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The Redemption of the Feeling in Kierkegaard's and Tillich's Thought

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The Redemption of the Feeling in Kierkegaard's and Tillich's Thought ICOANA CREDINTEI. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH VoL. 2 No. 4/2016 The Redemption of the Feeling in Kierkegaard’s and Tillich’s thinking PhD. Lehel BALOGH Department of Philosophy, Kyungsung University Busan, SOUTH KOREA Page | 60 E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT In the modern era, with the development of the “objective”, scientific method, subjective, personal feelings and emotions have gradually become somewhat dubious sources of knowledge. A few religious thinkers, however, particularly those emerging from the existential tradition, have come to revitalize the belief in subjectivity, along with the trust in the authority of faith and inwardness in finding out important truths about our personal existence and about the human condition in general. In my paper I wish to investigate and compare the thoughts of two highly influential Christian philosophers of the 19th and the 20th century, respectively; those of Søren Kierkegaard and of Paul Tillich. These two unique thinkers, although living under considerably different historical circumstances, carried out strikingly similar analyses about the role of emotions and faith in human life, and through the emphasis of such phenomena as anxiety and despair they both attempted to “redeem” and reaffirm the significance of feelings and the subjective side of reality. Keywords: subjectivity, inwardness, anxiety, truth and faith, religious existentialism KIERKEGAARD’S QUEST FOR AUTHENTIC SUBJECTIVITY Existence and inwardness, in other words, bringing the ontological truth of subjectivity to the fore: this is what elevates Kierkegaard's philosophy to be the prototype of all other existential philosophies. While combating the then dominating Systemphilosophie of German Idealism and especially that of Hegel, he gradually formulates and develops his own characteristic philosophical attitude. This attitude provides central ground to the individual's personal subjectivity, and believes that what is really at stake in philosophical thinking is precisely this singular and irreproducible intimate reality, that is, the subjective reality of the self, which always slips through the cracks of rigid systematical thinking. Under the influence of the late Schelling's lectures and writings, Existenz became the key concept in his thinking, and the elaboration of this concept extended along his entire oeuvre. What makes this thinking so unique and exemplary for other existential philosophers? One approach could be that he seems to be the first thinker in the modern era who was able to divert the course of philosophical thinking from being occupied primarily with general concepts and universal ideas toward the importance of human singularity, the unrepeatable nature and the contingencies inherent in the human condition, that is, toward the actual differentia specificae of the individual human existence. In absolute terms, he was not the first one to do so in the history of Western Philosophy but Socrates who inspired Kierkegaard greatly. This emblematic Greek thinker’s philosophy was characteristically of a personal nature, and this personal nature is exactly what Kierkegaard – who is sometimes STUDIES AND ARTICLES ICOANA CREDINTEI. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH VoL. 2 No. 4/2016 labeled as the “Socrates of Copenhagen” – attempted to revive when he analysed the concept of irony (On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates), or also when he engaged into a polemic discussion with the teachings of Socrates regarding the concept of sin in The Sickness Unto Death. Ultimately though, what brings these two – both spatially and chronologically – distant philosophers together is not so much the convergence of their thematic interests, but the way in which they cultivated philosophy. Page | 61 A few lines earlier I have mentioned the “differentia specificae of the individual human existence”. How are we to understand this? Kierkegaard waged a philosophical as well as a personal war against the dominance of the all-absorbing, all-consuming monstrosity of the Hegelian system that seemed to devour the individual self just as well as every other part of reality. His famous thesis – “the truth is subjectivity” – was conceived in this spirit: “Contained in the principle that subjectivity, inwardness, is truth, is that Socratic wisdom whose undying merit is to have heeded the essential significance of existing, of the fact that the knower is one who exists…”. [1] In so far as epistemology falls into the exclusive competence of the individual subject, would there be still any place left for such categories as “differentia specifica”? Wouldn’t this be, one might ask, a sure way of sliding back into the abyss of Systemphilosophie? For instance, the conceptual analysis of “anxiety” that features so prominently in Kierkegaard’s work, is it to be understood as an objective or “merely” a subjective analysis? As a matter of fact, Kierkegaard in his analyses worked out a sort of proto-phenomenology that antedated the one Husserl is to develop some 60 years later. The analysis of the concept of anxiety is, for instance, neither the accurate and detailed jotting down of Kierkegaard’s own experiences of anxiety, nor is it a logically necessary description of an objective, natural law, but a conceptual framework, a mode of discourse that provides a viable alternative to the objective idealistic approach which exalts the abstract while neglecting the concrete. It is important to point out right from the outset that in his inquiries Kierkegaard always remained in relation with religiosity, and, in particular, with the Christian God. Christianity supported him with a basis on which he could build up his anti-systemic reaction to the challenge of Hegelianism. For him, the human individual is a dynamic complex of references that has a fundamental feature of becoming-ness (werden), hence it is always amidst continuous change. The ideal telos of this change is the authentic form of being which, by passing through different life phases, enables the individual to fulfil his inner potentials, and eventually to become his true self. As we shall see, this true self is unattainable for those who reject faith, religiosity and irrationality en bloc; in other words, for those who refuse to accept and embrace the belief in the many paradoxes that are intrinsic in Christianity. There is no authenticity for the self-outside of the properly understood and appropriated Christian religiousness, claims Kierkegaard: “It is Christian heroism (…) to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God…”. [2] But, one might ask, why would anybody strive to become his true self? The answer is this: “because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity's claim upon him.” [3] What does the Danish thinker mean by the self? “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation…”. [4] The individual is, hence, a synthesis, namely, first of all, the synthesis of body and soul, and secondly, the synthesis of the spirit with the synthesis of body and soul. The self in an incessantly moving, dynamic STUDIES AND ARTICLES ICOANA CREDINTEI. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH VoL. 2 No. 4/2016 system of relations, in which there is a vigorous tussle between such opposites as freedom and necessity, infinity and finitude. Kierkegaard maintains that an eternal, divine part exists in man, and the name of this eternal component is spirit. The individual human being, however, has a completely individual constituent as well, which belongs exclusively to him, and which he can either win or lose. This implies that being our true selves is not a natural state or a default position of the individual, but, in order to become ourselves, we must Page | 62 actively search for our authentic selves. It is well known that Kierkegaard distinguished three stages of human life: aesthetic, ethical and religious. While in the aesthetic stage one’s unreflective and particular passion is dominant, in the ethical stage: boredom, passivity, impersonality and the levelling of individual differences are characteristic. The ethical stage extinguishes the uniqueness of a personality, since personalities exist by differing or deviating from the generic, and the ethical attempts to eliminate exactly these very differences. At any rate, ethics cannot be reasonably grounded, according to Kierkegaard, as there is no such thing as an “individual per se”, therefore in order to answer the fundamental question of morality – how should I live? – we can only give particular answers which cannot be universalized. Furthermore, passion, which is present in the aesthetic stage but absent in the ethical, will be, in the religious stage, that instrument and crucial impulse which helps the individual swing over his resignation and his feeling of guilt, in the direction of faith. After all, as Kierkegaard put it in Fear and Trembling: “the highest passion in a person is faith.” [5] If man cannot expect proper guidance from the world without, then there is only one place left to turn to: the world within. What do we find inside the soul? We find anxiety – sounds Kierkegaard’s grim answer. If anxiety is what we find, then what is characteristic of this specifically human “symptom”? Here is the description from The Concept of Anxiety: “it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility. For this reason, anxiety is not found in the beast, precisely because by nature the beast is not qualified as spirit.” [6] A few lines earlier ago, I have called anxiety a “specifically human symptom”, and now we can see why it is apt to call it exactly that.
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