Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions

7. Becoming a Christian

113 Chapter Seven
Becoming a Christian O ur readings of Kierkegaard’s three 1843 texts have brought to light many variations on the theme of movement: metaphors of leaping, dancing, swimming, and sailing; characters who travel, step forward, and pace back and forth; philosophical discussions of kinesis, mediation, and repetition ; and reflections on the communicative processes of dramatization and edification. The significance of movement has many layers and involves several rich but rather difficult concepts, such as inwardness, faith, and transcendence , but whenever the theme appears it announces the coherence of each text, and of Kierkegaard’s thought as it develops during 1843. We might say, more simply, that movement here means becoming, and reaching beyond. For Kierkegaard movement is, in a sense, something unthinkable: it is not a concept but a theme that opposes intellectual reflection and “the truth as knowledge;” that reaches beyond thought, trying to transcend it. The progression from aesthetic to ethical to religious forms of existence is the deepening, intensifying movement of inwardness itself: the Kierkegaardian “stages” or “spheres” are not external but internal to one another, connected by an internalizing movement. These existential “spheres” signify degrees of power, which correspond to degrees of happiness. In Either/Or we find that the ability to move distinguishes the ethical individual from the aesthete. Becoming ethical means facing the future and projecting forth into it, whereas the aesthetic consciousness remains static, impotent, gripped by the necessity of the past. Here, making movements means making decisions and commitments: discriminating between possibilities, and actualizing those chosen. Movement requires a recognition of real difference—either/or. This difference is the key to freedom . The sermon at the end of the book explores these issues of difference and freedom in a religious context: the individual’s relationship to God is characterized by a profound difference, and freedom is significant insofar as it is essential to love. Repetition begins with a discussion of various philosophical accounts of movement: the Eleatics’ denial of motion, Aristotle’s kinesis, Platonic recollection, Hegelian mediation, and the “new category” of repetition. Then an intellectual takes a trip to Berlin, and a young fiancé struggles with changes occurring within him and in his relationships to others. At both of these levels of the text—the philosophical and the dramatic—there is an opposition between idealizing movements and actualizing movements . Constantin Constantius, like the processes of recollection and mediation, seeks the truth as idea, whereas repetition signifies a form of truth that actually requires the movement of becoming. This movement is also the intensification and expansion (deepening) of inwardness, which at once asserts the individual’s freedom and distinguishes him from the external, social world. This means that repetition exceeds the sphere of ethics as well as that of knowledge: this kind of movement “is always a transcendence.” Fear and Trembling presents movements expressive of religious faith— Abraham’s journey to Mount Moriah, and the graceful leap of the knight of faith. Such movements require a particular kind of power: the power of love that flows between God and the individual in the form of a gift given and received. Faith reveals God’s love as the source of all finite things, as the actualizing power that grounds existence. God, then, is the hidden inwardness of beings, and the task of faith is to become receptive, to open up the self to His loving power. We find in Kierkegaard’s writing an interest in movements of going beyond, of transcending. (Just as being and becoming are not things or states of things, but movements, so transcendence signifies something active and dynamic.) Heidegger once remarked that every great thinker pursues a single thought, and if we were to try to identify Kierkegaard’s then the theme of movement might provide a clue. It certainly highlights a unity within Kierkegaard’s authorship, for both his pseudonymous and his religious writings of 1843 are concerned with “the task of becoming a Christian.” This coheres with Kierkegaard’s own retrospective view that his “whole literary production” possesses the “integral coherence” and “comprehensiveness” of a single project: “to make people aware of the essentially Christian.”1 One of the differences between the two kinds of 114 Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming publication is that in the pseudonymous or “aesthetic’ literature the orientation toward Christianity remains implicit (except in the sermon at the end of Either/Or), whereas the religious discourses make their...