(2013) Kierkegaard’s Concept of Revolution: Antipragmatism, Critical Theory, and the Limits of Political Reflection

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Kierkegaard’s Concept of Revolution:Antipragmatism, the Present Age, and Religious Faith

Robert Wyllie

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Kierkegaard as a theorist of revolution. Two Ages (1846) ends with a manifesto for ‘unrecognizable revolutionaries’ to subvert the media public. Kierkegaard attacks an essential characteristic of the media public, leveling, which represents a distraction from passionate ethical subjectivity and a sedative for revolutionary political action. Social revolution, however, remains aneschatological hope. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard provides a critical theory to defend the individual subject from the modern age’s hyperextension of rationalism. In many ways, Kierkegaard anticipates the pessimistic Frankfurt School critical theorists who, a century later, criticized the total reach of instrumental reason through the public sphere. Does this permit us to reread the outwardly conservative Dane in the tradition of critical theory? In what sense is revolution desirable for Kierkegaard? This essay explores what it means for Kierkegaard to call for a revolutionary response to the world in the mass media age.

Each of us is a small part of a big conversation. We citizens

participate in a long process of political reflection, one that

stretches into the past as democratic tradition,1 and one which carries

our social hopes into the future.2 None among us has access to the

ultimate “Truth, fixed and absolute and hence not open to inquiry and

public discussion.”3 But we can use philosophy, “our time held in

1 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 13.2 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1999).3 John Dewey, 1946 Introduction, The Public and Its Problems, ed. Melvin Rogers (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,

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thought”.4 Indeed, in the democratic public sphere, we must use ‘the

cunning of reason’ to minimize suffering, fight against cruelty, and

make the earth a little better for all people. Admittedly “progress is

not steady and continuous.”5 But it’s all we can do. What we say and do

in the lifeworld—“the web of everyday life and communication”

surrounding us—is who we are.6 And it will constitute the “people we

can aspire to be.”7

Kierkegaard conferences would be frustrating if we all felt

compelled to use indirect communication…

1

2012), 38.4 Hegel wrote: “so ist auch Philosophie, ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfaßt,” or ‘so too philosophy is its time grasped in thought,” in the Preface to Elements ofthe Philosophy of Right. Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Georg Lasson using Eduard Gans’s notes to Hegel’s lectures of 1821 (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1911), 15. Rorty is fond of quoting this passage. “My starting point [in pragmatism] was the discovery of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a book which I read as saying: granted that philosophy is just a matter of out-redescribing the last philosopher, the cunning of reason can make use even of this sort of competition. It can be used to weave the conceptual fabric of a freer, better, more just society. If philosophy can be, at best, only what Hegel called ‘it’s time held in thought,’ still, that might be enough. For thus holding one’s time, one might do what Marx wanted done—change the world. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 11.5 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 56.6 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MITPress, 1990), 9.7 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 19, 20-41.

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Kierkegaard’s Antipragmatism

The foregoing tapestry of paraphrase is drawn from the

pragmatists’ compelling defense of modern political life. Its threads

are prominent thinkers: John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas… of

course, Hegel. In his 2005 book Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout

shifts the defense of modern political life from liberal theory to

democratic tradition. Bringing religious voices into this tradition,

he claims to evade John Milbank’s critique of secular liberalism.

Reframing democracy as an ethical culture, even as a tradition of

virtue, he claims to evade Alastair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas.

The pragmatist dream of open-ended political reflection in a

discursive democratic public—espoused in various forms by Stout,

Rorty, and Habermas—was first imagined by John Dewey. Long before it

became a redoubtable defense of modern political life, and long before

Dewey, the pragmatists’ dream of the democratic public was already

Søren Kierkegaard’s nightmare. Stout, no doubt, would recognize

Kierkegaard as the first of the “Augustinian traditionalists” that

reject the public sphere.8

Yet even for Kierkegaard, an antipragmatist before the

pragmatists came on the scene, the democratic public is appealing. For

8 Jeffrey Stout, Democratic Traditions, 26-7.

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Kierkegaard, even though the public is an infinite mirage, it is a

“glittering illusion.”9 The illusion threatens to cut individuals off from

transcendent moral sources. Kierkegaard warns of a present age where

the “spring of ideality stops flowing”:10

“The idolized positive principle of sociality in our age is

the consuming, demoralizing principle that in the thralldom

of reflection transforms even virtues into glittering vices.

And what is the basis of this other than a disregard for the

separation of the religious individual before God...”11

Here, Kierkegaard echoes Augustine, who called the pagan virtues

“glittering vices” in The City of God.12 There is some anticipation of

Charles Taylor here: the public sphere admits of no moral sources

beyond its ongoing political reflection.13

The new lifeworld—Habermas’s term for the public context of

background assumptions14—squeezes out religion. The search for

9 Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, A Literary Review, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 89. Hereafter TA.10 TA 62.11 TA 86.12 Augustine, City of God, XIX, 25.13 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 36.14 Jürgen Habermas’s uses lifeworld to mean the context of communication “present… only in the prereflective form of taken-for-granted background assumptions...” (Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. I., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 335. Hereafter TCA 1.)

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transcendent values or ultimate Truth, in the public eye, will appear

to be hubris. Kierkegaard writes in his journals of 1850:

“Everything is understood politically… with the result that

the religious person comes to be hated as being proud,

aristocratic, and the like. The religious person expresses

that there is a God… Please make room; it is the expression

of respect....”15

In the public sphere, the religious individual’s absolute commitments

are politically dangerous and haughtily come by.

But in fact, for Kierkegaard, it is the deliberative public

sphere itself that is an expression of hubris. The new lifeworld not

only subverts the ethical but also perverts it. Love, for example, is

lost “by being made public.”16 One imagines the citizen who loves his

country because it reflects his values. Love collapses into idolatrous

self-love, the great ‘glittering vice.’ Kierkegaard writes in his

journals of 1851 that politics is “egotism dressed up as love.”17

So far, Kierkegaard fits Jeffrey Stout’s typology of the

“Augustinian traditionalist.” While for the pragmatist, the search for

religious truth is egotistical, for the radical Augustinian, the

15 JP 4,4172,164; X A 391, n.d. 185016 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 137.17 JP 4,4206,181-2; X A 83 n.d. 1851.

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immanent democratic tradition is an empire of egotism dressed up as

love.

Although Kierkegaard attacks modern democracy as a tradition of

virtue, it may be misleading to rank him alongside Milbank and

MacIntyre—those Stout calls the “new traditionalists.”18 Kierkegaard is

unconcerned with attacking liberal theory. Bruce Kirmmse makes clear

that Kierkegaard believes that “politics has its proper sphere of

activity.”19 Although Kierkegaard issued polemics against his liberal

contemporaries, he does not critique liberalism per se. To the contrary,

we read in his journals, “I can understand that a politician would

believe that free institutions are beneficial to the state, because

politics is an external thing which, by its very nature, not having

any life in itself, must take its life from forms… [but religion] has

life in itself.”20

Kierkegaard’s critique of modern political life will be aimed

elsewhere: directly at the deliberative public. In his journals of

1851, Kierkegaard marks his departure from antiliberalism; “Instead of

all these hypotheses about the origin of the state, etc., we should be18 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 11-12.19 Bruce Kirmmse, “Call Me Ishmael—Call Everybody Ishmael: Kierkegaard on the Coming-of-Age Crisis of Modern Times,” Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, eds. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans, 161-182 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Intl., 1992), 170.20 XIII 439-40, Kirmmse’s translation.

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more occupied with the question: given an established order, how can

new points of departure be created religiously?”21

Kierkegaard’s critique of modern political life is

antipragmatist, not antiliberal. Kierkegaard is not merely ambivalent

about public deliberation, like the Augustinians whom Jeffrey Stout

has in mind; for example, Reinhold Niebuhr’s begrudging acceptance of

democracy.22 Kierkegaard conceives of a totalitarian public sphere. In

this, Kierkegaard resembles the early generation of Frankfurt School

critical theorists—Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse

—more than his fellow Augustinians. Adorno and Horkheimer saw a

“culture industry,” particularly in entertainment media, repressing

ideological challenges to the capitalist system.23 Capitalist

democracies are totalitarian in Herbert Marcuse’s sense of “non-

terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the

manipulation of needs by vested interests.”24 Adorno and Horkheimer

argue that, “reason itself has become the mere instrument of an all-

inclusive economic apparatus.25 The Frankfurt School shows signs of

Kierkegaard’s influence. They intermittently borrow his term leveling to

21 JP 4, 4205; X A 72 n.d. 185122 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 26.23 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 140.24 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 3.25 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 30.

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signify the growth of the totalitarian public sphere and its

contamination of reason.26 Kierkegaard—in ways strikingly similar to

the Frankfurt School—gives us a “totalitarian” picture of democratic

society.27

In his 1847 journals, Kierkegaard suggests that, “it would be a

long time before the person who is going to contend with the masses…

[is] able to understand the reality of this battle.”28 On the hundredth

anniversary of Kierkegaard’s 1844 Philosophical Fragments, Horkheimer and

Adorno published their “Philosophical Fragments” (as Dialectic of

Enlightenment was originally titled). In retrospect, it took almost

exactly a century for another theory of the totalitarian public sphere

to emerge.

Kierkegaard is not calling for a revolution against the

government, for which he has a properly Augustinian indifference. In

this sense, Georg Lukács was right to argue against Karl Löwith that

Kierkegaard was no revolutionary thinker.29 Kierkegaard tells us that

26 John M. Hoberman, “Kierkegaard’s Two Ages and Heidegger’s Critique ofModernity,” International Kierkegaard Commentary 14: Two Ages. 256., James L.Marsh, "Kierkegaard and Critical Theory", 209. and "Marx and Kierkegaard on Alienation,” International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two Ages, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 172.27 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 3; Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, 4.28 JP 4, 4118; VIII A 123 n.d. 184729 Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Neuweid am Rhein: Luchterhand, 1962), 19, 254.

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revolution is dialectically opposed to authority—e.g., Louis XVI or

Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government.30 But the modern concept

of the political—anticipated by Kierkegaard but not championed until

Dewey—authorizes procedural public discourse. Danish political

authority is no longer symbolized by royal body of Christian VIII; it

becomes vested in an abstract process of democratic deliberation,

generation after generation.

The abstract public conceals the machinations of the very real

mass media, bringing Kierkegaard’s reflections once again close to the

Frankfurt School’s analyses of the culture industry, or later critical

theorists’ analyses of the technocratic domination of a well-educated

“New Class.”31 Kierkegaard calls democracy an illusion in 1850; the

concealed government of the press:

“Total publicity makes it absolutely impossible to ‘govern’…

[because] total publicity is grounded on the idea that

everybody should ‘govern.’ Quite right; the press really

wanted to dispose of ‘government’—and then it would itself

govern, which is why it also assured for itself the

concealment which is necessary in order to govern.”32

30 TA 108.31 Piccone32 JP 4, 4192; X A 690 n.d. 1850

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Kierkegaard’s deep skepticism of the public sphere is the antithesis of

the pragmatists’ politics.

For Kierkegaard, the public sphere cannot be Dewey’s anti-

totalitarian hope.33 The public sphere is itself totalitarian because

it creates a totalizing lifeworld. The lifeworld is a human

conversation stretched out across time, with truth and values are

immanent within it. Colonized by the lifeworld, the religious promise

of transcendence is assumed to be a cultural phenomenon. Marcuse

channels Kierkegaard’s fears, recognizing that, in his day, “God, Zen,

existentialism and beat ways of life” have become “harmless

negations.”34

The modern democratic public ushers in a new form of tyranny.

Kierkegaard calls this totalitarianism “tyranny as a relation of

reflection” in his journals of 1847:

“…no individual (king, pope, etc.) can ever again become a

tyrant. Tyranny must become a relationship of reflection.

You see, here we are confronted again by the category: the

crowd, public opinion…”35

33 John Dewey, 1946 introduction, The Public and Its Problems, 38.34 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 14.35 JP 4, 4118; VIII A 123 n.d. 1847. Kierkegaard writes in his journalsthat this is non-obvious: “But another form of tyranny is a corollary of equality—fear of men… Of all the tyrannies, it is the most dangerous, in part because it is not directly obvious and attention must be called to it” VIII 1 A 598.

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Like the critical theorists who attack the ‘culture industry’ and mass

media, Kierkegaard’s attack of the press shows a glimmer of

uncharacteristic class consciousness: “In ancient times the masses

were sensually buttered up outright with money and bread and circuses—

the press has intellectually-spiritually buttered up the middle class.”36

Because the modern public sphere reproduces a totalitarian

lifeworld, one that reflects the vested interests of a media elite,

Kierkegaard calls for a response more radical than Augustinian

ambivalence. It is not enough for the Christian to identify the self-

loving egotism of public life, and then once the ‘idolatry’ is

smashed, participate in public life, albeit with a certain wariness à

la Reinhold Niebuhr or Jean Bethke Elshtain.

Even so, against the totalitarian public, there does not appear

to be any hope for direct resistance. Instead, Kierkegaard wants each

individual to ‘overthrow’ the public, to dispel the illusion that she

is an indissoluble part of a process of political reflection.

Kierkegaard would agree with the melancholy Marcuse: “all liberation

depends on the consciousness of servitude,” a consciousness that

requires “transcendent, critical notions” that have all but been

lost.37 Kierkegaard shares the deep pessimism of the founding

36 JP 4,4119; VIII A 134 n.d. 1847. Emphasis mine.37 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 7 and 247.

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generation of the Frankfurt School, writing in Two Ages, “An

insurrection in this day and age is utterly unimaginable.”38

2

An Unrecognizable Kierkegaard

In the last pages of Two Ages, Kierkegaard prophesies the

emergence of the “unrecognizable ones” arrayed against the public

sphere.39 The unrecognizable ones are tasked with the unimaginable

insurrection. With a nod to Johannes Climacus, I am going to refer to

Kierkegaard’s “revolution against the public sphere” as Revolution B.

Revolution B can be a useful biographical concept to distinguish

the revolutionary praxis of the ‘later Kierkegaard’. In 1846, Two Ages

ends the first pseudonymous period, and Kierkegaard intended it to be

a closing statement to his entire authorship.40 Although obviously not

Kierkegaard’s last work, it does mark the beginning of his

transformation into an ‘unrecognizable one’ committed to self-

actualizing Revolution B.

Bruce Kirmmse calls the Revolutions of 1848 “the key to

understanding [Kierkegaard’s] violent attack on Christendom,” which

38 TA 70.39 TA 105-109.40 Kirmmse 1990, 266; Garff 2005, 412.

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consumed the last years of his life.41 Johannes Sløk calls Kierkegaard

a “one-man revolution,” an individual Trotsky waging a “permanent

revolution” against the public.42 The only avenue of communication open

between the ‘unrecognizable one’ and the public is “through a

suffering act,” which gets further development in the late Practice in

Christianity.43

The concept of revolution is more than a hermeneutic for reading

Kierkegaard, because when one reads Kierkegaard one finds he claims to

have a theory of revolution that explains the revolutions of 1848. In

his journals, Kierkegaard claims the bread riots of 1847, “all fits my

theory perfectly, and I dare say it will come to be seen how exactly I

have understood the age.”44 Likewise in 1850 he is adamant that events

have proved his theory of revolution right:

“It is really worth noting that if one reads the description

of the future found at the conclusion of ‘a literary review

of Two Ages,’ he will realize how quickly and exactly it was

fulfilled two years later in 1848....”45

41 Bruce Kirmmse, “Kierkegaard and 1848,” History of European Ideas 20:1-3, 167-175 (1995), 173.42 Johannes Sløk, Kierkegaard, humanismens tænker (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel, 1978), 238-9.43 TA 109.44 JP 4, 4116; VIII A 108 n.d. 1847.45 JP 4, 4167.; X A 52 n.d. 1849

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In 1848, Kierkegaard writes in his journals that “everything that

looked like a religious movement became politics...”46 The present age

is not theocentric but politics-centered, defined by “a modern mentality

[that] can be reduced to that damned caricature of religion, which is

represented by politics.”47 The political has swollen in importance for

Kierkegaard. Politics is distended beyond authority, government,

representation, etc.—the political has become the new “abstract

infinity” of the public sphere.48

The later Kierkegaard shifts the target of his polemics. If Hegel

was the emblem of the theocentric nineteenth century, the public

sphere will be emblematic of the world that came into being in 1848.

3

The Overextension of Reason in the “Theocentric Nineteenth Century”

Discursive thinking, reason, and “understanding”—the latter two

words being mostly interchangeable for Kierkegaard49—involve coercion

46There is a revolutionary corollary: “…now everything looks like politics, but will become a religious movement” IX B 63 n.d. 184847 X 4 A 84.48 TA 108.49 Andrew J. Burgess, "Forstand in the Swenson–Lowrie Correspondence and in the “Metaphysical Caprice”," International Kierkegaard Commentary 7 (1994): 109-128.

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prima facie. If I understand why 2+3=5, how could I be said to voluntarily

assent to it? How could I dissent? Kierkegaard most famously attacks

the “Hegelian” overextension of reason to historical developments.

Johannes Climacus attacked the theocentric nineteenth century that

tried to “contemplate world history—from God’s point of view.”50 In

retrospect, this began with Hegel’s first attempt to present his

system in 1806 until the revolutions of 1848. In Philosophical Crumbs,

Climacus rejects the embedded rationality of Hegel’s philosophy of history.

Climacus blazes a clear path to the limits of reason in the Absolute

Paradox. He cuts to the quick of Hegelian attempts to understand the

Christ-event—i.e. portray it as a logical consequence—eviscerating the

towering Danish Hegelian J. L. Heiberg’s attempt to use speculative

philosophy to resurrect Christianity.51 Kierkegaard obliterates the

Hegelian view that history unfolds in a rational manner intelligible

as a dialectic.

One might qualify Hegel’s views, and read him more charitably,

but my aim is to sight-in the theocentric nineteenth century. I

suspect we will see it most clearly in the more famous theory of

revolution developed in the 1840s: Marxism.

50 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 332.51 Ibid 31-33.

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Marx’s utopian belief that communism would transcend politics is

underpinned by Hegel’s philosophy of history. Marx and Kierkegaard

share the understanding that Hegelianism contains a necessary

historical dialectic. Allan Megill locates the “historical dialectic”

in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and traces its influences

filtered through Marx’s Hegelian milieu.52 Marx was predisposed to a

rational history. The apparent unpredictability of politics and the

market—the turbulent dynamics of the bourgeois world—had to have an

underlying solution. Even in its futurity, communist revolution is a

fact of history for Marx; his task is to merely show how it will

unfold. Marxism is held captive to that mad Hegelian premise that one

can reflect upon history in such a manner. (Megill delights: “missed

trains, broken condoms… marital disagreements, random murders,

fornications… [all history] proceeds like the working out of a

deductive argument.”53).

The Frankfurt School attempted to lobotomize Marx’s rationalism.

Performing science fiction, they try to take a thinker cryogenically

frozen in the theocentric nineteenth century and resurrect him cured

of his Hegelian madness. Marcuse proposes that “negative freedom—i.e.

freedom from the oppressive or ideological power of given facts—is the

52 Allan Megill, Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 27-35.53 Allan Megill, Karl Marx, 29-30.

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a priori of the historical dialectic.”54 In the American critical theory

journal Telos, Alain Manville wildly speculates that the real lesson of

Hegel for Marx is that the “world is essentially transformable.”55 As

intellectual historians, the early critical theorists look like

alchemists. All of them are trying to turn Marx into Kierkegaard.

4

The Overextension of Reason in the Present Age

After the troubling episode with the Corsair ended in 1846, in

which Kierkegaard felt victimized by the liberal newspaper, he

transposes his better-known philosophical critique of Hegel to the

public sphere. There is a connection between the public sphere—as

theorized by the pragmatists—and Left Hegelianism. Although the

pragmatists adamantly critiqued speculative philosophy, there is some

sense to Rorty’s judgment that John Dewey is—much like Marx—“steeped

in Hegel.”56

While the target of Kierkegaard’s critique shifts from

Hegelianism to the public sphere, the core problem remains the same.

54 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 22355 Alain Manville, “Hegel and Metaphysics,” TELOS 42, 108-116 (Winter 1979), 116.56 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 30.

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Speculative philosophy precludes the individual’s leap to faith by

overextending the understanding “upwards,” so to speak, claiming

unwarranted knowledge about God and the logical denouement of history.

Hegelianism, for instance on Heiberg’s explicit view, took the place

of religion. The political public sphere blocks the individual’s leap

to faith with another abstraction. In the public, the understanding is

overextended “outwards”—leveled. In a sense, the public—“abstract

infinity” 57—immanentizes the speculative system. The effect, for

Kierkegaard, is just as troubling. The endless social task of

broadening humanity’s incomplete understanding continues ad infinitum. No

understanding that can be reached—by a leap to faith, for example—

outside this process.

But that does not mean the religious is an obvious alternative, one

cannot ‘leap to faith’ from the public sphere, because it has a

‘background assumption,’ a lifeworld, of its own limitlessness. The

leap to faith in Kierkegaard’s 1844 works—The Concept of Anxiety and

Philosophical Crumbs—is a response to the moment, an encounter with the

possible reality outside of time. The public sphere is closed to such

conceptions; transcendence, the Absolute, metaphysics, these zones may beckon

hubris, but they lie beyond the proper scope of the human endeavor.

57 TA 108.

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The pragmatists champion a public sphere that is abstract and

infinite. For Dewey, democracy is the unattainable ideal of community

life—that is, the tendency towards constituting a wider public.58

Although unattainable, the public is an abstract goal for Dewey, even

a human destiny, for “to learn to be human is to develop through the

give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an

individually distinctive member of a community.”59 For Habermas,

everyone “implicitly recognizes” the obligation immanent in their

speech acts to provide justification and engage in communicative

action.60 “Philosophies of subjectivity,” Jürgen Habermas’s foil, may

chase such mirages, but ultimately no philosophy of subjectivity—like

Kierkegaard’s—takes into account the human being as intersubjectively

constituted in his web of everyday interactions. The lifeworld has no

life beyond itself. The lifeworld is a heavenless earth.

The pragmatist conception of the public—running from Dewey to

Habermas—is completely leveled. Leveling is Kierkegaard’s metaphor for

the “flattening-out” of society infinitely across time while denying

any passionate relationship to that-which-transcends-time—absolute

58 Melvin Rogers, “Introduction” to John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 16.59 John Dewey, 124.60 Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, 64.

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truth and the like.61 Leveling prohibits the leap from even occurring

to the individual. Kierkegaard is not claiming that the lifeworld

created by the press can inoculate itself against God. But Revolution

B, despite its extraordinary claim to a relation to an Absolute, does

not start with any privileged epistemic access to the divine.

Kierkegaard’s ‘unrecognizable ones’ are not prophets with “private

instructions from God,” but rather those who “[apprehend] the

universal in equality before God.”62 Leveling blocks such an

apprehension.

5

61 Leveling is very famously picked up by Heidegger, who changes its meaning. Kierkegaard distinguishes between ancient and modern “leveling” devices—fate and the public, respectively: “The present situation is analogous to ancient times. The negative principle was fate, a principle of nature. Fate was envious of the individual, especially of the prominent individual. The insignificant individual wasnot pursued by fate. In tragedy fate crushes the hero, but the chorus is oblivious to the blows of fate. In the realm of the spirit the analogy now appears. The general concept “public” and the like, an abstraction, is fate, negatively oriented against the individual. The chorus in a sense no longer exists, since the chorus is really the public. The insignificant individual lives happily in thepublic, while this abstraction levels the outstanding individual. This is the battle of the future, except that the individual will not be of the tyrant type but the religious individual, whose intention is precisely to free the individual, but the public does not understand this.” Interestingly, Kierkegaard uses the same analogy to the classical chorus that Nietzsche highlights in Birth of Tragedy. Heidegger hews closer to Nietzsche, denying the qualitative difference between ‘nature’ and ‘the realm of the spirit’ that exists for Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, the public and fate are analogous to each other. Political reflection in the public sphere absolutely cannot incorporate individuality (or Dasein) because the two are inherently opposed.62 TA 107.

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Revolution B: Strategy and Tactics

It is somewhat popular to take elements of Kierkegaard’s thought

and amalgamate them into the Habermasian project. In 1987, Habermas

began exploring Kierkegaard as a postmetaphysical thinker. This has

led him to engage religion, and Kierkegaardians to engage Habermas.63

Robert L. Perkins and especially Martin Matuštík have explored ways to

infuse Kierkegaard’s existential thought into Habermasian critical

theory—here, Kierkegaard the existentialist is called upon to give a

fuller account for human needs.64

63 J. Michael Tilley, “Jürgen Habermas: Social Selfhood, Religion, and Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s Influence on Social-Political Thought, ed. Jon BartleyStewart (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 73-88.64 Matuštík: “In my earlier work (Matuštík, 1993, 2001), I took one small step in the direction abandonedby early Marcuse and unsuccessfully pursued by Sartre. I did so by articulating JűrgenHabermas’s theory of communicative or discourse ethics in conjunction with SørenKierkegaard’s indirect communication underwriting his existential ethics. To be sure,Kierkegaard is able to provide critical theory with an existential dimension of communication.”Quoted in Martin Matuštík, “Towards an Integral Critical Theory of thePresent Age,” 227-239, Integral Review 5 (2007), 228. Matuštík is referringto two books. Cf. Martin Matuštík, Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (New York, NY: Guilford Publications, 1993)., and Martin Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). See also Robert L. Perkins, “Habermas and Kierkegaard: Religious Subjectivity, Multiculturalism, and Historical Revisionism,” International Philosophical Quarterly 44 (2004), 481-496.

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But let us stick to Kierkegaard’s express political theory. First

of all, there is an intersubjective lifeworld for Kierkegaard. His

vision of community stresses that each individual must reflectively

relate to a common ideal:

“When individuals (each one individually) are essentially

and passionately related to an idea and together are

essentially related to the same idea, the relation is

optimal and normative… they are united on the basis of an

ideal distance. The unanimity of separation is indeed fully

orchestrated music. On the other hand, if individuals relate

to an idea merely en masse (consequently without the

individual separation of inwardness) we get violence,

anarchy, riotousness…”65

There is communal life, passionate and direct, beyond the public

sphere and beyond formal political structures. But this genuine

community is incompatible with the public sphere. In fact, the public

sphere fills the vacuum left by the implosion of shared community

values: “Only when there is no strong communal life to give substance

to the concretion will the press create this abstraction, ‘the

public’.”66

65 TA 62-3.66 TA 91.

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Kierkegaard rewinds the Habermasian project, turning the clock

back a half century to an earlier generation of Frankfurt School

critical theorists. We have seen Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and

Kierkegaard converge upon Revolution B, some sort of inward resistance

to a totalitarian public sphere. But political theorists commonly

regard this to be a dead-end. In 1970, Alastair MacIntyre went so far

as to say Revolution B is properly inconceivable; if the public sphere

was really totalized, Marcuse could never have written One-Dimensional

Man, nor could he have found readers.67

With his 1956 habilitation thesis, Habermas proposes to relaunch

critical theory a theoretical structure of pragmatic ground rules to

determine how rational consensus should be generated. Rejected by

Horkheimer, the thesis was published as Structural Transformation of the Public

Sphere, and it introduces the idea of communicative action in its

incipient form. Communicative action differentiates “critical

publicity” from “one that is merely staged for manipulative purposes”;

Habermas sees his theory as a contribution to the struggle for a

democratic public. It is possible, he thinks, for communicative action

to reproduce lifeworlds free of manipulation by powerful vested

interests, for instance in media elites.68 Habermas argues that,

67Alastair MacIntyre, Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic (New York: Viking, 1970), 70. Cf. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 121. 68 Jürgen Habermas, TCA 1, 337.

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“unlike the idea of a bourgeois public sphere during the period of

liberal development, it cannot be denounced as an ideology.”69 The task

of resuscitating the public sphere is attractive to Habermas in the

first place, because he saw his Frankfurt School mentors reach a dead-

end, and secondly, because he discovered John Dewey’s pragmatism.

I doubt Kierkegaard would have been swayed by Habermas’s project.

Habermas’s exchange with Michael Theunissen shows clearly that the

former is committed to a lifeworld that excludes transcendent critical

concepts drawn from negative theology. There, Habermas argues that one

might philosophize in the mode of negative theology—in the tradition

Theunissen traces from Kierkegaard to Horkheimer—only as a last resort

against a public sphere with no rational potential.70 Unlike the

political responses envisioned by Habermas’s radical and feminist

critics, Revolution B does not equate to testimonial protest (Lynn

Sanders),71 nor do the ‘unrecognizable ones’ constitute a counter-public

(Nancy Fraser).72 Kierkegaard is calling for an antipolitical

69 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (The MIT Press, 1991), 235.70 Jürgen Habermas, “Kommunikative Freiheit und Negative Theologie,” 15-34, in Dialektischer Negativismus: Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Emil Angehrn, Hinrich Fink-Eitel, Christian Iber, and Georg Lohmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), 34. 71 Lynn Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory72 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25, 56-80 (1990), 67.

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revolution; the ‘unrecognizable ones’ do not aspire to enter the

public sphere or politics, but rather to set the limits to political

reflection.

The unrecognizable ones do not participate in communicative

action, and do not seek to create a lifeworld out of the public

sphere. In the communicative public sphere, Habermas means to “exclude

cases of latently strategic action, in which the speaker inconspicuously

employs illocutionary results for perlocutionary purposes.”73

Kierkegaard’s concept of indirect communication, which is employed by

the ‘unrecognizable one’ is strategic rather than communicative in

form. Like Socrates, Kierkegaard is prepared to say that “one can

deceive a person into what is true.”74 Habermas admits expressive

language in the public sphere that describes and manifests “the internal

world of the speaker.”75 But strategic action that has the

perlocutionary result of manifesting a change in the internal world of the

73 Jürgen Habermas, TCA 1, 305.74 Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 53. Habermas explains, “Whereas in strategic action one actor seeks to influence the behavior of another by means of the threat or sanctions or the prospect of gratification in order to cause the interaction to continueas the first actor desires, in communicative action one actor seeks rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding effect of the offer contained in his speech act.” Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. ChristianLenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 58.75 Jürgen Habermas, TCA 1, 309.

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listener—i.e. causing someone to feel anxiety or guilt—is excluded

from communicative action. Nonetheless, such changes goad individuals

to the decision to believe, destroying the pragmatist lifeworld by

rendering it in the visible foreground, where the individual’s

critical posture can decide its limits.

Short-circuiting public networks forces citizens beyond the

borders of the public lifeworld to reflect upon Johannes Climacus’s

metaphysical questions. Who am I? How does something come to be out of

nothing? Could a god-who-loves be the architect of the universe? The

religious community, where each individual is powerfully attached to

the divine-command ethic of love we find in Works of Love, gathers beyond

the limits of the public sphere in a secret lifeworld. Here, Merold

Westphal sees clearly, Kierkegaardians and Habermasians must reach an

impasse—they might be committed to the same projects, but never with

the same first principle.76

Kierkegaard suggests in his journals of 1847 that any approach to

“reform” the public must be Socratic.77 Revolution B uses Kierkegaard’s

theory to short-circuit the distinction between strategic/instrumental

and communicative rationality that is central to Habermas’s theoretic

network of public discourse. In addition to bringing the lifeworld of

76 Merold Westphal, “Commanded Love and Moral Autonomy: The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate,” Ethical Perspectives 5, 263-276 (1998).77 JP 4,4118; VIII A 123 n.d. 1847

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the public sphere into view for critique, indirect communication

secretly reproduces the antipolitical lifeworld of the religious

sphere. Kierkegaard rejects all attempts for the lifeworld to colonize

the sacred, while all the while arguing that the public sphere is

expanding voraciously.

Habermas acknowledges “the skeptic who voluntarily terminates his

membership in the community of beings who argue—no less and no more.

By refusing the argue, he cannot, even indirectly, deny that he moves

in a shared sociocultural form of life, that he grew up in a web of

communicative action, and that he reproduces life in this web.”78 But

does Habermas acknowledge skeptics, seizing upon “a residue of

decisionism that cannot be disproved by argumentation,” return to the

public sphere incognito with different first principles?79 It is doubtful

that Habermas’s theory would tolerate Kierkegaardian communication

that, activated in Revolution B, constantly subverts communicative

action.

Kierkegaard’s “permanent revolution” is one by which each

individual must determine the limits of politics. The revolution

against the public sphere starts with religious belief itself, since a

religious belief is an end to reflection. It is precisely a dead-end for politics—

78 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 100.79 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 99.

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Kierkegaard might respond to critics of his Frankfurt School heirs. That’s the point. After

that point, Revolution B still wages its struggle at the concealed

limits of the public sphere, bringing others to the selfsame dead-end

to make the leap of faith. Defection from the political, to hope for

more than social hope, inevitably appears to be hubris. But

Kierkegaard and his heirs have accepted that they are unrecognizable,

and furthermore, “few… are able to understand the reality of this

battle.”80

80 JP 4, 4118; VIII A 123 n.d. 1847