527 - Kierkegaard and Consciousness

Kierkegaard and Consciousness
By Adi Shmuëli
Translated by Naomi Handelman
202 pp. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971. $8.50.

Shmuëli begins by stating the purpose of his book: in the face of critics who find Kierkegaard's work at key points not altogether consistent and coherent, and by means of a more careful reading thereof, to uncover his remarkable coherence and singleness of vision. But unless the reader happens to be distressed by the apparent incoherencies which our author offers to clear up, this way of stating the book's telos will appear to him altogether too modest. Shmuëli has done something more interesting and more important. He has attempted to explicate Kierkegaard's category of the Single One afresh by reading him as a theoretician of consciousness. The apology is swallowed up in the exegesis. If one really wants to try all over again to grasp Kierkegaard's famous definition of the self as a spirit which is "a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self, relates itself to Another," if one wishes

528 - Kierkegaard and Consciousness

to behold again and in perhaps a new way that grand Kierkegaardian vision, with its stages on life's way and its categories of repetition, dread, irony, humor, religiousness A and B, knight of resignation, indirect communication, despair, love, sin, etc., then one must read this book.

For the author's project is to "reconstitute" the entire structure of Kierkegaard's authorship by means of an interpretive frame provided by the insights of phenomenology. He draws Kierkegaard into the phenomenologists' world of thought with the argument that Kierkegaard is really, all along, talking about the structure and behavior of human consciousness. The meaning of Kierkegaard's assertion that man is a "synthesis of the infinite and the finite" is suggested by the fact that in consciousness there is a similar dialectic between the general and the particular. The esthetic stage is a state of mind in which there is a confused tension between the two, and the ethical stage involves the clear articulation of the distinction between them and thus a new level of consciousness, while the religious stage is the highest intensification of consciousness as the transcendent sets a new context of self-determination. Shmuëli reads Kierkegaard as a kind of master phenomenologist who, like Husserl, sets forth on an archeological expedition into the depths of consciousness in search (if not of certainty then) of the archimedean point.

That feature of subsequent analysis received by this reviewer with special enthusiasm is the emphasis placed upon Kierkegaard's understanding of man as essentially a social being. The author's analysis of Kierkegaard's view of love as intrinsic to the life of the self as spirit and of being loved (through the maieutic relation within the Christian community) as the context within which the self truly becomes conscious, redresses an imbalance long perpetuated by those who read Kierkegaard as a rank individualist. Shmuëli's assertion, for Kierkegaard, "truth is inter-subjectivity," is overdue.

Of course the book raises some questions. A troublesome one arises from the fact that the account of Kierkegaard is purely expository. The author thus seems to suggest that the phenomenological category "consciousness" has the power to explicate Kierkegaard without remainder. Shmuëli's Kierkegaard is flawlessly consistent throughout, a philosophical Mr. Clean-not at all the maddening man many of us find him at times. For example, does the category consciousness help us understand the intellectual esthetic? Does not Kierkegaard's notion that pure love can be offered only to a dead man (p. 79) run counter to his emphasis elsewhere in Works of Love on the concreteness of the neighbor (cf. title of chapter 4)? And if "truth is inter-subjectivity," what does one do with the Kierkegaardian dictum that every man "essen-

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tially should talk only with God and with himself" (Point of View)? Without some effort on the part of the author to take account of some of Kierkegaard's rough edges, one is left wondering whether any violence has been done to the sources and what are, if any, the limitations of the phenomenologist's conceptual frame for elucidating Kierkegaard.

But that is not much of a complaint. The reader should have to do some hard work too, after all. This impressive book is an insistent invitation to do just that.

Stanley R. Moore
Wisconsin State University-Platteville
Platteville, Wisconsin