Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s “existence” nullifies itself through lack of sufficient reason; how is it possible to conceive of an “existential” morality, that is to say, a morality which is “lived and not thought” and therefore immune to “abstraction,” at the level of terrestrial man who is a thinking being by definition? This alternative between “existence” and “thought-abstraction” is the fundamental misunderstanding in existentialism; indeed the latter is simply one of the most aberrant manifestations of what may be described as Western alternativism.(1)

The Western spirit has always lived to a large extent on alternatives: either it has confined thought and life within real but fragmentary and hence unbalancing alternatives (pleasure and pain, for example), or else it has erected false alternatives in the course of its philosophical “researches” or in its destructive pursuit of originality and change.

One of the most typical examples in fact is Kierkegaard’s criticism of the “abstract thinker” who, so it would appear, is guilty of “the contradiction of wishing to demonstrate his existence by means of his thought.” “To the extent that he thinks abstractly he makes an abstraction of the fact that he exists” is the conclusion reached by this philosopher.

Now in the first place, really to think, to think intelligently, and not merely to juxtapose figurative or question-begging propositions implies by definition “thinking abstractly,” since otherwise thought would be reduced to imagination; and in the second place, there is no fundamental opposition between the two poles of existing and “thin king,” since our existence is always a mode of consciousness for us and our thought is a manner of existing.

Only error (not abstraction) is inadequate in comparison with the positive fact of existence, and only mineral existence (not our life) is completely separated from our consciousness, whether the latter becomes coagulated in thought or not. An element of truth is contained none the less in the existentialist criticisms, in the sense that discursive knowledge is separative by reason of the subject-object polarization; however, the conclusion to be drawn from this is not that such knowledge is devoid of value on its own plane or that it is limited as to its content, but that it does not embrace all possible knowledge, and that in purely intellective and direct knowledge the polarization in ques tion is transcended.

1. What is one to say of a philosopher who “thinks” cheerfully about the insincerity or the mediocrity of “thought” as such? Inept though that may be, an audience is never lacking for such literary artifices of a mentally compressed city dweller.