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CHAPTERI . T E N The Subjective IssueFor Orientation in the Plan ofFragments (Pages 361-84) At the heart of Hegelian philosophy is the triple claim that philosophy has the same content as religion, differing only in form; that Christianity is the highest form of religion; and that by virtue of its conceptual form, Hegelian philosophy is the highest form of Christianity. Climacus wants to challenge the third claim by examining the first. If the form of speculative philosophy is objectivity rather than subjectivity, and if it therefore belongs to the aesthetic sphere rather than to the ethical-religious spheres, then has the content not been changed beyond recognition? Would it not be more honest to say that Hegelianism is not a form of Christianity at all, and, a fortiori, not the highest form? The target ofFragments is Hegel and not Socrates. By spelling out the difference between recollection and revelation as two modes of access to the truth, Climacus seeks to show that Hegel falls in the former camp. Thus, what he presents as the movement from an inadequate form of Christianity (Vorstellung) to the adequate form (Begriff) is actually the movement beyond Christianity to paganism. Climacus's quarrel with Hegel has the form, Is X or Y a more authentic expression of religion Z? In itself this is a theological dispute; but throughout the history ofChristianity, as well as, for example, the history of Hinduism and Buddhism, such debates have often been the site of significant philosophical reflection. The central philosophical issue here is the meaning of human temporality. In his dissertation, Kierkegaard had commented on how Socrates "so beautifully binds men firmly to the divine by showing that all knowledge is recollection" (CI 30). In other words, he notes the linkage between the thesis of the divinity of the soul and the recollection thesis in the dialogues. Eternity is I 144 145 I For Orientation in the Plan of Fragments the natural home of the soul, and even when it is in time, it can attain direct access to the eternal, can see sub specie aeterni. In the tradition of the Orphics, Pythagoreans,ยท and Empedocles, the Platonic dialogues employ the dualism of soul and body to undermine the duality between the human and divine.1 Hegelianism, whose tendency to collapse this latter difference has already been noted, goes one step further. Both as a logic and as a philosophy of history, its claim to embody an all-f encompassing and all-culminating Logos is a claim to see the world sub specie aeterni, from the divine perspective. But the distinction between the here and the hereafter, between this life and the life to come, falls away (361-62). The momentary, mystical foretaste of divine glory of the dialogues is replaced by a realized eschatology in which the unhappy consciousness of living toward a beyond (Jenseits) is replaced by an ultimate human fulfillment here and now, totally present. In fulfillment of the truth of the Enlightenment, "The two worlds are reconciled and heaven is transplanted to earth below."2 Suddenly Climacus is talking about infant baptism. Without attacking the practice as such, he calls it "ludicrous" to see people take themselves to be Christians "solely by virtue of a baptismal certificate" (363), just as it is "ludicrous that a man for whom Christianity has meant nothing at all, not even so much that he cared to give it up, dies, and then at the graveside the pastor as a matter of course ushers him into the eternal happiness as it is understood in Christian terminology" (364). The problem with this is that it reduces Christianity to "custom and habit" (363-64), eliminates the need for decision and appropriation, and makes people Christians "as a matter of course" (365-68; cf. 373, 379). In other words, infant baptism becomes ludicrous when it serves to eliminate the need to become a Christian.3 "The parallel would be: just as one must be born, must have come into existence , in order to become a human being, inasmuch as an infant is not yet that, so one must 'be baptized in order to become a Christian " (366, my emphasis). These becomings, as the previous account of subjectivity is intended to make clear, are tasks of a lifetime. Just as one has not completed the task of becoming human by getting married and beginning a career,4 so baptism and confirmation as rites of passage signify beginnings rather than compietions of the task of...

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