Category: eternity

Calculating rightly

Do you ever have stretches of time where life as life exerts itself on you as a force that pulls, strains or simply weighs down?  There are no immediate pressures in life that are causing the pressure, rather it seems to come as a whole.  I ask this seriously because while I see others express similar experiences I don’t assume that it is so for many people.  Sometimes I think this is a condition of privilege; that I have a certain leisure to sit with and entertain such thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes I think this is a condition of arrogance; that I can account for the variables of life and attempt to create and navigate a true course and understanding.  So in no ways do I assume this is a healthy experience or one that can be characterized as indicating some profound nature (though in saying this I of course am tempted to view it as such).  This was simply the best way that I could characterize much of last week.  I was absentminded and removed though in some ways more attuned to what was going on around me.  I looked out and saw meaningless, well, maybe not quite.  I saw arbitrary meaning.  I could not discern and adjudicate the possible meanings.  They swirled, arose, and died again around me.  They taunted me asking which meaning I would choose.  Is this a false option?  Is this an incorrect framing of the question and circumstances?

Towards the end of Kierkegaard’s final published writings he speaks at length about the Instant or Moment (depending on translation).  Kierkegaard believes that humans are a synthesis of the finite and infinite and therefore can never exist as settled.  To do so is to collapse (as if that were possible) or at least tune out the dialectic.  The Instant is the in-breaking of the eternal.  It is a qualitatively difference expression then what all the resources of the finite are able to muster.  But our applied resources are just that.  We cannot speak, think, or act beyond the finite.  So Kierkegaard speaks of the ‘leap’, though from what I can remember he does not use this expression (to leap) in his writings on the Instant.  Rather he says this,

The Instant is when the man [sic] is there, the right man, the man of the Istant.

This is a secret which eternally will remain hidden from all worldly shrewdness, from everything which is only to a certain degree.

Worldly shrewdness stares and stares and stares at events, at circumstances, it reckons and reckons, thinking that it might be able to distill the Instant out of the circumstances, and so become itself a power by the aid of the Instant, this breaking through of the eternal, hoping that itself might be rejuvenated, as it so greatly needs to be, by means of the new.

But in vain.  Shrewdness does not succeed and never will to all eternity succeed by means of this surrogate.

No, only when the man is there, and when he ventures as one must venture (which is precisely what worldly shrewdness and mediocrity want to avoid), then is the Instant – and the circumstances then obey the man of the Instant.

. . .

For the Instant is precisely that which does not lie in the circumstances, it is the new thing, the woof of eternity – but that same second it masters the circumstances to such a degree that (adroitly calculated to fool worldly shrewdness and mediocrity) it looks as if the Instant proceeded from the circumstances.

There is nothing worldly shrewdness so broods over and so hankers after as the Instant.  What would it not give to be able to calculate rightly!

– The Instant  no. 10

In some ways that comes close to framing my experience last week.  There is always this grasping.  But the nature of the grasping does not seem to understand what it is grasping at.  I continue to read and reflect on accounts that I admit to complexity but implicitly or explicitly render formulas for personal or social change.  Can I believe that circumstances will obey the person of the Instant?

To what extent is this experience also an internal condition to a particular strand of the Christian tradition, that is existential angst?  Is it helpful to even speak of a human condition on these matters?  Sure I could retire into the refrain of the Preacher of Ecclesiastes but how satisfying is that and how much does it reveal that I need to be satisfied in this process?  Is this simply by definition a transitional experience that happens prior to another stasis, or just a rhythm of a larger pattern?

From here is eternity

I have not posted recently on my Kierkegaard reading.  Things continue to progress more or less on target.  I am currently in the middle of Christian Discourses.  I continue to have a mild reception to most of his religious writings.  The first section of CD comes off as firmly okay.  It is essentially an exploration of how living in light of eternity creates a reversal of popular (temporary) understanding.  So wealth and poverty are inverted, gain is loss, strength is weakness, etc.  There is nothing wrong with this approach in itself and there are moments of insight in Kierkegaard’s thinking here.  For instance when Kierkegaard develops the inversion of wealth and poverty he does so by demonstrating the nature of wealth.

Riches are indeed a possession, but actually or essentially to possess something of which the essential feature is losableness or that it can be lost is just as impossible as to sit down and yet walk – at least thought cannot get anything in its head except that this must be a delusion.  If, namely, losability is an essential feature of riches, then it is obvious that no essential change has occurred when it is lost, no essential change occurs in it by being lost.  Therefore, it is essentially the same, but then it is indeed also essentially the same while I possess it – it is lost – because it must indeed be essentially the same at every moment.  Lost, it is essentially the same; possessed, it is essentially the same, is lost; that is, in a deeper sense it cannot be possessed. (28)

A key element of how Kierkegaard energizes this dialectic is the role of eternity.  Eternity for Kierkegaard is a mode or posture of approaching the world.  In one key passage Kierkegaard describes how eternity creates a way of being more present as opposed to a future or spiritualized orientation.  In this section Kierkegaard is referring to self-torment as the next day.

The one who rows a boat turns his back to the goal toward which he is working.  So it is with the next day.  When, with the help of the eternal, a person lives absorbed in today, the decisively he turns his back to the next day; then he does not see it all.  When he turns around, the eternal becomes confused before eyes and becomes the next day.  But when, in order to work toward the goal (eternity) properly, he turns his back, he does not see the next day at all, whereas with the help of the eternal he sees today and its tasks with perfect clarity.  But if the work today is to be done properly, a person must be turned in this way.  It is always delaying and distracting impatiently to want to inspect the goal every moment, to see whether on is coming a little closer, and then again a little closer.  No, be forever and earnestly resolute; then you turn wholeheartedly to the work – and your back to the goal.  This is the way one is turned when one rows a boat, but so also is on positioned when one believes.  One might think that the believer would be most distanced from the eternal, he who has completely turned his back and is living today, whereas the glimpser stands and looks for it.  And yet the believer is closest of all to the eternal, whereas the apocalypt is most distanced from the eternal, then the next day becomes a monstrous confused figure, like that in a fairytale.  Just like those daimons we read about in the book of Genesis who begot children with mortal women, the future is a monstrous daimon the begets the next day. (74)