Adam Smith, the City, Natural Order, Republicanism

Primary version if this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

At the end of Book III, Chapter 1, ‘Of the Natural Progress of Opulence’, of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith refers to a unnatural and retrograde order. What he means is the inversion of a natural progress from agriculture, to manufacture to international commerce. That natural progress is the progress from improvements in agriculture which allow the formation of towns and investments in manufacture, and a similar progress to international trade.

The unnatural event takes place in European cities where international trade has introduced new luxuries to cities. These luxuries influence domestic manufacturers who compete in that new market, and that further influences agriculture.

I’ve mentioned dialectic in Smith a few times, and Smith as bringer of dialectic into his definitive work on political economy. The idea of an unnatural order is either a break down of dialectic, or a suggestion that dialectic leads to rigid unifying forms. Writing about Pascal and Smith as dialecticians yesterday, I suggested that Pascal’s form of dialectic is more contradictory, more concerned with paradox than Smith’s. Kierkegaard also provides a model of a more paradoxical kind of dialectic, he had a good phrase for it, dialectic of the absurd.

Smith is shocked by something that is clearly inevitable, I would have thought. That is the feedback consequences of a long historical process, so that ‘older’ forms of wealth are influenced by the older forms. There is a moralism here about the influence of ‘luxuries’, not that Smith ever thinks it would be a good idea to try to restrict them. At an earlier point in The Wealth of Nations, Smith even recognises the positive impact of the wealth of towns on the surrounding countryside. He also suggests that an alliance between monarchs and cities in the Middle Ages was a good thing in hastening the end of feudalism, and the increase in free trade.

The moralism about cities appears in a slightly different form with regard to cities which are centres of political power. Smith refers to the huge waste of a royal court and its hangers on which outweighs even the wealth produced by Paris. At another point, Smith mentions the expense of royal courts and back tracks to refer to the honourable role of high royal servants. I’m disposed to believe that Smith was a covert critic of royalty. From that point of view, it;s interesting that in the discussion of the Navigation acts he repeatedly refers to what he normally calls Holland, also known then as the Dutch Republic, as the ‘maritime republic’. Smith strongly hints that royal courts continue the tradition of wasteful expenditure on hangers on, which is wealth diverted from investment, in nomad princes and the like.

The implied criticism of royal expenditure, and of the institution itself, is rather mingled with moralising about the sort of people to be found round royal courts. That lurking republicanism is maybe associated with the less rational dislike of the inversion of nature, since royal expenditure might be regarded as the diversion of economic capacity, occasioned by a premature entry of luxury goods from another country,

This odd outrage at countries which don’t follow economic stages in the right order, is in tensions with the feedback processes Smith otherwise values; and his general feeling that trade should be left alone, except where really very strong moral and national interests are at stake. It also suggests a limitation in the understanding of ‘nature’ at the time, which has natural theology somewhere within it, that is the view that everything in nature moves forward in orderly stages to an end ordained by God. I don’t think that notion is really abandoned, in general, until Nietzsche, and then later in the 19th Century when Darwinism became neo-Darwinism, and when the laws of thermodynamics led to a cultural interest in entropy in nature.

Pascal at the beginning of Modern Philosophy

Primary version of this post, with visual content, is at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

The question of where modern philosophy begins is clearly not answerable, There’s always an earlier precedent for what someone has said, or a later really significant step beyond archaic residues, But let’s at least not just passively assume that modern philosophy began with Descartes. Even in Descartes’ time, Antoine Arnauld pointed out precedents for in Augustine for Descartes’ Cogito, in his ‘Fourth Objection’ to the Meditations on the First Philosophy (fourth of five ‘authorised’ objections to the Meditations printed with Descartes’ reply as an appendix). Of course it was Arnauld that Pascal was defending from his religious enemies, in The Provincial Letters. Søren Kierkegaard pointed out the paradoxes around saying that philosophy became modern in Descartes, as if philosophy was not claiming to be atemporal, and as if it could be reinvented again from nothing, in Johannes Climacus. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger suggested the idebtedness of Descartes to his contemporary, the late Scholastic Francisco Suárez, somewhat messing up Descartes’ claims to have put the Scholastics in their place. Kierkegaard’s point rather undermines the discussion I have proposed, but I think Kierkegaard appreciated that we have to periodise; as always he wanted to show the inherent paradoxes of knowledge, and the absurdity of some of the formulations of Descartes’ place.

It could be Suárez, it could be Francis Bacon, it could be Montaigne, no doubt there are other contenders, so why Pascal?

1. Pascal might be the first to really give a sense that the human individual grasps itself as alien to the universe.

2. Pascal might be the first to give the sense that human nature is contradictory (between passion and reason, between reason and the senses, between mind and body), and not in a way which can be resolved by balance, moderation, or the sovereignty of reason.

3. Pascal might be the first to break with Antique notions, still very present in Montaigne and Descartes, of moderation, balance, and tranquillity, as achievable and as guiding principles for ethics and rationality.

4. Pascal might be the first to give the sense that human individual grasps itself as a concrete, particular existence preceding description or any particular perception.

5. Pascal might be the first to give a really strong sense of how different the universe is after New Science from older conceptions, when he talks about infinitely large and small, for example.

6. Pascal might be the first to give a really strong sense of humans as alien to nature.

7. Pascal may have taken a big step in scepticism beyond his predecessors. There are various ways in which Pascal picks up on sceptical elements in Ancient philosophy, and in Montaigne and Descartes. But he gets beyond the sense the earlier scepticism always has of offering a cure for illusion in a healthy life style, Scepticism is traumatic in Pascal and tied in with the trauma inherent to human existence. For Descartes scepticism cannot affect actions.

8. Pascal’s Wager might be the first bit of economic reasoning about action, an account of the trade off of benefits and costs in believing in God. It’s missing the point to think this argument is about proof of God’s existence or proof of the grounds of faith. It theorises choices and actions as guided by calculations about costs and benefits, though it looks at the conscious level it hints at the power of that at the habitual level, because the wager is about how you form a habit of belief.

9. Though Pascal takes the idea of ‘mystic foundation of law’ from Montaigne, he really creates the idea that law is absolutely and inherently unjust and violent in principle, not just in application, as I suggested in Sunday’s post.

Philosophy and Literature: Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge

A recent rereading of Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge has inspired a view thoughts about philosophy and literature.

It is a novel which is particularly close to tragedy, as define dby Aristotle in The Poetics, a hero falls in the world and endures suffering as the result of an error of judgement. As a novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge repeats the situation in a structure more complex than tragedy. An Aristotelian terms. a repeated tragedy within an epic. The tight structure of tragedy is repeated across a work with the episodic associational structure of epic.

The tragic falls: Henchard sells his wife while drunk and angry with her; Henchard ruins himself later when he is a wealthy farmer and a mayor, by engaging in a reckless attempt to win a commercial battle with his ex-friend and manager Donald Farfrae; he misses the chance to marry his ex-girlfriend before Farfrae wins her over; he misses the chance to tell his step-daughter Elizabeth-Jane that he is not her biological father when he finds out himself: he misses the chance to tell the truth to Elizabeth-Jane and her biological father. He goes through many little falls due to his self-destructive character leading to our next topic.

The hero Michael Henchard has many 'anti-hero' qualities. He is a loner and is disposed to arbitrary destructive and self-destructive acts. He is a Dostoevskian character in this sense, and has some resemblance with the heroes of Knut Hansun, themselves presumably drawing on Dostoevsky. Like Dostoevskey's characters he tends to promote scandal. One memorable example is his attempt to welcome a member of the Royal Family to Dorchester after he has fallen from being mayor and is a rather disreputable laboourer.

The anti-hero, I believe, receives its classical description and theorisation in Lukacs' Theory of the Novel. Lukacs refers to the growing contradiction in the novel between the hero and the world. The hero does not see herself in the world and cannot follow the laws of the world. There is an opposition between subjectivity and the world. The hero can increasingly only exist as insane or criminal. In this argument, the anti-hero is the necessary hero of the novel since Cervantes.

The Dostoevskian aspects of Henchard, irritability, irrationality, self-destruction, provocation of scandal, excessive pride coexisting with excessive humility, draw us towards Bakhtin"s discussion of the novel through Dostoevsky in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Bakhtin emphasises all these aspects of Dostoevsky in a discussion of what he takes to be the ideal form of the novel in Dostoevsky. The most Bakhtinian concern is the provocation of scandal and that leads us to the preoccupations of Rabelais and his World. Famously Bakhtin there dwells on the carnivalesque as an important moment in popular culture until recent times, referring to festival moments where social hierarchy is inverted, and power is mocked. The rise of Henchard from labourer to mayor and rich farmer, and his subsequent fall to labourer again has this structure in general. One moment in the novel particularly suggest the Carnivalesque. This is the 'skimmity ride' in which disreputable local characters humiliate a couple in the novel. In general the Skimmity Ride is a rural practice of mocking a couple where the wife does not 'belong' wholly to the husband. In this case they the locals parade large dummies of Henchard and his ex-girlfriend Lucetta. The intention is to humiliate Lucetta and her husband Donald Farfrae. The consequence is that Lucetta miscarries and dies. This is the Carnivalesque as a festival of resentment, rather then the neo-Marxist reading of Bakhtin in which the Carnival is the release of popular radical energies. In this case, the mocking of power is clearly an example of evil, and is described in terms of every kind of economic, social and psychological resentment coming to the surface. It very much suggests Rousseau on self-love and imagination, and Nietzsche on ressentiment.

In its tragic aspects, Hardy's novel seems to confirm Hegel and Kierkegaard's analysis of the difference between Ancient and Modern Tragedy. Ancient Tragedy refers to the burden of fate carried by a family or a nation , it refers to pollution that afflicts the hero which comes from an unconscious or inherited transgression of boundaries. In Modern Tragedy, the hero bears all this alone from deliberate willed decision. Henchard demonstrates a strong sense of unbearable guilt not just at his actions, but at his who,e existence. The novel ends with his desire to be forgotten. Elizabeth-Jane is left to reflect in a more measured novellistic way on the burdens of existence, so tragic elements are modified by the novellistic which presents a whole world or varied fortunes. The tragic elements also have to be seen in terms of Schopenhauer, whose philosophy Hardy knew,a s did many literary writers of the time. Henchard's sense of the futility of existence is like Schopenhauer. The role of tragedy relates to Schopenhauer, as does the role of music. Henchard is partly destroyed because he normally lacks the music which communicates with his inner self, a view of music clearly taken from Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation.

Kierkegaard and the Danish-Norse Context

Kierkegaaad includes regular, if not very frequent, references to the old pagan Nordic world. Ragnarok, the end of the word and the Norse pantheon, and Loki, the trickster god, feature for example. Loki seems very appropriate to Kierkegaard's own sense of constant irony. Ragnarok is appropriate to the sense of melancholy and anxiety. References to Danish literature are frequent in Kierkegaard, particularly Heiberg, and sometimes Hans Christian Anderson. There is a great sense in some of Kierkegaard's texts of the physical geography of Copenhagen and its surroundings, as in the coach journey featured in the preface to Either/Or I. The criticisms of Hegel establish a Danish perspective on the issues discussed by Hegel. Danish subjectivity is contrasted with German objectivism, though in an indirect way. Kierkegaard certainly creates the sense that Danish Christian thought is marked by the earlier pagan Nordic world. Kierkegaard belongs to the 'Danish Golden Age' which included the institution of Danish as an academic language instead of Latin and as the literate and literary language instead of German. Kierkegaard's texts are full of a struggle with German idealist universalism, and the irreducibility of subjectivity and of particularity to objectivity and universality. Kierkegaard is taking up Germanic tradition: Luther in religion; Kant, Ficthe, Schelling and Hegel in philosophy and creating something focused on individuality. We see Kant from the perspective of Loki and Ragnarok.

Fear and Trembling: Ethics of Marriage

Further thoughts while teaching Kierkegaard.

Marriage and Ethics
What is the topic of Fear and Trembling? Is it the story of Abraham and Isaac? Yes, but we should not be distracted from the other topic. This is the topic defined in the 'Diapslamata' of Either/Or I, in the first sentence of the section on 'Either/Or: An Ecstatic Discourse'

Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way (Princeton University Press, edited and translated by Hong and Hong: 38)

Either/Or I deals with the aesthetic stage in which marriage is to long term in a perspective dominated by the interest of the immediate. Most of Either/Or II deals with the ethical stage, and that is defined by marriage. The ethical stage is presented by Judge William, the aesthetic stage in the fragments of an anonymous young man.

Marriage and the Daemonic
Fear and Trembling deals with the drama of Abraham and Isaac, but in large part it deals with relations between men and women and the possibility of marriage. There is more to be said about Fear and Trembling but will concentrate on the marriage theme which is deeply embedded. It was published in the same year as Either/Or, so we would expect some common themes. Kierkegaard deals with various ways in which the possibility of marriage, and barriers to such a possibility, are presented. In comedies, Kierkegaard gives Danish examples which seem to correspond with Hollywood Romantic Comedies in structure. A barrier to love and marriage is overcome through happy accident. In the more sombre examples, marriage is related to terrible danger. Sarah and Tobit in the Old Testament/Torah book of Tobit, are married despite the deaths of seven previous husbands of Sarah. Faust avoids marriage with Gretchen in Goethe's poem to protect her from his daemonic side. In a very Danish touch, Kierkegaard refers to the story of Agnes and the Merman in Hans Christian Anderson, the story is non-Danish in origin but given that it was published by Anderson and that it fits with various reference Kierkegaard makes to Nordic myths and monsters, we can see it as belonging to the Danish-Nordic element Kierkegaard regularly introduces. Kierkegaard thinks of various possible alternative versions of the story of the girl seduced by a merman. They all deal with the daemonic in the merman.

Kierkegaard discusses various fictional and scriptural examples of the daemonic in the individual coming into conflict with the desire to marry, in a way which relates to Abraham's choice between ethics and obeying God. Abraham's solution is the paradox in which he obeys both, Kierkegaard recommends the same solution for the marriage dilemma. The ethical relation of marriage is threatened by the daemonic within the individual, the daemonic element within makes marriage apparently unethical for that person because it threatens the destruction of the loved person

Ethics and the Absolute Self
Kierkegaard recommends faith that ethics will not be contradicted in marriage, just as Abraham is a hero because he had faith that God's command could be obeyed while remaining within ethics. Ethics must be suspended in order to preserve it. Ethics rests on the absolute, the absolute self, the absolute capacity of the individual for a decision. Ethics is always suspended in relation to that absolute, the necessity of the judging self.

Hegel
By any standards, marriage can be defined as an ethical relation because it requires two people to think of at least one other person, and because it provides a basic structure for the existence of a society based on ethical principles. This is particularly clear if we think of the way Hegel thinks of marriage, it is the first step of the ethical. For Hegel, the ethical is a social form, a form of life as opposed to nature and as opposed to purely individual morality.

In the very first page of 'Problema 1' in Fear and Trembling, Hegel is referred to with regard to individual conscience as evil. In the section on morality and conscience in Philosophy of Right, Hegel refers to individual conscience as evil in its results, because it is purely individual. Opposing the individual to universality can only be evil. Hegel describes a move from morality to ethical life (Sittlichkeit, which is something like the being of ethos/mores), in which individuals are part of universality through marriage, family, civil society, and the state.

Absolute Individual and Marriage
The project announced in Fear and Trembling is that of showing that the individual is higher than the universal but is not evil. That should encourage us to read the Abraham/Isaac story as referring to individuality rather than God. This is very clear with the accounts of marriage dilemmas which in their most serious refer to the daemonic within an individual.

Fear and Trembling deals with the aesthetic individual who is beneath marriage and the absolute individual who is above marriage. The individual as individual is beneath and above the ethical relation or marriage. There is no complete distinction between the aesthetic individual and the absolute individual. The absolute emerges from the aesthetic through the melancholy of mere immediacy.

Islam and Kierkegaard: Abraham and Sacrifice of the Son

I've been teaching Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling recently in Istanbul. One advantage of teaching that text in a Muslim country, is that everyone is familiar with the story of Abraham and Isaac.

For those who don't know it, for Jews and Christians, it is the story in Genesis 22 of Abraham commanded to kill his son Isaac by God. Abraham takes Isaac to the place of Sacrifice, but God relieves him of the sacrifice by revealing a sheep for a substitute sacrifice. Sura 37 of the Koran refers to Abraham/Ibrahim nearly sacrificing his son, which is often interpreted by Muslims as referring to Ishmael rather than Isaac/Isak; and it refers to a great sacrifice rather than a specfic animal but it is always understood as a goat or sheep.

In any case, the story is very familiar because one of the major Muslim festivals is the Sacrifice Festival, which started on the 20th December this year. The Sacrifice Festival includes the ritual sacrifice of sheep, goats, and bulls to commemorate İbrahim's obedience and Allah's offer of the sheep as substitute.


From Kierkegaard's point of view the Koran story is significantly different from the version because Ibrahim tells his son of a vision of the sacrifice, and the son is willing to be sacrificed, so the trial is just as much of the son as the father. Kierkegaard emphasises Abraham no telling Isaac, as part of the emphasis on the silence appropriate to the absurd dialectic, the paradox of faith. The tragic hero may explain the problem, but not the Knight of faith.

Even if Kierkegaard had incorporated the Muslim account, I don't think it would have been too much of a problem. Fear and Trembling includes an account of different possible stories to fill in the very sketchy original story. The possibility that the son is Ishmael not Isaac, and that the son knows of the sacrifice would not change the factors Kierkegaard discusses. It would still be a miraculous son of Abraham's old age, and it could still be the case that Abraham did not tell his wife Sarah (mother of Isaac) of his servant Hagar (mother of Ishmael). Kierkegaard makes up the supposed silence of Abraham anyway, and if the silence was directed towards the mother that would fit with the various painful love stories Kierkegaard brings into Fear and Trembling in comparison with Abraham's story.

Kierkegaard's Epistemology

I'm including some Kierkegaard in an Introduction to Philosophy course, where I concentrate on questions of knowledge. Kierkegaard is not obviously a reference for Epistemology for most people, but I believe he made an important contribution. My teaching is drawing on Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments and on Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est, and that's what I will mostly refer to here.

Kierkegaard against Descartes and Epistemic Scepticism
Kierkegaard questions the method of doubt in philosophy. He contrasts Cartesian doubt with the 'wonder' with which the Ancient Greeks regarded the world. Descartes claims that philosophy begins with doubt. Kierkegaard's reply is that doubt in Descartes is only possible after philosophy has begun. Descartes' method of doubt casts doubt on previous philosophical positions. Wonder better describes a pre-philosophical attitude of curiosity and questioning with regard to the world. Descartes' claim, or implicit claim, that modern philosophy begins with doubt, leaves two unanswered problems: what was philosophy before doubt? From where did the method of doubt originate? In general the idea of philosophy as the appearance of pure doubt in the mind, leaves finite consciousness in a confrontation with the absoluteness of pure doubt. Consciousness cannot grasp such an abrupt intrusion of an external absolute. That is another reason why we need to begin with 'wonder'. With regard to general positions in Epistemology, Kierkegaard is against scepticism. It should follow that he rejects Foundationalist attempts to find pure foundations, beyond doubt, for Epistemology.

Kierkegaard against Hegel and Epistemic Coherentism or Internalism: Definitions
A lot of what Kierkegaard writes in many texts is directed against Hegel. Where Kierkegaard talks about Hegel, he is also referring to earlier Rationalism, particularly Spinoza. We can also take him to be referring to Kant and to the more recent phenomena of Coherentist and Internalist Epistemology; and Analytic Hegelianism. Coherentist Epistemology argues that the criterion for there being a state of knowledge, is that a set of beliefs cohere with each other. Internalism develops from this position, because it argues that there is knowledge where is agreement amongst inner beliefs. Donald Davidson's paper 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge' is probably the best known argument for Coherentism in recent philosophy. Hegel could be taken as a forerunner of Coherentism, certainly the Preface and Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit are open to that interpretation. Hegel is not so clearly an Internalist, because he takes consciousness is general as what knows. The earlier Fichte (first and second editions of the Grundlage der Gesamten Wissenschaftslehere, mistranslated into English as Science of Knowledge) might be a better example of an Internalist in German ıdealist philosophy, a he takes the 'I' as a starting point for philosophy. We might also think of recent 'Analytic Hegelianism' as a kind of Coherentism (thinking particularly of John McDowell and Robert Brandom).

Kierkegaard against Hegel and Epistemic Coherentism or Internalism: The Critique
Kierkegaard asserts that objective knowledge must be a contradiction. What he is referring to here is knowledge as something outside subjectivity. Since it must be the subject that knows, what is know cannot completely stand outside subjectivity according to Kierkegaard. An object of knowledge is known by subjectivity and therefore cannot be absolutely objective. It mus tbe an object for a subject, though that should not be taken to mean that Kierkegaard is a Solipsist. He is an anti-Solipsist since he shows how the subject can have knowledge, if not absolutely objective knowledge. Coherentism is contradictory because we cannot enter the Coherentist circle of mutually supporting beliefs from outside. The beginning of Coherentist Epistemology cannot be epistemic since it does not already have a set of mutually supporting and connecting beliefs. There cannot be a entry into the Coherentist circles accept by weakening the criterion of Coherentism that there should be a complete set of strong mutually justşfying beliefs. Hegel was aware of this problem, as can be seen in his Prefaces and Introductions, where he announces the Preface of Introduction cannot be part of the system. He leaves open the question of why there is a Preface or Introduction. This will not do for Kierkegaard, it is the subject that knows. Hegel gets into the same problem as Descartes: knowledge is such an absolute it is not possible to understand how to enter it, and it is not possible to understand how one contingent consciousness can come into contact and union with it.

Kierkegaard's Epistemic Alternative: Realist and Subjectivist
Fichte. As was pointed out above, the early Fichte could be taken as a proto-Internalist. Indeed Fichtean has been critically examined by a major Analytic philosopher, RobertNozick as contributing to the internal understanding of the 'I'. I hope to return to Nozick and Fichte at a later date. Fichte was certainly very important for Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard paid exhaustive attention to the internal reflections of consciousness. He also pays great attnetion to similar aspects in the work of other German ıdealists, as in theConcept of Anxiety, where he develops Kant's account of the inner traumas free will in Religion within the Bounds of Reason and Schelling's development of that account in the Essence of Human Freedom. Should we see Kierkegaard as an extension of Fichtean Internalism? Kierkegaard strongly criticises Fichte in his first book, his dissertation on The Concept of Irony. The context is irony in literary aesthetics. The starting point here, and in Kierkegaard's later work is an Ironic Subjectivism, in epistemic terms Internalism. However, this is not enough for Kierkegaard.
The Paradox. Like the method of doubt (and foundationalism), and Coherentism, Fictean Subjectivism runs into paradox. The paradox is good for Kierkegaard, it is the passion of paradox. The point though is to make a 'leap' beyond the paradox. It must be emphasised that the phrase 'leap of faith' is never used and that the leap is a twist in dialectical reasoning rather than an irrational unmotivated jump in to the beyond. There must be a dialectical move to surpass paradox, because the concepts must change. The paradox is never left behind, the existence of the paradox and the surpassing of the paradox belong together. Kierkegaard's Epistemology is Subjectivist. It is strongly Subjectivist, because it is based on a double reflection, in which reflective knowledge reflects on its belief that something is the case.
Time. However, Subjective consciousness escapes from the isolated moment of Subjectivity because that double reflection can only be grasped over time, in a moment known as the leap, as the reflection on the paradox that subjective knowledge is not knowledge of the objective. That movement in time establishes the self as existing over time as well as in moment to moment. The self is aware of something permanent in relation to itself, indepedent in relation to itself, but which is within it What is known is Real though Subjective. It does not disappear in a moment because it can be the object of double reflection, and subsequent indirect communication. It is only grasped through those movements. If what is known endures over time, it is Real and can be known to others, and we can communicate this even if only indirectly.

Kierkegaard Against the Ethics of Aristotle

We are concentrating on Fear and Trembling here, which I am teaching in an Ethics course.

For Kierkegaard, Aristotle defines something accurately, that is the Ethics of the Ancient world. In Fear and Trembling, he does this more with reference to Arisotle's Poetics rather than the Nichomachean Ethics, or any other of Aristotle's texts on Ethics.

What Kierkegaard concentrates on in Fear and Trembling is the recognition of the sin of the tragic hero. There is disclosure and recognition through necessity beyond the control of the hero. Oedipus' tragic error is revealed not by his confession but by the plagues which assault Thebes, where he is King.

For Kierkegaard, Aristotle defines a view in which the individual is not responsible for sin. It is the nation, the family or fate. Greek tragedy in Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, shows that a sin is inherited from the family , or fate makes the sin inevitable, as when Oedipus actions to avoid the prophecy of his sin, leads to that sin.

In the modern world, it is clear that the individual is responsible for guilt, bears sin. The idea that ethics may contain conflict between the individual and the universal, for the social good, is replaced by an extreme of individual responsibility. The şissue of sin becomes harder to bear than the ethics derived from social habit in Aristotle.

Ethics must refer to subjectivity, Aristotle detracts from that in his view of humans governed by fate. The difficult situation that must be faced now is the melancholic within. The real anxiety we have to face now, on or own, is the need to have faith which will enable us to endanger another person with our melancholia. We can overcome melancholia as an expression of subjectivity that can only see itself as contingent. That may require silence and an inner suffering, which cannot be explained to another person. The universality of Aristotle's ethics is replace by the bond that exists between the melancholic person and the person who might be a sacrifice to that melancholia. The melancholia that mişght lead us to think, Like Abraham that God has commanded him to kill Isaac . Ethics at its highest rests on a subordination of universal rules to the inner struggle to find the absolute within the contingency of the self.

Ethics at its highest is not obeying rules, it is developing the self that rises above itself in the dialectic of the absurd, in the passion for paradox, with regard to the actions in which the subject becomes ethical in the strongest sense. The self that can be ethical must emerge from the paradoxes of subjectivity. The self that is ethical because it has the capacity to be unethical. Ethics emerges fully when we take the risk that the unethical will destroy in our relations with others.

Philosophical Myths: Kierkegaard never talked about the 'leap of faith'

The Myth
A student presentation today in 'Introduction to Philosophy' brought up that persistent myth again. The myth that Kierkegaard used the phrase 'leap of faith'. The phrase is often attributed to Kierkegaard but was never used by him.

Irrationality and Subjectivism
This is not just some purely accidental slip in the history of philosophy. There are reasons people can believe that Kierkegaard used this phrase. They are based on a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard's philosophy. The misunderstanding is the belief that Kierkegaard was a subjectivist of an irrational kind who thought that beliefs can and should be adopted without reason, particularly the belief that a Christian God exists.

Fear and Trembling
Kierkegaard never held the view that reason should or could be subordinated to irrationality or that faith is a matter of an arbitrary decision. Part of the problem comes from the way that Kierkegaard's most widely read book, Fear and Trembling, is understood.

Abraham's Paradox
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard refers to the story of Abraham and Isaac. That is the story that Abraham is commanded to kill his son Isaac, by God. Abraham is ready to obey God's command, but at the moment Abraham raises his knife, a sheep appears as a substitute sacrifice. This has been understood as if Kierkegaard justifies anyone committing murder who claims to have heard a command from God. The point is that Abraham does not kill Isaac. The story is contrasted, by Kierkegaard, with the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia in Euripides' play Iphigenia in Tauris. Agamemnon does sacrifice his daughter so that he can sail to Anatolia and attack Troy. Abraham has a 'teleological suspension of the ethical'. The 'teleological suspension of the ethical' is not permission to ignore ethics. It refers to the 'dialectic of the absurd, 'dialectic of paradox', according to which Abraham must recognise both the following theses:
1. God is absolute, and is therefore above ethics.
2. God will always follow ethics.

From Subjective to Absolute via Anxiety
The context for this dialectical dilemma is not a motiveless subjectivist view of decisions. Kierkegaard does favour subjectivism over objectivism. It is important to follow the argument.

The argument is that objectivism is contradictory because it requires subjectivity to know what is outside itself, which objectivity must be.

The problem of relating subjectivity to something outside itself is dealt with inside subjectivity. Subjectivity can relate to something outside itself because subjectivity can only exist as what goes outside itself.

The argument starts by looking at subjectivity in a rather Humean way, that is subjectivity as a series of distinct moments in time which have different contents and are unconnected. Subjectivity seeing itself as a series of discrete moments and aware of the freedom which comes from its indeterminacy arrives at melancholy and anxiety. These come from awareness of the nothingness in subjectivity and fear of making a decision when free will exists on a premise of non-determinism which means that decisions lack motivation.

Melancholia exists over time, it is in melancholia that we can grasp ourself as existing over time. We grasp the absolute in subjectivity. That is the basis of God in Kierkegaard, not a motiveless leap of faith. Even in his more pious religious texts, Kierkegaard is coıncerned with how a relaiton with God the absolute rests on a relation of subjectivity with the absolute within itself, Love of the neighbour depends on love of the self.

Positive and Negative Moments in Kierkegaard

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche divides his work between the yes-saying and the no-saying, between creation and critique. The yes-saying includes The Gay Science and Thıs Spoke Zarathustra. The no-saying includes Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality. The recent extreme emphasis on the Genealogy in recent Nietzsche commentary, productive as it has been, is neglecting what place Nietzsche gave to the Genealogy.

Maybe the no-saying and yes-saying applies to Kierkegaard's texts. The no-saying would include the 'pseudonymous aesthetic' texts (Fear and Trembing, Either/Or etc) and at least one signed text, Concept of Anxiety. The yes-saying would be the signed 'religious' texts: Works of Love, Upbuilding Discourses, Without Authority etc. The no-saying texts work though what Kierkegaard rejects, and present the beginning of another perspective. The yes-saying texts give us the exposition of Kierkegaard's values in particular love. There is no need to classify these texts as just 'religious'. They depend on the range of worlds and moods dealt with in the earlier texts. The two groups exist together though not as homogeneous.

Repetition in Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard Commentary
Repetition does not feature much in Kierkegaard commentary. However, it is rather important. There is a book called Repetition and it features heavily in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. This lack of discussion reflects a failure for Kierkegaard commentary to develop properly. This certainly not a comment on the competence of individual commentators, but it is a comment on a tendency to put him in an over restricting framework, where concepts are applied to Kierkegaard without enough attention to how Kierkegaard's thought might challenge those concepts . Over time this has given us: Existentialist Kierkegaard, Postmodern Kierkegaard, Deconstructive Kierkegaard, Literary Kierkegaard, Fideist theological Kierkegaard, Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Theory Kierkegaard.

Repetition and Recollection
A brief consideration of 'Repetition' will hopefully make some small contribution to grasping Kierkegaard himself. 'Repetition' is established in opposition to 'Recollection'. Recollection is presented with reference to Plato's Theory of Recollection from the Meno and the Republic. That is the theory that perceptions of the forms of things are present in our memory, so that knowledge in its fullest sense comes from recollection of those forms.

Metaphysics and Psychology
Kierkegaard suggest that his is a move at the heart of metaphysics. We can think here of Kierkegaard giving a psychological theory for the origin of Platonism and of metaphysics in general, paralleling his explicitly psychological account of Anxiety as essential to free will.

An Alternative to Anxiety and Melancholia
Recollection is a backwards move in which we establish the continuity of the self through orientating our state now to past states. It represents a subordination of subjectivity to objectivity, and a subordination of 'living' to abstraction. Recollection is a backward Repetition. Repetition is a forward recollection in which we live forward, actively repeating the past in order to establish the continuity of self. In this understanding, knowledge emerges from subjectivity instead of an impossible attempt of subjectivity to subordinate itself to objectivity. The relation between subjectivity and objectivity is irreducibly paradoxical for Kierkegaard, but the paradox must be approached from subjectivity because that is our irreducible starting point. Repetition is against the metaphysics which subordinates time to atemporal forms, and tries to crush subjectivity under atemporality. Subjectivity is temporal and time moves in a direction, from past to future. That direction enables Repetition in which past moments are seized in the present in a new context. Repetition is the condition of happiness, so it it provide a structural psychological alternative to his discussions of Anxiety and Melancholia.

Kierkegaard at the Main Event in British Philosophy
Fortunately Kierkegaard will be the subject of a plenary Session of the Joint Society of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, in Aberdeen in July 2008. John Lippett and Michelle Kosch will speak. Given the under developed nature of Kierkegaard commentary
the organisers have made an interesting choice. The Joint Session is the big event of the philosophical year in Britain. Kosch and Lippett have a chance to make a difference to the interest in and understnad of Kierkegaard, I hope they use the chance to the full.

Self-Love as the Foundation of Kierkegaard's Ethics

I've just got through grading last semester's courses and submitting grades at the two universities in Istanbul I was giving courses last semester, one full time and one part time. The process of grading overlapped with getting next courses ready, and it's been an intense time. It's left with me with a few ideas which I hope to keep developing. Some of this comes from what I feel I did not convince students of last semester. I usually get that when I'm teaching Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and I spent 8 weeks on them in an Ethics course last semester, after working through Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Bentham and Hegel. The other figure I might have that problem with is Machiavelli. I'm teaching him in a Politics course next semester, but I'm teaching the overtly Republican Discourses (pdf download) instead of the merely covertly Republican Prince (pdf download), in the hope that cuts out all the Machiavelli was a life style coach for power junkies kind of stuff. Machiavelli may well feature in future blogs.

My immediate concern is the tendency to see Kierkegaard as a Christian Moralist. This is a misleading way of looking at Kierkegaard, with respect to both words. That is an absurd thing to say in some sense, as Kierkegaard devoted himself to Christianity and to Christ as the supreme moralist. There are strong reasons for rejecting this label for Kierkegaard though. In his philosophical arguments (as opposed to his declarations of faith, and even those are still conditioned by the philosophy), the problem is what it is to be a self.

I chose to illustrate this in my Ethics class with a thorough look at Part I of Works of Love. That seems like a high risk place to start a non-theological and non- Fideist reading of Kierkegaard. The non-Theological reading emphasises Kierkegaard's Enlightenment attitude to the metaphysical reality of Christianity, which is that there is no objective reality established for Christianity. The non-Fideist reading emphasises that Kierkegaard does not put pure unmotivated faith at the beginning of his thought. The Fideist interpretation of Kierkegaard partly relies on the widespread myth that Kierkegaard advocated a 'a leap of faith', a phrase he never used. In general it ignores the structure of argument in which a relation within the self in Kierkegaard is a relation between the empirical self and the absolute self. In genral it ignores Kierkegaard's use of dialectic. It is 'dialectic of the absurd' but it is still a dialectic. Kierkegaard advocated a passion for paradox, which is sill a rational philosophical exercise in finding paradoxes of reason. Philip Quinn's argument for a Divine Command Ethics does not rest on an irrationalist form of Fideism in its reading of Kierkegaard, but its emphasis on the acceptance of divine command as absolute is still failing to engage with the question of subjectivity in Kierkegaard.

The Christian readings of Kierkegaard cannot deal with Kierkegaard because they cannot deal with his approach to subjectivity, which is at work in all his texts, including both the 'aesthetic' texts of literary philosophy and the 'Christian' texts of Biblically based faith. We will see how this works in the highly Christian looking Works of Love. This is centrally concerned with a philosophical problem of moral motivation taken from Kant, as interpreted by Hegel. Kierkegaard deals with the question of why we should obey law if it exists in the univeral rational form suggested by Kant. What motivates the individual to follow law? It is Hegel who suggested that an absolute gap opens between subjective inclination in Kant and the abstract universality of law. Kierkegaard has a solution in love.

Christ commands us to love. Kierkegaard looks at that injunction itself, before looking at hiw it applies to 'God', 'the neighbour' and so on. In the Bible (pdf download), Christ says you shall love, or you ought to love as Kierkegaard says in an echo of Kant's formulation of moral law as a universal ought. The command to love, however, is not a command to follow abstract duty, it is a command to be what you already are, to become what you are, since love is part of human inclinations and needs.

The command to love your neighbour comes out of the command to love (again echoing Kant on respect for humanity) through self-love. I can only love my neighbour if I can already love myself. The command to love the neighbour is the command to love yourself and then love what you see of yourself in the neighbour. The command to love God continues on this basis since it is the command to love the absolute in myself.

Kierkegaard is not a 'moralist' since he puts our capacity for ethical judgement on the grounds of out subjectivity, not of the duty to obey external commands. The subjectivity itself is not Christian in the sense of giving ethical commands from God which are external to us.

Therefore, we do not read Kierkegaard in all his philosophical riches if we assume that his philosophy leads us to an extra-rational faith, or willingness to follow external commands. Truth is already in us and becomes apparent in the subjectivity of life, without reference to the historical truth of the Bible or the external existence of God.

Kierkegaard's A-Theist Philosophy

Kierkegaard appears to be as Chrisitian and religious as any philosopher? Nevertheless, there are at least two senses in which he was an a-theist.

1. He was no mere Theist. A Theist refers to a God who intervenes in the universe with omnipotent power. For Kierkegaard, that belief in itself was mere paganism. Religion must be Faith, in which the individual is transformed.

2. In light of 1, the claim that Kierkegaard was a-theistic may seem like a mere play with words, which is just a superficially paradoxical way of saying that Kierkegaard was a Fideist, that is he had a theology of faith. But, the rigour with which Kierkegaard pursued 1. leads towards atheism in the normal sense.

What theological commentators like to call Kierkegaard's 'fideism', or possibly his 'divine commandment ethics', is Kierkegaard's definition of faith as subjective experience and as experience of subjectivity. Some would like to relegate such views to Kierkegaard's 'aesthetic' or 'pseudonymous' works such as Fear and Trembling and Either/Or, which are considered as merely the way to Kierkegaard's religious point of view. One response to this, is that there is only the way and there is never more than the way in Kierkegaard, but today I will concentrate on something else.

I spent a lot of time last semester considering Works of Love in an ethics class. I structured an ethics class to contain consideration of virtue and reason in Plato, friendship in Aristotle, sympathy in Hume, universality in Kant, the Utilitarian Maxim in Hegel, the superiority of ethical life to subjective morality in Hegel, all the ethical issues in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality including the relation between master and slave.

In this context, it is particularly clear that Works of Love is a text concerned with defining ethics. The answer seems to be straightforward: Ethics is based on Christian love, inparticular the commands 'You shall love' and 'Love your neighbour as yourself'.

But what comes out of Kierkegaard's exhaustive analysis of these commands? He is finding a response to Kant's suggestion that ethics derives from the possibility of a universal command. For Kierkegaard, Kant's kind of command lacks a place for the individual who commands and is commanded. What does a universal command mean to me, or to you, or anyone?

The command to love makes it clear where the individual fits in. The individual must love the self in loving the neighbour. I can only love my neighbour if I love myself. Self-love is already a relational love. I become the subject and object of love. The command to love myself is not an abstract irrelevance since only in the self-relation of self-love can there be an individual. Individuality which is more than the moment to moment of some pure flow of perceptions in experience must be the relation of empirical self with something in itself more than the moment, but which can be contained in the moment.

What is there in Kierkegaard's discussion of love which takes us beyond subjectivity? All love with the individual outside myself is intertwined with my own self-relation. There can only be love where there is love of self. That applies to God as well. Love of God is a relation with the absolute, and my relation with the absolute must be the relation with the self which exists as more than the moment.

The theological reader of Kierkegaard may assert that Kierkegaard refers to love of, and obedience to a God outside subjectivity, but can the theologian show this in the detail of Kierkegaard's philosophy, other than those moments when Kierkegaard uses the formulae of Christian theology. His thought is never in the formulae, it is always in the conditions of subjectivity, of an individual who experiences individuality.