The Jewel on a Frozen Lake: Kierkegaard on the Meaning of Action (May 2019) CERI-SK Conference, Slovenia and Croatia
Jasna Koteska: The Jewel on a Frozen Lake, Kierkegaard on the Meaning of Action
Ljubljana, 16 May 2019, 13:00-13:30
Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana, Slovenia
The Jewel on a
Frozen Lake: Kierkegaard on the Meaning of Action
Jasna Koteska
1.
The Parable
On
30 March 1846 Kierkegaard published a book Two
Ages, A Literary Review, his first book under second authorship (1846-1855),
a period marked by rich literary production. The question about the meaning of
action was not his prime interest during these years, but it was closely
related to his main concern regarding the religious salvation. Two Ages tried to address the present
situation, the responsibility regarding the “divine message”, the question of suffering,
the pseudo-Christianity and above all what does the concept of selfhood mean. The
question of selfhood was of the highest importance to Kierkegaard, and it was
further developed in his book Sickness
unto Death (1849), in which, he offered a highly abstract definition of
selfhood, writing that self is “a relation that relates itself to itself or is
the relations’ relation relating itself to itself in the relation”. Although
abstract, for Kierkegaard the definition meant few basic things: a self is a task, a self is not given, a self includes
responsibility, and the only medicine
against despair of the selfhood is faith. The Two Ages was written as a prelude, as the explanation why the
present age obstructs the self from achieving these goals.
The
Jewel on Thin Ice parable reads as follows:
If the jewel
which everyone desires to possess lay far out on a frozen lake where the ice
was very thin, watched over by the danger of death, while, closer in, the ice
was perfectly safe, then in a passionate age the crowds would applaud the
courage of the man who ventured out, they would tremble for him and with him in
the danger of his decisive action, they would grieve over him if he were
drowned, they would make a god of him if he secured the prize. But in an age
without passion, in a reflective age, it would be otherwise. People would think
each other cleaver in agreeing that it was unreasonable and not even worthwhile
to venture so far out. And in this way they would transform daring and
enthusiasm into a feat of skill, so as to do something, for after all
‘something must be done’. The crowds would go out to watch from a safe place,
and with the eyes of connoisseurs appraise the accomplished skater who skate
almost to the very edge (i.e. as far as the thin ice was still safe and the
danger had not yet begun) and then turn back. The most accomplished skater
would manage to go out to the furthermost point and then perform a still more
dangerous-looking run, so as to make the spectators hold their breath and say:
‘Ye Gods! How mad; he is risking his life.’[1]
The
main idea with this parable for Kierkegaard was to explain the difference
between an engaged, passionate age, and the objective spectatorship of
modernity. His explanation was simple, if the age is revolutionary, the
community celebrates the courage of a person who sacrifices his life for the
common goal. And vice versa, if the age is reflective, people consider the
hero’s action as unreasonable and meaningless, they ridicule his courage and
strength, and they reduce the hero’s sacrifice to a simple display of skills. The
passion mobilizes the spirit; enflaming the passion will bring hopes in the
possibility of a new form of spiritualized political collective. But for
Kierkegaard, the passion is inevitably obstructed by the features of modernity.
Already
Hegel voiced his melancholy about the lack of passion in today’s world, but there
is an important difference between the two thinkers. Not only because Hegel’s main
concerns were the nature of society, institutions and reality, and Kierkegaard
was preoccupied with the destiny of the single individual; the difference was more
fundamental. In his book Elements of the
Philosophy of Right (1820), Hegel wrote:
In a completely
organized state, it is only a question of the culminating point of formal
decision and [institution is] a natural bulwark against passion […] the monarch
has only to say "yes" and dot the "i".[2]
For
Hegel the institutions are the defensive wall against the passion, but at the
same time he confirmed that there exists a need of people to periodically busy
themselves with eager discussions about the polis just as Greeks did. He feared
that concept of the polis will otherwise easily become innocuous, sentimental,
equalizing and leveling. The same qualities of modernity worried Kierkegaard as
well, but the difference between the two thinkers was that for Kierkegaard precisely
these passionate debates were part of the problem, and not part of the
solution. Here is why.
2.
The Present Age:
Reflection and
Reflex, Voice and Gaze
The
features of modernity which bring decay of the civilization are listed in the third
part of the book titled The Present Age,
and they are: sensibility, endless reflections, the lack of passion, superficiality,
short-lived enthusiasm, laziness;[3] conformity;
also lack in the erotic, domesticity, piety and vitality; also the publicity,
media and newspapers serve to assimilate people into numbers and dumb the
public (Kierkegaard writes that there are various announcements about nothing,
and they still gain instant publicity). The result is that people are daydreaming
about discovering new parts of the world, while in reality they cannot focus on
finishing simple, specific tasks. He used two metaphors to describe people in
the Present Age: they swim dangerously in shallow water, and they brilliantly
declare what needs to be done, but as soon as someone even attempts to act on
what was decided, everybody would be taken aback, “[and] would find
it rash”. The apathy is overcome with jokes, which makes the Present Age a
comic age.
We
can read the comedy of the Present Age at two different levels - if we read it
as a part of historical reality, we can easily submit it to a “dialectical” comedy,
not in the sense in which comedy produces a much needed laughter, or wit, or the
Kierkegaard’s beloved farce, but as the age of primitive and profitable
industry of fabricating images (Kierkegaard’s word “reflection” in this context
is used in the sense of “mimicking”, and “imaging”), and as the ultimate
failure of history. If, however, we analyze the Present Age as an Event, as a representation
of the idea of egalitarian justice, then the superficiality and comedy of the Present
Age although suffocated with conformity and numbness, continues to be the spectral
display of the ghosts of failed ideals. For Kierkegaard it was clear which of
the two reading, prevails, and he wrote: “We today long for a little
primitivity, but what is more primitive than wit.” Since there are no more heroes,
no lovers, no thinkers, no knights, and no humanitarians, the reflection is
used by different occupations in the society, from political to scientific and
theological “virtuosos”, who would issue invitations to meetings for the
purpose of deciding on a revolution, then they would create the illusion of a
revolution, and everyone would go home quietly, spending a pleasant evening.
Three
instances are important regarding the uncanny resemblance of the Present Age to
the life in the 20th and the 21st century: 1) the loss of individuality, 2) the
blurred lines between good and evil, 3) and most importantly, the reflection/thinking
as imaging. The loss of individuality
is connected to the mathematical work of leveling humans and turning them into
items. Kierkegaard described this process with uncanny vocabulary, such as
engineer, statistician, company, and business; he saw the Present Age as mathematical
work of flattened people, and he wrote:
“Leveling is a
quiet, mathematical, abstract enterprise that avoids all agitation. Although a
flaring, short-lived enthusiasm might in discouragement wish for a calamity
simply in order to have a sense of dynamic life forces, disturbance is of no
more assistance to its successor, apathy, than it is to an engineer working
with a surveyor’s level.”
From
the internet avatars to the small-town or tabloid gossips, contemporary ideology
bares a disturbing resemblance to Kierkegaard’s descriptions. The world today favors
small-town dramatization of a person; nobody is special, actual person, he/she
is a specialty elevated to a nickname. This man is the Intimist, the other is
the Cruel, the third is the Lover, the fourth is the Blacksmith, the fifth is
Death, etc. People are simulation, emptied of their “full” contents, cubes on
the ideological table, cliche roles in the comedy del arte, which are scattered
across the big stage of life, where the battle between Good and Evil is played
out. The ideology “incorporates” people in its theater; in a symbolic table of
values, one code name becomes intertwined with another. It is not a real
system, but it is an endlessly repetitive system, thus it is vital. The Russian
formalist, Viktor Shklovsky said: “Some kind of elemental process is taking
place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical.”
The elementary process he talked about is the transformation of the person into
a symbol, the formal separation of the person proper from the theatrical
version of that person, and it is the same process Kierkegaard described
already in 1846.
The
second devastating aspect of the Present Age for Kierkegaard is that it blurs
the lines between good and evil; or
as he says: no one is any longer taken by the great deeds of the good, no one
is outraged by the deeds of evil. Already in 1785 when Immanuel Kant produced
the categorical moral imperative, “Don’t do to others what you don’t want
others to do to you,” the sentence underscore the difference between the
principle according to which you act and
the principle according to which you judge!
This troubled Kierkegaard. If action is sunken to a public exercise of
judgments, the truth gets lost in the multitude of individual judgments (the
so-called Ockham’s razor), but it says nothing about the nature of truth. If
you allow people to vote, we would still vote that we live in a geocentric
universe, says Alain Badiou.[4] We
are used to thinking that the capacity to think is connected to the ability to
tell good and evil apart–that the critical mass of people is enough. But, people
do not choose good by default. People can be inclined towards evil, and be
easily seduced by it as well, that is why the concept “radical evil” exists. It
says that evil is more powerful than good. If we ask people whether war is
good, they shall all, in chorus, answer in the negative. However, politics
remains closely related to wars.
The
third uncanny resemblance to today’s ideology is the status of reflection in
Kierkegaard’s Two Ages - one is connected
to the voice, and the other to the gaze. As is known, in the book, Kierkegaard
used two different words for Reflection. When he wrote about reflecting images
(the gaze), he used the Danish word Reflex.
When he wrote about deliberation and thinking (the voice), he used the Danish word
Reflexion. Kierkegaard was not just staging
the nightmarish world of alienated bureaucracy; he explained the worrying
dimensions of immortal, no goal-oriented, irrational activity, an activity with
no purpose and no utility, which serves nothing, yet it exists. It dissects
people into partial objects, and what is supposed to be a modern subjectivity
is transformed into a ridiculous metamorphosed object (like in Kafka’s stories,
and the strange ontology of Odradek, or the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into an
insect). That is precisely why people chatter - not to capture some truth or essence,
but to miss it, to miss the experience. The gossips are told and retold without
any deeper aim, except to exhaust the experience
itself! While I’m relating some story, I neutralize the danger in it; the “witty”
gossip is told in order to say that there is no reason for tragedy. When a
person gets a nickname, he or she should laugh at the nickname with the same
intensity as those who created and conferred it. If you play yourself, you are
alienated from the point of pain, you become a mirage of yourself, and nothing hurts you, hence the mirroring appears side by side with chatter, and Reflex and Reflextion work
as two sides of the same coin of producing a straight division between the real
reality and the mirrored reality. This troublesome outcome lead Kierkegaard
towards the possibility where the polarization is overcome in the Age of
Revolution.
3.
The Age of
Revolution:
Lenin’s Laughter
For
Kierkegaard to act does not automatically
mean to choose the good, and it does not necessarily manifests itself with good
deeds. By itself, passion does not guarantee the good ethical outcome, and because
the Age of Revolution is also the age of contradictions, the action might actually
have either good or evil outcome. How to understand this extremely strange paradox
in Kierkegaard that the action is always
good, even though it may end up as
either good or a bad? And vice versa, how to understand that the non-action is always bad, even though it may have a good outcome? The resolution to this
paradox comes in the form of Kierkegaard’s believe that on a higher level
whatever a person choses, the impetus of passion and action remains. And the action always makes progress! Even if one makes a wrong decision, the very fact that
the action takes place is a “saving factor”, “for decision is the little magic
word that existence respects.”[5]
The
same idea is to be found in historical examples in the 20 century, from Che’s
famous quote “You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the spring”[6] to
examples from the beginning of the 20th century.
In
1908, when Maxim Gorky was on Capri, he organized a philosophical debate
together with a group of Bolshevik emigrants, and invited Lenin to be his
guest. Although Lenin considered Gorky a bourgeois, he appreciated his talent
and respected him as one of the rare Russian writers who could help the
Revolution. Lenin immediately replied to Gorky, but clearly set the conditions
of his visit: “Dear Alexei Maximovich, I should very much like to see you, but
I refuse to engage in any philosophical discussion.”[7]
Lenin wasn’t a naïve political strategist, he knew he would need support from
all of the emigrants, yet excused himself from the debate in what Althusser
called an act of “Lenin’s laughter.” Lenin didn’t excuse himself from the
philosophical debate because he considered theory unimportant, but because he
wanted the philosophical innocence, he wanted thinking to be only a remnant of
politics. Quite similar to Kierkegaard, in 1908, Lenin poses the question,
which marks the communist thought of the 20th century: When thought has reached
the threshold of the thinkable, what will thought be like? The last and most
famous thesis from Marx’s 11 Theses on Feuerbach (1845) reads: “Philosophers
have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it.” Althusser notes that when you proclaim an end of interpretation,
you are left with nothing else but to shut up. Lenin’s laughter is not
philosophically naïve and Althusser says that Lenin believed philosophy doesn’t
even happen, philosophy has no real history. But, for Kierkegaard, the Age of
Revolution should be left without theory and thinking, because the present age of
theory and reflection “lets everything remain but subtly drains the meaning out
of it”.[8]
In
the 17th seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
(1969-1970), Jacques Lacan says that the key feature of the Present Age in
Kierkegaard is “delay”, the reflection delays the event, because it has built a
repetition, it is an era that is “marked by repetition,”[9]
and what has been repeated is the loss itself. The loss here should be
understood at many levels, first as the loss of the present moment (a temporal
loss), and also a loss of passion. But the strange feature appears when Kierkegaard
describes the Revolutionary Age, and he does not use the temporal playfulness
and vigor, but, on the contrary, he gets stuck in stylistic repetition. How to
grasp his dubious discursive choice? Here is how Kierkegaard describes the
Revolutionary Age:
“The
age of revolution is essentially passionate and therefore essentially has
culture… The tension and resilience of the inner being are the measure of
essential culture… The age of revolution is essentially passionate”[10]
What
is confusing in these lines is the contradiction between the pronounced immanence
of the revolution and the way in which Kierkegaard expressed it, as Žižek says.
If the era is revolutionary, we would expect a momentum, an urgency, and speediness
which corresponds to the revolutionary vigor. Instead we get the same rhetorical
repetitiveness with which Kierkegaard described the Present Age. Hence the
logical question: why did Kierkegaard, who was a master of style, described the
Revolutionary Age with same banal, repetitive and dull sentences? Was it
because Kierkegaard wanted to emphasize the contradiction within the Revolutionary
Age, in terms of Lacan’s idea that one cannot speak about the revolution without
stating that it can come only in terms of the repetition? Or was it that what
is lost in the revolution is precisely the loss of temporality, the idea of
progress, and the loss of enjoyment? Or with the words of Lacan: “In repetition
there is a reduction of jouissance.”[11]
But, what if there is no age which can be called revolutionary? Žižek’s reading
of the two ages in Kierkegaard asks what if every gesture of self-sacrifice
(the hero on thin ice) is always already an act of senseless sacrifice, a
sacrifice which cannot be approved by the community.[12]
It was
Kierkegaard who fully articulated this logic of meaningless sacrifice (his term
for it is ‘infinite resignation’)... It is not surprising that Kierkegaard laid
out its most concise formula: ‘The fact of the matter is that we must
acknowledge that in the last resort there is no theory.’ In all great ‘anti-philosophers,’
from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to the late work of Wittgenstein, the most
radical authentic core of being-human is perceived as a concrete
practico-ethical engagement and/or choice which precedes (and grounds) every ‘theory,’
every theoretical account of itself, and is, in this radical sense of the term,
contingent (‘irrational’) - it was Kant who laid the foundation for ‘antiphilosophy’
when he asserted the primacy of practical over theoretical reason… Thus Kant
and Fichte – unexpectedly - would have agreed with Kierkegaard: in the last
resort there is no theory, just a fundamental practico-ethical decision about
what kind of life one wants to commit oneself to”.[13]
It
is precisely the melancholy and standard mourning with which Kierkegaard
describes the Present Age which should be read as an expression of the
essential historical trait – What if there is nothing exclusive in “our” Present
Age? What if there is no Age which we can call revolutionary, Žižek asks? What
if, for the gesture of sacrifice to make sense, the gesture should be totally irrational,
to be made with the idea that “you do it spontaneously,” or as Kierkegaard says
in the “urgency of reaction,” without any rational thinking? In other words, the
gesture which makes sense should be done only by sacrificing exactly the very
meaning of the gesture, the very irrational move which brings it forward, the
loss of faith? That is, probably the best reason behind the paradox contained
in the description of the revolutionary era in Kierkegaard. And if that is so, what
if the Revolutionary Age is indeed liberated from philosophy, as we saw it in
the case of Lenin’s Laughter, “I am doing it immediately, without thinking”,
while you, the philosophers continue to bubble about the concepts.
4.
The Single Individual:
Don Quixote,
Prince Myshkin, Jesus
In
Kierkegaard, however, these dilemmas are false. He clearly says: should an Apostle
come, his greatness could be recognized only with corresponding expression in an
external form of action. The metaphor of the Apostle is not used randomly,
quite on contrary. The whole idea behind Kierkegaard’s Two Ages is to make a religious
point about the meaning of action. The meaning of action for Kierkegaard is
not something which has implication
on the aesthetics (the categories of
beautiful or ugly), nor on the ethics
(good-evil - as is described in Althusser and Žižek). Kierkegaard’s understanding
of the meaning of action is strictly religious
and is connected to his concept of the single individual. In his study The Point of View for My Work as an Author
(1848), Kierkegaard makes this clear, when he says:
The literary
review of Two Ages is no argument
against this [esthetic production – note JK], both because it is not, after
all, esthetic in the sense of being a poet-production but is critical, and
because it has a totally religious background in its understanding of ‘the
present age.’ Once and for all I must urgently request the kindly disposed
reader continually to bear in mente [in mind] that the total thought in the
entire work as an author is this: becoming a Christian.[14]
What
does it mean that for Kierkegaard the concepts of good and evil are not connect
with the meaning of action, and are dimensions related to the history as open
toward the future? Here, we should avoid a key misunderstanding about Kierkegaard’s
dialectics, because he was not Hegelian in the sense of adopting the present age
in order to point toward finality, but the opposite, finality is already
incorporated into Kierkegaard’s vision of the Present Age.
There
is a strange scene, key to understanding the extreme conditions of goodness, in
Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605). The
Knight of Goodness meets a group of silk merchants and he stands before them in
military fashion, requiring that they should admit that no girl is more
beautiful than his Dulcinea; otherwise he will consider them to be the enemy
and shall have to fight with them. The merchants stand completely stunned by
this totally absurd request, and in the first moment rationally answer that
they would, without reservation, admit to the superior beauty of the girl if
Don Quixote offered them some proof, a portrait, or anything else for that
matter. Don Quixote answers:
If I were to
show her to you, what virtue would there be in confessing such a manifest
truth? The important thing is for you to believe, confess, affirm, swear and
defend without ever having seen her.[15]
In
a nutshell, this controversial scene contains the radical position that one
should start from when pondering the good. Don Quixote poses the unrefined
question of trust, and trust is not received for obvious reasons–it is silly,
even dangerous, to testify in regards to something of which you know nothing,
and as such is commonly reflected in the legal world of today. But Don
Quixote’s experiment is more complex than the request for trust without
grounds. Don Quixote appears before people with a grandiose project–to test the
capacity of the world for ultimate goodness, whether the world carries
goodness, and he basically experiments with a religious issue–I ask of you to act
and believe me without seeing (just
like one should believe in God without even seeing him). The question is posed
with childish naivety and childish cruelty, but notice that the concept of
ultimate good is impossible without that combination of infantilism and
cruelty. Don Quixote is like Prometheus, but unlike Prometheus he has very
little or no political experience. That is why he is a paradigm closest to
Jesus; another similar example can be found in Dostoevsky in the shape of The Idiot (1869), Prince Myshkin. Kierkegaard
reminds us, the inner journey of remembrance is something that concerns the traumatic
external encounter with the social and political world and it always embodies
jouissance. He says that people are capable of differentiating between the
aesthetic and ethical-religious reasoning, while not being corrupted by norms
in Christendom. Kierkegaard was not writing for people who are in a hurry. His involutions
and repetitions were directed toward the reader who is capable of delightfully
"Socratic" path and the beginning of a journey one has to make for oneself.
His
book Two Ages, drafted as review
already in 1845 shortly after the book Two
Ages (1845) by Thomasine Christiane Gyllembourg-Ehrensvard was published
under the pen name “The Author of An Everyday Story”, became the paradigm of
his life-long journey towards the complex elaboration on the meaning of action.
It became more than a review, it ended up almost as long as the novel under
review, and was connected to his ever urgent request, what means to be a person
who suffers, what ultimate price one has to be willing to pay for the communication
and what the royal command “Love your neighbor as yourself” genuinely means? As
he stated repeatedly, the individual must break out of the prison in which his/her
own reflection holds him/her, and if s/he succeeds, s/he still should broke only
by religious inwardness. An individual is someone who determines the significance,
and after s/he begins the path of the single individual. The message is to
arrive at the simple movement: from the public to the single individual.
BIOGRAPHY
1
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.
Badiou, Alain. Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated,
edited and with an introduction by Norman Madarasz. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.
Cervantes
Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated, with Notes by James H.
Montgomery. Introduced by David Quint, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company
Inc., 2009.
G. W. F. Hegel’s Elements
of the Philosophy of Right (1820), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991.
Kierkegaard, S. Parables of Kierkegaard, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978.
Kierkegaard, S. Two Ages, Vol. 14, edited and translated
by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong., Princeton, New Jersay: Princeton
University Press, 1978.
Kierkegaard, S. “On My Work as an Author, The Point of
View”, Essential Kierkegaard, edited
by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong., Princeton, New Jersay: Princeton
University Press, 2000.
Lacan, Jacques. The
Other Side of Psychoanalisys, book XVII, translated with notes by Russell
Grigg, W.W.Norton and Company, New York, London, 2007.
Pattison,
George, “Art in an age of Reflection”, The
Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by Alastair Hannay and Gordon
Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
The essential Kierkegaard, edited by
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong., Princeton, New Jersay: Princeton University
Press, 2000.
The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by
Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View, Cambridge, London:
MIT Press, 2006.
ABSTRACT
The Jewel on a Frozen Lake: Kierkegaard on the
Meaning of Action
Jasna Koteska
The
paper analyses the paradox in Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the meaning
of action in his famous 1846 tract “Two Ages: A Literary Review”. As is
well-known, to describe the two ages Kierkegaard used a parable of a precious
jewel on a frozen lake covered with thin ice. If the age is revolutionary,
Kierkegaard writes, the whole community celebrates the courage of a person who
will sacrifice his life for the common goal. And vice versa, if the age is
reflective, people consider the hero’s action as unreasonable and meaningless,
they ridicule his courage and strength, and reduce the hero’s sacrifice to a
simple display of skills. The paradox occurs when Kierkegaard describes the
revolutionary vigor. Otherwise known for his masterful literary style,
Kierkegaard enigmatically avoided the playful, urgent and swift descriptions,
which would correspond to the momentum needed for revolutionary action and
instead chose repetitive and dull sentences. E.g.: “The age of revolution is
essentially passionate and therefore essentially has culture”; “The tension and
resilience of the inner being are the measure of essential culture”; “The age
of revolution is essentially passionate” and so on. (Kierkegaard, S., Two Ages, H.V. Hong, E.V. Hong,
Princeton UP, 1978, 61-62).
The
obvious question is why Kierkegaard, who was aware that repetition brings
reduction of jouissance, chose to interpret the revolutionary age through
repetition, and with the same melancholy and mourning with which he described
the present age? Was it because he considered every revolution as essentially a
repetitive event? Or, because he believed that each self-sacrifice (the hero on
thin ice) is always already a senseless gesture, which cannot get an approval
of the community? Or, more radically, what if there is no age which can be
called a revolutionary age? What if there is nothing exclusive in history, and
each epoch is just a set of practical decisions about what kind of life one
wants to commit oneself to? The paper argues that Kierkegaard developed a
notion that both pleasure of the aesthetical and the ethical existence - “the
life of a poet” and “the life of a judge” are incomplete, the only resolution
of human’s destiny must come about in the form of a religious choice. Due to
the radical antagonism of human situation, humans are incapable of bypassing
the abyss between the finite and the infinite, therefore the action is always
conducted without a full meaning, without a rational knowledge of the
consequences of that action and with a leap of faith; therefore the true action
can come only in the form of a conduct of the single individual directed
towards the highest good as it is
understood in Kierkegaard.
[1] Kierkegaard,
Soren. Parables of Kierkegaard,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 15-16.
[2] Hegel, G. W. F. Elements
of the Philosophy of Right (1820), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991, p. 280.
[3] The essential Kierkegaard, edited by
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong., Princeton, New Jersay: Princeton University
Press, 2000, 126.
[4] Badiou, Alain. Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated,
edited and with an introduction by Norman Madarasz. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999,
13.
[5] The essential
Kierkegaard, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong., Princeton, New
Jersay: Princeton University Press, 2000, 124.
[6] Žižek, Slavoj. The
Parallax View, Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2006, 281.
[7] Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001, 13.
[8] Kierkegaard, S.
Two Ages, Vol. 14, edited and
translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong., Princeton, New Jersay:
Princeton University Press, 1978, 77.
[9] Lacan, Jacques. The
Other Side of Psychoanalisys, book XVII, translated with notes by Russell
Grigg, W.W.Norton and Company, New York, London, 2007.
[10] Kierkegaard,
S., Two Ages, H.V. Hong, E.V. Hong,
Princeton UP, 1978, 61-62.
[11] Jacues Lacan: The
Other Side of Psychoanalisys, book XVII, translated with notes by Russell
Grigg, W.W.Norton and Company, New York, London, 2007, 46.
[14] Kierkegaard, “On My Work as an Author, The Point of
View”, Essential Kierkegaard, p. 457,
note 2.
[15] Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote.
Translated, with Notes by James H. Montgomery. Introduced by David Quint,
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2009, 35-36.
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