The Dialectical Self

Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject

Jamie Aroosi

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780812295610
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard are both major figures in nineteenth-century Western thought, they are rarely considered in the same conversation. Marx is the great radical economic theorist, the prophet of communist revolution who famously claimed religion was the "opiate of the masses." Kierkegaard is the renowned defender of Christian piety, a forerunner of existentialism, and a critic of mass politics who challenged us to become "the single individual." But by drawing out important themes bequeathed them by their shared predecessor G. W. F. Hegel, Jamie Aroosi shows how they were engaged in parallel projects of making sense of the modern, "dialectical" self, as it realizes itself through a process of social, economic, political, and religious emancipation.In The Dialectical Self, Aroosi illustrates that what is traditionally viewed as opposition is actually a complementary one-sidedness, born of the fact that Marx and Kierkegaard differently imagined the impediments to the self's appropriation of freedom. Specifically, Kierkegaard's concern with the psychological and spiritual nature of the self reflected his belief that the primary impediments to freedom reside in subjectivity, such as in our willing conformity to social norms. Conversely, Marx's concern with the sociopolitical nature of the self reflected his belief that the primary impediments to freedom reside in the objective world, such as in the exploitation of the economic system. However, according to Aroosi, each thinker represents one half of a larger picture of freedom and selfhood, because the subjective and objective impediments to freedom serve to reinforce one another.By synthesizing the writing of these two diametrically opposed figures, Aroosi demonstrates the importance of envisioning emancipation as a subjective, psychological, and spiritual process as well as an objective, sociopolitical, and economic one. The Dialectical Self attests to the importance and continued relevance of Marx and Kierkegaard for the modern imagination.

PART I

BONDAGE

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

The self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.

—Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death

Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can’t I say that, Willy?

—Biff Loman, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Labour-power is a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to the capitalist. Why does he sell it? It is in order to live.

—Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital

CHAPTER 1

SELFHOOD

The Non-Identity of the Self

At the heart of Hegel’s philosophy lies an elegant theory of subjectivity, and it is against this backdrop that Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the self can best be understood. Most directly expounded in the passage on “Lordship and Bondage” from The Phenomenology of Spirit, for Hegel, it is through a process of recognition that individuals develop into the self-conscious beings that we essentially are.¹ In other words, our fundamental nature resides in our potential for self-consciousness, but it is only in recognizing ourselves as self-conscious beings that this potential is actualized. So, while Hegel argues that self-consciousness is the uniquely distinguishing feature of the human species, he also realizes that it is a quality that necessarily unfolds over time. After all, while we might be born with the potential to become self-conscious, it is only when we use our consciousness to apprehend the truth of ourselves—that is, when we self-consciously recognize ourselves as self-conscious beings—that this potential becomes an actuality.

However, for Hegel, the actualizing of this potential does not happen in a vacuum, but in relation to another self-consciousness. Specifically, it is in perceiving an other, and in being perceived by that other, that our self-consciousness emerges.² As Hegel writes, “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”³ While this confrontation initially develops as a struggle for dominance, with one individual “being only recognized, [and] the other only recognizing,” it is through the dialectical experience of being both recognized and recognizing that our self-consciousness emerges, because self-consciousness entails both of these positions.⁴ After all, as self-consciousness, we are both subject (recognizers) and object (the recognized); or, as Axel Honneth would write of Hegel (using terms borrowed from George Herbert Mead), human beings are both an “I” and a “me.”⁵

Hegel’s insight partially lies in recognizing that we live through the ideas that we have of ourselves. While philosophers had previously relied on a similar conceptual apparatus to argue for the necessity of developing new and truer ways of seeing ourselves—for instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s citoyen—the full significance of Hegel’s insight lies in his ability to abstract from any particular content that we might use for our self-definition (i.e., for our identity), in favor of identifying this very process as constitutive of the self. That is, rather than willing particular identities into existence, even if they are identities as universal as “citizen,” it is our very potential for doing so—our self-consciousness—that constitutes our fundamental nature. Consequently, the challenge of self-actualization resides in learning to see ourselves for the self-conscious creatures that we are rather than for the specific identities to which we might subscribe. Moreover, Hegel imagines the unfolding of this process as the activity of spirit, which unfolds not only on the temporal scale of our own individual lives, but also at the world-historical scale, as world cultures progressively arrive at a truer understanding of themselves too.⁶ Ultimately, at the end of this process, we arrive at authentic rather than alienated selves, because in arriving at a true understanding of ourselves, we reconcile ourselves as both subjects and objects. That is, our “I” and our “me” become one and the same, because we have finally recognized ourselves for what we are—self-conscious beings.

With this in mind, we can turn to Kierkegaard. In his mature work, The Sickness unto Death, penned under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, we find his own definition of the self that is replete with Hegelian undertones. For Kierkegaard, “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; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”⁷ Kierkegaard is clearly appropriating Hegelian language in his understanding of selfhood, which is a departure from his usual writing style, as Kierkegaard typically writes with a style that is both personal and metaphorical, rather than Hegel’s impersonal and abstract style. However, whereas Hegel deploys this language in the interest of philosophical clarity, Kierkegaard’s use of it is more strategic, and helps reveal a significant difference with Hegel.

To begin, Kierkegaard equates selfhood with spirit, as does Hegel, and further equates both with “a relation that relates itself to itself.”⁸ The language of relation is clearly a reference to self-consciousness, insofar as self-consciousness entails a relationship between ourselves as a subject and as an object, between our “I” and our “me.” More simply, when we think about ourselves, we are both the thinker and that about which we are thinking, and so, a relation exists. And this relation constitutes the structure of self-consciousness. Thus far, Kierkegaard has hardly strayed from Hegel.

However, immediately following this brief Hegelian introduction, Kierkegaard corrects himself and begins charting his difference with Hegel. And so, rather than continuing with his equation of self-consciousness and selfhood, he withdraws this earlier definition and clarifies that “the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”⁹ And in redefining the self as the relation’s “relating,” Kierkegaard is trying to draw our attention to the volitional nature of self-consciousness.¹⁰ That is, in relating ourselves to ourselves, our “I” to our “me,” Kierkegaard does not see the self in any of the self-definitions we might apply to ourselves (our self does not reside in the relation); instead, he sees it in the agency driving the very activity of self-consciousness (the relation’s relating). In other words, there is will behind self-consciousness, and it is in this will that selfhood resides. However, even in this we can find a Hegelian influence, insofar as Hegel’s notion of spirit evokes the generative activity driving the process of self-understanding forward, both in biographical and world-historical time.¹¹ And so, substantively, Kierkegaard has yet to stray far from Hegel.¹²

Where we begin to find the emergence of a larger difference resides in Kierkegaard’s use of the word “not.” Kierkegaard could have begun his definition of the self with what he takes to be the correct definition—“the relation’s relating”—but he does not. Instead, he begins with a faulty definition and then corrects it. While it has been argued that Kierkegaard is invoking this phraseology as an ironic parody of Hegel’s thought, against whom it is believed he is arguing, it is hard to support this position given that his corrected definition of the self as the “relation’s relating” remains quite Hegelian, if the stress is placed on activity rather than consciousness.¹³ Instead, Kierkegaard’s decision relates to the role that this negation plays in regards to his readers. That is, rather than attempting to offer a philosophically coherent definition of the self (which he nonetheless does offer), Kierkegaard is instead using language to draw his readers’ attention to their own self. And this refusal of the standard method of speculative philosophy has important philosophical significance.

As we will see in subsequent chapters, Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian thought—and German idealism, more broadly—lies less with its substance and more with its form.¹⁴ Unlike the project of philosophical understanding that preoccupied Hegel, Kierkegaard represents a Socratic turn toward the project of self-knowledge.¹⁵ Yet, in many ways, Kierkegaard draws upon Hegel (and Kant, among others) for the content of his understanding of subjectivity, while changing the form, so that his works are less concerned with offering a coherent speculative philosophy than they are with provoking self-knowledge among his audience.¹⁶ And in this passage on the self, we can see evidence of this.

First, Kierkegaard does not use the language of “self-consciousness” to speak of self-consciousness but instead writes of “a relation that relates itself to itself.”¹⁷ Whereas the former term might not engender any self-reflection due to its succinctness and philosophical clarity, that which is signified by Kierkegaard’s chosen phrase is not at all clear. As a result, readers must reflect on themselves in order to determine that to which it applies, and can only understand it when they identify the process of self-consciousness—the relation—within themselves. Second, by first drawing his readers’ attention to their own self-consciousness, he then negates that definition, but only to draw their attention to something that lies hidden beneath. That is, he draws their attention to the relation’s “relating,” or to the active dimension propelling their self-consciousness along. Had Kierkegaard used the standard terminology of German idealism, his readers might not have engaged in self-reflection at all, but in choosing the language that he does, the only way to understand Kierkegaard is through such a process of self-reflection.

Following this initial description of the self, Kierkegaard continues and offers substantive content to fill in his definition by arguing that human beings are comprised of a synthesis of several pairings of qualities that our self, as relational, relates. These qualities are “the infinite and the finite . . . the temporal and the eternal . . . [and] freedom and necessity,” to which he soon thereafter adds the duality of “the psychical and the physical.”¹⁸ In their substance, these qualities will be explored in later chapters, but what is important for now is the way that Kierkegaard describes the relationship between them.¹⁹ First, he writes, “In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity,” while also indicating that such a self is not quite a self.²⁰ This becomes clearer if we look at the last example he offered, that between the physical and the psychical, where he writes that “under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation.”²¹ Here, Kierkegaard is referring to the duality of mind and body by pointing out that most apparent syntheses between our mind and our body are actually “relations” we are effecting in our mind. That is, rather than truly synthesizing our constituent elements, we merely construct an intellectual idea—a self-identity—in which we imagine that they are synthesized. And this relationship, or idea about ourselves, is merely a “negative unity” in which “a human being is still not a self.”²²

However, as Kierkegaard continues, if “the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.”²³ Here, we get to the essence of Kierkegaard’s thought and to a process that will preoccupy much of the present work. For Kierkegaard, the type of selfhood we have as a consequence of merely existing is a minimal (or negative) form of selfhood. In contrast, true selfhood, positive selfhood, only emerges through an existential act of self-appropriation that many commentators have come to refer to as the activity of “self-choice.”²⁴ This should not be confused with the types of choices with which we are usually presented, such as those that relate to courses of action or even matters of belief or identity. For Kierkegaard, underlying them all is a more fundamental choice pertaining to the very way in which we relate to ourselves. It is a choice prior to the types of choices with which we are usually concerned, but it is a choice that provides the underlying foundation on which those later choices are made.

To better see this choice, it helps to return to Kierkegaard’s definition of the self as the “relation’s relating” and to Kierkegaard’s use of negation in arriving at it. Unlike other aspects of selfhood, it is impossible to focus our conscious attention on a self that is essentially a verb. That is, to see the relation’s relating, we have to look past the specific activities in which our self-consciousness is engaged, such as the particular identities through which we might be seeing ourselves, so that we can identify that there is a willfulness to our doing so. In other words, the relation’s relating is not found in any of the particular content that occupies our self-conscious relation to ourselves, but is instead found in the fact that we can identify a sense of agency behind them. Therefore, rather than focusing our gaze on the substantive content that we identify as constituting ourselves, Kierkegaard instead asks us why we have identified ourselves in this way, because it is this question that directs our attention to an underlying agency. And by learning to ask this question, we can begin to see that the willful activity of our self-consciousness might be motivated by reasons that are psychological and spiritual rather than ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. The Dialectical Self
• Part I. Bondage
• Part II. Emancipation
• Part III. Freedom
• Part IV. Praxis
• Conclusion. Love and Revolution
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments