ignoring evil or the evil

by Andrea Elizabeth

The difference between good and evil is indeed for freedom, but not in abstracto. This misunderstanding arises because freedom is changed into something else, into an object of thought. But freedom is never in abstracto. If freedom is given a moment to choose between good and evil, a moment when freedom itself is in neither the one nor the other, then in that very moment freedom is not freedom, but a meaningless reflection. So for what purpose is the imaginary construction except to confuse? If freedom remains in the good, then it knows nothing at all of evil. In this sense one may say about God (if anyone misunderstands this, it is not my fault) that he knows nothing of evil. By this I by no means say that evil is merely the negative; on the contrary, that God knows nothing of evil, that he neither can nor will know of it, is the absolute punishment of evil. In this sense  the preposition (away from) is used in the New Testament to signify removal from God or, if I dare put it this way, God’s ignoring of evil. If one conceives of God finitely, it is indeed convenient for evil if God ignores it, but because God is the infinite, his ignoring is the living annihilation, for evil cannot dispense with God, even merely in order to be evil. Here I shall quote a passage from Scripture, II Thessalonians 1:9, where it is said of those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel: they shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might. (note on page 111, 112 in The Concept of Anxiety by Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Thomte and Anderson)

Mt Athos and guilt

by Andrea Elizabeth

The 60 Minutes videos on Mt. Athos may be the closest I ever get to the Orthodox Holy Mountain. For the most part it was respectful and wonderfully illuminating, but there was one part where the interviewer shook his head when the Abbot spoke of not going to visit his dying father. This is a sharp picture of the controversy over leaving the world with the idea that this will help it, or staying to fix it seemingly more directly. I wonder if his father ever tried to visit him there. It seems that sometimes when a child makes a different value choice than the parents, that lines can be drawn that neither are willing to cross. I personally think the Abbot made the better choice. Here’s how Kierkegaard explains it:

If the genius remains thus immediately determined  and turned outward, he will indeed become great and his accomplishment astounding, but he will never come to himself and never become great to himself. All his activity is turned outward, and if I may so speak, the planetarean core that radiates everything never comes into existence.

[...] Every deeper dialectical determination of sin is excluded. The ultimate would be that of being regarded as guilty in such a way that anxiety is not directed toward guilt but toward the appearance of guilt, which is the category of honor. Such a state of the soul would be very appropriate for poetic treatment. What has been described can happen to every man, but the genius would at once lay hold of it so profoundly that he would not be striving with men, but with the profoundest mysteries of existence.

That such a genius-existence is sin, despite its splendor, glory and significance, is something that requires courage to understand, and it can hardly be understood before one has learned to satisfy the hunger of the wishing soul. It is true, nonetheless. That such an existence may nevertheless be happy to a certain degree proves nothing. Talent may be conceived of as a means of diversion, and in so doing one realizes that at no moment is it possible to raise oneself above the categories in which the temporal lies. Only through a religious reflection can genius and talent in the deepest sense be justified. (The Concept of Anxiety, p. 101, 102)

I’m not sure what he means about the “appearance of guilt”, but my first unbothered reading lumped both of them together to mean that the properly inwardly focused genius deals with his own guilt. Not to say that everything is his fault, but that he examines himself first. I believe that there is also guilt in passively dealing with anothers’ guilt, so one can’t just shut their eyes to what goes on around them either. Withdrawing to pray, however, is not necessarily passive.

freedom

by Andrea Elizabeth

When I say “transported” I don’t mean that I have an out of body experience where I’m flying above cloud 9. It’s more like a momentary vacation from cares and bothersome logismoi that distract me. Remembering God’s eternal kingdom posits (Kierkegaard’s word) eternity in the midst of temporal affairs and makes them seem less overwhelming.

On a different note in the next section on the nothing of anxiety inducing paganistic fatalism, (take a breath) “Fate [...] is the unity of necessity and the accidental.” (p. 96) I find that freeing.

Now and ever and unto ages of ages, amen

by Andrea Elizabeth

I’m letting Kierkegaard out of time out since my last post on his Greek philosophical views on women. In the next section, ending on page 93 of The Concept of Anxiety, he explores the concept of time. Rather than try to repeat his complex explanation of the unity of the past, present and future, the moment as an atom of time, and the future as eternity and possibility, I will relate what comes to me during the oft repeated, “Now and ever and unto ages of ages, amen.”

If I am paying attention during this phrase of the services, I am transported out of the shackles of materialism, which comes from dwelling in the moment divorced from eternity. I sometimes wonder if Kierkegaard borders on gnosticism, but usually find an excuse in that he comes back around to balance. But he does seem to favor spirit over body and the future over now or the past. In his note on death, I sense a bit of fascination with it, which leads me to wonder more about his untimely death. Yet, we can justify him with St. Paul, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” But I have also heard that this part of Romans is early in his career, along with the part about not doing what he wants and doing what he doesn’t want. Deliverance can come here and now by summoning the eternal.

He explains it a little more

by Andrea Elizabeth

My impression of Kierkegaard’s thought about women and subsequent beings taken up again on page 63 and following in The Concept of Anxiety: He repeats the notion of what I believe is Platonic degeneration. That which comes after is less than that from which it came, in this case woman from man. He also says it applies to subsequent generations. One aspect of less than is a decreased spiritual nature, increased sensuality and the resulting increased anxiety. Yikes. I’ll retain some apophaticism about it because how can I judge who is the more spiritual, if one is? To me spirituality and headship are two different things. Still, if a woman is all those things, I don’t think it is a result of degeneration, but of design. I don’t like comparing things in such an evaluative way.

where’s he going to go with this?

by Andrea Elizabeth

First we must note that the woman was the first to be seduced, and that therefore she in turn seduced the man. In what sense woman is the weaker sex, as it is commonly said of her, and also that anxiety belongs to her more than to man,* I shall try to develop in another chapter.

[...] Eve is a derived creature. To be sure, she is created like Adam, but she is created out of a previous creature. To be sure, she is innocent like Adam, but there is, as it were, a presentiment of a disposition that indeed is not sinfulness but may seem like a hint of the sinfulness that is posited by propagation. It is the fact of being derived that predisposes the particular individual, yet without making him guilty.

* Nothing is hereby determined about woman’s imperfection in relation to man. Although anxiety belongs to her more than to man, anxiety is by no means a sign of imperfection. If one is to speak of imperfection, this must be found in something else, namely, that in anxiety she moves beyond herself to another human being, to man. (The Concept of Anxiety, p. 47)

In the second paragraph, I’m detecting Platonic degeneration. We disagree that succession necessarily results in inferiority.

In the first and the note, I think the anxiety is different in a woman than a man, and not necessarily greater. A man may be less nervous about physical confrontation, but I think a woman is less nervous about emotional intimacy, generally speaking. Regarding moving “beyond herself to another human being,” communicableness doesn’t have to involve negative things, and even that is different in relation to what is being communicated: emotions, food, and hospitality, or power.

We’ve had our first argument. I’ll pass on the part about if God’s and the devil’s voices were actually Adam’s.

Anxiety with freedom

by Andrea Elizabeth

Kierkegaard disagrees with the idea that Adam fell because forbidden fruit is more enticing than permitted fruit. That may be a motivation now, but in Adam’s innocent state, he had no concept of evil or even of death to arouse desire or fear for them. Instead it was freedom that awakened anxiety.

When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire, one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had a knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility.

Post-fall, it has been explained that freedom in Christ means that with grace we can choose righteousness over sin. This has been used to contrast the notion that freedom means the ability to choose to disobey, which is what Kierkegaard is pointing out here in a pre-fall context. More neutral language would be, it is the ability to choose among several possibilities. Gnomically we want the best, as did Adam, but then it becomes a matter of deliberation and inspiration, for better or worse.

What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing – the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise – and this is what usually happens – that which comes late, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it.

After the word of prohibition follows the word of judgment: “You shall certainly die.” Naturally, Adam does not know what it means to die. On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent him from having acquired a notion of the terrifying, for even animals can understand the mimic expression and movement in the voice of a speaker without understanding the word. If the prohibition is regarded as awakening the desire, the punishment must also be regarded as awakening the notion of the deterrent. This, however, will only confuse things. In this case, the terror is simply anxiety. Because Adam has not understood what was spoken, there is nothing but the ambiguity of anxiety. The infinite possibility of being able that was awakened by the prohibition now draws closer, because this possibility points to a possibility as its sequence.

In this way, innocence is brought to its uttermost. In anxiety it is related to the forbidden and to the punishment. Innocence is not guilty, yet there is anxiety as though it were lost. (The Concept of Anxiety, p. 44, 45)

This is a sad thing, but it is better than the idea that God was dangling an enticing carrot in front of Adam. In His love, he knew the  consequence of anxiety, but to love means to make free. Anxious freedom in love is more important than peaceful security in lower ignorance. This anxiety is not the goal however. It takes maturity to push through it and to find peaceful facility with the knowledge of good and evil.

Proceeding according to precedent

by Andrea Elizabeth

Thoughts after reading the section entitled, “The Concept of the First Sin” in The Concept of Anxiety.

We, like Adam, are both individuals and the race. The question becomes do we sin because Adam sinned, or do we sin like Adam sinned. The answer seems to be both. Sin entered the world through Adam, but it enters us by our own first sin.

In a strange way I think this is like our participation in supposed progress. Say the ruination of the world through greedy consumption of natural resources happened in preceding generations. Every time we choose a product that is the result of abuse of resources we become personally guilty. But woe to the person who was first convinced to set the precedent. It is much harder for a person to act in a way inconsistent with his race than it was for the first person of the age to make a new precedent. This is why we read Saint stories. They set a new precedent against precedent.

The constant possibility

by Andrea Elizabeth

Kierkegaard’s Intoduction complete, I reflect. Sin is a constant possibility, not a necessity. Ideal ethics, sinlessness, is not an actuality.  K doesn’t deal with the sinlessness of Christ or His Mother at this point. Dogmatics takes sin into account in explaining why. Psychology explains how. Psychology also encompasses aesthetics and happiness, but not ideal ethics. Ethical asceticism would then be on the basis of ultimate, not temporal, happiness. Beauty may be temporal, but must abide by certain rules to remain so.

Seven pages into the Introduction of The Concept of Anxiety, and I have to stop and write

by Andrea Elizabeth

(Kierkegaard’s intro, not the Historical Intro cited earlier.)

In the midst of earnestness, the forward motion of the pondered thought expressing itself becomes less of itself. It abandons itself as a moth abandons a cocoon. Then all is emptiness. Emptiness cannot express itself except in its request to be filled. It becomes a negative. If negatives aren’t evil, then what is its purpose? To provide a transitory tension? A relationship? The relationship between emptiness and fullness is like the dipping bird who waits for its fluid to alternate from one chamber to the next. Perpetual motion. The anxiety of waiting for the vibration that represents the motion can be seen as evil. This is Hegalian dialectical thinking, not Kierkegaardian thinking of distinctive components in relationship. Patience is a fruit of the Spirit. Go to Jerusalem and wait for the filling of the Holy Spirit.