Kierkegaard's Romantic Legacy: Two Theories of the Self
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KIERKEGAARD'S ROMANTIC LEGACY Two THEORIES OF THE SELF This page intentionally left blank KIERKEGAARD'S ROMANTIC LEGACY Two THEORIES OF THE SELF Anoop Gupta University of Ottawa Press The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing programme by the Canada Council for the Arts and the University of Ottawa. We also acknowledge with gratitude the support of the Government of Canada through its Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gupta, Anoop, 1969- Kierkegaard's romantic legacy : two theories of the self / Anoop Gupta. (Philosophica, ISSN 1480-4670) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7766-0616-3 ISBN-10: 0-7766-0616-6 1. Kierkegaard, S0ren, 1813-1855. 2. Self (Philosophy). I. Title. II. Series: Collection Philosophica. B4378.S4G86 2005 198'.9 C2005-906294-0 Canada word mark University of Ottawa Press All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover art: Heather Horton Cover design: Laura Brady Interior design and typesetting: Brad Horning Copyeditor: Marie Clausen Proofreader: Stephanie VanderMeulen Published by the University of Ottawa Press, 2005 542 King Edward Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5 [email protected] / www.uopress.uottawa.ca Printed and bound in Canada This book is dedicated to the individual soul, wherever it may find some solace, in the age of reason. If I go insane, please don't put your wires in my brain. —Pink Floyd "If' Atom Heart Mother This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgements x Documentation x Search for the Kierkegaardian Self 1 KIERKEGAARD'S THEOLOGICAL SELF 1 Structure of the Self 7 Despair 7 Analysis 11 2 Self-Becoming 15 Sin 15 Anxiety 16 A Cure 18 The Aesthetic Stage 20 The Ethical Stage 22 3 The God-Relationship 25 The Religious Stage 25 Motivation 29 God and Ethics 33 4 Self and Knowledge 39 Myself 39 Godless 44 5 Reflections and Appraisals 49 Life and Psychology 49 Modern Loss 55 THE SOCIOLOGICAL SELF 6 Rousseau 61 Nature 61 Morality 65 The Social Being 67 7 Durkheim 69 Sociologist 69 Religion 71 Suicide 72 8 Winnicott 77 Dependence and Independence 77 Interdependence 79 SOME CONSEQUENCES FOR PRACTICE 9 The Idea of Suicide 85 Moral Problem 85 Social Problem 87 10 Suicide and Schizophrenia 91 Suicide: Three Approaches 91 Schizophrenia: Three Approaches 94 11 Existential Psychology 99 Alfred Adler and Ludwig Binswanger 99 RolloMay 100 R. D. Laing 101 Comparisons 104 12 The Self According to Kierkegaard 107 Kierkegaard Revisited 107 Notes 111 References 129 PREFACE QUITE SOME TIME HAS ELAPSED between my writing this manuscript and the bringing of it to print. I began research on it in 1996, while a master's committee was contemplating my thesis. I continued to revise it after my doctorate, ten years after its initial inception. I am pleased it was allowed to take this amount of time, as my ideas germinated, morphed, and crystallized as time passed. I wanted to deliver my most recent, and clearest, statement on selfhood. Although generally a committed follower of naturalism and realism, I renounce reductionism (which some types of realism are thought to entail) if it eliminates, for instance, the self. In attempting to avoid reductionism, I follow the pragmatism of Hilary Putnam. If one disputes the extreme naturalist contention that there is no self, one must in doing so present a suggestion as to what we are. I consider several authors, whom I locate, roughly, in the romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, and which have something to say about the nature of the self. Furthermore, I emphasize, as a pragmatist must, that there is a relevance to practice for holding a certain conception of the self. The problem of reductionism is a natural consequence of the intellectual revolutions that began in the seventeenth century. The Enlightenment, for instance, was an intellectual revolution which held that reason—by which the enlightened meant something like the critical spirit of scientific inquiry—could solve humanity's problems, be they medical, economic, social, and so on. The romantic tradition reacted against the Enlightenment. It was not, however, totally at odds with the Enlightenment, but can in retrospect be seen to occupy a place beside it. For instance, the enlightened and the romantic, like their cognitive heirs the reductionist and anti-reductionist, respectively, need each other to develop and nuance their views. I have as indicated in the title of this work, wished to emphasize the importance of the romantic tradition in the development of intellectual thought of the West, and how, more specifically, it has contributed to a discourse about the self. I hope that cognitive scientists, interested in more than the physiological side of the story, will profit from this discussion on the self. Scholars of Kierkegaard may find that some of his concepts—for example, choice, faith, subjectivity, and so on—are not scrutinized in this my exegesis of x Kierkegaard's Romantic Legacy his writings as much as they may require in order to have their complexities fully explored. Nevertheless, these deficiencies are tolerable, I believe, as my stated focus is his theory of the self (and some of its legacy). Furthermore, I have avoided as much as possible Kierkegaard's polemic against Hegel. Kierkegaard was no authority on Hegel (it is unlikely he read his writings). Kierkegaard was not as far from Hegel's thought as he may have wished, either in terms of his dialectical style or content. German idealism was, after all, an expression of Romanticism in that country, where the self was conceived, literally, in relation to everything. As Plato put it, in the Phaedrus, "And do you think that you can know the nature of the soul intelligently without knowing the nature of the whole?" ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Nicholas Griffin, of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster University, for assisting me with access to the collection at Mills Memorial Library. His continued interest was a source of encouragement, and noteworthy, as my book is far removed from the Russell Project. I thank Andrew Brook, Director of The Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, for sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge, and passion, for the philosophy of mind. I thank Mathieu Marion at UQAM, Peter McCormick, from the University of Liechtenstein, Barry Allen, Gary B. Madison, both of McMaster University, Martha Hussain, the Aristotle scholar, and Harry Hunt, the theorist of the self, both of Brock University. I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of CanWrite.ca, and specifically Mohan Juneja, its coordinator. CanWrite.ca is an organization dedicated to assisting Canadian writers, a group I am fortunate enough to belong to. Finally, I thank the three anonymous referees for their scrutiny of the text and, for his persistent support, the assistant editor at the University of Ottawa Press, Eric Nelson. Finally, I acknowledge Marie Clausen, managing editor at the University of Ottawa Press and also my copy-editor, who did a first-rate job. DOCUMENTATION In "Kierkegaard's Theological Self" I refer to "supplements"; when I do so I am referring to the additional sections added by the editors of Kierkegaard's texts, called "supplements" in those texts. A "supplement" will contain, for instance, excerpts from Kierkegaard's journal entries, unpublished manuscripts, and so on, which I draw upon to build my case. Where Kierkegaard expounds a point that resonated from the Bible, I have attempted to refer to the corresponding quotation within the text, citing the book. SEARCH FOR THE KlERKEGAARDIAN SELF WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHY we should consider Kierkegaard's theory of the self, and how I intend to develop it. In what follows, we shall grasp the importance of investigating Kierkegaard's theory, and how I shall proceed. Historically, the romantics reacted against the imposition of reason, by which they meant something akin to the naturalist methods of science. Scientism can be understood as an extreme form of naturalism. A. Brook and R. Stainton, in a useful account of the variety of naturalisms, write of the extreme version: Stronger naturalism is the idea that philosophical problems about knowledge and the mind (and almost everything else) are really scientific ones and can be adequately answered by using only the methods of science, natural science in particular...Strongest naturalism is the idea that one accepts stronger naturalism but goes one step further. It holds that neurosdence is the only justifiable approach to cognition. [Emphasis mine.]1 For the strongest naturalist, there is likely no self, only biochemical happening.2 In the enlightened tradition, scientism has had many guises. We have alternately been considered the totality of our experiences; the end product of socialization; a result of our particular historical or biological situation. According to this tradition, there is nothing under the surface, there is no soul, no "real me/7 Scientism's greatest challenge to theorists of the self is its denial that there is such an entity. Furthermore, some extreme naturalists and existentialists claim the self is a tabula rasa. According to the strongest naturalists, our bodies are simply biochemical machines that allow imprinting, while according to existentialists, we are the results of acts of will. G. Pence remarks: [A] central principle of existentialism [...] holds that the essence of any human being is completely determined by the free choices made by that already-existing person. It denies that God or anything else created a 2 Kierkegaard's Romantic Legacy human nature that makes humans a certain way.