Either / Or concludes with Judge William offering the transcript of sermon he received from a friend who is a minister. William is convinced that this sermon reflects what he had been straining towards in his letter (which is what all of vol 2 is considered). The minister has yet to preach this sermon but believes in time that he will be able to have his entire congregation understand it “for the beauty of the universal consists precisely in the fact that all can understand it.”
Category: 04 – either/or – b
The self as choice . . . the choice to impregnate yourself that is
This weekend I finished Kierkegaard’s Either / Or. A major theme in the ethical ‘Or’ of Either / Or is the role of choice.
But what is it I choose? Is it this thing or that? No, for I choose absolutely, and the absoluteness of my choice is expressed precisely by the fact that I have not chosen to choose this or that. I choose the absolute. And what is the absolute? It is I myself in my eternal validity. Anything else but myself I never can choose as the absolute, for if I choose something else, I choose it as a finite thing and so do not choose it absolutely. Even the Jew who chose God did not choose it absolutely, for he chose, indeed, the absolute, but did not choose it absolutely, and thereby it ceased to be the absolute and became a finite thing.
. . .
This self which he then chooses is infinitely concrete, for it is in fact himself, and yet it is absolutely distinct form his former self, for he has chosen it absolutely. This self did not exist previously, for it came into existence by means of the choice, and yet it did exist, for it was in fact ‘himself.’
In this case choice performs at one and the same time the two dialectical movements: that which is chosen does not exist and comes into existence with the choice; that which is chosen exists , otherwise there would not be a choice.
This strikes me as a tremendously pivotal move in Kierkegaard’s work. The notion of ‘self’ will be picked up again with greater rigour in The Sickness Unto Death but here we must also remember that Kierkegaard is still trying to awaken, to disturb, to move. These are not his ‘direct’ religious writings. It is easy to see that as Kierkegaard’s work was slowly translated into German and English that these sort of passages were developed into the type of ‘individualism’ that existentialism became known for. However, even in this section Kierkegaard has no interest in the unique individual instead Kierkegaard demands the dialectic of the individual which is both absolutely singular and universal. In following page he writes,
Therefore it requires courage for a man to choose himself; for at the very time when it seems that isolates himself most thoroughly he is most thoroughly absorbed in the root by which he is connected with the whole.
This then culminates not in the maxim of ‘knowing yourself’ but in the admonishment to ‘choose yourself’. Though he admits if he wanted to be clever he would say that we must ‘know’ ourselves as Adam knew Eve.
By the individual’s intercourse with himself he impregnates himself and brings himself to birth.
I’ll let my distinguished readers unpack that one.
Danger afoot
What with life and all I am starting to fall just a little behind in my Kierkegaard reading schedule. I was hoping to keep the pace around two volumes a month. While I am almost finished volume two of Either / Or I am not excited about pushing myself further behind the eight ball. The second volume is picking up. Part of the interest is the way my mind continues to move about with regards to Kierkegaard’s own authorship. What does Kierkegaard himself mean by what he has Judge William say? A terrible question I know but what is wonderful is that despite all the layers that have been revealed with respect to Kierkegaard’s intention and life (including his own reflections) there a remains a movement, a dialectic, inherent within his authorship that continues to aid his project. I can only imagine the way these pseudonyms aided in his own process of understanding and development. I am glad we are give access to the process.
About half way through this volume there is a great section on choice which in many ways frames the whole notion of ‘either/or’. The aesthetic mode is about immediacy (no choice) or multiplicity (also no choice) but ethics becomes the beginning, the first choice; not the choice between ethics and aesthetics but the choice that there is a choice. In any event here are a few excerpts I enjoyed.
Think of the captain on his ship at the instant when it has to come about. He will perhaps be able to say, ‘I can either do this or that’; but in case he is not a pretty poor navigator, he will be aware at the same time that the ship is all the while making its usual headway, and that therefore it is only an instant when it is indifferent whether he does this or that. So it is with a man. If he forgets to take account of the headway, there comes at last an instant when there no longer is any question of an either/or, not because he has chosen but because he has neglected to choose, which is equivalent to saying, because others have chosen for him, [that] he has lost his self.
. . .
For me the instant of choice is very serious, not so much on account of the rigorous cogitation involved in weighing the alternatives, not on account of the multiplicity of thoughts which attach themselves to every link in the chain, but rather because there is danger afoot, danger that the next instant it may not be equally in my power to choose.
David CL Driedger 