37. Ibid., 10:17.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 10:27.
41. Ibid., 11:29.
42. Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two, p. 67.
43. Knausgaard, Min kamp: Sjette bok, p. 365.
44. Augustine, Confessions, 10:30.
45. Ibid., 11:1.
46. Knausgaard, Min kamp: Sjette bok, pp. 610, 611.
47. Ibid., p. 610.
48. Ibid., p. 409.
49. Augustine, Confessions, 10:17.
50. Ibid., 10:3.
51. Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One, p. 25.
52. Ibid., p. 28.
53. Knausgaard, Min kamp: Sjette bok, p. 227.
54. Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Three, p. 172.
55. Ibid., p. 178.
56. Ibid., pp. 186–187.
57. Ibid., p. 182.
58. Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One, pp. 164–165.
59. Ibid., p. 29.
60. Proust, Finding Time Again, p. 208.
61. Ibid., p. 204.
62. Ibid., p. 459.
63. Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 371.
64. Knausgaard, Min kamp: Sjette bok, pp. 1116, 1117.
65. Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One, pp. 25–26.
66. Proust, Finding Time Again, pp. 345–346.
67. Ibid., p. 345.
68. Ibid., p. 357.
69. Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One, pp. 3–4.
70. Ibid., Book Three, p. 8.
71. Knausgaard, Min kamp: Sjette bok, p. 596.
72. Ibid., Book Two, p. 98.
73. Ibid., Book One, p. 441.
74. Ibid., p. 350.
75. Ibid.
76. Epictetus, The Discourses, p. 215.
77. Knausgaard, Min kamp: Sjette bok, pp. 916–917.
3. RESPONSIBILITY
1. Gen. 12:2. The cited translations from the Bible generally follow The New Oxford Annotated Bible, edited by Michael D. Coogan.
2. Gen. 22:12.
3. Gen. 22:16–17.
4. See Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, p. 251.
5. Luther, in Luther’s Catechetical Writings, vol. 1, p. 203.
6. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 20.
7. Ibid., p. 52.
8. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 204.
9. Kierkegaard, “On the Occasion of a Wedding,” p. 58.
10. Ibid., p. 44.
11. Ibid., p. 50.
12. Ibid., p. 62.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., pp. 52–53.
15. Kierkegaard, “At a Graveside,” p. 83.
16. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 23.
17. Ibid., p. 24.
18. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 31.
19. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 25.
20. Ibid., p. 22.
21. Ibid., pp. 14 and 49.
22. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 189.
23. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, pp. 23–24.
24. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 190.
25. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 38.
26. Ibid., pp. 39–40.
27. Ibid., pp. 38–39.
28. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 36.
29. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 391.
30. Ibid., p. 393.
31. Ibid., p. 410.
32. Ibid., pp. 410–411.
33. Ibid., p. 412.
34. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, p. 284.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 285.
38. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 386.
39. Ibid., p. 410.
40. Ibid., p. 405.
41. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 46. See also the discussion of Religiousness A in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in particular pp. 556–557. For a systematic account of the notion of religious faith in Kierkegaard’s major works, see Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith. As Westphal rightly argues, Religiousness A is “the genus of which Christianity is a species. When Climacus [the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Postscript] says that one must first be in Religiousness A in order to actually be in Religiousness B, he is not doing developmental psychology. The meaning is the same as when we say that an animal must first be a dog in order to be a collie. The priority is logical or conceptual, not temporal” (pp. 208–209).
42. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 393.
43. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 45.
44. Ibid.
45. John Davenport has analyzed this Kierkegaardian notion of faith in terms of “eschatological trust”; see Davenport’s series of interrelated essays: “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling”; “Kierkegaard’s Postscript in Light of Fear and Trembling”; “Eschatological Faith and Repetition.”
46. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 20.
47. Ibid., p. 50.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 40.
50. See, for example, Dreyfus and Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and the Later Heidegger”; Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard on the Self”; Lippitt, Kierkegaard and “Fear and Trembling”; Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling”; Krishek, “The Existential Dimension of Faith.” In contrast, see J. M. Bernstein’s incisive essay “Remembering Isaac,” which beautifully articulates what it means to remember the standpoint of Isaac (especially through an extraordinary reading of Caravaggio) and shows how Fear and Trembling is predicated on the forgetting of Isaac.
51. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 36.
52. Ibid., p. 12.
53. Ibid., p. 14.
54. Ibid., p. 37.
55. Ibid., p. 22.
56. Ibid., p. 39.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., p. 41.
59. Ibid., p. 42.
60. Ibid., p. 46.
61. Ibid., p. 44.
62. Ibid., pp. 44–45.
63. Ibid., p. 44.
64. Ibid., p. 49.
65. Ibid., pp. 43–44.
66. Ibid., p. 48.
67. Ibid., pp. 46–47.
68. Ibid., p. 48.
69. Ibid., p. 50.
70. Ibid., p. 40.
71. Ibid., pp. 40–41.
72. Ibid., p. 39.
73. Ibid., pp. 39–40.
74. Ibid., p. 40.
75. Ibid., p. 34.
76. Ibid., p. 40.
77. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 15.
78. Kierkegaard, in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 1, p. 10.
79. See Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, pp. 7–22.
80. Ibid., p. 14.
81. Ibid., pp. 15–16.
82. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 307.
83. Meister Eckhart, “Detachment,” p. 91.
84. Omri Boehm, The Binding of Isaac, p. 23.
85. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 22.
86. Ibid.
87. My argument in this paragraph is indebted to the reading of the Gospel of John in Henry Staten’s important book, Eros in Mourning, chapter 3.
4. NATURAL AND SPIRITUAL FREEDOM
1. The insight that not only human beings but also other living animals are capable of rudimentary forms of practical classification and discrimination—taking food as f
ood, distinguishing in practice between what counts as nourishment (essence) and what merely seems to be nourishing (appearance)—is suggested by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, §109; see also his Science of Logic, p. 684. Hegel’s argument has been developed with great lucidity by Robert Brandom in “The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution,” pp. 132–134. See also the insightful further development of Hegel’s and Brandom’s argument by J. M. Bernstein in “To Be Is to Live, to Be Is to Be Recognized,” pp. 180–198.
2. For a detailed overview of Neurath’s various formulations of the boat model throughout his career, see Thomas E. Uebel, Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics, pp. 89–166. For an influential philosophical account of Neurath’s boat as a model for grasping the problem of objective knowledge, see W. V. Quine, Word and Object. For an important deployment of Neurath’s boat that goes beyond questions of epistemology to ethical questions of character and virtue, see John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, chapters 2, 3 and 9, as well as McDowell, The Engaged Intellect, chapter 2. McDowell does not, however, analyze the inherent finitude and fragility of leading a life, which I will argue is crucial for understanding what is at stake in Neurath’s boat. McDowell notes that “Neurath’s sailor may need to tinker with the boat” (The Engaged Intellect, p. 35), but he treats the necessity of maintaining the boat as episodic rather than as constitutive. In contrast, I will show how any form of life is constitutively self-maintaining by virtue of its inherent finitude—the boat must always be maintained in order to hold together and it can always fall apart—which in turn accounts for the primacy of practical self-consciousness in any form of spiritual life.
3. Privileging the notion of “life” in a logical sense does not entail any kind of vitalism. As I will show, the logic of self-maintenance makes clear that the living necessarily depends on the existence of nonliving matter, while nonliving matter does not necessarily depend on the existence of the living. For the same reason, privileging the notion of “life” in a logical sense is compatible with a modern evolutionary account of life. In the evolution of the empirical universe, there was nonliving matter before there were any living beings, and there was no prospective necessity of the advent of life. Evolution did not require any reason or final purpose to get going as a causal process, and it did not have to be intelligible to anyone in order to proceed. However, in order for evolution to be intelligible as evolution—and indeed for anything to be intelligible as anything—the contingent existence of living beings is necessary. Only living beings are able to take anything as anything—to practically distinguish between quantity and quality, appearance and essence, the nonliving and the living, and so on—all the way up to our ability to give an evolutionary account of our own existence and a philosophical account of the conditions of intelligibility for our own activities. For an insightful analysis of Hegel’s Logic along these lines, see Jensen Suther, “Hegel’s Logic of Freedom.” My general emphasis on conditions of intelligibility is indebted to Robert Pippin’s groundbreaking work on the Science of Logic; see Pippin, “Hegel on Logic as Metaphysics,” “Hegel’s Logic of Essence,” and “The Many Modalities of Wirklichkeit in Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik.”
4. I here draw on and transform the notion of “formally distinctive” ways of being alive, which John McDowell formulates in his analysis of the concept of life in Aristotle and Hegel (see McDowell, “Why Does It Matter to Hegel that Geist Has a History?”). Strikingly, the mortality of the living plays no role in McDowell’s account of what it means that we are living beings. McDowell’s admirable philosophical project (pursued in his essays on Aristotle and Hegel as well as in Mind and World) is to insist that even our highest rational and spiritual capacities depend on our status as essentially living beings. The stakes of our status as living beings, however, are diluted as long as we do not explicitly grasp and spell out the implications of mortality as constitutive of any form of natural life as well as any form of spiritual life. This is what I seek to do on every level of This Life. To that end, I have deduced the necessity of (1) finitude, (2) fragile material embodiment, and (3) asymmetrical dependence on inanimate matter, as conditions of intelligibility for the activity of self-maintenance—the activity of the living—as such. I will proceed to give an account of how the mortality of life is actualized in two different ways in natural and spiritual life respectively.
5. My argument seeks to develop Hegel’s claim that all living beings are characterized by the ability to bear a negative self-relation: to be in pain and yet stay alive, to break apart and yet hold together (see his Science of Logic, pp. 682–685 and Philosophy of Nature, pp. 429–441). The negativity of pain—of breaking apart—is intrinsic to any living being as such, since it is a necessary part of what animates the activity of striving to hold together and stay alive. Hegel’s radical claim is that it is neither possible nor desirable to overcome negativity. When Hegel describes the form of a living being in terms of the negation of the negation (Science of Logic, p. 685), he does not mean that a living being can overcome its negative relation to pain, loss, and death. On the contrary, he means that the relation to the negative does not simply negate the existence of a living being but belongs to its positive constitution. A life that was absolved from pain, loss, and death would not be a life at all. Moreover, even though a living being can maintain itself in the pain of loss, it cannot finally master the negativity it bears within itself and cannot immunize itself against its own irrevocable death. Rather, any living being is mortal in the sense that it will be absolutely negated in death. Unlike the pain of a living being, the death of a living being is not compatible with the living being maintaining itself.
6. Hegel makes a similar distinction in analyzing how certain animals—as distinct from plants—have a capacity for “self-enjoyment,” which is expressed through what Hegel calls “the artistic impulse” that is one aspect of “the constructive instinct” of animals (Philosophy of Nature, pp. 406–409). Most suggestively, Hegel argues that birdsong expresses a capacity for self-enjoyment that is distinguishable from the activity of mere self-preservation. Birdsong is a “distinterested” activity, not in the sense of being contemplative but in the sense of being an end in itself for the bird—enjoyed for its own sake (Philosophy of Nature, p. 409).
7. See Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, pp. 57–58. See also the remarks on “the principle of balancing” in Korsgaard’s The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology, p. 92n22.
8. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, p. 102.
9. Ibid., p. 101.
10. See Rödl, Self-Consciousness, Chapter 4.
11. My argument here is further developed in the Conclusion to this book, where I address Hegel’s notion of self-consciousness.
12. Collins, Nirvana, pp. 25–26.
13. Ibid., pp. 21–22.
14. Ibid., p. 25.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 27.
18. Ibid., p. 25.
19. Collins, “What Are Buddhists Doing When They Deny the Self?,” p. 75.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. See, for example, the ReSource project led by Tania Singer, director of the Social Neuroscience Department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. For two overviews of the research results of ReSource project—which seeks to adapt meditational practices for secular therapeutic purposes—see Singer and Klimecki, “Empathy and Compassion,” as well as Singer, “What Type of Meditation Is Best for You?”.
24. See Phil Zuckerman, Living the Secular Life, pp. 17–20.
25. Collins, Nirvana, p. 17.
5. THE VALUE OF OUR FINITE TIME
1. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p.
149.
2. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 706.
3. See Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in particular pp. 74–78.
4. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 611.
5. Ibid.
6. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 173.
7. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 290.
8. For an insightful discussion of the philosophical distinction between valuing something and merely believing that something is valuable, see Samuel Scheffler, “Valuing,” in Equality and Tradition, pp. 15–39. As I argue below, however, the two aspects of valuing must ultimately be understood as inseparable in the activity of valuing anything, even though they are distinguishable in important ways. The degree to which I value something—rather than merely believe that it is valuable—is decisive, but the two aspects of valuing cannot ultimately be separated.
9. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p. 103.
10. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” p. 171.
11. For a discussion of the effective freedoms principle, see, for example, John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in The Law of Peoples.
12. Aristotle, Politics, 1259b.
13. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §57, p. 88.
14. This is what Robert Pippin has called Hegel’s notion of “institutional rationality”; see chapter 9 in Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical Philosophy. The importance of Pippin’s argument regarding institutional rationality was first brought to my attention by Jensen Suther, who is developing a new appreciation and immanent critique of Hegel/Pippin on institutional rationality in his dissertation Spirit Disfigured: The Persistence of Freedom in Modernist Literature and Philosophy. I am indebted to conversations with Suther on this subject.
15. For an excellent and admirably lucid account of Hegel’s historical conception of freedom, see Terry Pinkard, Does History Make Sense?: Hegel and the Historical Shapes of Justice, in particular chapter 5.
16. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, remark from his lectures on the Philosophy of Right from 1819–1820, quoted in the English edition on p. 453.
17. Ibid., p. 454.
18. Ibid., §230, p. 260.
19. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §244–245.
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