism, primarily) identifies subjectivity as undesirable because it is “accidental, angular, selfish, eccentric.” He goes on:

Nor does Christianity deny that such things should be gotten rid of; it has never been a friend of loutishness. But the difference is, that philosophy teaches that the way is to become objective, while Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, i.e., to become a subject in truth. Lest this seem a mere dispute about words, let me say that Christianity wishes to intensify passion to its highest pitch; but passion is subjectivity, and does not exist objectively. (CUS, 117)

Then comes this well-known passage:

The objective tendency, which proposes to make everyone an observer, and in its maximum to transform him into so objective an observer that he becomes almost a ghost, scarcely to be distinguished from the tremendous spirit of the historical past [another crack at Hegel] – this tendency naturally refuses to know or listen to anything except what stands in relation to itself. (118)

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Exactly. One way to notice subjectivity is to sit quietly with your feet on the floor and just feel your feet contacting the earth. There’s no theory to it.

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Yes, Kierkegaard makes much use of the distinction. He directs his criticism toward Hegelians in that vernacular. It is ironic, however, that the distinction has a psychological dimension that is often employed in Hegel.

One place where Hegel is directly challenged by Kierkegaard is at the beginning of The Concept of Anxiety.

Thus by captioning the last section of the Logic “Actuality” one gains the advantage of appearing to have reached the highest, or if you prefer, the lowest, through logic. The loss is, however, obvious since neither logic nor actuality is served thereby: not actuality since contingency, an essential ingredient in actuality, is something that logic cannot let in; and no good is done to logic since if logic has thought actuality, it has ingested something it cannot assimilate, anticipated something for which it merely prepares the way [prædisponere]. The penalty is clear: every deliberation about what is actual is held back, yes, and perhaps for some time made impossible, since the word “actuality” must first be given time to as it were come to its senses, time to forget the mistake.

–Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin, translated by Alastair Hannay

The ensuing “psychological deliberation” will use some of the language developed by Hegel but within limits that correspond to our limits. Accordingly, Kierkegaard addresses the idea of movement in Hegel’s Logic:

What will follow now? Presumably language will come to celebrate a great sabbatical year† in which speech and thought take a rest so as to begin with the beginning. In logic the negative is used as the quickening power that brings movement into everything. And movement one must have in whatever way one can, by fair means or foul. The negative helps, and if the negative cannot, then wordplay and platitudes can, just as the negative itself has become a play on words.* In logic, no movement may come about, for logic is, and everything logical simply is,† and this, logic’s impotence, is logic’s passing over into coming about, where human life [Tilværelsen] and actuality step forward. So when logic gets absorbed in the concretion of the categories, what was at the beginning remains constantly the same. In logic every movement, if for a moment we are to use that expression, is an immanent movement, which in a deeper sense is no movement, as one will easily convince oneself by reflecting that the very concept of movement is a transcendence that can find no place in logic. The negative, then, is the immanence of movement, it is the vanishing factor, what is annulled.11 If everything happens in this way, then nothing happens at all and the negative becomes a phantom. But precisely in order to get something to happen in logic, the negative becomes something more; it becomes what produces opposition and not a negation but a contraposition. The negative is then not the muteness of the immanent movement, it is the “necessary other,”12 which may no doubt be most necessary for logic in order to set things going, but which the negative is not. If we leave logic and proceed to ethics, here again as in the whole Hegelian philosophy we find the negative indefatigably active. To our amazement, we find that the negative here is the evil. Confusion is now in full swing, there are no bounds to brilliancy, and what Mme. de Staël-Holstein13 has said of Schelling’s philosophy, that it makes a person clever for a lifetime, is true in every way of the Hegelian. One sees how illogical the movements in logic must be, since the negative is the evil, and how unethical they must be in ethics, since the evil is the negative. In logic it is too much, in ethics too little. If it has to fit both places, it fits nowhere. If ethics has no other transcendence, it is essentially logic; if logic is to have as much transcendence as ethics requires to preserve common decency, then it is no longer logic.

–ibid. (pp. 39-40)

From this basis, Kierkegaard goes on to establish the limits of psychological explanations as they relate to the problem of the single individual and the consciousness of sin.

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Yes, that’s a great entry point into SK’s world. By emphasizing the “psychological dimension”, you also illuminate something common to both SK and the existentialists he influenced: They were unwilling to accept a firm borderline between philosophy and psychology, or even (I would imagine; I’m no expert) to understand by “psychology” what we usually mean today. It’s easy to see why. Part of what The System has to reject is the significance of anything that is about becoming, that regards becoming as more than a necessary journey toward Being. But what makes me subjective – if I succeed in becoming subjective in SK’s sense – is my unique and unending incompletion, what it means to be me, to live my life. What is this, if not psychology in one of its modern senses?

Yes, so he’s not eliminating or reducing the spiritual to psychology. I’d be interested in hearing more about what SK says about this in The Concept of Anxiety, which I don’t think I’ve ever read.

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For Hegel, Becoming is primary. Being is part of Becoming’s analysis.