KSRK

Thanks, Jonathan, for laying down what probably marks the end of this session of the Summer Reading Klub. One person made it, anyway. Perhaps I will give it a go this weekend. Devote all of Sunday to finishing the Frater Taciturnus section. But Taciturnus shouldn't feel too badly; I myself take my lack of readers as a sign of extreme rarification. Actually, I think he does too. Since I haven't read the end of the Stages, I'll offer what I can here in the way of a few reflections on the metaphysical tradition that Kierkegaard is drawing on, and how it evolved, or perhaps 'devolved', after him.

FT writes:

There are three existence-spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. The metaphysical is abstraction, there is no man who exists metaphysically. The metaphysical, ontology, is but does not exist; for when it exists it is in the aesthetic, in the ethical, in the religious, and when it is it is the abstraction of or the prius for the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious.

The remark about ontology not existing seems to be derived from Aristotle:

Since a definition is a formula, and a formula has parts, and as the formula is to the thing, so is the part of the formula to the part of the thing, the question is already being asked whether the formula of the parts must be present in the formula of the whole or not. Aristotle Metaphysics, book Zeta, chapter 10

'Formula' here is to Aristotle here what 'Definition' is to Aquinas when he writes:

The term quiddity, surely, is taken from the fact that this is what is signified by the definition. But the same thing is called essence because the being has existence through it and in it.

So for Aristotle, or at least Aquinas, existence is dependent on essence, and perhaps this is why for Kierkegaard "the metaphysical, ontology" doesn't exist. They've certainly inherited the conception of the Platonic ideal. Of course it was Aquinas who drew on this metaphysical to establish what can and can't be said about the supreme being. I find this division between essence and existence the most interesting problem in all philosophy, although I'm still not exactly sure how the latter is covered by the word is while the former is not.

It's certainly a long ways from St. Thomas to Sartre and his phrase 'existence precedes essence'. Am I wrong, or has Sartre completely inverted the order of being here? Sartre is perhaps most famous for writing the words "existence precedes essence", and in fact what we now take to be "existentialism" is inextricably bound up with this inverted metaphysic. And we wonder how he became an atheist and a communist. But we're not reading Sartre. We are reading Kierkegaardand, and his attempt at putting Aristotelian metaphysics and Thomistic theology together with Hegel's dialectic to come up with his own tripartite theory of existence. Notice that Kierkegaard writes:

for when it exists it is in the aesthetic, in the ethical, in the religious, and when it is it is the abstraction of or the prius for the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious.

Here, for example, the distinction seems to be between "is" and existence, while my understanding is that in a sentence such as "the chair is in the dining room" the word "is" is just shorthand for 'exists'. There just doesn't seem to me to be a useful distinction there. Kierkegaard writes the "is" (that which has essence but not existence) as the prius for the aesthetic, ethical and the religious, and I'm not sure what that means, except perhaps that essence, or God, isn't bound by these categories as all existing things are bound. But of course Aquinas wouldn't claim that God doesn't exist. Quite the contrary. Wouldn't he rather claim that God does exist? Perhaps the point is that God exists as pure essence. Or perhaps that God exists for us as pure essence. I'm certainly not an expert on this. What makes sense in the Kierkegaardian scheme of things is that existing things - chairs, personalities - must exist within the aesthetic, ethical or religious, or some mixture of the three. I'm just not sure how this is tied to the metaphysical tradition; maybe it's significant enough that he wanted that connection to be there. I wonder if it is part of his reaction to Hegel.

So what to make of what Kierkegaard has made of the metaphysical tradition. It isn't the mess that Sartre made of it; Aquinas' and Aristotle's work seems relatively intact, if unreferenced. That's my opinion. I like it, and as difficult as it is to read, I think there's a lot of value in trying to bring Aristotelian distinctions (especially those emphasized by Aquinas: "essence signifies something common to all natures") to bear on Hegel ("Essence is mere Identity and reflection in itself only as it is self-relating negativity, and in that way self-repulsion") in order to form his own, extremely personal vision of what it means to be a Christian.

I believe it all works as well as it does because of his psychological insights, which I think are pretty formidable. This is where some of his most beautiful metaphors come into play. These are why, after reading page after page of such extremly obscure prose in search of even more obscure ideas, the clouds part and the sun finally shines through. I think he used literature and philosophy the way we use space flight: after estranging himself as much as possible and putting himself at further and further remove from the life lived every day by most other citizens, possibly at even furhter and further remove form his own life, he was then able to turn around and see himself anew. Over and over again. The Latin for "turn around" is convertere, and while it's kind of cheesy to say it was this conversion that became his life project, I'll say it anyway.