“Also A History of Philosophy Vol. 2” by Jurgen Habermas (translated by Ciaran Cronin)

Volume Two of Habermas’ magnum opus is where he recounts how the fissures between faith and knowledge solidified. First, Habermas notes the differences between classical Athens and Christian Jerusalem, “There remains the crucial difference between the metaphysical path of salvation, which privileges the thinking and intellectual contemplation of the sage as epistemic ways of approaching the unknowable One, and the religious path of salvation, which teaches the sinner's faith in the promise of the invisible but communicatively accessible God…. Christians believe that they can only be redeemed from their sins by God's prevenient grace and through faith in Christ's sacrificial death, the Platonist knows that he can only free his rational soul from the material entanglements of a corporeal existence and reunite it with the transcendent good through insight, that is, intellectual self-liberation.”

The lynchpin between classical and Christian philosophy was Aristotle. “Aristotle's writings on physics, biology and psychology assume as self-evident the idea of a hierarchical 'ladder' of nature, which has retained its relevance to the present day, extending from inorganic nature through self-reproducing plants and animals endowed with consciousness to ensouled human beings…. Individual things are composed of 'form' and 'matter'; and the law-governed connections between things are analysed from the perspective of a craftsman making a product in accordance with four causal aspects (the form, the material, the applied movement and the desired end). But since what exists as a whole is conceived as a self-sufficient cosmos, eternally resting within itself, the telos inherent in things cannot be understood on the model of the mode of production as a fixed or intended purpose. Rather, as in an organism, the 'telos' is 'implicit' in each thing as a specific or generic determination…. This teleological structure pervades that which is as a whole, so that in this respect Aristotle's ontology is congenial to the Christian doctrine of creation…. It is not primarily by reconceptualizing metaphysics in scientific terms that Aristotle leaves the via antiqua and points towards modernity, but rather by decoupling practical and theoretical reason…. The Aristotelian theory of virtue is not based on any metaphysical premises…. The bios theorêtikos is no longer conceived as a path leading to a transcendent goal; it loses the religious meaning of a preparation for a fulfilled life of the immortal soul after death. Rather, the philosopher's life, devoted to intellectual activity, is a source of pleasure and contains the reward of satisfaction in itself…. In accordance with the ancient ideal of the life of the wise man, the life of the theoretician is distinguished from the already privileged ways of life of the politician and the soldier, of the businessman and the craftsman, by the advantages one enjoys in the sublunar spheres. This is what ethics as such is about: it is a guide to the good life, which belongs in general to the telos of the human species.”

It was the juxtaposition of Plato, carried into the Middle Ages through Neoplatonism, and Aristotle, first subsumed through Aquinas via Albertus Magnus and the Arabs, that would form the foundations for western metaphysics, “In the Platonic theory of knowledge, experience, discursive thought, intellectual intuition and wisdom still refer to each other. The complex relationship between these cognitive faculties reflects the unity of the understanding of the world and of oneself, of theoretical and practical reason. Aristotle, on the other hand, constructs such a relationship only at the biographical level, through the philosopher's way of life dedicated to theory. In Aristotle, the perspective of a first person seeking practical orientation becomes so independent of the observer perspective of the natural scientist that the doctrine of metaphysical principles can no longer provide information about the principles of ethics. This task is now left to practical prudence, which no longer has to satisfy the demands of scientific knowledge. Ethical reflection is oriented towards a highest good that already lacks the redemptive power and transcendent position of the Platonic idea of the good. The downgrading of practical reason in the hierarchy of cognitive faculties goes hand in hand with the profanation of its goal—the good life assumes the concrete form of a telos in the world…. If, like Thomas, one wishes to discover the monotheistic god of creation and salvation in the anonymous shell of the 'unmoved mover', the ontotheological idea of a first being suggests itself as the common ground of philosophy and theology…. But God cannot be grasped with the senses, nor can he be subsumed under a generic concept (such as 'living being') or a specific concept (such as 'man' or 'plant'). Otherwise, he would just be one composite being among others. Using our natural reason, we can only infer God's existence indirectly from the effects he causes in the world…. This makes it all the more urgent to trace the boundaries between the realms of faith and knowledge, and thus to ask how far conclusive scientific knowledge extends into the realm of the truths of faith. Thomas chooses two indirect ways in which the human mind can get confirmation, at least in outline, of the divine essence, using metaphysical concepts alone: the first is the via negationis, the negation of general statements that we use to describe what we typically perceive as imperfect features of natural processes in the world; the second is the analogia entis, the analogical comprehension of qualities…. In both cases, we not only presuppose from the outset the teleological structure of being as a whole, but also tacitly assume that God has a personal nature. Otherwise we would not be able to know his essence either via negationis as the exalted compensation of perceived deficiencies, or per analogiam as the asymptotic perfectioning [infinitesimale Perfektionierung] of the most highly valued faculties of the human mind, that is, of an individuated mind embodied in a person.”

Habermas's Aquinas is the philosopher who, more than any other, re-ontologizes what Aristotle had cut loose, “Whereas theoretical reason aims at describing an existing ontic 'order' that reason itself does not produce but only considers (ordo quem ratio non facit, sed solum considerat), practical reason first produces such an order in the world (ordo quem ratio considerando facit) by guiding action accordingly. Practical reason owes its existence to the extension of the intellect to another faculty of the human mind, namely, the will, in order to guide it in action…. By providing practical philosophy with a metaphysical foundation, Thomas removes it from the sphere of mere considerations of prudence and returns it to the realm of ratio. This enables him, in contrast to Aristotle, to ground the binary coding of the free decisions of the will as 'good' and 'bad' in the truth code of rational knowledge…. Ethics can indeed be guided by the theoretical philosophical concepts of the ens realissimum and the summum bonum; but this 'highest good' remains an ontological abstraction from the 'face-to-face' encounter with the transcendent God.”

The political consequences of this ontology are treated as a shift in the order of the disciplines, not as doctrine, “For Aristotle, human beings are inherently 'political' in the sense that they can realize their telos only in exercising their rights as citizens within the framework of the polis…. For Thomas, this becomes animal sociale et politicum. He sees how Aristotle defines human nature through language as a medium of communication and sociability. Language makes possible a form of cooperation based on a division of labour by which human beings can compensate for the deficiencies of their natural endowment…. Thomas is more likely to have in mind the kinship groups of the Old Testament when he declares the 'oikos', the family household and its associated economic ties, to be the nucleus and paradigm of society…. Augustine’s relationship between civitas divina and civitas terrena had shaped political theory insofar as, in the former, human beings are united under the realized law of the New Testament in a community of love governed solely by virtue, whereas, on earth, the law of the Old Testament is in the hands of a political authority that administers justice by spreading fear and terror with the sword. From this perspective, which is informed by the theology of history, the ethical already appears to be superior to the political…. The political goal of 'the good life' is subordinated to the ethical goal of blessedness, not only for the individual but also for the organization of society…. From this perspective, in contrast to Aristotle, ethics also takes precedence in the system of sciences over politics as the doctrine of wise government.”

Ockham’s nominalism introduces mentalism and contingency into God’s actions, freeing the immanent world from necessity, “Ockham rejects the claim that 'abstractive knowledge does not attain the object in itself under its perfect idea but only in a certain diminished likeness, while intuitive knowledge attains the object in itself under its perfect idea’…. He extends the faculty of intuitive experience from sensible to intelligible objects, so that the introspectively accessible acts of the human mind become as much objects of cognition as the things and states of affairs encountered in the world…. This blurs Scotus's juxtaposition of the two cognitive faculties of intuitive experience and abstract cognition to such an extent that Ockham can also question the primacy of intuition and the dependence of conceptually abstract cognition on intuition…. Ockham transforms the ontological dualism of mind and matter into the epistemological relationship between the subject of knowledge and the world of objects…. The nominalist de-structuring of the ontological order makes external nature the object of a science that, relying solely on natural reason, must search for traces of the order contingently established by God in the diversity of the objects of experience we encounter. And because it is directed in a similar way to internal nature, the subjectivity of the human mind, this objectifying view of external nature generates the opposition between subject and object that would eventually make epistemology, along with rational natural law, the royal road of modern philosophy.”

Luther’s reforms would unleash a chain reaction of new ideas through western Europe that was unfathomable at its start, “Luther no longer attempts to explain the believer's encounter with God with the philosophical intention of clarifying the propositional content of this experience and, if possible, justifying it on philosophical grounds. He develops a hermeneutic awareness of the methodological primacy of the performative meaning of religious experience over its propositional content; but he no longer seeks to reconstruct and justify the latter rationally in order to prove that faith is rational. Rather, he focuses on the relationship between the sinner struggling for salvation and God, and decouples the act of faith from reason as such.” This irony is the hinge of the whole second volume, “It is precisely the theocentric doctrine that human destiny is unconditionally dependent on God's inscrutable mercy that, as a result of the resolute emancipation of faith from all metaphysics, opens the door to an anthropocentric turn in philosophy — and thus becomes the forerunner of postmetaphysical thought.”

Habermas locates the origin of that communicatively accessible God in Augustine, whose inward turn discovers the will as a faculty distinct from the intellect and, with it, the first-person stance that Luther will later seal off from the world entirely. Henceforth, after Luther, theology and philosophy would separate into their own spheres of interest, never to overlap, “Theology is supposed to follow the epistemic stance of the believer 'before God', while philosophy and science take the position of an inquiring observer 'towards the world'. Luther sees no way of mediating between these two epistemic stances. This definitive decoupling of faith from knowledge is a consequence of the doctrine of justification…. Faith depends on the motivational condition of a radical awareness of sin and an intense desire for existential conversion—and is no longer tied to the context of a particular worldview. Faith is a matter of trust, not of knowledge…. Until Luther, philosophy and theology had sought to demonstrate their truth by embedding the articles of faith in the context of a well-founded worldview—in other words, by proving the coherence of faith and knowledge…. There is nothing to be learnt from the knowledge gathered coram mundo for the faith experiences coram Deo. For the latter, all that counts is trust in God's promise of salvation, which can be trustworthy or untrustworthy, and not the affirmation of propositions, which can be true or false…. From a sociological point of view, this fideistic turn amounts to a self-referential isolation of religious faith from any interference by propositions from other domains…. From the point of view of the participants, the truths of faith, tailored to truthfulness or authenticity, become detached from the spectrum of assertoric and normative validity claims raised for statements and the content of statements…. The price paid by Luther for the renewal of an internalized, subjectively deepened faith was a fideistic separation of faith and knowledge, which in the following centuries called into question the religious mode of faith as such all the more, the more the faith thus sealed off also lost its roots in the ritual practice of the community…. Without a connection to God's will and his promise of salvation, practical philosophy must separate questions of justice from the perspective of the righteous life that leads to salvation, and justify moral precepts by reason alone. It must also face the resulting problem of how rational morality and rational law, tailored to questions of justice alone, relate to the socially integrative energies of moral cohesion in an increasingly secular society…. From the point of view of a philosopher who also saw himself as a natural scientist, laws of nature could still be traced back to a divine lawgiver, but they could no longer be understood in an ontotheological double sense as at once naturally necessary and normatively commanding laws of God. In any case, once the theological aspect of salvation history recedes into the background, the idea of nature as a self-sustaining whole operating according to unchanging mechanical laws suggests itself…. Once philosophy is no longer interested in the salvific relevance of the god of salvation, it makes no essential difference to the concept of law whether the divine lawgiver is conceived in deistic terms as limited to the establishment and maintenance of a self-reproducing nature (Descartes), or in pantheistic terms as merging with the living spirit of nature (Spinoza), or in materialistic terms as playing no role at all (Hobbes)…. The philosophy of the subject is faced with the question of where to locate the normative dimension of the right and the good as such.”

Luther had successfully sealed faith off from within. The natural sciences now are able to do it from without, “The modern natural sciences and their philosophical foundations claim a monopoly on scientific knowledge that deprives faith of its rational character and relegates it entirely to the realm of the irrational…. As Hegel would note, Descartes's attitude of not accepting as true any proposition that does not withstand the most scrupulous rational scrutiny embodies the modern consciousness of freedom.” Spinoza takes the opposite tack, not sealing religion off, but going in after what is salvageable, “Spinoza is the first philosopher to seek to understand the biblical tradition in its historical context in order to reconstruct a truth content hidden in religion itself; he wants to teach religion about its own rational core.” And the modern political settlement is what emerges from the wreckage of the scholastic worldview, “A crucial legacy is the conceptual tools of late scholastic natural law, which Hobbes and Spinoza put on a secular footing: political rule can only be legitimized by the general consent of free and equal citizens who agree with each other—each with all the others—to unite in a political body and cumulatively transfer their natural individual power to the legally constituted authority of a government…. Like Hobbes and Spinoza, Locke endows human beings with primordial natural rights. From the right to self-preservation follow the fundamental rights to life and bodily integrity, liberty and property.” The final question is one Habermas returns to, whether reason alone can generate the normative substance that the metaphysical path of salvation used to supply, or whether it can only inherit it from theology.

“Also A History of Philosophy Vol. 1” by Jurgen Habermas (translated by Ciaran Cronin)

This is Habermas’ last great work, spanning three volumes in the English translation and taking him over a decade of the last years of his life to complete. In this first volume, he takes on the challenge of explaining how the change in worldview from the mythical to the age of the axial religions was a precursor to the rise of secular philosophy and post-metaphysical thinking. He grapples with the blurred divisions between faith and knowledge that still weigh on modernity. In Habermas’ telling, modern morality, philosophy, and secularist thinking cannot shake free of religion’s roots. He begins, “In pursuing the correct path of salvation, religious communities can at least recognize each other as competing over the same goal, and in a sense as stakeholders in the same human enterprise. There is no similar basis for mutual recognition if the secular environment allows religious views per se to be regarded exclusively as scientifically demystified illusions and considers religious existences to be remnants of a superseded social epoch…. This touches upon the philosophical question of how to understand the secular character of reason in relation to religious traditions…. The decoupling of secular thinking from all paths of salvation based on faith or ‘wisdom’ acquires an immanent justification if it can be understood as the result of a learning process extending over more than one and a half millennia…. The genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking seeks to understand the structural transformation that worldviews underwent in the West as a learning process.”

Habermas details the transformation of modern philosophy, “Philosophy changed sides from theology to the natural sciences…. The human sciences acquire a different meaning for a form of postmetaphysical thinking that embraces the basic insight of the linguistic turn—that the subjective and the objective mind are interdependent…. Inherently socialized subjects are embedded in an intersubjectively shared lifeworld context by which they are as much shaped as they contribute to its reproduction…. Human ‘nature’ consists in the manifold of organically based, symbolically embodied, sociocultural forms of life that are only accessible to us from the ‘internal’ perspective of a virtual participant. Reflecting philosophers see themselves as situated subjects who, in contrast to natural scientists, do not adopt an imagined view from nowhere or deny their own situation. Rather, they understand themselves as subjects who are located in a particular political and global social constellation, are individuated by their life histories, and belong to a political community and a culturally shaped, albeit increasingly pluralistic, civilization; moreover, as subjects of cognition, they have to take this location in social space and historical time as their point of departure for making generalizations.”

The axial age saw changes in how humanity viewed the world and itself within it, across all cultures. “The concept of the axial age rests on the belief that, without constructing a transcendent divine standpoint or without the reference to the world-immanent vanishing point of a cosmic law that generates unity and coherence, the human mind would not be able to free itself from the clutches of the more or less narratively ordered flood of events controlled by deities and magical powers. A transcendent point of reference is both theoretically and practically necessary—on the one hand, to form a theoretical picture of the world, or of world history or the world ages, as a whole, and, on the other, to establish an ethics that is to some extent universalistic.”

The socialization of humanity was transformative. “Insofar as the contents of consciousness are simultaneously externalized and communalized through the symbolization of meanings, the monadic consciousness of the individual conspecific is ruptured. This entry into the public world of symbolic forms not only marks the overcoming of cognitive egocentrism; it is not only a challenge from the side of the natural environment that had to be cognitively mastered in the long run through mythical worldviews—perhaps prepared by the interactions in the context of a ‘mimetic culture’. Rather, the socialization of intelligence goes hand in hand with a revolution in how behaviour is coordinated—namely, a changeover from the instinctively secured interactions controlled by emotions and triggered by signals of conspecifics who, in their intentional actions, are trapped in their egocentric perspective in the sense indicated, to the symbolically mediated interactions of group members who have to cope cooperatively with the contingencies of the world within the horizon of their shared lifeworld.”

Axial religions shaped how cultures related to their objective world. “My hypothesis aims at the conclusion that the axial worldviews transformed the sacred for the first time into a power that promises a saving justice by linking the attainment of salvation with an ethically demanding path of salvation, hence by explicitly making salvation from earthly misfortune contingent on the observance of a universalistic ethos…. Not only the salvation religions in the narrower sense, but also Confucian wisdom teaching and Greek metaphysics were distinguished from mythical traditions by their novel teaching practice and their truth-oriented interpretation of sacralized texts, around which schools and ritual communities took shape…. Thus the canonization of sacred teachings, for which the Hebrew Bible provided the model, had to satisfy stricter standards than the literature of heroic legends and hymns. Canonizing teachings that were attributed to historical founder figures was not only intended to counteract change in time and keep classics present as contemporaries; rather, the point was to guarantee the authenticity of timeless truths…. Practising absolute obedience to God, even if it is initially ‘blind’, is meant to instruct the believer concerning the absolutely binding character of moral commandments. From the point of view of a pious person, therefore, the monotheistic moralization of salvation and misfortune subjectively means completely decoupling the moral way of life from personal expectations of salvation in the shape of ‘rewards’ for services rendered…. The judging God, who endows the general moral laws with absolute validity, is at the same time the guarantor of the history of salvation as the liberating and redeeming God. A tension can arise from the perspective of the believer between the moments of justice and salvation, because God makes moral action the responsibility of human beings, whereas salvation is something that ‘befalls’ them. In modernity, all that postmetaphysical reason—from its anthropocentric perspective—will retain of the divine legislator is the ‘moral point of view’ as a world-transcending point of view.”

Habermas contends that the axial religions completely transformed how society viewed morality from the mythical worldview, “Moral conceptions of manifestly profane origin came into conflict with the experiences of violence, injustice and oppression in ways that did not admit of convincing explanation in mythological terms. This accounts for the cognitive drive towards the moralization of the sacred from which a new worldview emerged. Everywhere, the enlightening protests of intellectuals undermined the mythological explanatory models and the symbiosis of salvation and political rule; the religious and metaphysical worldviews of the axial age gave rise to generally binding norms that the ruler could no longer embody, but could only represent to the extent that he himself was subject to them…. With the concept of God, Judaism created a transcendent reference point from which the world of nature and history could be objectified as a whole. The cosmological conceptions of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Platonism developed equivalent concepts for the transcending movement of thought in the shape of the fixed pole of the underlying reality of Nirvana, of the Tao that maintains everything in balance, and of eternal being. This explains the dualistic structure of the axial worldviews, which differentiate the world as a whole from the natural processes in the world. Opposing conceptions now open up a perspective from which empirical events that were hitherto only narrated are explained as an ephemeral flow of appearances of a deeper-lying, essential or true reality. In this way, the reflecting observer achieves the necessary theoretical distance from the many, the contingent and the changeable that enables him to comprehend occurrences in the world as constituting an organized whole…. The powers of salvation and misfortune withdraw into a transcendent divine sphere beyond or underlying the disenchanted world, and become sublimated into the unifying figure of a personal god or an anonymous foundation of the world. This telos combines the origin and goal of the ontic construction of the world with a soteriological power that confers on the collective and its members a purpose that goes beyond the contingencies of human existence. The ontological cause of everything, or that which is everything in one, has at the same time the eschatological character of the guarantor of saving justice. In each of the basic concepts of ‘Yahweh’, ‘dharma’, ‘Tao’ and ‘ontōs on’, the multiplicity of mythical powers merged into something singular in which the ontic aspects of world creation or of the ground of being of the world coalesce with the normative-evaluative aspects of redemption, liberation and just fulfilment.”

Finally, Habermas concludes volume 1 with the commonalities concerning the universalness of the axial religions, “All axial worldviews detached the multitude of sacred powers from their entwinement with processes in the world and sublimated them into a singular divine power that constitutes the world as such. While magical thinking was stripped of its foundation, everyday moral consciousness was sacralized by being connected with ideas of saving justice…. In general, the communicative relationship with the person of God, whom the believer addresses as a second person and whose word he hears, and the mystical fusion with the impersonal figure of the divine are the two privileged modes of contact with the sacred…. These approaches are connected with the ethically demanding paths of salvation along which individual believers and the community of the faithful could achieve the salvific goal of redemption or liberation, of perfection or maturity, and immunization against suffering, pain and danger through a constant way of life…. The worldviews all break with the particularism of traditional forms of conventional ethical life that developed on the basis of customary family ties. Even if Yahweh’s promise of salvation is addressed directly to the covenant people, even if Confucius has the citizens of the Chinese state in mind, and even if for Plato the constitution of the polis is the measure of what is human, the postconventional core of these ideas already points to an individualistic and egalitarian universalism.”

“The City and the Mountain” by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This novel splits time between nineteenth century Paris and the mountains of Portugal. It is narrated by Ze Fernandes, the close friend of Jacinto, the heir to a fortune with vast estates across the Portugese countryside and a mansion in Lisbon. He was, nonetheless, born and raised in Paris, never having visited his homeland, the grandson of a self-exiled royalist noble. Jacinto spends his time indulging in food and wine, attending the theater and masked balls, perusing books from his 30,000 volume library, and tinkering with the newest mechanical inventions. “Jacinto had come up with an idea, namely, that “a man can only be superlatively happy when he is superlatively civilized.” And by “civilized” my friend meant the kind of man who, by honing his thinking skills on all the philosophy acquired since Aristotle onwards and multiplying the physical strength of his organs using all the mechanisms invented since Theramenes created the wheel, could make of himself a magnificent, near-omnipotent, Adam ready to reap—within a particular society and within the limits of Progress (at least as far as Progress had gotten in 1875)—all the pleasures and all the advantages that spring from Knowledge and Power.” Jacinto was also, as befits a man of his station, a dandy. “He always wore a flower in his buttonhole, not a real flower, but one skillfully concocted by his florist from the petals of several different flowers—carnations, azaleas, orchids, or tulips—all bound together on one stem, along with a sprig of fennel.”

Despite his wealth and position, the city of Paris gradually began to bore Jacinto. “He never openly confessed his feeling to me. Jacinto, elegant and reserved, did not wring his hands and moan: “Oh accursed life!” It was more the look of satiety on his face: a gesture angrily dismissing the importunate nature of things; the way in which he would sometimes sit immobile, as if in protest, on a divan from which he would not stir, as if he wished those moments of repose to be eternal; then there were the yawns, the gaping yawns with which he underlined everything he did.” All his books of political and economic philosophy and the modish salons, where they discussed the newest utopian fads, could not cure him. “Hardened in sin, the bourgeois revels in his strength, and against him all the tears of the Humanitarians, the reasoned arguments of the Logicians and the bombs of the Anarchists are impotent.”

Ever-tired of his routine in Paris, Jacinto spontaneously decides to journey to his family estate, spurred by the news of a ceremony to reinter the bones of his ancestors, displaced when a mudslide destroyed their resting place in the ancient familial chapel. “Those hairy Jacintos who returned to their high lands in Tormes, back from defeating the Moor at Salado or the Spaniard at Valverde, did not even bother taking off their battered armor to tend their fields and to train their vines to the elms, building their kingdom with lance and spade.” In the countryside, Jacinto finally finds himself, his calling, and his home. “Jacinto had put down strong loving roots in his rough mountain home. It was as if he had been planted, like a cutting, in the ancient soil from which his race had sprung and as if the ancient humus were seeping in and penetrating him, transforming him into a rustic, almost vegetable Jacinto, as much a part of the earth and as rooted in the earth as the trees he so loved.”

“Truth and Method” by Hans-Georg Gadamer (translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall)

The title is adversative, not conjunctive. Gadamer's quarrel is with the assumption that the methodical procedures of the natural sciences alone set the standard for what counts as knowledge, and that the human sciences earn their keep by imitating them. His counterclaim is that art, history, theology, and philosophical texts make claims on us that no verification procedure can certify but that no honest reader can dismiss. Understanding, on his account, "does not consist in a technical virtuosity of 'understanding' everything written," but, instead, is "a genuine experience (Erfahrung) — i.e., an encounter with something that asserts itself as truth.”

Gadamer begins with the rejection of the idea that aesthetic experience can be isolated from the rest of existence. "Every experience is taken out of the continuity of life and at the same time related to the whole of one's life." He claims, "because it is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too." Art intensifies this structure. "The power of the work of art suddenly tears the person experiencing it out of the context of his life, and yet relates him back to the whole of his existence." Thus, aesthetic experience is not merely one discrete subjective state among others. "Our experience of the aesthetic too is a mode of self-understanding…. Self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self." Ultimately, "art is knowledge and experiencing an artwork means sharing in that knowledge."

For this reason, the work of art cannot be detached from the circumstances in which it exists. "The work of art cannot simply be isolated from the 'contingency' of the chance conditions in which it appears.” Doing so produces "an abstraction that reduces the actual being of the work." Gadamer develops this argument through the model of play. The artwork is not primarily an object possessed by a spectator's consciousness, but an event that comes into being through its presentation. The being of art therefore cannot be defined merely as "an object of an aesthetic consciousness." Rather, aesthetic experience "is a part of the event of being that occurs in presentation, and belongs essentially to play as play." The same objection applies more broadly to an aesthetic consciousness that treats works as timeless objects, "The pantheon of art is not a timeless present that presents itself to a pure aesthetic consciousness, but the act of a mind and spirit that has collected and gathered itself historically."

This historical character of understanding becomes Gadamer's central concern. "Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms…. It is not its own master but remains constantly dependent on the given circumstances in which it operates…. History does not belong to us; we belong to it." Long before reflective self-examination, "we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live…. The prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being." To acknowledge human finitude therefore requires Gadamer to "fundamentally rehabilitate the concept of prejudice."

This rehabilitation turns on a reversal. Freedom from prejudice is "the unattainable ideal of the Enlightenment," and the demand for it is itself a prejudice—one that conceals its own operation. A person who believes himself free of prejudice, "relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo." The consequence for historical work is direct, "In seeking to understand tradition historical consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if this preserved it from mixing in its own judgments and prejudices. It must, in fact, think within its own historicity." The hermeneutical situation "is not a regrettable distortion that affects the purity of understanding, but the condition of its possibility."

That this could be seen at all Gadamer credits to Heidegger. The productivity of historical distance "could be understood only when Heidegger gave understanding an ontological orientation by interpreting it as an 'existential' and when he interpreted Dasein's mode of being in terms of time." Understanding ceases to be a procedure that a subject performs on an object and becomes the way the interpreter already is.

Gadamer calls the resulting self-awareness "historically effected consciousness." The interpreter does not stand outside history examining it, but is already constituted by the history and tradition he seeks to understand. Understanding, consequently, cannot be conceived as a detached subjective procedure. "Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated." Interpretation begins with "fore-meanings," which must be tested rather than simply discarded. "Working out appropriate projections, anticipatory in nature, to be confirmed 'by the things' themselves, is the constant task of understanding." We cannot "stick blindly to our own fore-meaning," but neither can we simply forget our prior assumptions. What is required is that "we remain open to the meaning of the other person or text," while situating that meaning in relation to our own.

Accordingly, understanding a text does not mean reconstructing the author's psychology. "We do not try to transpose ourselves into the author's mind.” Rather, we try to enter "the perspective within which he has formed his views," which means trying "to understand how what he is saying could be right." Hermeneutics is, therefore, not "a mysterious communion of souls, but sharing in a common meaning." The interpreter already has "a bond to the subject matter" and "a connection with the tradition from which the text speaks," while genuine interpretation remains suspended in a "polarity of familiarity and strangeness." Neither wholly inside nor wholly outside what it interprets, hermeneutics has its true locus in this in-between.

Understanding is therefore never merely the reconstruction of a past meaning. Gadamer revives the hermeneutical concept of application: to understand what has been handed down is already to understand what its claim means within one's own present situation. Understanding, interpretation, and application are not three stages but one act, and the model is the judge who grasps the law only in determining what it requires of the case before him. Nor is the meaning of a text permanently fixed by its original author or audience. "The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience.” Instead, it is "co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter." From which Gadamer draws the consequence that gives the book much of its force: not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text exceeds its author, and understanding is never merely reproductive but always productive as well. Every age must understand a transmitted text in its own way. If we understand at all, we understand differently. Temporal distance is therefore not an obstacle to be eliminated. "Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates.” Rather, it is "the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted." Temporal distance is "a positive and productive condition enabling understanding," filled by "the continuity of custom and tradition."

This produces Gadamer's conception of understanding as a "fusion of horizons…. Understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves…. Every encounter with tradition that takes place within historical consciousness involves the experience of a tension between the text and the present." The task is not to eliminate that tension through "a naive assimilation of the two,” but consciously to bring it out. Tradition does not imprison understanding. "To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible." Genuine openness to tradition means allowing the past, in its otherness, nevertheless to "have something to say to me.” This is the same openness, Gadamer notes, that constitutes the relation of an I to a Thou, and which is destroyed the moment one reflects oneself out of the relationship in order to master it.

Understanding also proceeds through the structure of question and answer. Interpretation is "a circle closed by the dialectic of question and answer.” To understand a text is in part to recover the question to which it responds, while remaining open to the questions the text in turn puts to the interpreter. What looks like the interpreter's own initiating move is in fact a response. “The dialectic of question and answer always precedes the dialectic of interpretation. It is what determines understanding as an event."

That that tradition reaches us above all in writing is not incidental. "What has come down to us by way of verbal tradition is not left over but given to us, told us." Writing detaches meaning from both author and original addressee, and this detachment "gives it a life of its own. What is fixed in writing has raised itself into a public sphere of meaning in which everyone who can read has an equal share." Hence, Gadamer's blunt reversal of the Romantic assumption, "A text is not to be understood as an expression of life but with respect to what it says." Reading is not archaeology but participation. "The understanding of something written is not a repetition of something past but the sharing of a present meaning." In the form of writing, all tradition is contemporaneous with each present time.

Finally, this entire process is linguistic. "Language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs. Understanding occurs in interpreting…. The essence of tradition is to exist in the medium of language…. The linguisticality of understanding is the concretion of historically effected consciousness." The claim is not that we are sealed inside our vocabulary but that there is no vantage above it. "We cannot see a linguistic world from above in this way, for there is no point of view outside the experience of the world in language from which it could become an object." The world that appears in language is not thereby made into language's object. Rather, "the object of knowledge and statements is always already enclosed within the world horizon of language." Even the world of physics, on this account, is one project of inquiry carried out within that horizon rather than the measure of it.

Interpretation is accordingly speculative in Gadamer's sense. The interpreting word is the interpreter's own, so that "assimilation is no mere reproduction or repetition of the traditionary text; it is a new creation of understanding." What the interpreter says seems, set beside the text, to be something new, and "yet does not maintain any proper existence apart from the understanding process." The paradox that holds of everything handed down — "being one and the same and yet being different" — is what proves all interpretation speculative. The hermeneutic relation shares in dialectic without terminating in it. It is "fundamentally different from the dialectical self-unfolding of the mind, as described by Hegel's philosophical science," because the finitude on which it rests admits no consummation. Hence the book's most quoted sentence — being that can be understood is language — states not that everything is words but that whatever can be understood presents itself, and that we participate in that presentation rather than seize it. “Truth and Method” thus presents understanding not as the recovery of a fixed meaning by an autonomous subject, but as a historically situated, linguistically mediated encounter in which text, tradition, and interpreter continually determine one another.

“The Moral Economy” by Samuel Bowles

Bowles wants to take down the idea that homo economicus rules. Of course, behavioral economics (as well as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and the other social sciences) have already posited that man does not always act in his longterm monetary self-interest alone. This might be because of lack of information, because of framing issues, time preference, or because of altruism. Nonetheless, the starting assumption in economics is that it is often best to think of man as a rational actor acting in his own best interest. Therefore, when designing a form of governance it is best to assume that men are selfish, acting for their own gain over the general weal. What is best is to restrain their motives and channel their selfish individual desires in a better direction for the group as a whole: to create a Constitution for knaves. Political theorists from Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and James Madison felt that it was better to design a system based on the assumption man acted more as knaves than as angels. Bowles suggests, “what the classical economists (and most economists since) missed is the possibility that moral and other prosocial behavior would be affected- perhaps adversely- by incentive-based policies designed to harness self-interest.” Are incentives and morals additively separate as basic economics suggests or is Bowles onto something? Can we separate moral and economic worth? Do economic incentives, in fact, change people’s moral calculus? Does putting a price on something (be it a fine or a reward) change how an issue is framed? Does the moral sphere of society get crowded out by the economic sphere? The bottomline: if you put a price on something, make sure you are willing to accept it when someone is willing to pay it.

“The Slaughterman’s Daughter” by Yaniv Iczkovits (translated by Orr Scharf)

This novel, translated from Hebrew, has its fair share of Yiddish sprinkled in. It takes place during the nineteenth century in the Pale of Settlement. Most of the action takes place in Motal, a predominantly Jewish village with a few muzhiks in the mix. It has quite the cast of characters—a mute Russian Army veteran, a degenerate-gambling Jewish cantor, a hobbling Okhrana officer, a brothel owner, an apocalyptic Yeshiva scholar, and, of course, a slaughterman’s daughter or two. “Fanny feels the sheath against her thigh: Why has she continued to carry the knife even after abandoning her career of slaughtering? She does not know. She intended many times to bury it in the back of a cupboard, but whenever she removed the blade from her body she felt as though something was amiss, as if it were another body part in addition to the 248 that the Sages of antiquity had enumerated in the human body.” Fanny belongs to an insulated rural Jewish community, but is a bit of an outcast, having married a stoic cheesemaker, who lives dangerously close to the goyim. “The righteous do not take political positions, they strengthen their allegiance to the Blessed Holy One instead, and they could not care less whether the nobility is bickering with the peasants, and it is all the same to them if Polish nationalists are clashing with Russian oppressors. If there is something to sell to the gentiles or to buy from them in order to make a living, so much the better—but this is where the line between them and us is drawn. We share with them the same soil but not the same world.” The adventure Fanny will end up going on will bring death aplenty, as well as soul searching, hero-making, and reconciliation. “Now she is proud of the riff-raff she has gathered around her, the types that townspeople would point at and say: “See them? They’re exactly what we’re not.” Well, this is her army. And although none of them would admit it, she knows that whatever powerful thing it is that unites this divided, battered crew, it has made waves throughout the entire empire.”

“The Beast in the Nursery” by Adam Phillips

I would not recommend this book to any of my friends with young children. It might seriously disturb them. On the other hand, it might also enlighten. Freud claimed, “if children could follow the hints given by the excitation of the penis they would get a little nearer to the solution of the problem” of how to best navigate the mysteries of growing into a successful adult. In another essay, Freud propounded, “no one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.” Phillips does not dwell on all things Oedipal, yet, as in all psychoanalysis, it lurks in the recesses of the mind.

This book is about the struggles with and conflicts in growing up- what we have to give up and what we, unfortunately, leave behind. We are told that “being realistic is a better guarantee of pleasure” and that “morality is the way we set limits on wanting,” but we don’t want to kill that inner child for “inspiration is the best word we have for appetite, and that appetite is the best thing we have going for us.” In the end, “lives are only livable if they give pleasure: that is, if we can renew our pleasures, remember their intensities.” We are told or we figure out as children that there is a natural progression in life. We are not fully humans until we become adults. Children are in search of the missing, what will complete them. But as we age we learn we must all make sacrifices, that we are not the center of the universe, and that we must settle, for not all our wishes will become fulfilled. “People come for psychoanalysis when they are feeling under-nourished, and this is because- depending on one’s psychoanalytic preferences- either what they have been given wasn’t good enough, so they couldn’t do enough with it, or because there is something wrong with their capacity for transformation…. We are interested in things despite ourselves.” To grow up is to learn to live with disappointment. “Wishing is the sign of loss; wanting things to be otherwise because they are not as they are supposed to be. For the child to live his curiosity is itself an acknowledgement of loss, of wanting as the sign of life…. We are the animals for whom something is missing and for whom what is missing is always privileged. What is absent, ironically, is what is there for us to be interested in.” Growing up also often means settling. “Education, Freud implies, teaches the child either to lose interest in what matters most to her or to compromise that interest.” What is lost on the child is that she too has something unique to offer to the world as is. The child is not merely waiting to become an adult. One could say that an adult is a child who has become stale and calcified. “If you know too well how to do something, you’re less likely to fall into originality.” The adult can try to teach, but only the child can learn. “Children’s self-education [is] about what they learned despite the adults, not because of them…. From an unknowable (unconscious) set of criteria a person, unbeknown even to himself, picks out and transforms the bits he wants; the bits that can be used in the hidden projects of unconscious desire.” Learning about the world is a mysterious process that one is constantly involved in and what is unconsciously absorbed is often more lasting than what is learned through effort.

Phillips suggests the best kind of learning is done by simply taking a hint. But “the useful hint is, more often than not, not intended as such.” It is often the case that we do most of our teaching when we never even intend it- or, at least, not how we intend it. “We might make our words smell as nice as they can, but they will go into the world and be made use of sometimes beyond our wildest intentions. They will fuel that dreamwork of everyday life called gossip. They will evoke idiosyncratic personal histories- what we call associations- in their listeners.” Life is a continuous project, but it is not always linear. But we are always growing up (or growing somewhere, at least). But as we are growing into something, we must also be growing out of something. And that loss can be acute. “How could growing up be anything but an adaptation to something other than oneself, and therefore a disillusionment?…. Something essential is lost, or at least attenuated, in the process of growing up. Whether it is called vision or imagination or vitality or hope, lives are considered to erode over time.” As we grow we learn to accept life, to accept compromise. But what we cannot compromise on, what we will not compromise on, are our morals. “It is from our discontents that we can infer our ideals…. Our unofficial, more idiosyncratic morality is only available, so to speak, through humiliation. Once you know who or what humiliates you, you know what it is about yourself that you ultimately value, that you worship. Tell me what makes you enraged- what makes you feel truly diminished- and I will tell you what you believe or what you want to believe about yourself.” In the process of growing up the child’s pleasures turn into the adult’s ideals. “Freud is not saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. That the values and ambitions- the representations- of the adult are an obscured picture of the passions and conflicts and curiosities of childhood. (So the wish to be rich, for example, becomes a fantasy of uninhibited access, or of being exempt from dependent need.)” What is the underlying need that is being superficially satisfied by wealth? What fears do riches satisfy? Self-sufficiency? Adulthood? Growing up? Growing old? “There is an inevitable element of humiliation in simply being a child, though the child’s relative helplessness can be more or less exploited by the parents; the child is not sufficient unto himself, he cannot bring himself up…. Compliance is always experienced by the child as demeaning (sadomasochism is the trick by which adults make compliance and domination bearable by making them sexually exciting.)”

In the end, do we ever really grow up? Is it healthy to do so? “What children supposedly suffer from is not being what they think of as adults; and adulthood becomes the afterlife for children, which means a growing acquaintance with the unappeasable nature of desire…. Growing up, in other words, is not so much acquiring a more realistic sense of ourselves, but rather the process of forgetting our earliest entitlements.” However, the really interesting question for Freud was quite the opposite of growing up, “why is it that adults are more like children than they want to be?”

“The Tonality of Thought” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This short book is a transcription of three lectures Han gave in April of 2023. The series of talks, in Leipzig, Porto, and Lisbon, was rare as Han rarely travels from his home in Berlin. In Leipzig, Han gave a talk interspersed with a pianist playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He began by describing his method of working, “When I am thinking I often feel I am taking off with my wings. I love these flights of speculation that are accompanied by two wings, dos pianos de cola, and their music. Heidegger also experienced thinking as a speculative flight that uses two wings…. Without the beat of a wing, without the wings of Eros, thinking is impossible. Someone who thinks must take off on the wings of Eros onto untrodden paths, onto the not-yet-born, or the coming, even into the new…. Without flowers I am not able to think…. I make great efforts, and I will continue to make great efforts, to make my thinking smell of flowers too. That is where the truth is.” He also defended his oeuvre, “Some people accuse me of too much repetition. But they do not understand that my books are not repetitions, they are variations.”

In Porto, Han critiqued modern society, “If asked to summarize my philosophical thoughts in one sentence, I would say: The Other disappears…. Are we today still capable of touching – of touching the Other, that is? Physical touch is very important for the cohesion of a community. The hand, the squeeze of the hand, is what creates trust. Despite, or because of, digital interconnectedness and communication there is very little touching in our society.” He discussed depression, “The ego rests isolated in itself, and this poverty in world makes us depressive…. Anyone who has been depressive, who suffered a deep depression, knows that a depressive person loses the world. He is without world.” Han continued reciting the woes of modernity and technology, “So, permanently typing and swiping on the smartphone has an enormous effect on our relation to the world, to the Other. Information that does not interest me is quickly swiped away. Content I like, on the contrary, I zoom closer with my fingers. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world must conform to whatever I want from it. In this way, the smartphone intensifies our self-centredness. Typing around, I subjugate the world to my needs…. The smartphone actually permits us to retreat into a sphere that is protected against the imponderables associated with the Other, into a digital bubble that shields us from the Other…. It turns a You into an It. We should turn the It into a You again. You, that is the Other…. Since the spread of the smartphone we less and less look each other in the eyes. The gaze is lost. But the gaze is the Other…. We exploit ourselves voluntarily and passionately under the illusion that we realize ourselves by doing so. The destructive pressure does not come from the Other but from ourselves. I am not exploited, whipped by the master, I whip myself, I exploit myself. I am master and slave at one and the same time.”

Han discussed the paradox of freedom in the contemporary world, “The self as project, which believes it has liberated itself from external coercion and coercion by others, submits itself to the inner compulsion to achieve and optimize itself. We exploit ourselves believing we realize ourselves…. The freedom of being-able-to creates even more compulsions than the disciplinary you-ought-to which puts forward precepts and prohibitions. The ought has limits. Being-able-to, ability, in contrast, knows no limits…. The neoliberal achievement-subject believes itself to be free but in truth is a slave. It is an absolute slave in the sense that, in the absence of a master, it exploits itself voluntarily…. The disappearance of the Other is a pathological phenomenon of the present. Being connected is not the same as being together. The limitless connectivity actually weakens our ties…. An intensive relation presupposes an Other who is not at my disposal. Only the non-availability of the Other makes closeness possible…. The Other is not an available and consumable object.”

Finally, in Lisbon, Han discussed the lack of transcendence in modernity, “I said that the life of a monk is a very happy life because the ideal monk, a monk, that is, who is not corrupted, lives off transcendence. In our society of consumption and achievement all transcendence is lost. This makes us unreal. Transcendence does not agree with the immanence of consumption or achievement or production. God does not consume. God also does not produce. And God’s creation is not an achievement, it is an act of love. We are currently losing ourselves, we even vegetate in the immanence of production and consumption. Life without transcendence withers and becomes nothing but the satisfaction of needs. This consumerist life, this life without transcendence, is a life without happiness, a poor, miserable, impoverished, atrophied life. This is not a human life, but the life of cattle.”

“The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

In many ways this is a book of philosophy disguised as a novel. “The heart is the main thing, the rest is nonsense. Brains are also necessary, of course…. maybe brains are the main thing. Don’t smile, Aglaya, I’m not contradicting myself: a fool with a heart and no brains is as unhappy a fool as a fool with brains but no heart. An old truth. I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.” At the center of the story is a superficially simple-minded man, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, the Idiot. “All those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the “highest being,” were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “So what if it is an illness?” he finally decided. “Who cares that it’s an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?… Those moments were precisely only an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness…. “Yes, for this moment one could give one’s whole life!””

Prince Myshkin has returned to St. Petersburg after years in Switzerland, trying to cure his affliction. “You have suffered and have emerged pure from such a hell, and that is a lot.” What makes this story so much like life is that all the characters are actually quite complicated. “Well, see how you throw a man into a final flummox! For pity’s sake, Prince: first such a simple-heartedness, such innocence as even the golden age never heard of, then suddenly at the same time you pierce a man through like an arrow with this deepest psychology of observation.” There is no one who is easy to root for or wholeheartedly identify with. “Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of own’s own.” Prince Myshkin, upon returning to Russia, goes from knowing not a soul to, in quick succession, becoming acquainted with some distant, well-off relatives, getting pushed into the edges of polite society, and coming into his own sizable inheritance. His life becomes a whirlwind. He also almost immediately falls in love with a mysterious lady of dubious origins, even before he meets her in the flesh. “A man could even lose his faith from that painting!” The story is on the surface a love triangle, or perhaps, more aptly, a love polygon. “It made no difference to this ‘poor knight’ who this lady was or what she might do. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and believed in her ‘pure beauty,’ and only then did he bow down to her forever; and the merit of it is that she might have turned out later to be a thief, but still he had to believe in her and wield the sword for her pure beauty.” It is also a story about Russia, its personality, its people, its religion, and what makes it unique and great. “But I am not saying anything against liberalism. Liberalism is not a sin; it is a necessary part of the whole, which without it would fall apart or atrophy; liberalism has the same right to exist as the most well-mannered conservatism; what I am attacking is Russian liberalism, and I repeat again that I attack it essentially because a Russian liberal is not a Russian liberal, but is a non-Russian liberal. Give me a Russian liberal and I’ll kiss him at once right in front of you.”

“The Sickness Unto Death” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong)

In this book, an accompaniment to “The Concept of Anxiety”, Kierkegaard is trying to define despair and sin Christianly, against psychological, ethical, pagan, Socratic, and speculative-philosophical accounts. The book is by Kierkegaard, but published under the pseudonym, Anti-Climacus. The book’s central claim is that despair is not merely unhappiness or psychological distress, but a sickness in the self’s relation to itself and to the power that established it. “The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s superiority over the natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian’s blessedness…. Consequently, to be able to despair is an infinite advantage, and yet to be in despair is not only the worst misfortune and misery—no, it is ruination…. Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It is always the present tense…. In every actual moment of despair the person in despair bears all the past as a present in possibility. The reason for this is that to despair is a qualification of spirit and relates to the eternal in man…. Every moment he is in despair he is bringing his despair upon himself. For despair is not attributable to the misrelation but to the relation that relates itself to itself…. This concept, the sickness unto death, must, however, be understood in a particular way. Literally it means a sickness of which the end and the result are death…. In that sense, despair cannot be called the sickness unto death. Christianly understood, death itself is a passing into life. Thus, from a Christian point of view, no earthly, physical sickness is the sickness unto death…. If there is to be any question of a sickness unto death in the strictest sense, it must be a sickness of which the end is death and death is the end. This is precisely what despair is…. To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.”

Kierkegaard then radicalizes despair: it is not limited to the miserable or obviously broken person, but includes every form of life that avoids becoming conscious of itself as spirit before God. Even aesthetic brilliance, ethical achievement, or absorption into state, nation, or universality can still be despair if the self does not transparently rest in God. “Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something—every such existence, whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, whatever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically—every such existence is nevertheless despair. That is what the ancient Church Fathers meant when they said that the virtues of the pagans were glittering vices: they meant that the heart of paganism was despair, that paganism was not conscious before God as spirit.”

One lower form of despair is immediacy, where the person has not yet become inward enough to possess a self in any serious sense. Such a person identifies the self with external conditions and imagines salvation as becoming someone else, as if changing the self were like changing clothes. “Immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself; thus it cannot recognize itself and therefore generally ends in fantasy. When immediacy despairs, it does not even have enough self to wish or dream that it had become that which it has not become. The man of immediacy helps himself in another way: he wishes to be someone else…. Imagine a self (and next to God there is nothing as eternal as a self), and then imagine that it suddenly occurs to a self that it might become someone other—than itself. And yet one in despair this way, whose sole desire is this most lunatic of lunatic metamorphoses, is infatuated with the illusion that this change can be accomplished as easily as one changes clothes. The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities.”

Kierkegaard’s more intense form of despair is defiance: not despairingly wanting to get rid of oneself, but despairingly willing to be oneself apart from God. This is more spiritually developed and therefore more dangerous; it is close to faith because it uses the eternal, but it misuses the eternal by refusing surrender, consolation, and the possibility that “for God everything is possible.” He continues, “First comes despair over the earthly or over something earthly, then despair of the eternal, over oneself. Then comes defiance, which is really despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself. But just because it is despair through the aid of the eternal, in a certain sense it is very close to the truth; and just because it lies very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away. The despair that is the thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself…. In order in despair to will to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self. This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self…. The form of despair that despairs over the earthly or something earthly was understood basically to be—and it also manifests itself as being—despair of the eternal, that is, an unwillingness to be comforted by and healed by the eternal, an overestimation of the things of this world to the extent that the eternal can be no consolation. But this is also a form of the despair, to be unwilling to hope in the possibility that an earthly need, a temporal cross, can come to an end. The despairing person who in despair wills to be himself is unwilling to do that. He has convinced himself that this thorn in the flesh* gnaws so deeply that he cannot abstract himself from it (whether this is actually the case or his passion makes it so to him*), and therefore he might as well accept it forever, so to speak. He is offended by it, or, more correctly, he takes it as an occasion to be offended at all existence…. Hope in the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible.”

Kierkegaard’s account of sin turns on the difference between ignorance and will. Socrates can explain wrongdoing as a failure of understanding, but Christianity goes further: sin is not merely failing to know the good, but willing against the good, even when one understands it. “Socrates would say: If this happens, it just shows that a person such as this still has not understood what is right. This means that the Greek mind does not have the courage to declare that a person knowingly does wrong, knows what is right and does the wrong; so it manages by saying: If a person does what is wrong, he has not understood what is right…. Absolutely right. And no human being can come further than that; no man of himself and by himself can declare what sin is, precisely because he is in sin…. That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right…. Socrates actually gives no explanation at all of the distinction: not being able to understand and not willing to understand…. Socrates explains that he who does not do what is right has not understood it, either; but Christianity goes a little further back and says that it is because he is unwilling to understand it, and this again because he does not will what is right. And in the next place it teaches that a person does what is wrong (essentially defiance) even though he understands what is right, or he refrains from doing what is right even though he understands it; in short, the Christian teaching about sin is nothing but offensiveness toward man, charge upon charge, it is the suit that the divine as the prosecutor ventures to bring against man…. To comprehend is the range of man’s relation to the human, but to believe is man’s relation to the divine…. Therefore, interpreted Christianly, sin has its roots in willing, not in knowing, and this corruption of willing affects the individual’s consciousness…. Sin is—after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is—before God in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself.”

Because sin concerns the self before God, Kierkegaard denies that it can be mastered by speculative comprehension. Christianity requires faith, not because it is intellectually lazy, but because faith preserves the qualitative gulf between God and man that speculative thought is always tempted to smooth over. “I steadfastly hold to the Christian teaching that sin is a position—yet not as if it could be comprehended, but as a paradox that must be believed…. Whether one will believe or not must be left to faith…. So let others admire and praise him who pretends to be able to comprehend Christianity. I consider it an outright ethical task, perhaps requiring not a little self-denial in these very speculative times, when all “the others” are busy comprehending, to admit that one is neither able nor obliged to comprehend it…. Let us never forget that Socrates’ ignorance was a kind of fear and worship of God, that his ignorance was the Greek version of the Jewish saying: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…. Christianity teaches that everything essentially Christian depends solely upon faith; therefore it wants to be precisely a Socratic, God-fearing ignorance, which by means of ignorance guards faith against speculation, keeping watch so that the gulf of qualitative difference between God and man may be maintained as it is in the paradox and faith.”

Furthermore, Kierkegaard describes an even deeper intensification: despairing over one’s sin. Here the sinner does not merely sin, but encloses himself within sin, treating repentance and grace as impossible, meaningless, or even hostile. "Sin is despair; the intensification is the new sin of despairing over one’s sin…. We are not talking about particular sins here; the state of sin is the sin, and this is intensified in a new consciousness…. To despair over one’s sin indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good…. It insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin. It is aware of having burned the bridge behind it and of thereby being inaccessible to the good and of the good being inaccessible to it, so that if in a weak moment it should itself will the good, that would still be impossible. Sin itself is severance from the good, but despair over sin is the second severance. This, of course, squeezes the uttermost demonic powers out of sin, gives it the profane toughness or perverseness that must consistently regard everything called repentance and grace not only as empty and meaningless but also as its enemy.”

Finally, Kierkegaard opposes the ethical and Christian category of the single individual to speculative abstraction. Sin may be universal, but it is never merely a universal idea; it becomes actual only in the individual sinner, standing before God. “The ethical does not abstract from actuality but immerses itself in actuality and operates mainly with the help of that speculatively disregarded and scorned category: individuality. Sin is a qualification of the single individual; it is irresponsibility and new sin to pretend as if it were nothing to be an individual sinner—when one himself is this individual sinner…. The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I…. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation. Christianity begins here—with the teaching about sin, and thereby with the single individual…. Sin, however common it is to all, does not gather men together in a common idea, into an association, into a partnership (“no more than the multitude of the dead out in the cemetery form some kind of society”); instead, it splits men up into single individuals and holds each individual fast as a sinner…. If “the single individual” is to feel in kinship with God (and this is what Christianity teaches), then he also senses the full weight of it in fear and trembling, and he must discover—as if it were not an ancient discovery—the possibility of offense…. Being a human being is not like being an animal, for which the specimen is always less than the species. Man is distinguished from other animal species not only by the superiorities that are generally mentioned but is also qualitatively distinguished by the fact that the individual, the single individual, is more than the species. This qualification is in turn dialectical and signifies that the single individual is a sinner, but then again that it is a perfection to be the single individual.”