Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 44: September 2002

 

The Politics of Exodus. Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility

278 Pages, $40.00, ISBN 0823221245

New York, Fordham University Press.

by Mark Dooley

 

Reviewed by

George Pattison

University of Aarhus

 

 

The title of Mark Dooley’s book incorporates a strong allusion to Derrida’s mention of “the politics of the exodus, of the émigré” (quoted by Dooley on p. 217) and Dooley is clear from the first page of the Introduction that he is in fact setting out to read Kierkegaard “from a specifically Derridean perspective” (p. xiii). In doing so, he insists that he is not doing violence to Kierkegaard’s text but is reading according to the spirit, not the letter. He admits, somewhat disarmingly, that “it is true that I have taken certain liberties in my reading of Kierkegaard, and that I do on occasion push him in a direction he himself might not have favored” (p. xv), but he nevertheless believes that if we are to keep the spirit of a thinker alive we have to “attempt to suggest what [the] thinker might have said if he or she had the benefit of foresight” (p. xvi). In this case the foresight concerns “the use to which Kierkegaard would have put his irony and religious sensitivities had he come after deconstruction” (p. xvi) More specifically (and as the title has already intimated) he wants to develop this connection in terms of its application to social, political and ethical issues. Acknowledging that he is not the first to attempt to rescue these elements from the over-individualistic, over-Lutheran portrait of Kierkegaard that has dominated much commentary, Dooley claims that it will be the specific originality of his work to bring these dimensions into fruitful dialogue with deconstruction. To pre-empt suspicions that he might be over-enthusiastically conflating two distinct intellectual undertakings or trying to Christianize Derrida in an inappropriate way he gives notice on the second page of the Introduction that he has no intention of covering over the simple fact that Kierkegaard wrote from a Christian standpoint and Derrida does not. But, in the avowed company of John D. Caputo, Dooley insists that there are still close and fruitful analogies to be drawn. It is only much later, in the hundred-page final chapter, that Dooley dwells on the differences between his own approach and that of such Derridianizing Kierkegaardians (or Kierkegaardianizing Derridians) as Mark C. Taylor. These differences not only have to do with Dooley’s political interest but also (as he rather quietly hints, and as any reader will by then have discovered) with the fact that Dooley clearly does not believe that reading Derrida with enthusiasm means that one becomes incapable of writing clear and agreeable English prose. Indeed, Dooley’s own writing is a pleasure to read –vigorous, clear, concise, full of light and shade, and with many a well-turned phrase (as I hope some of my citations will demonstrate); nor is he afraid to say “I” when that is what he means.[1] Based on sound learning and long reflection, this is a passionate and personal book - as writing on Kierkegaard should be, and the case it makes is, largely, convincing. None of which is to say that I agree with everything he says. I might begin by questioning the very idea that one can appeal to the “spirit” of a thinker (or, at the very least, that if we are going to appeal to the spirit of Kierkegaard then we may also appeal to the spirit of Hegel, for example, with very different results from those Dooley comes up with in his treatment of the great professor, but more of that below).

                      Dooley’s first chapter deals with Two Ages, where he finds clear evidence that Kierkegaard always thought of the individual as situated in a concrete, social and relational context, rather than in some acosmic solipsistic vacuum. Indeed, he traces the recent upsurge in interest in Kierkegaard’s social and political thought to the 1984 International Kierkegaard Commentary on this text. But Kierkegaard’s interest in society and in the political is not limited to asserting the general view that thought is always already contextualized. It is rather to advocate a very definite “line” vis-à-vis the questions of social and political existence. Kierkegaard’s Go, Dooley states boldly, is the God of liberation theology and, for that matter of the Jesus seminar, the God-Man whose Kingdom is “in” though not “of” the world.

Chapter Two turns to Hegel, the villain of the piece. Here we are introduced to Kierkegaard’s rejection of “the Hegelian assumption that to be ethical and responsible demands merely fulfilling one’s civic obligations as presented by the established order or the state” (p. 25). Nevertheless, Hegel importantly prepared the ground for Kierkegaard insofar as he pioneered a view of the self as “structured dynamically and dialectically” (p. 31). Their ways part, though, when Hegel insists on “the laws and powers of the ethical order” as constituting “ ‘an absolute authority and power infinitely more firmly established than the being of nature.’ ” (p. 32) Hegel’s criticism of conscience, of irony and of Socrates foreshadows precisely what Kierkegaard will “champion”.

As we move into Chapter Three Dooley identifies this Hegelian position with what Kierkegaard calls “human knowledge”, so that human knowledge is not simply identifiable with the knowledge that it is possible for human beings to have but a particular form of such knowledge, namely, “a type of world-historical knowledge that sees no reason to cast a hermeneutically suspicious eye on the dominant codes governing reality” (p. 47) and that “ has no real ‘interest’ in questions of truth” (p. 48). It is the sort of knowledge espoused by the established order, “a body of subjects who communicate with one another at the level of pure externality only” (p. 48). Opposed to this is the path of those, like Socrates, who are prepared to risk responsibility by becoming self-reflective and questioning their own “take” on the world as a critical precondition of accepting any “established” viewpoint.

It is at this point that Dooley offers his revisionist account of Fear and Trembling’s Abraham. Kierkegaard’s (Johannes de silentio’s) eulogizing of Abraham is “not a call for murder on Moriah” (p. 115), as Dooley will put it later, nor an open-door to terrorists who justify their actions by appealing to the will of God but a metaphor for “the relinquishing of the objective human mentality, or of disinterested reflection” (p. 64) and thus exemplifying the kind of self-critical stance of the individual who risks responsibility by breaking with the established order.

But what is it in the nature of human beings that makes them capable of such self-criticism? To address this question Dooley now digs deeper and turns to the concept of repetition as highlighting the fundamental structure of the self that makes both radical self-criticism and radical responsibility possible. Identifying repetition with the rebirth of which Johannes Climacus speaks in Philosophical Fragments Dooley sees in it the idea that personal truth is not and cannot be immediate or immanent, but must be acquired in and as self-transcendence, as Spirit. Here we run into the apparent inconsistency that whereas Climacus insists on the absence of necessity in history, Anti-Climacus speaks of a necessary pole in the human synthesis. What Dooley makes of this is that, with Anti-Climacus, we must acknowledge the necessity of the existing human being’s relatedness to a given historical and social context but, with Climacus, deny that context any absolute necessity in itself (for otherwise we would be back with deifying the established order). Dooley doesn’t say, though he might have, that (as Sartre put it) we are “condemned to freedom”. The risk-taking responsible ethicist à la Kierkegaard, then, is one who, starting from where he is, is ready “to allow the possibility of imagining otherwise …” (p. 107)

Isn’t this all rather humanistic? Hasn’t Dooley lost sight of the religious – the Christian – dimension of Kierkegaard he promised to keep in view? Not at all, for now, in the fifth chapter, he turns to the role of “The God-Man as Unconditioned Ethical Prototype”. Superseding Socrates and Abraham as exemplary ethical models “is a radically Christian God who seeks perpetually to undermine the established order in favor of those whose voices are never heard in a universal sense” (p. 115). But (and Dooley skirts lightly over the submerged reefs which theologians like to spend much of their time examining) this does not mean submission to a heteronomous Other. A key point here is language, for the fact that we are linguistic beings means that we have no immediate access to reality, only to possibility and our relation to reality, divine or human, can only be established on the basis of a free reflection on possibility. A spiritual creation, which is what we are through rebirth, cannot but be marked by freedom and responsibility since the capacity for these is what being as Spirit is! Taking the God-Man as the object of faith (and, crucially, of imitation) is therefore to relate oneself freely to a supreme exemplar, with whose aid one “comes to learn that being responsible and earnest rather than merely conflating dutiful observance to the law with genuine ethical behavior demands that there be a teleological suspension of the established ethical order” (p. 126). To have faith in the incarnate one, is in this way “a process of disclosing reason’s true vocation as a power that turns on novelty, dissent and originality” (p. 132).

Dooley’s final chapter (which, as already stated, runs to a hundred pages and constitutes nearly half the book) brings us to how the reading of Kierkegaard developed in the previous chapters can be aligned with Derrida and, especially, what we have come to learn about Derrida through the 90s and beyond. Against Sylvia Walsh’s view (itself reacting to Mark C. Taylor’s version of Derrida), Derrida cannot be dismissed as exemplifying the kind of aesthetic irony Kierkegaard attacks. In broad alliance with John D. Caputo Dooley argues that Derrida too exemplifies an “ethics of responsibility”. Areas of convergence with Kierkegaard include the role of repetition, the critique of Hegelian identity, the question of death and the need to understand God not just as “absolutely” Other (as does Lévinas), but as wholly other in a sense that also allows for relationship, supremely the relationship of love. The idea of love worked out in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is, Dooley suggests, profoundly similar to the Gelassenheit that Derrida recommends, i.e. letting the other be the impossibly other they are. In the course of his comparison between the two thinkers, Dooley inevitably raises the question of writing. Kierkegaad, like Derrida, emerges as a protagonist of writing against the book, a point Dooley makes by a delightful meditation on the character of Hilarious [sic] Bookbinder, as he Anglicizes the name of the publisher of Stages on Life’s Way.

Where we get to, then, is the “notion of a community of neighbors, one founded on self-sacrificing love”, challenging “the inhospitable ‘perfect community’ (communio) in which individuals, in loving the other, seek only their own” (p. 246).

I indicated that I don’t go all the way with Dooley. Where, then, do I want to voice doubts? Perhaps the key issues are those of Abraham and the Incarnation. Here it’s not so much that I think Dooley is wrong in what he does say, but in what he doesn’t say or what he denies. The trouble is, if all Abraham is doing is what Dooley says, then Kierkegaard has chosen a very infelicitous example. Abraham doesn’t merely step into a space of uncertainty, openness or radical questioning – he really does prepare himself to do what society sees as murder, and not just the boring old bourgeois society we’re all so critical of. We can metaphorize this into something weaker than Kierkegaard seems to make of it, but then we are not going all the way with Keirkegaard (or with Johannes de silentio - who may not be entirely reliable). Here are some alternative strategies at this most difficult of points. One would be to go with Iris Murdoch into the utter weirdness of moral decision-making and to say that what Abraham shows is what Murdoch meant when she spoke of our only being able to be good ‘for nothing’, i.e. that in the moment of moral decision we can never know whether our action is or isn’t morally justifiable on any version of morality. In other words, acting morally means giving up wanting to be right, or wanting to know that we are right. But maybe an ethics of responsibility, even if it doesn’t claim the kudos of universality, is still trying a little too hard to make a good showing? Maybe, all we can do, having exhausted all reflection and reached an impasse, is hope for the best? Who knows which action in any given situation is really a work of love, and who really know enough about themselves to be sure of their own motivation? Or we might demand that Fear and Trembling should only be read if it is read alongside the three upbuilding discourses published on the same day. At least those two that deal with love offer a very different take on things from Johannes and provide a standpoint for far-reaching questioning of his position. If, in response, one insists on the autonomy of Fear and Trembling, couldn’t that be just to go back into the laager of the book and to turn our backs on the flood of Kierkegaardian writing that isn’t tied to any one book or genre?

The same points are, essentially, “repeated” in relation to the Incarnation. Doesn’t the whole (dare I say) “Spirit” of Kierkegaard’s writing on this subject suggest that he is not wanting just to talk about a different kind of reason but about something that really is a “scandal” to any possible human understanding and not just to the bourgeois mind? With regard to both Abraham and the Incarnation, then, isn’t Dooley in danger of “soft-pedalling” the raging scandal with which – if only in the mode of  possibility – Kierkegaard confronts his readers? Or else of ignoring other resources in Kierkegaard’s own writing that importantly qualify the picture drawn by the pseudonyms.

And there are other questions, of varying levels of importance.

One, quite important, question is this. Isn’t Dooley’s Hegel ultimately a caricature, and a pretty gross one at that? Can we really imagine Hegel (or the “Spirit” of Hegel) approving a society whose citizens were all mindless conformist sustaining only the emptiest and most external relations with each other? Isn’t the theoretical difference between Kierkegaard and Hegel at this point much less than Dooley makes it seem? That there are differences is not to be denied, but perhaps they have as much to do with the respective authors’ judgements in particular situations as with general principles. After all, it’s fairly clear that Kierkegaard’s critique of “the public” was taken more or less lock-stock-and-barrel from the Hegelian J. L. Heiberg. The difference is that Heiberg thought society was reformable. Kierkegaard didn’t. In this connection Hegel’s view of Socrates is much more nuanced than it is allowed to appear here. At least as far as the History of Philosophy lectures are concerned, Hegel presents a picture of Socrates that is in many ways very positive, and a clear prototype for Kierkegaard’s treatment in On the Concept of Irony. Hegel was not simply out to rubbish Socrates. The point is whether a particular orientation is or isn’t justifiable in a concrete situation. It is unfortunate that by presenting Hegel in the way he does, Dooley limits in advance what he can get out of Kierkegaard. After all, we scarcely needed a Kierkegaard to rectify the utter conformism that Dooley’s Hegel represents.

I’d also like to register a note of caution regarding linking Kierkegaard too closely with the very tendentious Jesus seminar. Crossan et al. have their own agenda in downgrading the eschatological prophet of the gospels in favour of a non-eschatological simple wise man. This may currently seem to win Jesus for an anti-establishment politics, but it only takes a twist or turn or two of history for the wise man to get entrenched in the corridors of power and for us to need an other-worldly eschatological prophet to get rid of him (democratically, of course). Remember Pasolini’s Jesus: they don’t come more radically eschatological than that, but where do we find a more powerful protest against the establishment than there? The point is simply that historical enquiry has its own imperatives, and that we don’t seem any cleverer than the nineteenth century in painting Jesus in our own image.

Dooley’s final paragraph in which he bears witness to the hope of a community of neighbors can be read as a prophetic word to Kierkegaard’s own Denmark today: since moving here at the start of the year, I have not been able to open the newspaper without reading article after article, letter after letter, about the crisis in Danish society and identity provoked by recent immigration (usually identified tout court with Islam). It is perhaps to offer a final gesture of solidarity with Dooley to note that Kierkegaard’s first book was a review of a novel that had at its very centre the relationship between a wandering, cosmopolitan Jew and the Danish “Christian”. It was a powerful implication of Kierkegaard’s fairly relentless criticism of the novel that it was a mere projection of (the) Christian’s own weakness to lay the guilt of nihilism and the decay of values at the door of the Jew, the other. Only by taking responsibility for ourselves could we really go forward to meet the other in openness, friendship and the acknowledgement of real differences. So, yes, I think Dooley reads the “Spirit” of Kierkegaard well, even if he takes liberties with the texts.

 

George Pattison

University of Århus.

 


[1] The banning of the ”I” from academic writing is something I think we are happily now recovering from, as the insistence on third person passive discourse not only forces students into clumsy formulations but is an obstruction to just the kind of moral and ethical reflection that much contemporary philosophy is trying to be about.