Either/Or (Part I)

Here are some of my reading notes on the first part of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

‘that eternity which lies not outside time but in the midst of it’ [51. Compare, regarding actualizing the eternal in the temporal (Bergman), the reference on 37 to ‘an idea that joined the finite and the infinite’. Cf. also 54, for instance the remark that ‘Only where the idea is brought to rest and transparency in a definite form can there be any question of a classic work’ (compare 103: ‘the stillness of the moment’). These references to rest and stillness are themselves worth comparing with Kierkegaard’s (hereafter SK’s) notion of ‘suspension’: ‘The art of recollecting and forgetting will also prevent a person from foundering in any particular relationship in life – and assures him complete suspension.’ (295) This effect of an ‘artistically [vs. ethically] achieved identity’ of forgetting and recollecting seems to me to correspond to the Buddhist meditative condition of detachment or acceptance; for me mindfulness can be what SK, on the same page, calls ‘the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world’. Suspension - also because it is an aesthetic position - is of course a relativistic state: one ‘does not hoist full sail for any decision’ (293).] 

‘When was it that the hetairias became common in Greece except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration? And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was? Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed […]’ [141. These statements, like the similar ones in Irony, seem to evoke the conditions of Weimar era Germany – as well as the conditions of our time.]

‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.’ [149. Cf. the ‘subjectivity reflected in itself’ on 143, and the quotation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right regarding ‘the right of subjective freedom’ on 626 n. 13.]

 

‘since we […] acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality […]’ [151. Cf. the advocacy of concise communication – ‘simple statements’, ‘time-and-talk-saving pithy aphorisms’, ‘economizing’ – on 465. Cf. too the recommended ‘venture in fragmentary endeavour’ in line with ‘the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers’, and a vocation of obscurity, on 152 (& 137).]    

[quotation above from 151 regarding ‘fragmentary prodigality’ continues with:] ‘what is the producing individual’s enjoyment is the receiving individual’s also, not the laborious and careful accomplishment or the tedious interpretation of this accomplishment but the production and the pleasure of the glinting transiency, which for the producer holds much more than the consummated accomplishment, since it is a glimpse of the idea and holds a bonus for the recipient, since its fulguration [Fulguration] stimulates his own productivity […]’ [152. 629 n. 36 glosses ‘Fulguration’ as a loan word in Danish, meaning ‘a sudden flashing (for example, the flashing of molten gold or silver)’. Compare, therefore, 129: ‘Then in the most distant heavens, far off on the horizon, one sees a flash; it speeds away swiftly along the earth, is gone in an instant. […] it seems as if the darkness itself has lost its composure and is starting to move. […] There is an anxiety in that flash; it is as if in that deep darkness it were born in anxiety – just so is Don Giovanni’s life. There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy. […] Don Giovanni’s life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life.’ In this relation, compare too SK’s constellation of aesthetic-intellectual love, risk and a Nietzsche-like terror of natural contingency (contingent even in its ‘infinite coherence’). ‘With what kind of love do we embrace nature? Is there not a secretive anxiety and horror in it, because its beautiful harmony works its way out of lawlessness and wild confusion, its security out of perfidy? But precisely this anxiety captivates the most. So also with love, if it is to be interesting. Behind it ought to brood the deep, anxious night from which springs the flower of love. Thus the nymphaea alba [white water lily] rests with its calyx on the surface of the water, while thought is anxious about plunging down into the deep darkness where it has its root.’ (424; cf. 294) On 102 Don Giovanni is posited as ‘absolutely musical’ because, unreflective and nonverbal, he ‘does not have that kind of [intellectual] continuance at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music’.]

‘love is always present tense’ [226]

‘the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries.’ [285. Cf. Hegel’s infinite absolute negativity adopted in Irony, and Hegel’s definition of negativity as ‘the turning point of the movement of the Notion […] the innermost source of all activity’ quoted in 641 n. 3. Cf. with this principle of motion the ‘movement of thought […] in the service of reflection’ discussed on 188, where, for the will (mediation, and the ethical) to begin, or to free itself from serving reflection, it ‘must be altogether impartial, must begin in the power of its own willing; only then can there be any question of a beginning’. The logic of this replacement of the principle of (aesthetic-)intellectual motion by the free exercise of the will (the decision, ethics), seems to me to be analogous to the meditative logic wherein mindfulness emerges from (within, ‘in the power of’) the body’s own wisdom: the breath. Cf. also, however, SK’s opposition of spirit-motion to the perpetual motion imposed by the capitalist work ethic. He writes of the ‘businesslike zeal with which they work at the office’ on 289: ‘There is an indefatigable activity that shuts a person out of the world of spirit and places him in a class with the animals, which instinctively must always be in motion.’ (Cf. SK on ‘busy bustlers’ on 25, and critiquing working for a living on 31).]    

‘There is so much talk about man’s being a social animal, but basically he is a beast of prey, something that can be ascertained not only by looking at his teeth. Therefore, all this chatter about sociality and community is partly inherited hypocrisy and partly studied perfidy.’ [288. Cf. the quotation from Aristotle’s Politics in 642-43 n.12: ‘man is by nature a political [social] animal. […] the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts’. Cf. 22, and also Hobbes?]

‘Every erotic relationship must always be lived through in such a way that it is easy for one to produce an image that conveys all the beauty of it.’ [390. Cf. 418: ‘For love, everything is a symbol […]’; ‘Erotic love is much too substantial to be satisfied with chatter, the erotic situations much too significant to be filled with chatter. They are silent, still, definitely outlined, and yet eloquent, like the music of Memnon’s statue. Eros gesticulates, does not speak; or if he does, it is an enigmatic intimation, symbolic music.’]     

‘To have an understanding of the moment is not such an easy matter, and the one who misunderstands it is doomed to boredom for life. The moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences I do not understand.’ [433. Cf. the seducer’s statements with the references to the moment on 90 and (as 658 n. 209 points out) The Concept of Anxiety, 82-91.]

As in my previous post on The Concept of Irony, the page numbering here refers to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings. 

The Research of Hope

William Kluback’s ‘Karl Jaspers and Schmuel Hugo Bergman: Believing Philosophers’ appeared in the collection edited by Richard Wisser and Leonard H. Ehrlich, Karl Jaspers: Philosopher among Philosophers. Kluback opens with a scene which movingly evokes the attempt to perpetuate Weimar era German-Jewish thought after the Holocaust, in the form of a philosophical conversation between Israel and postwar Germany: a meeting on a street in Jerusalem in April 1949 between Jaspers and Bergman (the subject of my previous post on this blog), who had been the first Rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. ‘In 1948,’ Kluback notes, ‘Jaspers had published a book on philosophical faith, Der philosophische Glaube. Bergman had reviewed the book in the newspaper Haaretz a day or two before and now the friends spoke about it.’ Jaspers’ book, writes Kluback, made ‘a deep impression’ on Bergman. ‘The book rightly shocked him. He was stunned by its description of the spiritual situation of the time and by the helplessness of the philosophy that was offered to a tortured mankind.’ For Bergman, Kluback continues, ‘The shattering nature of the problem’ exposed by Jaspers’ book ‘lies in the silence of transcendence’: that is, in contemporary nihilism. Kluback – from the vantage-point of an adherent of religious tradition – points to a post-Kantian ‘anarchy of autonomous, sophistic subjectivity, of inescapable relativism, and of an incurable hedonism’. Weimar thought itself, viewed from Kluback's position, was already coloured by nihilism: ‘Bergman was right when he saw the shattering consequences of nihilism in the decades before 1948 and those which were yet to come.’

Kluback understands nihilism in terms of social coercion, or the way in which a power-hungry rationalism can turn itself into political dogmatism. As ‘philosophers in the age of despotism’, Bergman and Jaspers, Kluback maintains, ‘worried about the efficacy of philosophy […] only because at times some of their colleagues turned to political insanity while others fought and died in physical and spiritual exiles’. For Kluback, ‘The philosopher knew that in the tempests of politics nihilism was the ever present threat to spiritual and physical survival’, because ‘When Bergman spoke of the shattering effect of Jaspers’s book, he recognized the power of nihilism, the profanation of the sacred and the blatant and uncontrolled will to power’. Kluback could be talking about the will-sapping, depressing corruptions which characterize the marketized state bureaucracies of the UK today, such as the higher education system; actually here he is referring to the threat to the creation of the new state of Israel.

‘Hugo Bergman described his reaction to this discussion of nihilism as shattering, threatening the birth of a state in a hostile world where the depths of the oppositon [sic] had hardly been measured. The future demands an unflinching courage, a masterful self-confidence and an incontrovertible hope in man’s reasonableness.’ 

Nihilism hits at the root of the philosopher’s decisive participation in state-building, Kluback emphasizes, because ‘The problem of values was not merely academic; it became the essential quality for the society, the expression of the state’. The emergent state demands an education – a transmitted and interpreted intellectual culture, a community of debate – which is not eroded by nihilism.

‘The Arab question had become acute for the independent Jewish state. There were the historical values, the constitution, the rule of law and the security of the state; all these issues had to be addressed. These were debated and needed consensus and solution. The philosophers had a role to play.’

Kluback’s suggestion, therefore, is that nihilism threatened Jaspers’ philosophical work towards the refoundation and rehumanization of Germany, just as it threatened Bergman’s work as a public intellectual in the new Israel. We can note too that the anti-nihilist ‘historical values’ shared by all three thinkers to which Kluback refers in this connection – Jaspers, Bergman and Buber – were precisely the philosophical values which came to fruition in 1920s Germany:

‘The philosopher [in Israel] accepted the role of educator. Jaspers knew this well. He had been an educator in a Germany destroyed by Nazism. He spoke to the people of the true German spirit. His voice was heard. He had to lay the foundations of a Germany that would seek to lessen the effect of twelve years of totalitarianism. Bergman and Buber had similar tasks in an emerging state. Jaspers would continue his work from Basle, Bergman and Buber from a divided Jerusalem.’

          

It is clear that the post-postmodern supermarket that is the contemporary university is unable to offer such an anti-nihilist education. The blogosphere is awash with disaffected academics (or post-academics) complaining of their alienation from a higher education system lacking in values – for instance an English lecturer in the UK notes today’s inane cacophony of academic discourse, whilst an American Max Scheler scholar comments on the recent interviewing of only one philosopher, himself, for a post in philosophy (the other candidates included an historian and someone from an English department). Both examples point to the fact that the university itself now is programmed by a relativistic nihilism – by the educators’ own inability to hold to any value, effectively, other than their own self-assertive need to hustle, and make some noise. The academic system fosters quasi-celebrities, strange spectral celebrities whose elite peer group glamour is accrued through the canny autopoietic administration of existing knowledges, rather than the creation of new knowledges; it is as if short-term subcultural infamy is to be attained through the collective self-distancing from truth, rather than long-term public fame - the fame of a Kierkegaard, say - achieved following the individualistic creation of new truths. The Scheler scholar, in his blog post [here], concludes that the genuine philosopher can only respond by returning to the work of searching for truth: ‘we can resist the postmodernist on the grounds that not all texts inspire in the same way; philosophical texts are those that inspire the search for truth [his italics]’. Jaspers’ definition of nihilism in his The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, quoted here by Kluback, had indeed focussed exactly on the absence of truth and loss of faith:

 

‘“While demonology and deification of man,” he said, “offer a substitute for faith, open unbelief is known as nihilism. The nihilist ventures to appear without disguise. For him all contents of faith are untenable, he has unmasked all interpretations of the world and of being as delusions: for him everything is conditional and relative; there is no fundament, no absolute, no being as such. Everything is questionable. Nothing is true, everything is permissible.”’

It is in contrast to such a nihilist that Bergman and Jaspers, Kluback maintains, are ‘believing philosophers’.

‘When other men compromise and conform to the needs of the time the philosopher remains embedded in his belief in freedom, in human dignity and the communicating community. These beliefs the philosopher shares with all reasonable beings. In them he sees a hint of the Idea of mankind. The philosopher sees danger in nihilism; it becomes his single antagonist.’

Bergman argued, Kluback writes, that ‘if we are to prevent the danger of nihilism “we must turn to God:” this is the powerful task which Jaspers gives to philosophy’. ‘“What he would like,” Bergman remarked, “is the renewal of philosophical belief that is hidden in the religious, the transformation of religion into philosophy. This certainly will not be the way of mankind, although it may be the way of a minority.”’ Kluback signals that (Jaspers’ and) Bergman’s concept of philosophical faith, and their practice as believing philosophers, may be regarded as being elitist (or at least as being avant-gardist); he observes of Bergman that ‘He knew that a turning toward God was not the answer for mankind, but he also knew that the philosopher had to be a believer; on his faith others depended’. Yet Jaspers’ conception of faith, like Bergman’s concept of revelation, is – Kluback stresses – not exclusive. The believer, Jaspers wrote, must be able to ‘acknowledge the faith that is alien to him as a possible truth emerging from a different source, even if he is unable to understand it’. Bergman, Kluback writes, ‘found in revelation a universality which was at the foundation of his idea of The Believing Community’. Kluback suggests how Bergman's position on the hinge of two faiths, liberal-rational philosophical faith and potentially dogmatic-exclusive religious faith, was determined by his own inspiring conception of a decisively directing, socially unifying revelation:

‘He moved easily between philosophical and religious faith. In fact, it would be difficult to distinguish one from the other in his life and thought. This is comprehensible because he believed that a revelation was given to the people and it concerned their earthly destiny, their service to mankind and their vision of a future that spoke of justice, compassion and love. In a letter to his life-long friend Robert Weltsch, the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau (11/2/71), Bergman spoke of his conviction “that only a new moral direction would make it possible to find a solution for all difficulties, however utopian this may be”.’

Kluback also quotes from an important 1945 letter to the philosopher Jacob Fleischmann in which Bergman clarified his idea of the non-dogmatic path of faith – the shared ‘new moral direction’ – which springs from revelation.

‘“I do not believe in an absolute religion. All religious art [sic, pres. ‘religions’], in my view, are methods to a goal, ways. The dogmatic divisions are artistic superstructures which religions have built over or under their dwelling (Bau). In my eyes they are not important. […] Every people, and their epochs have their paths to God. But God is one, and if we feel a nearness to the Jewish tradition, it is because this pedagogy, and not the dogmatic, is close to our heart. I don’t believe in the absolute truth of either Judaism or Christianity. I believe in a particular mission of the Jewish people which has shown itself in such a fruitful way in our time. Thus it is for me tasteless and laughable when Zionists draw from a religious-historical reality simply political consequences.”’

Like Jaspers, Bergman in this letter is suspicious of objective religious forms on account of their potential dogmatism. Again like Jaspers, Bergman would supplant such absolute religion with a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence; a path to God. Because of his personal closeness to Jewish tradition, Bergman (unlike Jaspers) identifies the path to God with his contemporary ‘particular mission of the Jewish people’. Thus for Bergman the non-dogmatic hermeneutic of transcendence itself has assumed the dimensions of a ‘religious-historical reality’: for him here the struggle towards transcendence takes place within contemporary Jewish history, just as for Jaspers, we could add, it first took place within the religious-historical reality of Weimar era Germany. Both religious-historical realities are built out of, and hence consist of, philosophical faith.

Noting that ‘What we find revealed in Jaspers is the capacity of philosophy to describe the nature of faith, a clarification of the modes of faith’, Kluback underlines the fact that Jaspers’ decisive hermeneutic of transcendence remains a Kierkegaardian, negative one. ‘Faith becomes for Jaspers certainty “coupled with distance.” […] Faith defies description; it belongs to experience. Man never escapes the reality of non-belief, of inner doubt and despair.’ Because, as Kluback writes, ‘Faith is not a given to be held in perpetuity undiminished’, ‘Bergman and Jaspers knew that faith was a struggle; it was a gift’. Thus just as the mission towards God is faith, in the sense that it consists of it, faith itself is, consists of, the struggle – the (transcendentally) decided, decisive risk. Kluback quotes from Jaspers’ final book, Philosophical Faith and Revelation : ‘“There is hope without deception”, he said, “only when we do not hold it to be a certainty, not even a probability, but dare to live by it because such a life can be worthy of us and founded in transcendence.”’

Kluback stresses that a philosophical life is ‘formed through commitment’; ‘The philosopher shows the way of faith; he must decide to travel it.’ His very commitment to the path also suggests, as Kluback intimates with an additional quotation from Philosophical Faith and Revelation, that philosophical faith can become a collective, rather than an exclusive or elitist, project: ‘all our actions are based on what we expect of men – and that means of ourselves. Whoever despairs of man despairs of himself. Contempt of man is self-contempt.’ Kluback reinforces this point: ‘Faith is the foundation of man’s actions, of his world view, of his concept of the future.’ Faith thus emerges as the quality which relates people to each other, as well as to the distinct (yet interrelated) phases of human experience – past, present and future. Once more, the point is that each ‘religious-historical reality’ quite literally consists of philosophical faith.

I have tried to suggest in this post that Kluback shows Weimar era Germany and the new postwar Israel alike to be exemplary religious-historical realities instancing how, as he put it, ‘The problem of values was not merely academic; it became the essential quality for the society, the expression of the state.’ The intuition that in these two historical and intellectual moments the projection of philosophical faith became a social – even a state – project, could perhaps become more sustainable through a consideration of the concern within Weimar thought with natural law; particularly if we understand the tradition of natural law thinking as an articulation of what Kluback calls ‘a sacred covenant of belief between the philosopher, the past, the present and the future’. Kluback’s opposition to the lineage of post-Kantian reason – ‘The [French] Revolution declared the end of the sacred tradition that declared that God is truth’ – brings him to quote from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. ‘Each construct of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society […] connecting the visible and invisible world according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and moral natures’. Whereas now amidst our nihilism, Kluback comments, ‘We have discovered what it means to deify man, to identify history with natural law’, Jaspers and Bergman ‘knew that faith alone held together the sacred covenant that tied the generations to each other’.     

 

(The phrase 'the research of hope' is borrowed from Robert Hullot-Kentor's essay 'Critique of the Organic: Kierkegaard and the Construction of the Aesthetic' (reprinted in his Things beyond Resemblance))

Bergman on Dialogical Philosophy

Shmuel Hugo Bergman’s little-known but intensely readable primer, Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber, presents a series of lectures given by Bergman in 1962. In his ‘Preface’, translator Arnold Gerstein – aptly, I sense – describes Bergman’s original language as ‘a semiformal but elegant conversational Hebrew that is compelling to students and philosophers alike’. The intimacy of Bergman’s lecturing style thus mirrors that of his subject: the dialogue. Nathan Rotenstreich, in his ‘Foreword’, maintains that the term ‘dialogical philosophy’ is ‘undoubtedly taken from Martin Buber’; both Rotenstreich and Gerstein, however, note that for Bergman it is Kierkegaard who emerges as ‘the central link in the history of the philosophy of the dialogue’ (in Gerstein’s words).

Later sections of Bergman’s study address other thinkers of central importance to Weimar era philosophy: Eugen Rosenstock, Franz Rosenzweig. Yet the first and by far the longest part of the book focusses on Kierkegaard’s thought. In some introductory statements prefacing this part, Bergman suggests the affinity of dialogical thinking to existentialist thinking: ‘What distinguishes any genuine dialogue is the fact that the participants are individuals, each bearing their own specific and generic traits. They are not abstractions but men of flesh and blood.’ On the following page Bergman adds a caveat: ‘The philosophy of dialogue which we will discuss in these lectures is not the same as “existentialism,” since not every existential philosophy stresses the dialogical factor; however, the two schools are identical with respect to the position of the individual within the philosophical system.’ As Bergman puts it later, ‘With this stress on the importance of the individual self, the single man in all his existential individuality, Kierkegaard lays the foundation for what has subsequently been called dialogical philosophy.’ But, as Rotenstreich rightly observes, Bergman’s treatment of dialogical philosophers’ relationship to existentialism is ultimately of lesser importance than the emphasis his book places on ‘the centrality of man’s individuality and the relationships and encounters between individuals and with God’. Bergman notes, for instance, that Kierkegaard’s dislike for German Romanticism’s ‘tempestuousness and exaggerated subjectivism that isolated man’, meant that he ‘strenuously sought the way to religion through the use of subjective irony’.

Crucially, in connection with Weimar political philosophy’s decisionism, Bergman shows how Kierkegaard’s thinking of the decision forms an aspect of his thinking of man’s emergent relationship with God, repeatedly referring to ‘the autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’. Because, as Bergman writes, for Kierkegaard ‘Real action is in the internal decision of man’, therefore for him ‘Man’s relation to God is not direct or objective; it is an inner relation, a relation of risk’. For Kierkegaard, as Bergman notes, within the moral and religious dimension of life ‘direct communication is impossible’. ‘In order to see God, one must break the direct-passive relationship. Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act, and he confronts the reality of God.’ 

Bergman emphasizes that the I-Thou relation, the relationship of man to man, is the concern of post-Kierkegaardian dialogical philosophy:

‘Actually, in spite of the tremendous importance of dialogue for Kierkegaard, the major dialogue for him is between man and God. The dialogue between man and man has no function in religious life because religious man leads a solitary life and cannot disclose to others the task that is imposed on him.’

Bergman’s attention to the importance of religious ‘silence’ or ‘speechlessness’ reappears within the context of his discussion of the modality of ‘non-Socratic learning’ within which, for Kierkegaard (as Bergman puts it), ‘a genuine mutual relationship between God and man is created’: learning as divine revelation.

‘The relationship between man and man is invariably Socratic – that is, it will always be such that one man, when he teaches another, even when he teaches him about revelation and faith, can only be an agent or a midwife. He cannot take the place of direct revelation, which comes through God as teacher.’

Commenting on Kierkegaard’s Repetition, Bergman stresses how ‘the essence of revelation’ involves a recreation of man by God, and that ‘God alone can recreate man’. ‘The learner is given something that was not within him and for which he was unprepared, and so the moment in which he receives the doctrine or revelation is of crucial importance.’ It is here that Bergman evokes the sort of divine revocation of speechlessness ‘which is expressed among Jews in the prayer: “Oh Lord, open thou my lips and my mouth may declare thy praise”’. We remember how Bergman wrote of how in relation to God, man’s ‘inner nature […] bursts forth in an independent act’: ‘Man enters this personal dialogue with God only through God’s action.’ It is as if the spiritual release afforded by the human decision is matched by – though it does not have the power to solicit – a divine revocation of our silence.

For instance when it juxtaposes Ferdinand Ebner’s view that (in Bergman’s words) ‘Man’s spirit is in its essence a receiving spirit dwelling in a relationship to a giving spirit’, with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s argument that (as Bergman puts it) ‘logos finds its way to our physical life and awakens it to the life of the spirit’, Bergman’s book foregrounds the position that ‘language is the revelation of God to man’. Noting that ‘this viewpoint predominates in the thought of Rosenstock, a friend of Rosenzweig’, Bergman explores the philosophy of language presented by Rosenstock in his Angewandte Seelenkunde [Applied Psychology], a text published in 1924 (but largely written some years before).

Bergman focusses on the concept of ‘true speech’ – revelational speech – which Rosenstock developed as a result of his view that, as Bergman phrases it, ‘The word, “logos,” is a revelation of divine presence’:

‘In speech [for Rosenstock] there are two levels, reflecting the distinction between true and ordinary speech. The two levels are the compulsion (or necessity) of speaking, and the ability to speak. True speech is not voluntary or arbitrary; it is not a matter of will but a necessity whose force causes speech to spring forth. True speech springs forth almost against the will of man, and thus all true speech is revelation.’

With this idea that ‘The word is given to man or forces itself upon him’, Bergman clearly echoes his earlier commentary on Kierkegaard – where he wrote of how ‘Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act’. It is as if Bergman’s exegesis of the philosophers’ views of the experience of revelation has become as compulsive and involuntary as the experience itself. Yet though for Rosenstock ‘true speech’ entails that (as Bergman puts it) ‘the speaker is entirely subject to his own speech’, this does not mean that for Bergman such involuntary revelational speech divorces the speaking/spoken subject from his own existential individuality. The example of revelational speech which Bergman provides – the Jewish hermeneutic practice of ‘the law of intra-linear parallelisms in the Book of Psalms’ – is itself, Bergman observes, ‘grounded in distress and necessity’.

‘In prayer Israel encircles the prayer leader, who passes in front of the Ark, while others release him by repeating the prayer which he has recited with such total self-absorption and compulsion that he does not hear it. The congregation repeats his prayer, paralleling it by half-lines in such a way that he can and must hear what he has prayed, and in this way they free him from his distress. This is true speech.’  

At the end of his book Bergman returns to this logic of call and response – of sacred language or prayer and hermeneutics – which characterizes revelational speech, noting how Buber (in his ‘The History of the Dialogical Principle’) situated the event of call and response at the core of his thinking influenced by Hasidism:

‘[…] the question of the possibility and reality of a dialogical relationship between man and God, thus of a free partnership of man in a conversation between heaven and earth whose speech in address and answer is the happening itself, the happening from above and the happening from below, had already accosted me in my youth. In particular since the Hasidic tradition has grown for me into the supporting ground of my own thinking, hence since about 1905, that had become an innermost question for me.’

The de-individualizing tendency within the dialogical philosophy of language treated by Bergman emerges clearly however, when he discusses Rosenstock’s idea of ‘liturgical grammar’. Bergman glosses Rosenstock’s notion of calling as recreation: ‘Rosenstock says that liturgical grammar would change Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” to read, “God, you have called me, therefore I am.”’ Bergman underlines how ‘The calling comes first and establishes the “I.”’ He also stresses the scriptural precedence for the idea that ‘only from the “Thou” can the “I” be created’. ‘The classic example is I Samuel, 3:5, where young Samuel turns to Eli and says: “Here am I for thou called me.”’ Within Bergman’s study of dialogical philosophy therefore, there seems to be a tension between his emphasis on the involuntary (and even de-individualizing) aspect of religious experience, and his emphasis on the contrasting ‘autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’ – on an individual’s decisive, committed, risk-taking experience. This tension seems to me to be resolved, though, by Bergman’s ongoing attention to the concept of redemption as recreation: that is, to a redemption of man by God which precisely enables man’s exercise of personal agency.

Bergman’s reading of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption suggests that ‘the redemption of the world must be perceived as a vital process, as the animation of the world’. This sort of redemption is evoked again within Bergman’s account of Buber’s notion of the state of ‘realization’, which Bergman describes as ‘the perception of reality in its immediacy, when one leaps into it, as it were, and identifies with it’. Towards the end of his book, Bergman relays the illustration of realization offered by Buber in one essay in his 1913 Daniel, Dialogues on Realization – a precursor of Buber’s I and Thou of 1923:

‘Buber illustrates this with the example of a Swiss pine […]. If […] I open myself to the tree with all my energy directed toward it, if I assimilate it, as it were, commit myself to it, then I am transformed and I become the tree itself. […] I experience a particular tree. I identify myself with it, without surrendering my unique position. I succeed, in other words, in conjoining the two, myself and the tree. I have access thereby to the mystery of reality. […] Entering the mystery of reality is […] a higher state of activity which I initiate and through which I open myself and transform my energy into a magical strength that fascinates and gratifies, while quieting the chaos around me. […] This is the great miracle of realization which this essay attempts to describe. Something of the philosophy of the dialogue emerges here, because the true dialogue also has the same openness and commitment along with the self-preservation of the person speaking.’       

The Concept of Irony

Some Reading Notes

Here is the first in what I hope will be a series of occasional posts presenting some of my notes from the work of thinkers of central importance to Weimar thought. These notes may be on texts by thinkers of the Weimar period itself (Carl Schmitt, say), or alternatively on texts by earlier philosophers, such as Hobbes and Kierkegaard, who significantly influenced Weimar era theorists.   

Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony, is referred to substantively in Adorno’s second Habilitationsschrift, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). Page references here are keyed to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings.

‘Socrates, in assigning to insight, to conviction, the determination of men’s actions, posited the Individual as capable of a final moral decision, in contraposition to Country and to Customary Morality, and thus made himself an Oracle, in the Greek sense. He said that he had a daimon(ion) within him that counselled him what to do, and revealed to him what was advantageous to his friends.’ [Hegel, quoted on 161. Compare Hegel’s reference to self-knowing and freedom cited on 162; Kierkegaard (hereafter SK) on subjectivity versus ‘the established’ on 163 (cf. identity vs. the established on 126); & the remarks on heteronomy, subjectivity and decision in Hegel on 163-65 (cf. 263, 264).]

‘When we take into account that even in our countries, where the state, precisely because it has undergone a far deeper mediation, allows subjectivity a much greater latitude than that which the Greek state could allow, when we take into account, I say, that even in our countries someone living on private means is always a dubious person, we may infer from that how the Greek state must have regarded Socrates’ attempt to go his own way and live as a private person.’ [179. Cf. 447. Compare too the remark on Socrates’ ironic and ‘purely personal relation to individuals’ on 180-1. Compare also the remarks on the ironist, the Taugenichts (good-for-nothing) and a vocation of obscurity on 281 (& on Hamann: 434).]

‘True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed. In political life, true freedom naturally consists in being involved in the circumstances of life in such a way that they have an objective validity for one and through all this preserving the innermost, deepest personal life, which certainly can move and have its being under all these conditions but yet to a certain degree is incommensurate with them.’ [182-83]  

‘we do find [in Socrates] a most consistently sustained irony that lets the objective power of the state break up on the rock-firm negativity of irony. […] In this way he becomes alien to the whole world to which he belongs […] ; the contemporary consciousness has no predicate for him – nameless and indefinable, he belongs to another formation.’ [196. Cf. 447. Compare too the note on Socrates’ ‘negative relation to life’ on 39; & the remark on his inability to ‘contract any real relationship to the established order’ on 178. Cf. dissident consciousness: Schmitt-Luhmann-Konrad (etc.); & the category of the extraterritorial as in my ‘Vortex Out of German London’ (Kracauer: here)? See also the counterposition of ‘fear of the law’ to ‘conscious knowledge of why he acted’ on 228.]

‘In many ways, the Athens of this period calls to mind what Rome was at a later time. Intellectually, Athens was the heart of Greece. Thus when Greek culture approached its disintegration, all the blood rushed back violently into the chambers of the heart. Everything concentrated in Athens – wealth, luxury, opulence, art, science, recklessness, the enjoyment of life – in short, everything that, as the city hastened toward its ruin, could also help to glorify it and illuminate one of the most brilliant intellectual dramas conceivable. There was a restlessness in Athenian life; there was a palpitation of the heart intimating that the hour of disintegration was at hand. But from the other side, that which was the condition for the decline of the state proved to have immense significance for the new principle that was to appear, and the disintegration and decay became indeed the fertile soil of the new principle.’ [200-1. Compare the Weimar/ interwar period?]

‘It [‘the contemporary age’] does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone – this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community?’ [246-47. Community as a mere temporary alliance of the self-interested or combative: so that now, the phrase ‘care in the community’ means nothing at all. Cf. the comment on irony as ‘isolation according to its concept’ on 249.]

‘dissimulation denotes […] the objective act that carries out the discrepancy between essence and phenomenon; irony also denotes the subjective pleasure as the subject frees himself by means of irony from the restraint in which the continuity of life’s conditions holds him – […] Irony […] has no purpose; its purpose is immanent in itself and is a metaphysical purpose. […] irony, in which the subject has no purpose.’ [255-56. Irony as a freeing from contingency; beyond this, for SK, is the sort of acceptance of heteronomy commented on (in terms of assigned virtuous tasks) at 235. Compare the important remarks on a religious reconciliation with actuality on 297, 298 (on the latter page SK writes of ‘becoming clear and transparent to oneself, not in finite and egotistical self-satisfaction but in one’s absolute and eternal validity’, anticipating Either/Or, part II (& cf. 445, 299 here)).]

‘Here, then, we have the idea […] as the infinite absolute negativity. Now, if this is to become something, the negative must assert itself again in a finitizing of the idea – that is, in making it concrete. [> existentialism?] The negative is the restlessness of thought, but this restlessness must manifest itself, must become visible; its desire must manifest itself as the desire that actuates the work, its pain as the pain it engenders. If this does not happen, then we have only the unreal actuality of contemplation, devotion, and pantheism.’ [312. Compare SK’s reference to infinite absolute negativity on 26, the sourcing Hegel quotation on 476, and 131. Cf. also 305 (‘In no way is the true ideal in the beyond’); 319 (‘The true actuality becomes what it is; the actuality of romanticism merely becomes.’) Cf. too 271.]

‘if our generation has any task at all, it must be to translate the achievement of scientific scholarship into personal life, to appropriate it personally. [On subjectivity as truth (cf. in Bergman, Dialogical Philosophy), compare the note on 219 and 552 n. 189 (>Postscript etc.).] […] Irony as a controlled element manifests itself in its truth precisely by teaching how to actualize actuality, by placing the appropriate emphasis on actuality. In no way can this be interpreted as wanting to deify actuality in good [socialist] St. Simon style or as denying that there is, or at least that there ought to be, a longing in every human being for something higher and more perfect. But this longing must not hollow out actuality; on the contrary, life’s content must become a genuine and meaningful element in the higher actuality whose fullness the soul craves. [Actualized actuality an element of transcendental(-ized) life: the quotation continues onto the next page.]’ [328]  

Walser Addendum: Two Anthropologies

It may be that my reading of Walser in recent posts – with its reliance upon Simmel’s theory of depersonalization and then Jaspers’ projection of a hermeneutic of transcendence – is riven by a tension between two conflicting anthropologies, functionalist and transcendental. In his Karl Jaspers, Thornhill notes that whilst a functionalist anthropology ‘views human life as both produced, and adequately described, by its objective forms’, a transcendental anthropology such as Jaspers’ promotes the view that ‘the human being is most human, most existent, insofar as it is least material, and least bound by the objective forms (laws) of scientific rationality and social orientation’. Thornhill observes:

‘The constructive receptions of Kant which underpin the philosophies of Jaspers and Heidegger [...] describe an unbridgeable fissure at the centre of German existential thinking. On one side of this, Jaspers insists on the ethical difference of humanity from its forms. On the other side, Heidegger insists on its ethical adequacy to these. Jaspers’ philosophy is a morally transcendental anthropology, in which humanity interprets itself most truthfully in its unconditioned imperatives. This has later echoes in the neo-Kantian writings of Habermas. Heidegger, by contrast, provides the basis for a functionalist anthropology, anticipated already by Georg Simmel and Carl Schmitt, and echoed later by Arnold Gehlen, in which human life interprets itself as delivered unto its realized objective forms. Jaspers’ anthropology is strongly obligated to the remnants of idealism and transcendental subjectivism, and it creates a metaphysic of the person on the foundation of these. In Heidegger’s anthropology, in contrast, the transcendental subject, and its ethical derivates in practical reason, are replaced by a historicist metaphysic of the Volk, or of the functions which the Volk imposes upon its members.’

In my presentation of Simmel’s theory of depersonalization here it is unclear whether I am maintaining that Simmel critiques the functionalization of the human or (as Thornhill indicates) merely discerns it.

Behind the Mountains, part 3

A second radical implication of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation, relates to the way in which it enables his writing to develop its thinking of freedom. In ‘Tobold (II)’ the narrator celebrates the fact that ‘I was a servant! I served!’:

‘My position, consequently, was a good one, which sufficed to set my person to rights. Isn’t it true our lives first take on beauty when we’ve learned to be unassuming, to forget or set aside our own wishes and desires, and instead devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty?’

The dialectic of the precept and liberation here is accompanied by a twinning of self-abnegation and self-exaltation (or self-transcending self-elevation), which Walser proposes in the preceding sentence. ‘So exalted I felt, even, I can say, yes, elevated far above my own person, which I scarcely dignified any more with so much as a hasty glance, or rather a hasty thought.’ Self-transcended, the narrator paradoxically no longer looks down on himself as on an alienated object (with ‘a hasty glance’), and can instead give a ‘hasty thought’ to his serving self. Walser’s sense of transcendence as something that gives one back to oneself, was voiced already in the following statements of the narrator’s towards the beginning of ‘Tobold (II)’.

‘Newly emerged from a terrible weariness of life, I attained fresh insights, began to enjoy living. As Peter, I’d had no real worldview, no true notion of life; […]. Living can be so tiresome when you lack an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision to help you come to terms with the disappointments awaiting you in life. No longer did I chase after fame or the like; the sublime no longer drew my gaze. I had learned to love the small and insignificant, and, armed with this kind of love, I found life beautiful, just, and good. I was delighted to renounce all ambition.’

These lines identify self-abnegation, cast in terms of the renunciation of monetary ‘ambition’, with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, or ‘an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision’. Walser thereby suggests that truly el(ev)ating happiness, true enjoyment of life, can be attained by holding to an inspiring vision of non-elevation. Elsewhere in ‘Tobold (II)’, the narrator identifies the happy condition of non-elevation itself – of ‘modest being’ – with spectatorship of an inspiring vision of others’ happiness. Genuinely fulfilling personal modesty is here contingent upon (liminal observation of) others’ illusory ‘glory’. Walser ironizes the notion that the elevated might really be freer: for him what matters is holding to the transcendental idea of happiness, to the 'glow' that surrounds the aristocratic diners 'playing their roles'. ‘I always took great pleasure in observing the splendour, the glory; for myself, though, I’d always desired a place in the quiet, modest background from which I could gaze with happy eyes up to and into the bright glow.’ The ‘twilight shadow’ is where the ‘common servant’ finds ‘a great benevolence’ and feels ‘most secure, most faithfully sheltered’, precisely because privileged life is viewed as a mere ‘magical spectacle’, at which the narrator ‘thought it lovely just to look on, entranced’. The idealizing worldview - the ‘whole picture’ – is what he ‘found so beautiful and cherished above all else’. But just this idealization of power is what enables him to find freedom in the refusal of power. ‘So I was always conscious of my merit, station, and joy in life, and took extraordinary delight in the modest being I embodied.’

In a short piece from 1917, ‘The End of the World’, Walser’s twinning of self-abnegatory, radical modesty with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, can be seen to expand into what could be called a broader geo-political twinning of apocalypse (or the limit) with utopia (or absolute freedom). In this piece, after ‘imagining the end of the world […] as a sea of bliss in which it could rock forever’, ‘everything looked so prosperous, fine, and free that at once the child was convinced this was the end of the world’. In this context we could also think of the inversion of nature associated by Walser with human conflict in ‘The Battle of Sempach’; when ‘Nature is […] annihilated in a battle’. ‘The sound was like a black, gaping abyss, and the sun now appeared to be shining from a darkened sky, glaring down more dazzling than ever, but as though from a hell, not the heavens.’ Here, unnaturally, the sun becomes brightest when as if apocalyptically detached from its heavens. Excessive brightness – brightness aspiring to the absolute, pushed to its limit – has already been associated with apocalypse on the previous page. ‘The whole earth, no matter how bright it looked, seemed to him to rumble and thunder in anger.’ Walser sees the earth, like the sky, to be darkened by its own aspiration to dazzle. A conception of the end of the world, for Walser, is inseparable from the conception of a transcendental urge towards brightness, freedom, utopia.

Walser’s imbrication of the limit and transcendence seems to me to be echoed by Karl Jaspers’ theorization of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence available to those in existential crisis. As Thornhill summarizes in his book on Jaspers, for Jaspers ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ Thornhill quotes from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy : ‘“Failing [Scheitern]”, Jaspers argues, “is the encompassing ground of all cipher-being. Seeing the cipher of the reality of being arises from the experience of failing”.’

For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, ‘Being […] is present only negatively, as a series of possible implosions in the order of human consciousness, in which consciousness is referred to its own limits.’ Jaspers’ conception of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence practiced by those in crisis, rests on the view that, subjectively, such implosions (as Thornhill notes) are ‘decisions’, through which ‘human life decides interpretively to reflect upon its own possibilities (ideas), acts in a manner which accords with these, and thus places itself upon a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’. The narrator in ‘Tobold (II)’ indeed decides to reflect upon self-abnegation, identifying it as a decision to ‘devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty’. Continuing his self-hermeneutic, he emphasizes too that to freely and decisively act upon such radical modesty, and ‘forgo heaven’, is to interpret the possibility of transcendence ‘many times more beautiful’:

‘For when I forgo something beautiful: doesn’t a brand-new, never-before-dreamed-of beauty a thousand times more beautiful come flying toward me in reward for my display of goodwill and my kind, strongly felt self-denial? And if, of my own free will, elevated by courage and compassion to nobler sentiments, I should forgo heaven: won’t I then, sooner or later, in reward for my righteous behaviour, fly into a heaven many times more beautiful?’    

We can view Walser’s writing as a whole in Masquerade and Other Stories as itself a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence, undertaken by a vulnerable adult. In linguistic terms, the transcendence at which it aims is, surely, the sort of visionary register to which Bernofsky points when – in her translator’s preface – she quotes from Walser’s ‘Meine Bemühungen’ (‘My Efforts’) of 1928-29. There he comments that in his late work he was ‘experimenting in the linguistic field in the hope that there existed in language an unknown vivacity which it is a pleasure to awaken’. This vivacity is in language but also beyond it, as Walser hinted already in his piece ‘Tableau Vivant’ from 1909. ‘Words won’t venture anywhere near the description of this dynamo. He sings, or something around him seems to be trembling with sounds. Behind the mountains, bells are ringing.’ Walser’s staged tableaux and prose masquerades are also aiming at transcendence in terms of an ideal ‘whole picture’, or ‘dream’, the construction of which they often dramatize. I am thinking here in particular of these marvellous lines in ‘The Aunt’:

‘Gradually I came into the mountains and soon reached an isolated village ringed all around by high crags; this was the birthplace of my mother. It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial. The whole world, and I as well, appeared wonderfully old and young; earth and earthly life were suddenly a dream; I felt everything was perfectly comprehensible, yet also utterly inexplicable.’



Karl Hofer, 'Montagnola' (c. 1930)

What better description could there be of the goal of Jaspers’ hermeneutic process working towards (in Thornhill’s words) ‘a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’? Walser here captures the existential uncertainty – the sense of the ‘utterly inexplicable’ – which, for Jaspers, accompanies any decisive hermeneutic bid for a transcendental cognitive unity at the limit of knowledge. As Thornhill observes in Karl Jaspers, whilst Heidegger argued that language (as Thornhill puts it) ‘defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world’, and thus ‘expressly excludes all ideal components from experience’, Jaspers by contrast maintained that language ‘always positions human consciousness in a relation (albeit existentially uncertain) to its primary ideal unity (its transcendence), and it thus permits an ideal/practical disclosure of this unity’. Thornhill, moreover, describes Jaspers' implicit fusion of Hamannian hermeneutics and Kantian epistemology by referring to Jaspers’ view of revelation or transcendence as mere ‘appearance’ – a term which seems to parallel Walser’s ‘whole picture’ or ‘dream’:

‘The hermeneutic of revelation […] has its profound validity in its ability to signal that the ideal limits of cognition do not reflect the absolute limits of being itself. Nonetheless, with Kant, Jaspers also argues that transcendence can only be knowable as a mere appearance of the possible unity of knowledge: true transcendence, thus, is inevitably beyond the limits of human thought.’

Walser’s lines in ‘The Aunt’, therefore, seem to me to exemplify what Jaspers would call an aesthetic cipher. Ciphers, though also decisive ‘moments of experience, embedded and disclosed in human historical life’, are for Jaspers (as Thornhill writes) ‘only the fleeting appearance of guiding ideas – akin to Kant’s transcendental ideas – which give shape to, but do not encompass, the ultimate underlying unity of human life and knowledge’. For Jaspers a truthful hermeneutic of ciphers ‘always also requires a critical-epistemological approach’ – Thornhill emphasizes – which with Kant and against Hamann, posits God as ‘an “idea”, which illuminates the limits of human consciousness, but which is never the realized experience of human transcendence’. (Walser: ‘It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial.’) Thornhill sees that for Jaspers, it is indeed ‘only because the idea of God is not the experience [but the] appearance of transcendence that it is interpretable as transcendence’. As I have argued elsewhere, you could say that mere appearance lends the quality of definition (or decision) to Jaspers’ visionary hermeneutics – in Thornhill’s words, ‘it is the (epistemological) recognition of the limits of human knowledge which makes the (hermeneutical) disclosure of transcendence, in ciphers, so radical and truthful’.

Vortex Out of German London

I am glad to announce that ‘Vortex Out of German London’, a long essay of mine from 2006, is now published in the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, 3 (2012), 28-66. A copy of the final proofs is available to read here.

Focussing in particular on the involvement in Anglo-German cultural phenomena which characterizes both the Vorticist-period radical culture in London and contemporary neo-Vorticist activity, my article documents points of affinity between the visionary sensibilities of a range of ‘extraterritorial’ cultural phenomena across the twentieth century: Vorticism, the ‘Lukács circle’ and Expressionism around the First World War, along with the London neo-Vorticism developed by Iain Sinclair and Brian Catling during the mid-1970s and after. In the article I argue that the floating social position, as well as the visionary perspective and strategies, adopted by these extraterritorial avant-gardes is of considerable relevance to today’s intellectual life – a condition increasingly riven by reliance on the short-term academic contract and random redundancy. I conclude that the vitalist primitivism of Vorticism, laid out first by Lewis in Blast, leads the aesthetic to occupy a place within a traceable lineage of visionary London writing concerned with the modern citizen’s spiritual passion. This explains why Vorticism interfaces with the exilic modernist sensibility developed within central Europe, which similarly fused romantic anti-capitalism with a magical perspective.

If I were writing the article now I would probably seek to derive its existentialist content from Karl Jaspers rather than Siegfried Kracauer – but, in its belated appearance now, my work drawing on Kracauer does at least chime with what seems to be a tiny Kracauer vogue at the moment (given the current New Formations devoted to him and Graeme Gilloch’s long-awaited monograph out at the end of the month).