I am sitting on a balcony in Beirut, high up on the tenth floor, from where I can pick out the harbor with its rusty ships, the gray-blue water with its narrow belts of green and turquoise, broken farther away by the white tips of waves, and on the other side of the bay a mist-covered mountain, below it a factory with tall chimneys from which smoke is rising, and behind the factory some concrete housing blocks, light, sandy, gray. Across the street, a matter of meters from the balcony railing, a building rises as yet unfinished, inside its shell some men with dust masks on are at work with pneumatic drills. Whenever they pause and their earsplitting racket stops, the tooting of car horns takes over, the rumble of lorries and the squealing of brakes from the busy traffic in the streets below.
I came here two days ago by plane from Istanbul and was woken on the first morning by the call to prayer from the minarets, strange and dreamlike, a song from another world. I went out and headed down toward the harbor promenade, passing a derelict site that lay perhaps five meters below street level and noticed that it was full of broken antique columns. Farther on there was an odd-looking concrete building, like a big rock or a gigantic turtle shell; only when I got closer did I realize it was a bombed-out ruin. I carried on and came to a roadblock where trucks full of armed soldiers were waiting. I approached tentatively, and when no one seemed to be bothered by my presence I carried on down into the streets in the center of town. The buildings were all new but built in the old style, and all the shops in them were high end, the most expensive European brands. There was hardly anyone about. The place was as lifeless as a ghost town.
I sat down at the Grand Café and took out a copy of The Concept of Anxiety (which I would never have dreamed of taking with me to Beirut had it not been for the fact that a few weeks earlier I had committed myself to writing about Kierkegaard). An hour later I crossed back through the roadblock and continued on through the upper town, a hubbub of people and traffic, street signs in French and Arabic, churches, minarets. An old woman in a tiny shop watching local TV, grainy flickering images on a screen. Builders at work everywhere, using spades and wheelbarrows and battered trucks, while tall cranes hoisted buckets of concrete from mixer trucks in the street, fifteen, twenty floors into the air. Evening came, and with it again the call to prayer, a man kneeling on his own in a parking space, praying. Young people dressed to the nines, countless small bars and eating places, densely built housing rising from the sloping streets like rock faces, a pavement covered in blue petals: I lift my head, an enormous tree shedding its blossom stretches its branches into the night.
I have never read anything by Søren Kierkegaard before. This may seem strange, given that he is one of the few major world writers I can read with full benefit in the original language – Henrik Ibsen is the only other one I can think of – an advantage denied to me in the case of, say, Heidegger (and one Joyce acquired, learning Norwegian in order to read Ibsen) – but not that strange, because for the same reason, coming from Kierkegaard’s own cultural and linguistic sphere, I have always felt as if I have read him, always felt that I have known what I needed to know about him and his writings. So, he was to marry Regine and broke off the engagement. He wrote about life’s three stages, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. He used pseudonyms. He disliked philosophical systems intensely, particularly Hegel’s. He was ridiculed in the Danish press and was perhaps rather self-important and prone to take offense since he let it get to him the way it did. He died young, in his early forties. He was the only Scandinavian philosopher to have contributed substantially to the history of philosophy. And he wrote that subjectivity is truth – I remember putting the quote in letters I wrote in my late teens, it was a slogan I liked, it kind of said it all.
On my second evening in Beirut I was scheduled to do a reading with eight other writers. It took place in a beautiful garden somewhere higher up in the town, at the top of some steps, behind a high wall. The garden was illuminated by spots, the shadowy trees were troll-like, it was a lovely warm evening. I was first on. I stepped up to the stage and read an autobiographical piece about the time a woman turned me down and I slashed my face in response. There was a trickle of applause from those who had found their way there. I sat and listened to the other writers. One from Jordan, one from Palestine, one from Syria who read a poem about Damascus, and another about hearing the news that a Palestinian had been killed, the point of which was that she reacted with such grief and pain when the media overflowed with similar stories. Another writer from the region read some ironic pieces about fundamentalists. A feeling of shame welled inside me as I sat there, eventually my cheeks were burning. There was a civil war going on in Lebanon’s neighboring country Syria; there were huge refugee camps not far from where we were sitting. Only a few days earlier, Lebanon’s other neighbor, Israel, had bombed Syria, apparently to prevent arms being trafficked to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It wasn’t that long ago either that Lebanon itself had been ravaged by a lengthy civil war. Suffering, uncertainty, fear, death, mutilation. And there I was reading out loud about slashing my face with a shard of glass. How narcissistic could you get?
Afterward, an Arab man in his sixties comes up to me and in faltering English asks me what I’m writing about now. I understand that he’s a writer himself. I tell him I’m writing essays. He asks if they’re about politics. I pause for a moment to consider my reply, then shake my head and say no, not politics. He looks at me briefly, then turns away without a word.
At the spacious and near-empty Grand Café in the center of town, where I had sat reading Kierkegaard on my first day there, some men had been sitting smoking hookahs in the dim interior, the waiters wearing what we at home called harem pants, the illustrations on the menu meant to awaken associations with the romantic Middle East described so exhaustively by Lawrence Durrell in his Alexandria Quartet, with the image of trucks full of soldiers wielding automatic rifles still clear in my mind, the bustle of life in the streets farther up filling the air, mingling with the bass line from an R & B song that I took to be coming from the open door of one of the shops nearby, I had occasionally looked up from the pages of my book and thought about how what I was reading might be relevant to what I was seeing and experiencing there. Or, in other words, what did this middle-class philosopher, living and thinking in a minor European province a hundred and seventy years before, have to say to people in our day and age? Or, what relevance did his thoughts have in Beirut on this day in May 2013?
It was a good question to put to The Concept of Anxiety, being implicit throughout that same book, which spends so much time explaining how guilt comes into the world, and which continually states, albeit in different ways, that guilt comes into anyone’s world with his or her first sin. We are born innocent, but that innocence is not collective, it is every person’s own individual innocence, and we become guilty, not collectively, but each and every one of us on our own, uniquely, in exactly the same way as Adam did. It matters little if this takes place a thousand times, a million times, or a billion times, it changes nothing, for guilt is not quantitative, whereas innocence, Kierkegaard writes, “is always lost solely through the individual’s qualitative leap.”
We are alone, but we are alone in the same way.
This contradiction, that we are individuals able to express our individuality only in what is common to the all, which thereby cancels it out, is a generator in Kierkegaard’s books, a center to which his thoughts continually return, from there to be slung out once more. If the relationship between the one and the all were any different and sin did not come into the world quite as new in every instance, the relevance of Kierkegaard’s books would be of a chance nature, dependent on fluctuations in culture, but if it is so, then it applies to all humans, regardless of the age and culture in which they live.
The notion that a philosophy should be applicable to everyone is of course not without problems. After all, we live in a time after deconstruction, after postcolonia
lism, after gender studies, and we know therefore that all thinking, not least that which has to do with universality, is relative, an expression of certain power structures perhaps unknown to the originator yet potent nonetheless, and in this case we are dealing with someone who ticks all the boxes: Kierkegaard was white, he was a man, he was a European, and he was a Christian. The shame of that was the shame I felt when I read in the garden in Beirut, accentuated by the fact that what I read there was not inclusive of those I was reading for, did not reflect the suffering and oppression that was taking place or had recently taken place in their lives, but remained firmly within my own white, male, Western European, middle-aged glass bubble, in the belief that what went on there would interest people here in one of the world’s most turbulent conflict zones. Muslims, Christians, Jews, fundamentalists, want, poverty, war, death – who cares, a woman turned me down once and I slashed my face, did you ever hear of such a thing! But things are different with Kierkegaard; when reading him and occasionally looking up from the pages of his book at the particular section of reality in which I sat, I never thought – since my mind is so little inclined to relativism – that what I was reading was not universally valid, that this insistent Danish voice was relevant only to itself and to the 1840s, to me, and to the handful of academics and philosophers who concern themselves with Kierkegaard; on the contrary, for this too, the nature of the relative, is a concern of Kierkegaard’s writing. There it goes under the name of the aesthetic and the ethical. Kierkegaard is a horizontal (relativistic) writer who writes about the vertical (the absolute). In this he is reminiscent of what in Either/Or he suggested characterizes the Greek gods, that they themselves do not contain what they bring with them, do not possess what they give, as opposed to Christ, who embodies what he brought and gave. Kierkegaard longs for the vertical, longs to embody it, but it is beyond his reach because he does not believe, cannot believe, but only wishes to. In this he is like Pascal, another knight of human volition. Reflection belongs to the relative – sin is understood differently by us than it was by the first humans, reflection upon it having been accumulated through generations, though it is no different in itself for that reason, sin in itself is immutable and thereby absolute. Since all communication between humans is relative, and only the interhuman may be communicated, it is only through faith, which is a relationship between the individual and God, that the absolute may be reached.
And where can faith in the absolute be found in our day and age?
It can be found in religious fundamentalists. Those often referred to as Christian fundamentalists are fundamental in their belief that the word of the Bible is absolute, nonrelative, nonsituational; unyieldingly they stick to their belief in a world in which everything is interpreted and discussed, and contrary to all scientific theory as to the nature of the world they can no longer reason, only believe.
Those referred to as Islamic fundamentalists share this faith in the literal word, but unlike most of their Christian counterparts many of them are willing to die for their beliefs and to take others with them into that death. The sacrifice of life, one’s own and that of others, for the sake of religious belief is not so much associated with Christianity and the Western world now as with Islam and the Arab world. In the West religious faith is no longer acknowledged as the basis for people’s actions, the religious absolute has more or less disappeared; in its absence these actions are relativized – the Muslim martyrs are poor, uneducated, uninformed, oppressed, easy prey for extremist ideas, we say, and we account for what they do with reference to everything else but their faith. We consider their beliefs to be perverted, something which to our minds can be the result only of brainwashing and manipulation, a mind game that is politico-cultural in nature, more to do with power than religion. We never see the individual fundamentalist, the particular person who has battled with his faith, who has overcome doubt and fear and eventually become ready to give up his own life for what he believes in. And we do not see his parents, his grandparents, his younger sister or his elder brother, in whose lives his act of faith leaves such immense and lifelong grief. We see only a horde of insane fanatics burning with hatred toward us, toward our values, which are the exact antipodes of faith.
Our conceptual world is full of such tropes. They are there to protect us, to keep us from sinking under the burden of complexity or losing ourselves in its labyrinth: too much information, like too many feelings, renders us feeble and unable to act. They protect us by removing us, and the more removed we are from the world the less resistance it gives us. This lack of resistance is a boon to us, it lightens our hearts and promotes our happiness with the absence of pain and inconvenience. This is why in our age we cultivate lightness and remoteness: it is good.
The problem with lightness, Kierkegaard appears to believe in his preface to Fear and Trembling, here under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, is that it costs us nothing, for what is without cost is the very nature of lightness, and what costs us nothing has no value. His example in Fear and Trembling is the idea of doubting everything. In modern philosophy, he states ironically, doubting everything has become the norm, something taken for granted, a starting point of philosophy rather than its conclusion. This means that to doubt everything is no longer meaningful, because then no one actually doubts everything, they know only the notion of doubting everything. It is this, knowing the notion of doubting everything without experiencing its consequences, and not faith, as one would imagine, that is the true contrary of doubting everything, so Kierkegaard appears to be saying. Certainly he brings doubting everything and faith together here as an example in that respect, suggesting that the majority in his day and age relate quite as superficially to faith as they do to doubting everything, it is something they take for granted without pursuing it further. In which case it is no longer faith, merely something that looks like faith. Faith is not something a person can put behind them, it is not a place from which one can depart without it thereby becoming something else.
But if we are happy in lightness, happy in the superficial, why then engage with our notions and take on the obligations that go with it? Why gravity, why heaviness, why earnestness and labor when they invariably bring with them pain, torment, anxiety, and uncertainty?
That Kierkegaard begins his book on the nature of faith with such reasoning is perhaps primarily to do with the insights it presents demanding so much investment from the reader in order to be understood, and that they lead to a place where, taken to its furthest conclusion, no one would wish to go, it being far too dreadful, and nothing repels us so instantly as that which is full of dread.
At the same time, this introduces an apparent value system whereby that which is gained by effort ranks higher than that which is given, in other words a typically Protestant or pietistic standpoint which more than anything else makes the implied value – that what is gained by effort is more valuable by virtue of being more authentic – an expression of a particular culture’s standpoint at a particular point in history: precisely nonauthentic.
If the preface is read on its own, it can indeed be understood in that way, but what it leads into is a book about the nature of faith, illuminated by the story of Abraham and Isaac, whose centrifugal point is the sacrifice. And what is sacrifice but a price, and toward what does it strive but the authentic? The price Kierkegaard asks his reader to pay in his preface, the suspension of his remoteness from Abraham and the consequences of his actions, is small and of Kierkegaard’s own time: Abraham’s sacrifice is great and belongs to the depths of history, and it is these depths that Fear and Trembling seeks to diminish, if not erase, in its constant movements between the small and the great, between man among men and man before God. Indeed, it is these two poles that the sacrifice has always connected.
So Fear and Trembling is an attempt to grasp and describe the nature of faith by interpreting a simple story of the Old Testament in which Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice his so
n, Isaac, and without protest prepares to comply, until the point when he is on the mount, knife in hand, his son bound to the altar, and God intervenes:
And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and beheld behind him a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
Like all important stories of the Old Testament, this one is short, and like all short stories of the Old Testament, this one can be understood in different ways. It can be about the necessity of sacrificing a son – something risked for instance by any father who sends his son to war, even today. It can be about the swap itself, the story marking or symbolizing the transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. It can be about the prize or victory of absolute faith or the reward of absolute loyalty.
Kierkegaard’s concern was another, he was interested not in the sacrifice or its happy conclusion, nor in any symbolic or sociological meaning that may be read into the story, but rather in the three days that passed from Abraham receiving the commandment to offer his son until he placed him on the altar and took his knife, the dreadful angst that must have filled him, which he had to conquer in order to do what had been asked of him.
How is such a sacrifice possible?
I have children myself and even the thought of killing one of them is unbearable, something I can entertain only in the briefest of flashes, and hardly even then. Yet for Abraham this was no experiment of the mind, but something real, and once the thought had been entertained, however fleetingly, he could not leave it behind, but was compelled to exist within it from the moment he received the commandment until the moment it was to be carried out, which according to the story was a period of three days. And yet he endured. He prepared the altar, he took his knife, he told Isaac to come with him and rode at his side for three days, all leading toward him having to kill his only beloved son. And why? Because God said so. In this there is no reason, no sense, no meaning. Such an action is beyond reason, beyond sense, beyond meaning, it rests entirely on faith, which (and this is its nature) is quite without reason, or as Kierkegaard puts it: absurd. For in what does he have faith? That God will revoke the commandment? Absurd, and yet it happens.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 25