Abstract
S. Kierkegaard argued that our highest task as humans is to realize an “intensified” or “developed” form of subjectivity—his name for self-responsible agency. A self-responsible agent is not only responsible for her actions. She also bears responsibility for the individual that she is. In this paper, I review Kierkegaard’s account of the role that our capacity for reflective self-evaluation plays in making us responsible for ourselves. It is in the exercise of this capacity that we can go from being subjective in a degraded sense—merely being an idiosyncratic jumble of accidental and arbitrary attitudes and affects—to being a subject in the ideal or eminent sense. The latter requires the exercise of my capacity for reflective self-evaluation, since it involves recognizing, identifying with, and reinforcing those aspects of my overall make-up that allow me to express successfully a coherent way of being in the world. Kierkegaard argues that taking immortality seriously is one way to achieve the right kind of reflective stance on one’s own character or personality. Thus, Kierkegaard argues that immortality as a theoretical posit can contribute to one’s effort to own or assume responsibility for being the person one is.
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Notes
Kierkegaard (1992) is, of course, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, published under the name “Johannes Climacus.” One must always proceed with caution in attributing to Kierkegaard the positions espoused by his pseudonymous authors. In this paper, however, I am going to largely ignore the distinction between Kierkegaard, Climacus, and his other pseudonyms because (as will become apparent), the pseudonymous authors’ claims about subjectivity and immortality are repeated, developed, or assumed by Kierkegaard in his journals and in several of the “Discourses” published under his own name.
There is one important difference, however, between the works published under Climacus’s name and those published under Kierkegaard’s own. In the latter, Kierkegaard develops and defends an essentially Christian understanding of immortality. This in no way repudiates the claims about immortality that Climacus makes. Rather, the essentially Christian account of striving for immortality that one finds in, for instance, Kierkegaard (1997) is a specific way of responding to the general problem that Climacus argues is posed for us by the thought of immortality. (See Sect. 3 below).
SKS stands for Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, the new Danish critical edition of Kierkegaard’s writings. For an electronic edition of SKS, see: http://www.sks.dk/forside/indhold.asp. Accessed 18 Nov 2015.
Of course, to do good it is not necessary that in addition to intending to achieve whatever end I do intend, I also have an occurrent intention to do good. But it is important that I act in the light of the good—that the meaning of situations shows up for me as normatively structured.
Indeed, Kierkegaard’s formal definition of “sin” is a condition in which “the synthesis is posited as a contradiction.” (Kierkegaard 1980a: 49; SKS 4: 354).
Frankfurt’s later effort to address this issue seems to me to only clarify the inadequacies of his original answer to the problem. To provide “help in coping with an alleged difficulty in hierarchical analyses of the self,” Frankfurt introduces the notion of satisfaction. “A person’s identification with some desire,” Frankfurt explains, does not consist “simply in the fact that he has a higher-order desire by which the first desire is endorsed. The endorsing higher-order desire must be, in addition, a desire with which the person is satisfied.” (Frankfurt 1992: 14) But “satisfaction with one’s self requires… no adoption of any cognitive, attitudinal, affective, or intentional stance. It does not require the performance of a particular act; and it also does not require any deliberate abstention.” (Frankfurt 1992: 13) As intriguing as this suggestion is, it seems to me essentially to concede Watson’s point. No higher order act can produce the kind of identification we are after.
This is reiterated in “The Faintest Passion”: “satisfaction is a state of the entire psychic system – a state constituted just by the absence of any tendency or inclination to alter its condition.” (Frankfurt 1992: 13) Thus, identification requires that any particular attitude be viewed against the background of a sense for the whole self.
Kierkegaard (1980a: 139; SKS 4: 439 translation modified by author). I am indebted to Brian Söderquist for his help translating the original Danish text.
This, presumably, is why St. Paul concludes in 1 Corinthians 15: 56 that “the sting of death is sin”—that is, that death is to be feared not because it extinguishes life, but because following death we are consigned eternally to the miserable condition of being sinful.
“Forever the same, forever different” is her protagonist’s frequent refrain. The differences are what entice him to once again get engaged in the affairs around him. But the sameness ultimately leads to indifference. See also Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin (2014) on the distinction between self-exhausting versus repeatable pleasures.
Demonstrating the modality of necessity is, not surprisingly, the weakest aspect of works in this genre. See Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin (2014) for a series of arguments calling into question different versions of what they have helpfully dubbed the “Necessary Boredom Thesis.” For Williams and de Beauvoir, an obvious obstacle to establishing the necessity is that so much of the argument depends on sharing their intuitions about a counter-factual hypothetical—that I have lived through and experienced ad satiatem everything that a being like me might care to experience.
Thomson and Bodington take a different tack. They posit the proposition: “If it is possible for an event to occur, then even an extremely unlikely event is certain to occur, given infinite time.” (Thomson and Bodington 2014: 253) From this proposition, they conclude things like: “if we can become a person we would now despise one step at a time,… then in the infinity of time, it will happen.” (Thomson and Bodington 2014: 258) Now, whatever merit the proposition might have with regard to “hard facts”—wholly intrinsically characterized states—it seems to me that it does not apply to sequences of events where the order or timing of the sequence is definitive of the sequence. In fact, the proposition must be false because there are incompossible sequences that, at some initial point, are both possible. For example, it is possible that I could flip a coin every day between now and the end of my life, and it would come up heads every time. It is also possible that I flip a coin every day between now and the end of my life, and it will come out heads 50 % of the time. And it’s also possible that next Thursday I will decide that this is a stupid experiment and never flip another coin again for the rest of my life. Suppose that, in fact, the latter is what happens (after getting tails 5 days in a row). So while the first two sequences were both possible when I decided to start my coin-flipping experiment, neither possibility in fact happened. And if it turns out I am immortal and live for an infinite time, that does not change a thing. What was once possible became impossible and no amount of time will ever change it, let alone make it certain to occur. (I am indebted to Michael Nelson for helping me to clarify my thoughts on this subject).
Now it seems to me that becoming morally abhorrent step-by-step is a sequence of the sort where the order of events matters. And thus, at least on the face of it, it is not obvious why an immortal (who in other respects is like me) is condemned to cycle through a stage of moral odium. While it might now be a genuine possibility for me to become a despicable person, it might also be the case that something will happen next Thursday to preclude me from ever becoming such a person. At the very least, I cannot conclude that I am certain to become a despicable person from the mere conjunction of the current possibility and an immortal’s life-span.
See Kierkegaard (1997: 207; SKS 10: 215, translation modified by author).
This claim might strike one as rather hyperbolic—surely there is an objective fact of the matter whether a given individual is immortal or not. In saying that the question is subjective, as we know by now, Kierkegaard doesn’t mean that it’s up to each individual to make him- or herself immortal through a sheer act of will. Instead, Kierkegaard should be seen as following out the consequences of the fact that immortality involves my continuity as the person that I am. The subjective character of the question of immortality follows if we accept that what individuates a particular as a person is, in the words of John Locke, that “it is self to itself.” (Locke 1997: Book II, chapter xxvii, §10).
Leaving aside the particulars of John Locke’s account of personal identity (Locke argues that it turns on consciousness only—a proposal that Kierkegaard would reject), we can see Kierkegaard as embracing this same principle. I am immortal, because only I am in a position to tell if I am self to myself. This is a metaphysical or constitutive claim, not an epistemic claim. That is, the point is not that nobody else has access to the necessary evidence to determine whether I persist. The point instead is that I am the one who, by determining my identity, determines what it means for me to persist. And likewise, only I can really determine how the prospect of immortality should effect me. Thus, Kierkegaard concludes, “the consciousness of my immortality belongs to me alone.” (Kierkegaard 2009: 145; SKS 7: 160).
In this respect, Kierkegaard’s approach to immortality is similar to Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal recurrence, which poses the question “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently?” (Nietzsche 2001: §341).
In fact, Kierkegaard considers Socrates’s version of immortality to be an expression of a fundamental despair over existence—albeit a more authentic one than most people achieve. Only someone in despair over embodied existence could find consolation in the thought that some psychic portion of us will endure eternally after the death of our mortal bodies. By contrast, Kierkegaard’s concern with immortality “is not answered by showing that the eternal is immortal, because the eternal is after all not the mortal, and the eternal’s immortality is a tautology and a misuse of words.” (Kierkegaard 2009: 143; SKS 7: 158–159) Eternally extended existence in a radically and essentially changed form is not Kierkegaard’s concern. As he puts it, “immortality… is a matter of the immortality of a mortal.” (Kierkegaard 2009: 143; SKS 7: 158–159) The im-mortality that Kierkegaard is interested in, in other words, is a modification of mortal existence—a continuation of the kind of existence we now enjoy beyond the horizon of death.
See also Kierkegaard (1980a: 153; SKS 4: 453): “Even though Christianity teaches that a person must render an account for every idle word he has spoken, and we understand this simply as that total recollection of which unmistakable symptoms occasionally appear already in this life, even though the teaching of Christianity cannot be more sharply illuminated by any opposite than that of the Greek conception that the immortals first drank of Lethe in order to forget, yet it by no means follows that the recollection must become directly or indirectly comical–directly by recollecting ridiculous things or indirectly by transforming ridiculous things into essential decisions. Precisely because the accounting and the judgment are essential, what is essential will have the effect of a Lethe on whatever is unessential, while it also is certain that many things will prove to be essential that one had not expected to be so. The soul has not been essentially present in the drolleries of life, in its accidental circumstances, its nooks and crannies; hence all this vanishes, except for the soul that was essentially in this, yet for him it will scarcely have comical significance… In eternity, on the other hand, all contradiction is canceled, the temporal is permeated by and preserved in the eternal, but in this there is no trace of the comical.”
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Brian Söderquist, Deidre Green, Iain Thomson, Michael Nelson, Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, John Fischer, Ben Morgan, and Naomi Rokotnitz for their assistance with this paper. This assistance took many forms, including helping me as I struggled with Kierkegaard’s Danish, discussing the ideas at the heart of this paper, and disagreeing with or helping me to sharpen certain arguments.
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Wrathall, M.A. Trivial Tasks that Consume a Lifetime: Kierkegaard on Immortality and Becoming Subjective. J Ethics 19, 419–441 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9213-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9213-6