OK, thanks. I’m not much of a Hegelian. So Hegel thought Becoming was a kind of objectivity? I’m thinking of SK’s charge that philosophy urges objectivity rather than inwardness or subjectivity.
More like, ‘In the beginning was Becoming, which the mind grasps as a duality: Being and Non-Being.’
Heidegger riffs dramatically on the same basic idea in What is Metaphysics. Is Becoming objective? I think objectivity has to do with vantage point, doesn’t it? So I’m not sure how to answer that. I mean, you can see Becoming either outwardly or inwardly. The mind has to take it apart as Being and Non-Being, though.
Hegel also gets psychological, specifically in offering a geneology of consciousness and the self. His views about recognition could easily be translated into anthropology. But the basis of Hegel’s whole philosophy is mysticism. The same is true of Kierkegaard.
Coming from the same framework, they part ways on the issue of where the self is headed.
Hegel’s world was filled with the idea that something great was about to happen in human life. And this is the starting point for understanding his project. He starts at the level of society and individuals are ant-like members of the colony. His focus was on what’s about to happen to the whole colony. So for him, spirit is very close to the Anima Mundi.
In this, Hegel was re-enacting something that had happened over and over in Western history. The advent of the new world is predicted, it doesn’t happen, and they go back to the drawing board.
Kierkegaard is a rare touchstone, like the fool on the hill, reminding us that as we look out to understand the world, we’re really trying to understand ourselves. The journey we see unfolding in the world is the self’s journey.
It is the book I have spent the most time reading from Kierkegaard. I will think about finding slices to quote. It is difficult to take him out of the contexts he develops. If I come up with something, I will put it in a new discussion so as not to hijack the OP.
I agree that Kierkegaard confronted the tyranny of the “scientific” as many others have done. I think of Kafka as his brother from another mother. They had very different education and life circumstances. Nonetheless, they share many views on moral agency and the vast opportunities for self deception.
I’m giving a fairly straightforward reading of SK here, using the idea that for him “objectivity” was a property of rational systems (and of The System) that permits a vantage point sub specie aeternitatis. From this vantage point, it would in theory be possible to know everything (as “knowledge” is defined within a rational system). SK agreed, except for one small problem – where am I, in this system? How do I know myself – not as an item sub specie aeternitatis, which others can know in the same way, but as a subject? For SK, this knowledge meant everything, literally the world, which was why he railed against systematic philosophy and endorsed a version of Christianity.
So . . . is “the fool on the hill” also saying that an understanding of the world will produce understanding of ourselves, that the two journeys are at bottom one? I think SK is very much open to interpretation here. If the answer is Yes, then Becoming is objective – and also subjective. As you say, it can be seen either outwardly or inwardly. If the answer is No, then SK’s view is more radical. Now subjectivity is placed in opposition to objectivity, not in harmony. They are not different ways of seeing the same thing. SK’s writerly attitude, depending on the pseudonym, often seems a sarcastic affirmation of this No.
Very good!
Per Hegel, everyday facts are only partial truths. Absolute truth would involve recognition of the unity of subject and object. This is achieved dynamically through the flow of dialectics. There’s no static view sub specie aeternitatis.
I’m not really sure what it would mean to call Hegel’s Absolute objective. Strictly speaking, it’s neither subjective nor objective.
If I’m understanding you, I think you believe Hegel’s view lacked subjectivity. That’s not true. You’re definitely there. But subjectivity isn’t you as an individual in history. Kierkegaard points out that subjectivity can’t be described. It’s that “quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form.”
In view of this departure from Hegel, it is interesting to consider a statement about faith from Kierkegaard:
But for an individual to be formed thus absolutely and infinitely by possibility, that individual must be honest toward possibility and have faith. By faith, I understand here what Hegel somewhere, characteristically and very rightly, calls the inner certainty that anticipates infinity. When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will discover all finitudes but idealize them in the shape of infinity, in anxiety overwhelm the individual, until the individual again overcomes them in the anticipation of faith.
–Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin (p. 209), translated by Alastair Hannay
Regarding the matter of subjectivity, Hannay provides the following in his Introduction:
Hegel (1770–1831), once a student-friend of Schelling’s, his younger colleague to whom much of his earlier thinking was indebted, retained this “conflict” terminology in his own rationalistic version of spiritual emergence. This was one in which the personal God dissolves pantheistically, or some would say altogether, into the developing world as we find it, this now being where, if at all, we find the divine will at work. In the Phenomenology we read, in connection with the development of self-conscious spirit as separate from the world it surveys:
With the positing of a single particular . . . [consciousness establishes] the beyond . . . [and in this way] suffers violence at its own hands, [spoiling] its own limited satisfaction. When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety [Angst] may well make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. . . .If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia. Or, if it entrenches itself in sentimentality . . . [etc.]–Section 80
Anxiety’s reader will find these words, and at least one metaphor, almost exactly reproduced in the second chapter in an account of “Subjective Anxiety.” But where the gist of Hegel’s philosophy was, through rational conceptualization of the human situation and its continuing history, to restore the belief that thought captures reality as it is, Kierkegaard polemicizes fiercely in the other direction.
-ibid. page 12.
Not so much what I think, since I don’t know Hegel well enough to have an opinion. Rather, I’m trying to suss out what SK thought he found in Hegel. Am I wrong in thinking that, when SK drew his distiction between “philosophy” and Christianity, re objectivity, he meant to attribute to Hegel the idea that “becoming objective” is necessary in order to avoid what is “accidental, angular,” et al.?
Right, that’s always been my take on (most of) SK that I’ve read. But @Frank is pointing out some of the nuances within Hegelianism. Perhaps what’s most important here is not a historical reconstruction of how SK saw Hegel (rightly or wrongly) but an appreciation of the predicament that SK believed a human being faced, and his brilliant expression of that.
I agree. My focus has been to show that Kierkegaard is deeply entangled with Hegel even as he diverges from him.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. I think SK understood Hegel pretty well. Hegel’s basic views about the nature of reality would have meshed fairly well with what SK knew about the views of Meister Eckhart, and I think Eckhart is what SK was really thinking about when he spoke of Christianity. That creates a complication because Eckhart was investigated for heresy and some of his teachings were condemned by the Catholic Church. So I don’t think SK was talking about a particular brand of Christianity, but rather just the vibe of Christian mysticism that says the experience of ‘resting transparently in God’ is possible for some.
I think SK was saying that Hegel took this dialectical framework, which is a potent thread running through Western philosophy, back to the pre-Socratics, and tried to use it to support his theories about history and society. He wasn’t criticizing Hegel’s basic ontology, but rather the use he made of it. I think SK would say some common sense would tell you that dialectics can’t be used for that. That’s a path to delusion.
Do you have any references that support this view?
In the passage I quoted from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, SK contrasts two responses to what he calls our “strong natural bent” to flee from subjectivity. He agrees that, if subjectivity is understood as “accidental, angular, selfish, eccentric,” then we have every reason to abandon it. This is how “the wisdom of the age” (by which I’m pretty sure he means Hegelianism) regards the problem: We must become objective. But for SK, there is another, better way to see it. We should become genuinely subjective, not merely “eccentric” etc., but what he calls “a subject in truth.” He identifies this somewhat obscure phrase with a Christianity that “wishes to intensify passion to its highest pitch,” and this passion “does not exist objectively.”
So . . . long answer to your asking about what I meant. To rephrase my question: Is the picture that SK draws of what Hegelianism recommends in order to flee from subjectivity correct? In your reading of Hegel, is the move “to become objective” indeed what Hegel prescribes in order to get oneself out of the predicament of individual eccentricity, of truths that can only be accidental, only true for me?
I don’t really know. I think the answer is: yes, but less as a doctrine and more as a general approach.