International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2005) 58: 63–94 DOI: 10.1007/s11153-005-1594-1

© Springer 2005

Selfhood and the three R’s: Reference, repetition, and refiguration BRIAN GREGOR Philosophy Department, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Ave., Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA (E-mail: [email protected])

Introduction This paper examines the problem of the self in time, and the role that writing plays therein. Because the self is a temporal phenomenon, questions arise regarding its continuity in time: Does personal identity endure over time? What sort of integrity might the self have if it is always changing? This raises the further problem of reference, particularly if one rejects the notion of a substantial self: what resources do we have to refer to the self ? Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Ricoeur both situate this discussion within the boundaries of writing. While recognizing the limitations of thought, reference, and writing, both authors push these boundaries in the hope that new possibilities of meaning might emerge through creative modes of discourse. For Ricoeur, the semantic innovations of metaphor and narrative exemplify this possibility. For Kierkegaard, I propose, the indirect communication of his pseudonymous writings comprises another type of semantic innovation. In comparing the pseudonymous writings with Ricoeur’s treatment of metaphor and narrative, I show how these forms of discourse create an indirect, second-order reference to those realities that do not permit direct, first-order reference – in this case, the self and its possibilities. Further, these innovations mark the intersection of reference to the self with the constitution of the self. That is, these semantic innovations are essential to the dynamic identity of the temporal self. We see this in Ricoeur’s discussion of narrative, the main features of which illuminate the narrative dimension of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship, whose task is to assist the reader in coming to selfhood. Kierkegaard and Ricoeur share many convictions regarding the nature of this self, and while I highlight some of these, I do not propose an identity between their positions.

64

BRIAN GREGOR

This is because Kierkegaard’s account has a religious dimension that steps beyond Ricoeur’s distinction between philosophical anthropology and religious confession, a point I demonstrate in comparing Kierkegaardian repetition with Ricoeur’s narrative refiguration. That said, Ricoeur leaves open the possibility for such a religious step, so the two positions remain compatible to that extent; repetition and refiguration are essential moments in selfhood, with the latter providing an important addition to Kierkegaard’s discussion of repetition – a phenomenon which, I propose, calls for narrative understanding.

Temporality, selfhood, and reference Ricoeur’s analysis of subjectivity begins in the aftermath of its seeming destruction at the hands of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, whose hermeneutics of suspicion reduced the foundations of the cogito to rubble. In exposing the motives, drives, and desires behind our actions, these thinkers conclude that the unity, purity and consistency of the subject are illusions (albeit very powerful illusions). Convinced that the cogito cannot live up to its exaltation in modern philosophy, Ricoeur agrees that a hermeneutic of suspicion is necessary when discussing the status of the subject. Yet he is not willing to dismiss the subject as mere illusion. We must take the necessary detour through the hermeneutics of suspicion, but on the far side of suspicion we stand in need of a hermeneutics of affirmation. This entails a retrieval of the subject, albeit a more modest, “wounded” cogito, who stands equidistant from its exaltation by Descartes and its humiliation by Nietzsche and the masters of suspicion.1 This poses a problem for any attempt to speak of the self. If the self is not a substantial ‘thing’, it might seem that our talk about it would be illusory – a linguistic phenomenon with no traction in reality. What sort of reference might language about this wounded cogito have? The stakes are raised even higher if we consider that the self is also a radically temporal being. What sort of being is the self, if not a bundle of passing, changing impressions? What sort of reference might lay claim to this temporal being? From Parmenides onward temporality has threatened to sink the ship of metaphysics. With no timeless eidos to anchor our claims, how is metaphysics possible? Moreover, with no anchoring referent, how is language possible in the midst of temporal flux? Is language a closed system with no connection to an external referent?2

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

65

With these problems in view one might conclude that all talk of the self is rooted in sand – as this sand slips through the hourglass of time, our reference goes along with it. Acutely aware of this problem yet not ready to dismiss referentiality out of hand, Ricoeur proposes another, different sort of reference for such temporal phenomena. In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur’s guiding hypothesis is his conviction that temporality, while eluding the direct discourse of commonsense notions of reference, traditional metaphysics, and even phenomenology, instead “requires the mediation of the indirect discourse of narration.”3 Narrative acts as a sort of second-order reference, beyond the first-order discourse that presumes to be the only genuine type of reference. First-order reference resides in shared, “tangible” reality; I see a table, you see a table, and in pointing and naming it as such we agree that there is a table in the room. What could be more obvious? From this perspective second-order discourse such as poetry, literature and other forms of fiction seem to have no referential function. They provide nothing “tangible” – whether physical or conceptual – for us to point to. They are products of the imagination, which appeal to the imagination in a way that appears to abolish reference. And, in a sense, they do. Such imaginative discourse abolishes ostensive, “first-order reference.” But more importantly, this abolition of first-order reference “is the condition of possibility for the freeing of a second-order reference.”4 Second-order reference does not refer to “manipulable objects” or abstract (yet manipulable) concepts, but to what Husserl calls the life-world and Heidegger calls being-in-the-world. Second-order discourse refers to what Ricoeur calls the world of the text. Just as Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world is bound up in possibility (Dasein’s “ownmost possibilities”), so Ricoeur’s notion of the world of the text is a world of possibility – a possible world, a “proposed world that I could inhabit and wherein I could project one of my ownmost possibilities.”5 The reference of poetry and fiction is therefore not that of ostensive or everyday language, not “the modality of being-given,” but rather “the modality of power-to-be.”6 Only literary discourse is capable of referring to that which resists and eludes the referential power of ordinary descriptive statements. This is why Ricoeur claims that “(t)he role of most of our literature is, it seems, to destroy the world.”7 Literature neutralizes the ‘thesis of the world’, negating the apparently actual to create a “nonplace” in which our horizons open and give us a glimpse of possibility. This glimpse invites us to redescribe reality, imagining other ways of being.8 Hence the “heuristic force” of literature9 : it reveals the

66

BRIAN GREGOR

possibilities of one’s own being-in-the-world through the possibilities presented in the proposed world of the text. We must not underestimate the function of the imagination in this activity. Ricoeur departs from the philosophical tradition that treats imagination in relation to perception, and thus as the producer of “images” in the perceptual sense of the term.10 Most notably, in Hume’s Treatise the imagination produces ideas that lie somewhere between impressions and ideas, and have a distinctly perceptual nature. Imagination in this account is only “an appendix to perception, a shadow of perception.”11 Ricoeur, by contrast, considers the way in which the imagination functions discursively, through “a certain use of language,” rather than perceptually.12 Imagination is neither primarily nor exclusively perceptual. Ricoeur’s claim might be counter-intuitive, given our assumption that an image is most truly perceptual – “a ‘scene’ unfolding in some mental ‘theater’ before the gaze of an internal ‘spectator’.”13 Nevertheless, Ricoeur insists that images are spoken and heard before they are seen. These images are the output of the productive imagination, which functions like the Kantian schema; as the schema gives an image to a concept, so the imagination “gives an image to an emerging meaning.‘’14 This image gives discursive shape to emerging meanings. In regard to imagination, discourse takes priority over perception: “Before being a fading perception, the image is an emerging meaning.”15 The image gives shape to these new meanings discursively, through semantic innovations. Ricoeur’s two exemplary types of semantic innovation, to which we now turn, are metaphor and narrative.

Metaphor and pseudonymity A metaphor is an image that gives expression to an emerging meaning. One encounters an incipient meaning, a new way of understanding something, a new way of seeing-as, and the imagination gives an image to this. Metaphor allows being to disclose itself in new ways; it allows new phenomena to appear. With metaphor the innovation occurs in the context of a sentence, amidst other words, and consists of “the producing of new semantic pertinence by means of an impertinent attribution.”16 A new meaning emerges as one transgresses the expected use of language. “Achilles is a lion.” Literally this is false, but metaphorically it reveals a meaning that emerges as we read of Achilles’ character and actions. Yet the metaphor “Achilles is

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

67

a lion” reveals something that statements like “Achilles is ferocious and proud” do not. The metaphor is genuinely innovative because the image of the lion reveals something of Achilles’ being that is not identical with a list of his character traits. Metaphor is therefore irreducible to literal discourse; a metaphor cannot be translated into “synonymous” adjectives without a loss of meaning, because it marks the emergence of a new meaning. In other words, metaphor cannot be reduced to the first-order reference of direct discourse. Metaphorical reference negates or effaces first-order reference, rendering a “more radical power of reference to those aspects of our being-in-the-world that cannot be talked about directly.”17 These aspects, while being perhaps less “tangible,” are nonetheless true of our being in the world. At this point we can connect our discussion of Ricoeur with the other main thread of our discussion: Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship and its place in temporal selfhood. Ricoeur shares with Kierkegaard a keen awareness of the limitations of language. But they also share a keen sensitivity to the potential of language. Both recognize that philosophy, language, and thought all have an impulse to run up against their limits. We find this in Ricoeur’s 1963 paper, “Philosophy After Kierkegaard,” in which Ricoeur draws out some of Kierkegaard’s Kantian inclinations. Here Ricoeur contends that Kierkegaard’s existential categories provide a critique of existence, addressing “the possibility of speaking about existence.”18 The existing individual entails an excess that cannot fit into a philosophical system; human existence is ab-surd. Nevertheless, Ricoeur suggests that “the existence of the singular individual is not a mystical experience that must be passed over in silence. Kierkegaard was far from being an intuitionist: he was a reflective thinker.” Against any such Wittgensteinian reading of Kierkegaard, Ricoeur finds in Kierkegaard no haven for mystical retreat. “The question of human existence does not imply the death of language and logic; on the contrary, it calls for yet more lucidity and rigour.”19 Like Kant, both Kierkegaard and Ricoeur believe the most interesting and important thinking takes place at the limits of thought. In Kierkegaard’s view the thinking and writing that takes place at these limits must proceed with the awareness that existential truth cannot be communicated directly. One cannot show ethical and religious truth via first-order reference because it is not objective. We do not know this truth through intellectual assent to correct propositions. Truth is subjectivity, and cannot be possessed as direct knowledge, but in passionate commitment and action. Subjective truth is the truth

68

BRIAN GREGOR

one lives. Accordingly, one cannot communicate the truth as a transmission of objective statements, but by helping the hearer to realize the truth in his own life and actions. One does not communicate truth directly as knowledge, but as capability and oughtness.20 One does not receive the truth as something to simply think about, but as the ability and the responsibility to practice it in actuality.21 This sort of communication is difficult, because persuasion regarding subjective truth is not possible: “The realization, or the result, however, is not within the power of the communicator, but lies with the recipient of the communication.”22 The communicator does not possess the truth objectively, nor can he ensure that the recipient receives it subjectively. As we shall see later, Kierkegaard believes that a realization of this sort depends on God’s involvement with the reader. Kierkegaard recognizes the limitations of authorship, that he cannot ensure the reader will understand him as he intends,23 let alone act on it. He writes, and writes prolifically, but if his authorship will help anyone into the truth it will do so indirectly, by ‘deceiving’ the reader into the truth.24 Kierkegaard’s task, then, is to write in order to stimulate the reader, present possibilities, goad him to decision. To this end, he writes under pseudonyms. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are not simply pen names, but personae, imaginary persons “created by the author for artistic purposes,” not merely to remain anonymous.25 These personae are fictional entities, voicing perspectives other than Kierkegaard’s own. But these are not opaque personalities, either. One catches glimpses of Kierkegaard through them, since they all reveal his brilliant wit, writing style, and concerns. Some passages from the pseudonymous works appear in his journals, and Kierkegaard also toyed with publishing some works, such as Philosophical Fragments, under his own name. However much these writings reflect Kierkegaard, though, they also refract him, so that the reader can never determine where the persona ends and the real Kierkegaard begins. This elusiveness serves to frustrate the reader’s desire to determine what Kierkegaard really thinks. Kierkegaard does not want to be mistaken for the exemplar of the truth he is writing about – namely, Christianity.26 Nor does he want the reader to look to him for the answer; the truth does not lie in agreeing with Kierkegaard, but in acting on the truth in one’s own life. Consequently, the pseudonyms “do not resolve the ultimate problems Kierkegaard sought to open up to us; rather they constitute essential points in the approach to those problems.”27 Kierkegaard does not seek to convince the reader, but

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

69

instead to dialectically examine issues, stimulate thought, and clarify the need for decision on the reader’s part. We thus find in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity a remarkable type of semantic innovation. Like a metaphor, a pseudonym is a type of “impertinent attribution.” The impertinence occurs not in a sentence, but in the attribution of another persona or name to a writer. This attribution is acutely transgressive, allowing Kierkegaard to efface his own situation as an author to articulate other possible realities via alternate manners of inquiry, opposing positions, and alternate existential orientations. For Ricoeur, this transgressive dimension is central to poetic and fictive discourse: . . . poetic discourse brings to language aspects, qualities, and values of reality that lack access to language that is directly descriptive and that can be spoken only by means of the complex interplay between the metaphorical utterance and the rule-governed transgression of the usual meanings of our words.28 Kierkegaard’s transgressive polynymity29 gives a discursive image to elusive dimensions of reality, creating a second-order reference to new meanings and existential possibilities.

Narrative and mimesis Just as Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor sheds new light on the workings of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, so Ricoeur’s narrative theory illuminates the narrative nature of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship. Like metaphor, narrative is an instance of semantic innovation, but whereas metaphor takes place at the level of the sentence, narrative innovation occurs at the level of plot. Ricoeur draws heavily on Aristotle’s Poetics here. Narration is the activity of emplotment, of composing what Aristotle calls muthos.30 For Aristotle, poetics is an art concerned with “how plots should be constructed if the composition is to turn out well.”31 Likewise for Ricoeur, a good composition enacts a mimetic synthesis of heterogeneous elements such as goals, causes, and chance, bringing them into “the temporal unity of a whole and complete action.”32 For Aristotle, the completeness of an action is crucial to a good plot. One cannot understand a plot that lacks completeness, coherence, and consistency. Likewise for Ricoeur, narrative understanding entails “grasping the operation that unifies into

70

BRIAN GREGOR

one whole and complete action the miscellany constituted by the circumstances, ends and means, initiatives and interactions, the reversals of fortune, and all the unintended consequences issuing from human action.”33 Narrative lends concordance to the discordance of human actions and events in time.34 Narrative is also similar to metaphor insofar as it does not suspend reference, but institutes a higher order of reference. Pointing to Aristotle’s definition of plot as “the mimesis of an action,”35 Ricoeur contends that narrative reference lies in our understanding of human action through emplotment. Narrative refers to extralinguistic reality, pointing to our pre-understanding of action, composing an ordered whole of events and actions, and resignifying the world with new possibilities. These modes of narrative understanding comprise a threefold mimesis, which we will examine more closely in what follows. In noting the mimetic nature of narrative, we must also note Ricoeur’s emphasis on its productive nature. As imitation, narrative is productive, not simply re-productive.36 In his words, if we translate mimesis by ‘representation’ . . . we must not understand by this word some redoubling of presence, as we could still do for Platonic mimesis, but rather the break that opens the space for fiction. Artisans who work with words produce not things but quasi-things; they invent the as-if.37 The activity of emplotment, of composing narratives, of poetics, is an activity that is at once mimetic and genuinely productive. According to Ricoeur, “Poetry is, in fact, a ‘doing’ [faire] and a ‘doing’ about ‘doing’ . . . But it is not actual, ethical doing, rather fictive and poetic doing.”38 Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings present an interesting instance of poesis in this regard. The pseudonyms are also genuinely productive. As Kierkegaard observes: “A pseudonym is excellent for accentuating a point, a stance, a position. It creates a poetic person. . . ”39 The pseudonyms are neither masks nor puppets, but poetic personae that are poets in their own right. Writing pseudonymously, Kierkegaard undertakes the mimetic activity of imitating the already mimetic activity of writing, creating what we might call a second-order mimesis. The action that the pseudonyms imitate poetically is poesis, and yet they do not fall back into the doubling of simple representation.

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

71

Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are productive insofar as they create poetic personae. In this light we can appreciate his remark that he considers himself the reader, rather than the author, of his books.40 The pseudonyms are thus also productive insofar as they engender new levels of understanding on the part of the reader. As Gadamer so famously argues, “Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well.”41 Gadamer provides the definitive challenge to the notion that the understanding of the reader can reproduce the understanding of the author; the text has a life of its own, which the author cannot control. As we noted above, Kierkegaard explicitly recognizes the limitations of authorial intent. His pseudonymous writings underline this point, leaving the reader to confront the text rather than the author. Of concern to both Kierkegaard and Ricoeur is the role that narrative understanding plays in selfhood. Our question here is, after all, the role of writing and narrative in temporal selfhood. For both Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, narrative plays a crucial role as mediator between time and the self. As Ricoeur writes, “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.”42 Although he does not discuss narrative as explicitly as Ricoeur does, Kierkegaard shares this conviction, as we will demonstrate in the next section.

Narrative and selfhood In a discussion of Ricoeur’s narrative theory, Jonathan R´ee makes the provocative suggestion that philosophical writing in general employs the principal resources of narrative, i.e. time and narrative personality.43 Philosophers may do so unwittingly, since the temporal and personal are two aspects that philosophy often attempts to exclude. Modern thought in particular aims at knowledge that is impersonal and communicable both directly and literally. It also aims at knowledge that transcends temporality and its correlate, memory. Proper knowledge would thus be marked by simultaneity, being available for apprehension all at once.44 Obviously not every modern philosopher finds these ideals to be self-evident, but this anxiety over time and personality is nevertheless a significant feature of thought after Descartes.

72

BRIAN GREGOR

In spite of this “flight from temporality and personality – in short, from narrative,”45 R´ee contends that philosophical discourse cannot elude these aspects of human existence, and often employs them in spite of itself. Such typical features of philosophical experience as following an argument, an author’s “journey-through-error,” understanding one’s motives for inquiry, and appreciating the distinct characters, personalities, and voices of the tradition all appeal to our capacity for narrative understanding. This is certainly the case with Kierkegaard’s writings. Although Kierkegaard does not take up the question of narrative in this explicit fashion, his writings evince an understanding of these points, presenting a more overt narrativity than most philosophical writings. Let us consider Ricoeur’s three-fold mimesis, and the place of each of the three mimetic moments in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship.

Prefiguration Ricoeur proposes that narrative understanding unfolds through three levels of mimetic figuration: prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. Prefiguration (Mimesis1 ) refers to the pre-understanding we have of human action. Narrative always begins with action. Action precedes the text of narration. But Ricoeur’s further and more interesting observation is that action demands narrative interpretation. Human action is prefigured meaningfully. Action is meaningful, and is structurally different from mere physical movement. We have a preunderstanding of our activity in the world via meaningful structures, symbolic resources, and temporality.46 Ricoeur outlines three features of narrative prefiguration: first, the semantic dimension of action is structured by our understanding of agents, goals, motives, means, conflict, success, failure, et cetera.47 Further, human action is prefigured narratively insofar as “it is always already articulated by signs, rules, and norms. It is always already symbolically mediated.”48 Finally, human action calls for narration insofar as it is temporal. The agony of passing time – the pastness of the past, the distension of the present moment, and our projections into the future – calls for narration. These features of our pre-understanding of human action prefigure action narratively, and they are also the conditions of possibility for our understanding not only our own actions, but also those of other people and literature.49 Kierkegaard reveals something of this when he famously observes:

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

73

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.50 One never reaches a plateau from which life is finally understandable. Even from the vantage point of one’s deathbed, one’s story is not finally told. The meaning of one’s life does not end with death, but resonates into the future through those who go on living and interpreting one’s life narratively. This is true in all but the saddest cases of social isolation. Nevertheless, this lack of finality does not amount to the absence of all understanding, but instead reveals understanding to be an ongoing task. Life must be understood – backwards, for sure, but it must be understood nonetheless. We must tell our stories. That is a given.51 We should not underestimate the importance of memory for Kierkegaard, who writes in his journals: “The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine his life becomes.”52 Our lives, cast about in time, call out for understanding. Even though we never quite arrive at a final understanding, we continue to narrate. For Ricoeur as well as Kierkegaard, this narration is the mediating factor between understanding backward and living forward. And as I propose later, it also opens the possibility of a degree of understanding forward.

Configuration If ever a human being felt the need for narrative self-understanding, it was Kierkegaard. His voluminous literary output and his journals testify to the urgency of this call to narration. Kierkegaard obsessively pursued narrative understanding, relentlessly telling and retelling his story to the point that Ricoeur remarks, “no one else has ever transposed autobiography into personal myth as he did.”53 Yet this impulse to understand our activity in the world, which turned into a compulsion for Kierkegaard, is naturally human. The prefiguration of Mimesis1 calls for configuration in Mimesis2 . The act of narration provides unity to the manifold of events, mediating between individual events and the “story taken as a whole”; events and actions figure

74

BRIAN GREGOR

not merely as atomic, isolated occurrences, nor as a random succession of events. Emplotment configures activity to make it intelligible;54 it brings concordance to discordant elements like agents, goals, means, results, et cetera;55 it synthesizes the heterogeneous.56 Narrative configuration thus serves a central role in the unity of personal identity. The telling of one’s story is essential to the constitution of one’s self.57 If that is the case, however, we have reason to question the truthfulness of Kierkegaard’s account of his story. The development of a personal mythology would seem to confirm the suspicion that the self is merely an illusion – in Kierkegaard’s case, at least. The pseudonyms seem to diminish the personal identity of Kierkegaard, increasing the discordance and creating a self-dispersion. We might argue that the impulse toward discordance and dispersion is met and countered by a move toward concordance in the journals, The Point of View, and Kierkegaard’s other commentary on the pseudonyms.58 Yet not everyone is convinced of the reliability of Kierkegaard’s narration in these sources. The “direct” writings may not provide such a clear key to the indirect writings as we might hope. Christopher Norris undertakes one such approach to Kierkegaard’s authorship, attempting to deconstruct and demythologize Kierkegaard’s mythic interpretation of his life through the pseudonyms and The Point of View. In Norris’s reading, Kierkegaard’s estimation of his authorship is shaped by “an overriding narrative concern” (emphasis his) – namely, that of self-approval and justification.59 In The Point of View in particular Kierkegaard wants to give an all-too-tidy teleology of the aesthetic/pseudonymous writings, claiming that they are directed by providence toward religious ends. Further, Kierkegaard uses the confessional opportunity to exonerate himself of all guilt in his dealings with Regine Olsen. Such is the ironic logic of confessional narratives: the need for self-approval leaves one “with nothing to confess.”60 Several aspects of Norris’ argument require serious criticism, but he nevertheless raises an important point regarding Kierkegaard’s narrative, viz., the necessary role of suspicion in hermeneutics. We cannot determine how much of Kierkegaard’s personal narrative is truth and how much is myth. On one level, this is his point – to highlight the distance between the figure of the author and his intent, and the world of the text that opens up in front of the reader. Whatever his motives in writing an account like The Point of View, Kierkegaard does not want us to attach to him as the answer or the exemplar of truth. That said, whatever the extent to which Kierkegaard’s narrative is fictive and self-justifying, it illustrates the

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

75

need for a hermeneutics of suspicion. We are always prone to selfdeception, and need to have our narratives challenged. This is why the intersubjective component of narration is so important. Alasdair MacIntyre argues that narrative selfhood is “correlative,” that one is accountable to others in composing one’s narrative. Good narration is co-narration. This renders narration an act of mutual accountability, which is essential to establishing the continuity of one’s narrative.61 The intersubjective dimension of narration can serve the need, at least partially, for a hermeneutic of suspicion. On the far side of suspicion this co-narration can also serve the need for a hermeneutic of affirmation. In our suspicion of Kierkegaard’s authorship we must not discount another important aspect of narration: viz., the positive role of fictional narrative. In Ricoeur’s view it is naturally human to compose fictional narratives to aid our understanding: “the first way human beings attempt to understand and to master the ‘manifold’ of the practical field is to give themselves a fictive representation of it.”62 The answer is not to write oneself into a fictional reality, but rather to recognize the heuristic potential of fiction. We cannot overestimate the importance of fiction in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Whether it is the re-examination of the Abraham narrative, various fantastic and mythic figures like Agamemnon and the merman in Fear and Trembling, the ensemble cast of kings, knights, and fair maidens, or the numerous personae who interact with each other and take credit for Kierkegaard’s authorship, the heuristic potency of fiction is obvious in Kierkegaard. With this in view we can appreciate his claim that the authorship comprised his own education.63 By writing fictional narratives, Kierkegaard was able to consider new possibilities and meanings in his own existence. More on that in a moment. We thus find emplotment at work in Kierkegaard’s authorship insofar as it lies somewhere between autobiography and personal mythology. We also find it insofar as it aids the reader in composing and understanding her own narrative. Therein lies some of the appeal of reading the life stories of others: whether it is the confessions of Augustine, Rousseau, or Tolstoy, autobiography is interesting to us – almost inherently so. Humans look to other life-stories to understand their own. Of course, one cannot hope to arrive at a final understanding of any life, let alone one as mysterious as Kierkegaard’s, whose pseudonymous writings break up the cohesion of his narrative. Even in instances like these, however, the human capacity for narrative is not utterly frustrated. Rather, Ricoeur suggests that even with texts

76

BRIAN GREGOR

that threaten to spell the death of narrative, as with those of Beckett and Joyce, we find a reiteration of the human impulse toward emplotment: These texts break up the habitual paradigms of narrative in order to leave the ordering task of creation to the reader himself. And ultimately it is true that the reader composes the text. All narrative, however, even Joyce’s, is a certain call to order. Joyce does not invite us to embrace chaos but an infinitely more complex order, what he calls ‘chaosmos’. Narrative carries us beyond the oppressive order of our existence to a more liberating and refined one.64 Transgressive texts of this sort do not abolish narrative understanding, but instead call the reader into the production of meaning. This is Kierkegaard’s concern with his authorship, particularly the pseudonymous authorship. We cannot hope to discern the true narrative of Kierkegaard’s actual historical life. That authorial figure is not available to us, and neither is his original intent. If we can discern anything of Kierkegaard’s aims it is his desire to shake us off the trail of authorial intent and leave us to confront the text on our own. Kierkegaard throws us back on ourselves, forcing us to reckon with our own stories in the light of the stories told by his pseudonyms. In addition to being works of poetry, Louis Mackey claims, Kierkegaard’s texts are also works of rhetoric. Whereas poetry is inner-directed, leading the reader “deeper into itself,” rhetoric is outerdirected, pointing the reader “beyond itself.” Being both poetic and rhetorical, these texts aim at driving the reader “through poetic apprehension to ethical appropriation.”65 Kierkegaard does not hope for his reader to come to appreciate his texts aesthetically or poetically and leave off there. Rather, he hopes the texts might contribute to decisions and activity by his reader. In Ricoeur’s terms, Kierkegaard hopes for a movement from text to action. This brings us to the third level of narrative figuration in Ricoeur’s theory: Refiguration.

Refiguration In the transition from configuration (Mimesis2 ) to refiguration (Mimesis3 ), mimesis “reaches its fulfillment.”66 Through the narrative understanding achieved in configuration, one’s horizon opens to new possible worlds; the world of actuality is refigured to reveal new

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

77

possibilities of action and meaning. Parallel to Gadamer’s notion of application, refiguration “marks the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or reader; the intersection, therefore, of the world configured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds its specific temporality.”67 The world of the text refigures the world of the reader, initiating the move from text to action. In this transition the movement of narrative understanding becomes a circle – moving from action to text to action. The circle is not a vicious one, though. Ricoeur prefers to present it as a spiral, “an endless spiral that would carry the mediation past the same point a number of times, but at different altitudes.”68 After the movement through the text, one then acts with a higher understanding of one’s action prior to the narrative. I would like to retain two key features of Ricoeur’s notion of refiguration for our examination of Kierkegaard. First, refiguration is the domain of new possibilities – new possibilities of meaning and understanding of the world and of oneself. Second, arising out of the first point, refiguration lies in the movement from text to action. Regarding the first point, Ricoeur recalls the importance of catharsis in Aristotle’s poetics. A well-composed tragedy will allow the audience (or reader) to recognize the universal truth which “the plot engenders through its composition.” The reader experiences pleasure in this recognition, and gains new understanding of himself and his place in the cosmos.69 According to Ricoeur, all sorts of narrative help one achieve this self-understanding. The “examined life is, in large part, one purged, one clarified by the cathartic effects of the narratives, be they historical or fictional, conveyed by our culture.”70 For instance, we see the priority of narrative in psychoanalysis: “Subjects recognize themselves in the stories they tell about themselves.”71 This recognition is the basis for redescription, in which the narrative imagination anticipates and projects possibilities.72 Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms provide a vivid illustration of this imaginative redescription. The pseudonymous writings function as a sort of existential laboratory, in which one can set one’s imagination in motion. Ricoeur makes this observation regarding art in general; it is “one of the oldest functions of art, that it constitutes an ethical laboratory, where the artist pursues through the mode of fiction experimentation with values.”73 In imaginative discourse we set in motion “the free play of possibilities in a state of noninvolvement with respect to the world of perception or of action. It is in this state of noninvolvement that we try out new ideas, new values, new ways of being

78

BRIAN GREGOR

in the world.”74 In this creative space we are free to “compare and evaluate motives as diverse as desires and ethical obligation, themselves as disparate as professional rules, social customs, or intensely personal values.”75 Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings allow him to undertake these existential, ethical experiments by disengaging from actuality; it opens the world of the “what if. . . ?” In this light Kierkegaard’s remark about being the reader rather than the author of these works gains deeper significance. Rather than positing these ideas and commitments in actuality, he can posit them as possible actions and existential orientations. The pseudonyms therefore comprise a series of heuristic patterns, for Kierkegaard as well as other readers – patterns of possible ways of being in the world.76 There is a danger in all of this, though. By poetically negating present actualities and exploring the world of possibility, one might easily become so intoxicated in the play of the imagination that one never realizes any possibilities in the actual. Given his poetic disposition, Kierkegaard struggles with this temptation all throughout his authorship. One can imagine oneself to be any number of things – the imaginative possibilities are seemingly infinite. One learns to negate any actuality simply by thinking otherwise. But unless one makes decisions and acts in the world of finite reality, the world of possibility ultimately becomes destructive.77 We see this in The Sickness Unto Death, where Anti-Climacus defines the self as the synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the necessary and the possible.78 If this synthesis breaks down, one falls into despair – either through the lack of finitude or infinitude, or the lack of necessity or possibility. The despair that lacks necessity spells out the danger of imagination and possibility: In possibility everything is possible. . . Legends and fairy tales tell of the knight who suddenly sees a rare bird and chases after it, because it seems at first to be very close; but it flies again, and when night comes, he finds himself separated from his companions and lost in the wilderness where he now is. So it is also with desire’s possibility. Instead of taking the possibility back into necessity, he chases after possibility – and at last cannot find his way back to himself.79 This is one way that one can become lost in possibility. Without the limitations of necessity, which are also the conditions for any actuality at all, “the self becomes an abstract possibility,” a “mirage.”80

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

79

Ricoeur is also aware of this danger. The activity of narration involves “a thought experiment by means of which we try to inhabit worlds foreign to us.” Although this experiment is an action of sorts, it belongs more to imagination than the will. For this reason, it is crucial here that “reading also includes a moment of impetus. This is when reading becomes a provocation to be and to act differently. However this impetus is transformed into action only through a decision whereby a person says: here I stand!”81 Kierkegaard’s fear is that the imagination might evade this moment of decision, this declaration “Here I stand!” He writes gravely regarding this danger, such that we might conclude his overall view of the imagination is a negative one. We have already stressed the importance of imagination and possibility, but we must reiterate the point here. In Ricoeur’s words, “Without imagination, there is no action.”82 I would argue that this is Kierkegaard’s view, as well. In his journals he writes, “Imagination is what providence uses to take men captive in actuality [Virkeligheden], in existence [Tilvœrelsen], in order to get them far enough out, or within, or down into actuality. And when imagination has helped them get as far out as they should be – then actuality genuinely begins.”83 This is the positive task of the imagination for Kierkegaard: to explore these possibilities for his readers (himself included), in hopes that it will spur them to action.84 Kierkegaard sees this as his task – that of spurring to action, since he considers himself as comparable to Socrates’ gadfly. Whatever his talents as an author, Kierkegaard understands he cannot compel his readers to “an opinion, a conviction, a belief.” The one thing he can do, however, is compel the reader “to become aware.”85 As with Socrates, this awareness comes with a sting. And like Socrates, many of Kierkegaard’s texts lead to aporias. Kierkegaard admires Socrates for this,86 and we see that Johannes Climacus also admires the other pseudonymous writings for the same reason. As Merold Westphal points out, Johannes Climacus “praises his own Philosophical Fragments for not solving the problem it poses; he praises Either/Or for not choosing between the aesthetic and the ethical; and he praises Stages on Life’s Way for reaching no conclusion and leaving its question unanswered.”87 Regarding Either/Or, Climacus suggests that whereas readers typically want to read books without “being inconvenienced,” the work leaves it “to the reader to put it all together by himself, if he so pleases, but nothing is done for a reader’s comfort.”88 This recalls Ricoeur’s point that transgressive texts, rather than abolishing narrative, call the reader into the production of meaning.

80

BRIAN GREGOR

This is certainly what happens in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, which call for the reader’s decision and activity. In the pseudonymous works we find a move from poetics to aporetics, (hopefully) followed by the movement from the aporetics of text to action. Whatever the similarities, Kierkegaard’s project differs from Socrates’ on at least one significant point, which I will outline here. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates does not simply want to teach his interlocutors. As John Sallis observes regarding the Socratic logos: “A logos can be of really serious import only if there attaches to it an ergon, not the kind of ergon which can be incorporated, as in a Platonic dialogue, into the logos, but an ergon in the soul of the one who hears the logos.” Plato employs his dialogical form in his “written logoi” in imitation of “the spoken logos” because the spoken form is best suited to attach logos to ergon. The end to be brought about through these writings is recollection (anamnesis).89 Kierkegaard’s writings hope to lead to a different, albeit similar, event: namely, repetition. Repetition bears a strong semblance to Platonic recollection, and Kierkegaard draws the comparison himself. Yet the difference between recollection and repetition is decisive in Kierkegaard’s thought, as well as for our concerns here, so we must now examine the Kierkegaardian notion of ‘repetition’.

Recollection, repetition, and refiguration In the book Repetition, the pseudonym Constantin Constantius undertakes an exploration of a mysterious metaphysical category called repetition. The work provides an excellent example of the way Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works function as existential laboratories (the subtitle of the book even reads “A Venture in Experimenting Psychology”). In this text we encounter a speculative philosopher of sorts, who attempts to realize repetition in his own life by recreating a trip he once made to Berlin – to comic results. We also encounter his young friend, a poet of sorts, who is torn in a romantic-ethical dilemma, and may or may not be a literary production of Constantius. Thus through the text we read several heuristic approaches to the category of repetition. To name a few: philosophical speculation, a narrative of Constantius’ trip, Constantius’ account of his young friend’s dilemma, letters between Constantius and his young prot´eg´e, reflections on Job, and tacit reflections on the tension between the existence spheres (the aesthetic, ethical, and religious).

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

81

But what is repetition, anyway? Constantius compares it with Platonic recollection: “repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.”90 Unlike recollection, however, repetition is not available to speculation. Nor is it something one can create. Early in his analysis Constantius surmises that repetition is a matter of choice and will,91 requiring a “vital force to slay this death (of necessity and actuality) and transform it into life.”92 When his experiment in Berlin fails in grand farcical fashion, we see this is not the case. Constantius remains within the aesthetic,93 like his young friend, whose desire for an ethical repetition also falls short of the religious. Not wanting to marry, since the actuality of marriage means an end of possibility, the young poet desires an ethical repetition; he wants to be an exception, to be excused from the ethical obligation to marry.94 Job serves as his model. But Job is an exception due to his religious orientation, whereas the poet merely repeats the aesthetic.95 Contrary to the hopes of Constantius and his young friend, repetition pertains to a religious alteration of the self, a reorientation of one’s relation to actuality. In De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, Johannes Climacus writes that repetition is the point at which reality and ideality, actuality and possibility, touch each other. These cannot meet in the medium of eternity, nor can they meet in time. Rather, ideality and reality meet “in consciousness – there is the contradiction.”96 Repetition inheres in the regeneration of consciousness, possibilizing possibility when the despair of actuality appears to hold exclusive rights to a situation. Consider Job’s circumstances: in the midst of his trials, no external conditions warrant the hope he has, and no possibility of redemption appears forthcoming. All vitality and meaning in his life have disappeared entirely.97 Repetition introduces movement, that is, possibility, into his actuality. Repetition remains a strictly religious movement, however, because one cannot introduce the movement of possibility oneself. One can imagine that all things are possible, but only with God are all things actually possible. As Job demonstrates, only through divine transcendence can one receive everything back after the horrors of actuality has taken all hope away. Repetition is the manifestation of the eternal in time, and as such it parallels the Platonic concept of recollection.98 Repetition and recollection are the same movement, because both involve the presence of eternity in time. Recalling Johannes Climacus’ observation, repetition

82

BRIAN GREGOR

cannot occur solely in time nor solely in eternity; the two must meet in human consciousness. According to the concept of recollection, the eternal manifests itself in consciousness when the individual recollects that which she has known eternally, yet forgotten since inhabiting the temporal world of flux. For the Greek perspective, Constantius writes, “. . . only in recollection and by moving backward into it did freedom possess its eternal life. The modern view, on the other hand, must seek freedom forward, so that here eternity opens up for him as the true repetition forward.”99 Thus recollection and repetition involve different notions of eternity, for while recollection reaches back into the “fixed finalities” of eternity past, repetition projects forward into the “open possibilities” of eternity to come.100 Recollection reiterates static, a-temporal actualities, while repetition provides dynamic, temporal possibilities. Moreover, Kierkegaard wants to preserve the religious significance of repetition, as an event initiated by God. In a paper supplementing Repetition, Constantius writes that when the concept is configured dogmatically “it will come to mean atonement, which cannot be qualified by mediation borrowed from immanence.”101 Recollection arises immanently, in which the soul remembers. Repetition is a gift of transcendence, in which the soul is redeemed. So while Plato’s dialogues attempt to act maieutically, helping the reader give birth to the truth that lies within, Kierkegaard’s authorship attempts to act maieutically, confronting the reader with Christianity. Knowing full well he cannot initiate ergon in the reader, let alone repetition, Kierkegaard attempts to make the reader aware of the possibility of repetition. This he can do, and he does so through his imaginative authorship. In reading these works the world of Kierkegaard’s texts meets the world of the reader, and one must reckon with these possibilities. As both Kierkegaard and Ricoeur insist, however, the movement from text to action, the movement of refiguration, is crucial. One must make a decision, take a stand, and act on it. In the case of repetition, the event is different from refiguration insofar as it depends on the involvement of God. At this point narrative understanding runs up against its limits. . . and yet, the event of repetition nevertheless calls for narrative understanding. This is true whether one considers the narratives of Abraham’s and Job’s repetitions, or Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous wrestlings with them.102 One comes away from these narratives with a greater awareness of the possibility and nature of repetition. Obviously narrative does not yield direct, transparent knowledge, but it can allow the more modest result

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

83

of a deepened understanding of experience and possibility. Thus repetition, while evading any direct referentiality, calls out for narration and all the innovative potential of indirect, second-order discourse. Hence the elaborate, literary richness of Repetition. Repetition is also similar to refiguration insofar as both are movements in which one “gets the world back” at a higher level. Compared with the world prior to repetition, the world one gets back is different, and yet the same, and still different. It is “the same, and yet changed, and still the same.”103 We have already noted how this holds true of narrative understanding, in which one moves from action to text to action in a spiraling (rather than circular) motion. But again, Kierkegaardian repetition occurs only as a gift of transcendence, and in this regard is something other than narrative understanding. This poses problems for philosophical anthropology, since it subjects the ontology of the self to the conditions of transcendence and its very particular activity in repetition. By contrast, Ricoeur’s hermeneutical– phenomenological description of narrative understanding is a more universal account of how narrative understanding takes place, and does not presuppose the possibility of divine involvement. This is a crucial difference. But the two are not mutually exclusive. Repetition calls out for narrative understanding. Because repetition does not initiate in the immanence of consciousness, it is more than a phenomenon of understanding. Yet repetition does take place in consciousness, and while understanding is not a sufficient condition for repetition, it is a necessary condition. Repetition is hermeneutical. Unless one recognizes repetition as such,104 through narrative understanding, one’s life will continue unchanged.

Coming full spiral: Temporal selfhood The absence of repetition does not only entail that one’s life, lacking possibility, will remain unchanged. It also entails that one’s life will lack continuity amidst change. As Plato observes in Sophist and Aristotle observes in Metaphysics, either pure stasis or complete flux would eliminate intelligibility and the possibility of understanding. Repetition, Constantius argues, mediates between the Eleatic and the Heraclitean, and with this is mind we are in a position to appreciate the implications of our discussion of repetition and refiguration for our inquiry into temporal selfhood. Contrary to the suggestion that temporality undermines the integrity of the self, along with any pos-

84

BRIAN GREGOR

sible reference to it, repetition and narrative provide the basis for a model of dynamic selfhood. Ricoeur’s ontology of personal identity involves both the sameness of the person (idem) and the dynamic selfhood of the person (ipse). Idem identity answers the question of “What?” in regard to an entity; it meets the need for an invariant through different instances in the life of a person.105 The idea of character is a fundamental form of this sameness. Character is “the set of distinctive marks which permit the reidentification of a human individual as being the same”;106 it is “the set of lasting dispositions by which a person is recognized.”107 Such stability and constancy are necessary cohesive elements, since they prevent the self from dissipating into a mere rush of experiences and actions. While idem-identity answers the question of What?, ipse-identity answers the question of “Who?”, and “is irreducible to any question of ‘what?”’108 I can list a great many characteristics and features to describe what I am without answering the question of who I am. This question is a matter of ipse-identity, which Ricoeur articulates as selfhood rather than sameness. Ipse-identity inhabits a different set of concerns than idem-identity, revealing “another model of permanence in time than character. It is that of keeping one’s word in faithfulness to the word that has been given.‘’109 The configuration of selfhood is irreducible to questions of what-ness, because the practice of being true to one’s word and faithfully keeping promises “expresses a self-constancy which cannot be inscribed, as character was, within the dimension of something in general but solely within the dimension of ‘who?”’110 Faithfulness to a promise illustrates the difference between ipse and idem with its volitional nature as well as its future-orientation, through the forward-projecting intentionality that structures action. The act of keeping one’s word reveals the self as a project rather than a possession.111 Narrative emplotment then unifies the actions of one’s past into a story that helps to establish the coherence of the self, while refiguration provides orientation for the future actions of this self. This dialectical interplay between constancy and change, between sameness and difference, yields a model of the subject not as a discrete, autonomous master of static, substantial sameness, as with the exalted cogito. Neither does it yield a humiliated cogito, washed out in the flux of time. Rather, it yields a wounded cogito, a self that is the subject of discourse, action, narrative, and ethical commitment.112 Reference to this self, in its dynamic continuity, thus takes the form of

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

85

what Ricoeur calls attestation, which acts as a testimony to personal identity. Attestation does not render epistemic certainty, but neither does it relapse into epistemic humiliation. Rather, this post-suspicious affirmation provides a more modest hermeneutical assertion akin to a belief, a promise, a wager. It thus has less the form of the doxic “I believe-that. . . ”, more the form of “I believe-in. . . ” Somewhere between certainty and skepticism, the wounded cogito makes promises, makes commitments, acts, and tells its story. For Kierkegaard, the self also depends on the synthesis of the poles of constancy and change, finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility. We are limited by our spatio-temporal location and our bodily constitution, but these limitations are also charged with possibility, and ultimately become a necessary condition for the actualization of any possibility. This synthesis, Anti-Climacus tells us, is only effected when the self is constituted by God, when the self is in faith, and “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self-rests transparently in the power that established it.”113 Selfhood depends on one’s surrender to the God who constitutes the self. One is not free to be whoever one wants, but must embrace the self that one is given. This self, however, is not a static entity but a dynamic reality. One cannot take selfhood for granted, because one is always in the process of becoming, of striving: . . . Finitely understood, of course, the continued and the perpetually continued striving toward a goal without attaining it means rejection, but, infinitely understood, striving is life itself and is essentially the life of that which is composed of the infinite and the finite. An imaginary positive accomplishment is a chimera. It may well be that logic has it, although before this can be regarded as true, it needs to be more precisely explained than has been done up to now, but the subject is an existing [existerende] subject, consequently is in contradiction, consequently is in the process of becoming, consequently is, if he is, in the process of striving.114 One never finally arrives at selfhood, but is always becoming, always striving toward it.115 The volitional nature of striving entails decision, action, and commitment – essential components of selfhood, as Ricoeur demonstrates. This impetus counters the movement toward multiplicity represented by the pseudonyms, in a way that Kierkegaard’s own narrative chronicles, taken on their own, cannot.

86

BRIAN GREGOR

On that note, let us consider how repetition figures into selfhood. For Kierkegaard, selfhood inheres in repetition, as the mediation between time and eternity, stasis and flux. Repetition is the condition for selfhood, which neither pure stasis nor absolute flux permit. Repetition is the movement in which one receives the world anew, charged with meaning and possibility. It is also in this movement that one receives oneself anew, redeemed, the same and yet different and still the same. We have suggested that narrative figures prominently in repetition as well as selfhood, and we can now consider in a new light Kierkegaard’s observation that life is understood in reverse, but must be lived forward. One cannot step outside of temporality; every step sets down in the river of time. But this living forward need not be a blind step into the rush of temporality, because in repetition the eternal punctuates time. Unlike Platonic recollection, however, it is a movement forward, so the movement of repetition, when understood through the narrative imagination, thus creates the possibility of understanding forward. Repetition establishes a dynamic continuity of the self, in meaningful actions, through narrative understanding, in time. The place of the pseudonymous works in this process, then, is to explore these new possibilities of meaning, orientation, commitment, and action – for Kierkegaard as well as other readers. His hope is to communicate these elusive realities indirectly, in order to disappear in order “to help the other to become.”116 There is no guarantee that such communication will take place, nor that the reader will step forward in decision. Things do not work that way with selfhood. What the pseudonymous authorship can do is make the reader aware, in the hope that the reader might, perhaps, think, decide, and act. That is all one can hope for – but that is a great deal.

Conclusion We have considered the way Kierkegaard and Ricoeur approach the problem of temporal selfhood and reference, and have situated them within a discussion of writing. Both authors demonstrate that certain creative modes of discourse engender the possibility of reference to the dimensions of reality that elude direct, first-order reference – in this case, the temporal self. Ricoeur shows this in his discussion of the semantic innovations of metaphor and narrative, as Kierkegaard does in his pseudonymity, a literary phenomenon that we recognized as another type of semantic innovation. Besides enabling this second-

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

87

order reference to the self, these types of second-order discourse also play a central role in the process of coming to selfhood. We demonstrated this through our comparison of Ricoeur’s narrative theory with Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship, which exemplifies narrative understanding and its spiraling movement from action to text to action. This brought us to Kierkegaard’s category of repetition, a crucial moment in selfhood that we compared and contrasted with Platonic recollection and Ricoeur’s narrative refiguration. Yet Kierkegaard’s concern with repetition – as a possible transformation of the existing individual, rather than as a constituent moment within philosophical anthropology – brings us to the boundary of the religious. Repetition differs from refiguration insofar as it is a gift from the divine, and does not belong to the immanent possibilities of the self. Consequently, one cannot presuppose repetition in Ricoeur’s narrative theory without it functioning as a sort of deus ex machina. But neither are the two categories incompatible; in fact, I have suggested that repetition demands hermeneutical, narrative figuration in order to be understood as such. If Kierkegaard is correct, then, we might sum up our reading of Kierkegaard and Ricoeur with the following proposal: selfhood comes as a gift, constituted by God, establishing a dynamic temporal continuity appropriated through narrative understanding and enacted in decision, commitment, and action. Such a proposal is quite likely too tidy, so we must present it with an eye to the fragility and contingency of this wounded (yet redeemed?) self, which can only be spoken of indirectly, in fear and trembling.

Notes 1. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 4, 21. 2. One author expresses this conclusion as follows: “Both Augustine and Aristotle reiterate the impassability attained when signification comes up against its limits in trying to designate the nonexistent referent implicated in the unity of the concept and the word time. Time is the tension and torsion effecting a discourse that lacks reference. Such a discourse describes the vulnerability of discourse to aporia, for time represents the failing of referentiality.” Bigelow, Pat. Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing (Tallahassee, FL: The Florida State University Press, 1987), p. 143. It is interesting that Ricoeur chooses precisely these two authors to deal with the challenges of time in the first book of Time and Narrative, where we find a quite different treatment of reference. 3. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 241.

88

BRIAN GREGOR

4. Ricoeur, Paul, ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,’ in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: The Athlone Press, 1991), p. 85. 5. Ibid., 86. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 85. 8. ‘Imagination in Discourse and Action,’ in From Text to Action, 174–175. Also see Ricoeur’s comment: ‘Everyday reality is thereby metamorphosed by what could be called the imaginative variations that literature carries out on the real’ (‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,’ p. 86). 9. ‘Imagination in Discourse and Action,’ p. 175. 10. Ibid., 169. 11. Ibid., 171. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 173. 15. Ibid., 173. 16. Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, vol. 1. trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. ix. 17. Ibid., 80. 18. Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Philosophy After Kierkegaard.’ Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. Jonathan R´ee and Jane Chamberlain. eds. and trans. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), p. 16. 19. Ibid., 23. 20. All references to Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Volume I–V. trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967–78), will note the entry number, in this case, JP 657. 21. It may seem that this conflicts with Ricoeur’s claim that Kierkegaard is a reflective thinker, but as we proceed we will see that action presupposes rather than precludes thought. Kierkegaard does not advocate an unreflective voluntarism. His criticisms regarding reflection pertain to the tendency to remain in thought and its possibilities rather than in the actuality of action. 22. Kierkegaard, Søren, The Point of View. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong ed. and trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 50. 23. On authorial intent: ‘It might seem that a simple declaration by the author himself in this regard is more than adequate; after all, he must know best what is what. I do not, however, think much of declarations in connection with literary productions and am accustomed to take a completely objective attitude of my own. . . . it does not help very much that I qua human being declare that I have intended this and that’ (The Point of View, 33). 24. “‘Direct communication’ is: to communicate the truth directly; ‘communication in reflection’ is: to deceive into the truth” (Ibid., 7). 25. Mackey, Louis, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 247. 26. “It is quite right – a pseudonym had to be used. When the claims of ideality are set at the maximum one should above all take care not to be mistaken for them, as though one were oneself the ideality.” Kierkegaard, Søren, Papers and

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

89

Journals: A Selection trans. and ed. (Alastair Hannay London: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 399. Webb, Eugene, Philosophers of Consciousness : Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988), p. 227. Time and Narrative, vol. I, p. xi. Pseudonymity transgresses the supposition that an author must always say what he means. This opens the door to a discussion of irony, which, despite its importance in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, lies beyond our discussion here. Time and Narrative, vol. I, p. 36. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1987), pp. 47a10–47a11. Time and Narrative, vol. I, p. ix. Ibid., x. Ibid., 38. Ibid., xi, 33. Ibid., 34. Ibid, 45. Ibid., 40. Kierkegaard, Søren, Armed Neutrality and An Open Letter. trans. and ed. Howard V. and Edna Hong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 87. “‘Without authority’ to make aware of the religious, the essentially Christian, is the category for my whole work as an author regarded as a totality. From the very beginning I have enjoined and repeated unchanged that I was ‘without authority.’ I regard myself rather as a reader of the books, not as the author” (The Point of View, 12). Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Rev. ed. trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (2d. ed). (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1989), p. 296. Cf., Merold Westphal’s ‘Kierkegaard and the Anxiety of Authorship,’ International Philosophical Quarterly Vol. XXXIV, No. 1 Issue No. 133 (March 1994), p. 9. Westphal relates Kierkegaard to Gadamer on this very point, and his discussion provides helpful insights regarding several other issues that we consider in the present paper. Time and Narrative, vol. I, p. 3. Jonathan R´ee, ‘Narrative and Philosophical Experience,’ On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood. (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 81–82. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 76. Time and Narrative, vol. I, 54. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 64. The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard, Peter Rohde (ed.) (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), pt. 5, sct. 4, no. 136, 1843 entry. For a compelling case for this point, see Richard Kearney’s book, On Stories (New York: Routledge, 2002).

90

BRIAN GREGOR

52. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard: A Selection, ed. and trans. by Alexander Dru, (Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 115. 53. ‘Philosophy after Kierkegaard,’ p. 14. 54. Time and Narrative, vol. I, 65. 55. Ibid., 65–66. 56. Ibid., 66. 57. See the fifth study in Oneself as Another, ‘Personal Identity and Narrative Identity.’ 58. Mackey, 251. 59. Norris, Christopher. The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in The Rhetoric of Philosophy (New York: Methuen, 1983), p. 94. 60. Ibid., 95. 61. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue (2d ed). (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 218. 62. ‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action,’ p. 176. 63. ‘The category: that I myself am the one who has been educated, that it all is my own education, is decisive enough’ (JP VI, 6530). Similarly: “It must above all be pointed out that I am not a teacher who originally envisioned everything and now, self-confident on all points, uses indirect communication, but that I myself have developed during the writing. This explains why my indirect communication is on a lower level than the direct, for the indirectness was due also to my not being clear myself at the beginning and therefore did not dare speak directly at the beginning. Therefore I myself am the one who has been formed and developed by and through the indirect communication” (JP VI 6700). 64. Kearney, Richard, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 104. 65. Mackey, 289–290. 66. Time and Narrative, vol. I, 71. 67. Ibid., 70–71. 68. Ibid., 72. 69. Ibid., 49. 70. Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 247. 71. Ibid. 72. Ricoeur: “narrative is a procedure of redescription, in which the heuristic function proceeds from the narrative structure and redescription has action itself as its referent” (‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action,’ 177). 73. Time and Narrative, vol.I, 59. 74. ‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action,’ p. 174. 75. Ibid., 177. “. . . it is in the realm of the imaginary that I try out my power to act, that I measure the scope of ‘I can’,” Ibid., 178. Also see Oneself as Another, p. 330. 76. Ricoeur uses the term “heuristic patterns” in his essay “Imagination in Discourse and in Action” (176), a phrase that corresponds to Sylvia Walsh’s suggestion that Kierkegaard’s existence spheres comprise “patterns for living poetically.” See Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), p. 63.

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

91

77. Kierkegaard addresses this problem as early as his MA thesis: “If we ask what poetry is, we may say in general that it is victory over the world; it is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect and thereby assuages the deep pain that wants to make everything dark. To that extent, poetry is a kind of reconciliation, but it is not the true reconciliation, for it does not reconcile me with the actuality in which I am living; no transubstantiation of the given actuality takes place by virtue of this reconciliation, but it reconciles me with the given actuality by giving me another, a higher and more perfect actuality. The greater the contrast, the less perfect the actual reconciliation, so that when all is said and done there is often no reconciliation but rather an enmity. Therefore, only the religious is able to bring about the true reconciliation, because it infinitizes actuality for me. Therefore, the poetic is a kind of victory over actuality, but the infinitizing is more of an emigration from actuality than a continuance in it. To live poetically, then, is to live infinitely.” The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Trans. Howard V Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 297. 78. Anti-Climacus alters the Hegelian thesis that the union of possibility and actuality is necessity. In The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-Climacus claims that actuality is in fact the union of possibility and necessity. The self is subject to necessities that limit who one is and who one might become. At the same time, the self is charged with possibility, and “the task of becoming itself.” It is not yet what it is. The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 35–36. 79. Ibid., 37. 80. Ibid., 36. 81. Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 249. 82. “Imagination in Discourse and in Action,” 177. 83. JP, II, 1832. 84. Richard Kearney’s book The Wake of Imagination discusses Kierkegaard’s fear that imagination will not lead to action, outlining the reasons why Kierkegaard’s take on imagination can seem negative. Kearney does not see Kierkegaard’s account of imagination as entirely negative, but it remains to be determined the extent to which imagination is redeemed in the actuality of religious commitment. Kierkegaard often seems to pit the imaginative and the aesthetic against the ethical and religious; given our discussion above, we can see why. A charitable reading of Kierkegaard would suggest that imagination continues to operate in the religious, since the religious existence is one of becoming. One never reaches a point of stasis in which decision and action are no longer required, and so imagination will continue to sensitize one to possibility and the need for further decision and action. Moreover, imagination is required for hope. We need imagination to be open to the possibility of goodness, that with God all things are possible, to think beyond that which is presently actual. See Kearney, Richard, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 201–211. Also see the chapter “Love Hopes All Things” in Works of Love, as well as M. Jamie Ferreira’s discussion in her book, Love’s Grateful Striv-

92

85. 86.

87. 88.

89.

90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96.

97. 98.

BRIAN GREGOR

ing: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 147–148. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Point of View. trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 50. “The fact that many of Plato’s dialogues end without a result has a far deeper basis than I had thought earlier. They are a reproduction of Socrates maieutic skill which makes the reader or hearer himself active, and therefore they do not end in a result but in a sting. This is an excellent parody of the modern rote-method which says everything the sooner the better and all at one time, which awakens no self-action but only leads the reader to rattle it off like a parrot.” JP, IV, 4266. Westphal, “Kierkegaard and the Anxiety of Authorship,” 21. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 298. See also Mackey, 275: “The trick of Either/Or was to leave conspicuously undone what no book can possibly do – the concrete universal is a person, never a persona – in the hope that the reader might notice the omission and act accordingly.” “Logos, whether spoken or written, serves only to provoke recollection in the soul of the one who hears. Mere logos, whether written or spoken, lacks a soul as long as it does not accomplish the deed of provoking recollection in the soul of the one who hears or reads it.” In this regard, Plato’s dialogues imitate Socratic activity. Sallis, John. Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (3rd ed.) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 20. Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling/ Repetition, trans. and eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 131. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 137. Another pseudonym, Frater Taciturnus, suggests in Stages on Life’s Way that Constantin Constantius was unsuccessful in his experiment with repetition “because he remained within the aesthetic.” Kierkegaard, Søren. Stages on Life’s Way (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), pp. 366–367. Ibid., 184–185. Walsh, 135. Also see Repetition, xx. Kierkegaard, Søren, Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est: A Narrative, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. (eds. and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 172. Repetition, 199. Repetition also parallels Aristotle’s principle of kinesis, which causes the movement from possibility to actuality. Repetition is the point at which the Eleatic and Heraclitean meet (Repetition, 148), on which stasis and flux converge to make movement possible. Kierkegaard draws the comparison to kinesis in order to point out the difference between his concept and Aristotelian metaphysics, though, for repetition is strictly a matter of transcendence rather than immanence (i.e. nature) (Ibid., 149). He also takes great efforts to avoid conflating repetition with Hegelian mediation, that movement which “tries in vain to say 1,2,3” (Ibid., 226). By “1,2,3” Kierkegaard refers to the triadic structure of Hegelian dialectical logic, which mediates oppositions into higher

SELFHOOD AND THE THREE R’S

99. 100.

101. 102.

103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

93

unities. Kierkegaard wants to distinguish repetition from mediation, for as he writes in his papers: “mediation is within immanence and therefore can never have before it the transcendence of a religious movement. . . That I had this in mind is clear from my characterizations of repetition. . . that it is transcendent, religious, the movement by virtue of the absurd that commences when one has reached the border of the wondrous” (Ibid., 313). Ibid., 317. Mooney, Edward F, ‘Repetition: Getting the World Back,’ in (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 287. Repetition, 324. Pace the silence of Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling. Despite his attempts to understand Abraham by re-telling the narrative, Johannes concludes that he must remain silent. There is no hope of understanding Abraham, whose actions cannot be mediated via the universal. Perhaps we should simply forget Abraham, “for what is the value of going to the trouble of remembering that past which cannot become a present” (Fear and Trembling, 30)? Yet de Silentio’s inability to “think (him)self into Abraham” (Ibid., 33) and comprehend his actions does not spell the final futility of narration. It certainly might reveal the shortcomings of Romantic hermeneutics; indeed, one cannot grasp Abraham’s individuality by placing oneself into the inner, psychological origin of Abraham’s action, or in Schleiermacher’s words, by ‘transforming oneself into the other’ and thinking Abraham’s thoughts after him (see Truth and Method, 189). But although the Abraham narrative points us to the very limits of thought and understanding, the text we know as Fear and Trembling also indicates the need for second-order discourse to discuss such philosophically problematic possibilities as the teleological suspension of the ethical, the movements of faith, and repetition. Walter Lowrie’s words in his introduction to Stages on Life’s Way, p.7. This is not to imply that one must understand the phenomenon of repetition as “repetition,” or have any notion of Kierkegaard’s discussion. What it requires is an understanding of the phenomenon of redemption, of atonement, of receiving the world of possibility back. For additional discussion of this point, see my paper, “Repetition and the Task of Mourning: Three Narratives,” in The Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry (forthcoming). For a discussion of the hermeneutical nature of religious experience, see Richard Kearney’s work, particularly Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003), and The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001). Oneself as Another, 118. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 123. Ibid. Van Den Hengel, John, ‘Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another and Practical Theology,’ Theological Studies 55(3) (1994): 463. Ricoeur, 335.

94

BRIAN GREGOR

113. The Sickness Unto Death, 131. 114. JP, V, 5796. 115. This is, of course, no small order. Like faith, repetition is not an event one experiences and then surpasses, but the work of a lifetime. In fact, it is no work, no ergon, at all. If we keep stressing the fact that repetition is not achieved through sheer willpower, it is because the possibility of repetition depends on this. Consequently, John D. Caputo’s reading of repetition in his book Radical Hermeneutics is misleading. While recognizing the importance of repetition in selfhood, he writes: “Repetition is the power of the individual to forge his personality out of the chaos of events, in the midst of the flux, the power to create an identity in the face of the incessant ‘dispersal’ of the self, of the dissipating effects of the flux. . . Repetition is the exacting task of constituting the self as a self.” Caputo, John D. Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 21. Caputo cites a journal entry in which Kierkegaard identifies repetition as “a task for freedom,” of “saving one’s personality from being volatilized and, so to speak, a pawn of events,” but he overlooks the crucial point: repetition is only possible with God. This seems to be at the root of Caputo’s later remark to the following effect: “Genuine religious repetition keeps deferring itself. It is nowhere to be found in this book, or in any book. . . The experiment undertaken in Repetition ends in failure, but this is meant, not to fill us with despair about the possibility of repetition, but rather to sharpen our sense of its illusive and self-deferring quality, of the demands it makes. It is meant to persuade us that repetition is not to be found within the margins of a book” (Ibid., 26, 27). Caputo is correct insofar as repetition does not occur within the margins of a book. But is repetition illusive? If God is not involved, it is impossible, even illusive. If God is involved, however, it may be elusive, but it is possible. Likewise, repetition has a self-deferring quality insofar as it does not establish a plateau of pure presence. Nor does it rapture the self out of time. But it does occur within time, in the moment, making meaning within time possible. 116. JP, I, 657.