THE NOCTURNAL  PATH  OF  MELANCHOLY. THE  CHANCE  OF  INDIVIDUATION  ACCORDING  TO  SOREN KIERKEGAARD.  

   My speech is an effort to inscribe Kierkegaard’s philosophy into the context of reflexion treating an experience of dependence as a mechanism of constituting an individual subject. It is devoted to the formulated by the author of Either/Or figure of esthetical man which seems to be a good starting – point for such a reflexion. First and foremost, this figure shows a double motion of the individual who  hidden under the garment of ironical distance contests the met reality as a source of obscure restrictions – here we have a preliminary and common concept of dependence. At the same time, the same individual is referred to what is coming as a completely new shape but anticipates the limits of its own freedom but not as its restrictions but as its compliment. A very meaningful aspect underlined by Kierkegaard is a possibility of an unsuccessful effort of individuation taken on by the esthetical man – the above mentioned nocturnal path of melancholy going to nowhere. The conception which is here the subject of interpretation shows that problem of individuation slips from the too simplistic alternative stating that human freedom is possible only as a negation of any form of conditionality (as it shows the old post-cartesian paradigm).

   An ambitious answer to this superficial alternative given by the author of Fear and Trembling is perfectly visible even at the level of antroplogical assumptions. We can see it  at the first pages of Sickness unto Death where, at the level of „transcendental” constitution of human being, is shown a positive, really individualizing role of experience of dependence. This answer shows us that the alternative which is mentioned is taking sidesteps rather than solving the problem of human freedom. “The man is the spirit, but what is the spirit? Spirit is the self.But what is the self? Self is a relation which relates to itself, or in this relation it is what relates to itself. The human being is a synthesis of finiteness and infiniteness, synthesis of time and eternity. Synthesis is a relation between two elements. But at this level man is not the self. In the relation between two elements, relation is the third element as a negative unity, and these two elements relate to relation. Thus, being the soul, this relation between the soul and the body is a relation. On the contrary, the relation relates to itself, so this relation is the third positive element and that is  the self. Such a relation relates to itself – the self must be either constituted by itself or by something Different. If the that relation relates to itself is constituted by something Different, it is probably the third relation. But this relation, the third one, is again a relation, which relates to That, what constituted the whole relation. In this way the deducted and constituted relation is  the self of the man who relates to himself and in the same moment relates to something different”[1]. This long and complex fragment is placed here for two reasons: first it is to show how difficult is an answer to the question about human freedom,  secondly this fragment is a genuine map of human inwardness, a map which lets us understand the very characteristic determinations of the aesthetic stage for exemple “sleeping spirit” or “immediacy”..

ROMANTIC  ROOTS

   We can suppose that the starting point for the kierkegaardian concept of aesthetic man is a Romantic vision of reality, creative imagination and tragical irony. That does not mean I simply regard Kierkegaard as one of the Romantics, I just would like to mark some classicaly Romantic threads in some part of his philosophy which is the more positive project as a whole.

   First motive should be remarked are two pre-Romantic conceptions of beauty created by Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller. According to Kant from the perspective of epistemological work of notions the sphere of beauty must be marked by a negative sign as a nothingness of experience[2], but in the same moment this nothingness is determined as a freedom. Then the feeling of beauty, which absolutely slips out of work of intelect’s notions, is acknowledged here as a source of the motion of transcending beyond the phenomenal sphere. In this motion we go into the noumenal world which founds the empirical reality.Beauty in itself becomes a symbol of morality[3], then it has of necessity a universal character. In this way aesthetic experience joins in itself a negative freedom from the limits implied by subject’s steepening in the world of  phenomenons with a positive freedom which means, according to Kant, the perfect accordance of human will with the maxims of the universal legislation.

According to Schiller the aesthetic experience, which is realized in a drive of play, surpasses the moral goodness because it joins in itself two opposed drives: material and formal. The beauty is described here as an aesthetic appearance transcends the reality and in this way reveals over moral human freedom. Two motions accomplished here are especially important for both: Kierkegaard and Romantics: mentioned nothingness of experience  opens the space for feeling, and transcending of  reality and moral sphere which is accomplishing in this feeling.

   It’s important because the Romantic individual, as it described Wiliam Blake, see the world “in disintegration, lifeless and devoid of spirit”. In this situation his basic feeling is the Longing which has no particular form, isn’t pointed to some concrete object, because of its object is absence.Then the Longing couldn’t be closed in consiousness of a loss – it would be just an imperfect form cut out a part from a whole. The Absence to which is pointed the Romantic Longing can never change into its opposite, any form of presence can reduce it. Then at the ontological level it has an abolute character as a something completely heterogenous, but such a absolutely otherness in view of everything which could be objected is a nothingness. “The Longing is a painful desire lives on itself, not founding a balminess, and the reason is not that  it can’t reach to its object but that object can’t be objected. Such an object is nothingness”[4]. This nothingness is an abolute, procesual structure which shines through the lifeless crust of reality and whispers a silent possibility of transformation. If so, the transformation must take a form of negation, fall because, as wrote Holderlin, “where is danger/ there is salavation”.

   In such situation the Art is to fulfil a very special role ( especially music and poetry, wchich is, according to Schelling, both arche and telos for philosophy and sciences), the Art which  is raised to the rank of epiphanic medium[5] and such as becomes the general model of attitude towards the reality. Probably the best description of its essence we can see in the notion of romnticision created by Novalis: “When I give a higher sense and mysterious shape to the common things, to the things which are known the dignity of unknown things, to the finitened an appearance of infiniteness – in every this case I romanticise them”[6].

   We can say that at the existential level its equivalent is, in some sense, a tragical irony, which is a deep consiousness of inevitable finiteness and a lack of of a reason of existence. Its correlative is infiniteness to which an ironical individual constantly relates, but he can never contact with it, and just approaches in a succesive acts of negation of the met reality. Then the sense of reality every time is made by its anihilation.

                                                                 ***

   The aesthetic stage is not, as we know, uniform, it’s possible to distinguish two main sub-stages. Nevertheless, when we describe the general characteristic of the aesthete we can distinguish mutual features like: immediacy, irony, experience of beauty  (which is revealed by the way of  intensification of sensual elations or within an aesthetic play) as a criterion for making “choices”. These features will be found in different forms and extent – it depends on the “place” where the aesthetic man is situated.

   Judge Wilhelm describes this stage :”Great as the differences within the aesthetic domain may be, all the stages have this similarity, that spirit is not determined as spirit but is immediately determined. The differences may be extraordinary (...)” from the purely sensual degrees to very sophisticated and reflective ones “but even at the stage where cleverness is evident the spirit is not determined as spirit but as talent”[7]. What does the word “immediacy” mean? The term Kierkegaard brought from Hegel’s writings, but here it has some different meaning – immediacy is a state of the sleeping spirit, it describes the spirit in primeval negative form, it’s just a psychical synthesis of  body and soul.This synthesis accomplishes in the spirit but as it were the spirit is not aware of it, then there isn’t a moment of self-consciousness, reflective self-reference. That is the reason why Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety describes the immediacy as an ignorance thus an innocence – moral and religious concepts and norms that are strange for an individual who determined himself aestheticaly. Of course that is no solid, “substantial” innocence which, we can suppose, was inherent to first people before the Fall, the aesthete derives from concrete social world. In that world he can’t find himself, he feels his presence as reduced to a level of being just an element of the system, only a function which is to “work” in accordance with objectively determined laws. From this point of view his individuality is completely irrelevant, in other (hegelian) words – his individuality is just an appearance. At the theoretically-cognitive level the best expression of this situation is the philosophical system which inscribes the whole reality, by means of objective reflection, into inexorable Notion’s logic. This logic gets hold of every particular content which appears within the universal process of history as a difference isolated from the Notion, a difference which in the way of aufhebung will be reassimilated. Truth, by the same token, is determined only abstractly, formally and logically. According to Hegel truth which this way made a circle is perfect subject-object unity which by means of  the evolution of  differences that had been assimilated, has become absolutely obcjective. “In consequence this unity is absolute and whole truth, is an idea thinking  itself, in this case as the thoughtful idea, as the logical idea”[8]. Kierkegaard comments on this intelectual practice: “In consequence the truth ,for the objective reflection, becomes something objective that can be seen irrespectively of the subject”[9]. Following this path,  the dimension of relation is forgotten, which means that the simple fact the truth constitutes every time for me is also forgotten. The truth, according to Kierkegaard, is an ontological structure which becomes an empty thesis beyond the phenomenology of subiective being. The aesthetic man perceives the horizon as an irrational burden and tries to transcend it. This attitude isn’t a banal form of anarchism or mystical attitude of negation of the world. Similarly to Abraham, who after his trip to mount Moria goes back to his people, an aesthetically disposed individual stays in the  world and what more - he needs the reality more than before because it becomes the material of his creative activity. We can see here a specific dual division –there is some distance being drawn between the individual and the reality, effecting from the  vague and indistinct presentiment of his own infiniteness.

   The method of the mentioned transcending is, as we can guess, irony which in the hands of an aesthete is an unaware preparatory instrument for an authentic religious life. Due to its unawareness the aesthete uses it in his sophisticated way. At every substage, irony appears with different intensity and in a different form, as a more or less reflective moment of human inwardness which breaks within the system restrictive dependencies. In its pure and perfect shape irony is “absolute infinite negativeness” which “isn’t pointed (...) against the concrete form of existence” but causes that “the whole reality becomes a stranger  to the ironically disposed subject, and on the other side he has become strange for reality”, thus “he has himself become something unreal”[10]. In accordance with its definition it could not be connected with any positive project, it has no object; being intentionaly pointed at infiniteness irony cannot reject it but just constantly feels an unclear intuition. That is the reason why irony is an  “infinitely light play with nothingness, a play not intimidated by nothingness but even intensifies it”[11].

   By means of irony, subjectivity transcends beyond the first step of its immediacy which is primeval conscoiusness characterized by a completely reflectiveless sinking of an individual into social structures. Thereby the  subject gains a negative freedom, and that means he “is free from dependencies the acquainted world limits him with (...) and in consequence he is in the state of suspension because there is nothing that could restrict him. This freedom and this suspension causes a form of enthusiasm, a state of euphoria which is the result of countless possibilities available to the ironist; this perspective allows to exhaust a reservoir of possibilities in order to find an escape”[12].

DON  JUAN

   Kierkegaard begins his reflection on the first main esthetical substages with a description of the most abstract idea with whose depiction we can come across in the art – the idea of  the “sensuous genius”. It’s difficult to say what it is really? Kierkegaard claims that by Christianity sensuality has gained the status of a principle because this religion accomplished a spiritual excluding of sensuality. But in the same way indeed it was acknowledged as a negative correlative of the spiritual principle. This idea has a double character: it is an immediacy and  an “inwardness in itself”[13]. What does this, paradoxal in its thickness phrase, means? It shows, as we can suppose, that sensuality, described this way, is a completely inreflected moment when what was assumed as a ground is equivalent to its manifestation or even more – it is its own manifestation. Sensuality is that form of the inwardness being in itself which realizes itself as a pure (there is no moment of self-reference) reaching  to the world’s finiteness. As such  the idea of the “sensuous genius” slips out from lingiustic determinations (language is the most concrete medium according to Kierkegaard). We can only say that “it is an energy, a storm,impatience, passion, and so on, in all their lyrical qualities”[14]; if so there is only one medium which can express this idea –and that is  music. In some sense it remains the nietzschean concept of  the Dionysian element as the universal principle of existence that by celebrating the Bacchanalia among the sounds of the dithyrambs absorbs everything what is singular. Similarly in the philosophy of Schopenhauer music is only possible way of immediate contact with the Will[15].

   Don Juan is exactly the expression of this idea, its incarnation, he’s the individual whose individuality was generalized, the individual who was eliminated from any concrete content. “This generality, this floating between becoming an individual and a force of nature is exactly Don Juan”[16]. His sphere is sensuous love which, contrary to spiritual love, is absolutely faithless because it has never concentrated on a single woman but in every its act “it loves not one but all, it seduces all. It exists only in the moment, but the moment is the sum of moments (...)”[17]. There is no place for a dialectic of uncertainty, of doubt, of otherness- the activity undertaken by Don Juan is closed into an indivisible and fleeting while where the evolving and the final effect are one and every time identical. It’s irrelevant how many women he has seduced because his every motion is nothing more than an infinite and slavish repetition. If so, can he be called a seducer? Kierkegaard denies it  in a deeper sense of this term , because a seducer “must have reflection and consciousness” thereby discursively mediates his activity. Meanwhile Don Juan seduces only by means of a sensuous desire. Closed to the past, thus devoid of memory, absent and pushing into absence, he desires constantly, in his demonic craving of the same object which constantly slipps out of “his hands”. We can say that this object is a transparenting infiniteness that haunts him being (as) a general idea of feminity which can’t find its expression in any concrete form. We can say that, in spite of his general reflectiveless, the figure of Don Juan could be acknowledged as some form of a “higher consciousness” which is necessary step in the rounded way of  the self to itself.

THE  REFLECTIVE  AESTHETE

At the first substage an individual was losing himself by constantly reaching out to the outward, but the steps of the reflective aesthete are pointed to a  reverse direction – he is more interested in the inner feeling , more in evolving his imagination than in real experiencing in real world. Of course it is not an  absolute withdrawal to itself, the aesthete still needs a reality, but only as a material for creative explorations, aesthetical experiments, for a purely reflective juggle of possibilities.

This  should happen by means of what Kirkegaard called “the rotation method” which is to save the aesthete from boredom. In its simple, extensive form it is based on constant variability of our modes of presence in the world. But this gives no guarantee of avoiding boredom, the best example of which is Nero. In its intensive form it is based on the principle of selflimitation which is supposed to cause an increase in individual creativeness.  In order to do this, one should give up hope, all interiorly (in-the-world) projects, and also scrupulously exercise himself in the dialectic of memory and forgetness. “No moment must be permitted so great a significance that it cannot be forgotten when convenient; each moment ought, however, to have so much significance that it can be recollected at will.”[18].But in order to recall it as a material for more intensive feeling. Such a described method of selflimitation causes that an individual, turned back against the object provoking a feeling, can utterly devote itself to the content, form and intensityof this feeling. Thus it contributes to enrichening, lyricalisation  of its own inwardness. Every attempt towards the outer world should be based on  free will.The free will that organizes the aesthete’s perception by beginning with contiguously chosen detail( preferably each time a different one) creates his own lyrical image of reality. It is not about the immediate delight, but rather a delight flowing from the very image of delight, from the thought about it, from the uncountable variations of it possible. In this sense, the activity of the reflective aesthete is inscribed into the phenomenology of aesthetical experience within which the space of feeling is constituted and within which the individual consciousness as its interest is born. This space is the condition of possibility, the original ”being inbetween” (inter esse) as a constant and reversible motion from what is finite towards the infiniteness, or as Heidegger would put is from what is ontic towards the ontological. Two metaphors carry for Kierkegaard a special meaning- the postillion’s horn (trumpet) that with each blow gives a different sound; and the metaphor of the theatre, where the actor’s personality, expressed in the movement, is disguised by performance. ”Personality has not yet been discovered. Its energy emerges in the passionate possibility, as the life of the spirit is similar to what happens with many flowers- their crown appear in the end”[19]. The form of repetition which emerges here is exactly that movement in which the individual begins to relate to itself but not to the essence (Kierkegaard meant to avoid associating repetition, in each of its variations, with neoplatonic reditio animae) - to its own activity, whose manifestation separates itself from “being itself inwardly”.

                At this stage, the whole project is jeopardized by the risk of failure. Because, to put it in the words of the author of “Either/Or” the self-reference, described this way, continually accomplishes itself  in the absence of the spirit, who still remains sleeping. The character who is supposed to express the nature of the reflexive aesthete is the seducer  Johannes, in the case of whom: “The poetical was the more he himself brought with him. This more was poetical he enjoyed in the poetic situation of reality; he withdrew this again in the form of poetic reflection. This afforded him a second enjoyment, and his whole life was motivated by enjoyment. In the first instance he enjoyed the aesthetic personally, in the second instance he enjoyed his own aesthetic personality. In the first instance the point was that he enjoyed egoistically and personally what in part was rea;ity’s gift to him and was that with which he himself had impregnated reality; in the second instance his personality was effaced, and he enjoyed the situation, and himself in situation”[20].

This way, thus, the inimmediate form of his erotic, gratified by “poetic infiniteness” not being the enduring characteristic for marital love, but only a delicately prolonged flowing while, within the frames of which, playing subtly with moods, he wished to realize “an inexhaustible variety of combinations.”[21] Finally, the reflective aesthete is acquainted with the immanent antinomy of this way of being, according to which the available possibility of being in an unlimited number of variations, unnoticeably changes into the possibility of “not being anyone at all”. “I feel the way a chess figure must, when the opponent says of it:that piece cannot be moved”[22] If then he will be able to correctly comprehend the anxiety that fills him up and causes that with ever greater strength he feels the pushing into not-being of the counterpart of ironical relation, he will find himself in a state that creates premises for a spring into an ethical sphere that he can authentically accomplish by undertaking himself  within the absolute choice. “If this does not come to pass, if the movement is checked, if it is forced back, melancholy ensues”[23].

The individual in whom the negative process comes into being is notioned as “the unhappiest man”. The main feature of this figure is the basic ambivalence towards the world, the feeling of loss deprived from knowledge about its object and the desperate awareness of self-absence. This way,  the aesthete “experiences the tragedy of personality, a tragedy without a katharsis”[24] This last notion brings to mind the path of understanding, according to which an attempt has been made to initiate a process of individuation through the aesthetic experience that joins itself inevitably with the communicational problem.  In The concept of anxiety the stadium,  this speech is devoted to (especially the deadpoint into which it sinks), is generally called “the demonic”[25], which can indicate the individual inability to come into communicational relations. The freedom which exists in it as “the possibility of possibilities”[26] and which expresses itself in the outer world only in its negative form, is negated and as a “unfreedom becomes more and more inclosed does not want to communication”[27] The essence of the properly understood freedom is a manifestation in the world, only within which  the inwardness can authentically become for itself. Thus neither in the form  the transcendental Ich,  nor in the contemplative loneliness, but as a concrete personality that understands itself in what he utters.