Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment

Divine Givenness and Self-Givenness in Kierkegaard

39 Divine Givenness and Self-Givenness in Kierkegaard Merold Westphal There is an obvious sense in which Kierkegaard is not a phenomenologist , whether in his own name or through his pseudonyms. He is not inspired by or working in the tradition of Husserl, or Heidegger, or Scheler, or Merleau-Ponty, or even Levinas, who insists that he is a phenomenologist1 even though he seeks to develop “an intentionality of a wholly different type” and holds that “not every transcendent intention has the noesis-noema structure.”2 But we can ask of Kierkegaard’s various writings whether they can be fruitfully read as phenomenological in a substantive rather than a historical sense.3 In particular, we can ask whether they provide us with analysis of the ways in which various “objects” of consciousness are given to us, both in terms of how they appear to us (noemata) and of the intentional acts by virtue of which they appear (noeses). Of the wide range of the latter it is useful to recall the Cartesian listing. A thing that thinks is a thing “that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and which also imagines and senses.”4 In the immediately following paragraph Descartes adds desire to the list and later will add memory. Conspicuously missing from the list, for present purposes at least, is faith in Kierkegaard’s Lutheran sense; for while it necessarily involves elements of both understanding and affirmation, it is reducible to neither, nor to the two together. Let us begin with Fear and Trembling and ask the questions, How is God given to human experience according to this text?5 What mode of intentionality is involved, and what sort of intentional object?6 The pseudonym Silentio is, we might say, a hermeneutical phenomenologist , for (1) he not only recognizes that philosophical reflection is a matter of interpretation and not the pure intuition of some unsituated, unconditioned, presuppositionless “view from nowhere;”7 but (2) he also allows his interpretation to appear as the interpretation of a prior interpretation, in this case the biblical story of Abraham and 40 M E R O L D W E S T P H A L the Akedah, the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22 and Heb. 11). Thus he follows Ricoeur in making “the detour through the contingency of cultures, though an incurably equivocal language, and through the conflict of interpretations.”8 Note well: The phenomenologist’s appeal to this story is not to the Bible as Scripture but as a cultural residue. That is the difference between the theologian and the phenomenologist, and it is why the phenomenologist who pays attention to religious texts and religious phenomena has not betrayed the phenomenological project, as charged by Dominique Janicaud. What the phenomenologist describes as a possible experience, the theologian affirms as actual fact.9 The God in question is, of course, the biblical God, and we are within a horizon where other gods are considered idols, including not only the gods of pagan polytheism but also the gods of modernity’s pure reason and onto-theology, philosophical “counterfeits,” in William Desmond ’s helpful term.10 This God is at once Jewish and Christian, for the basic story is found in the Hebrew Bible, while Abraham is the father of the faithful in Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews. Moreover, Mary in her Magnificat and Zechariah in his Benedictus interpret the events celebrated at Christmas as the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham (Luke 1:46–79). Fear and Trembling suggests at least three distinctive features of the way this God is given in human experience. First, God is given as personal . The decisive indication of this is that God speaks. In good Lutheran fashion, according to which revelation comes in the modes of Law and Gospel, the God of Abraham performs two different kinds of speech act: command and promise.11 Silentio’s focus is obviously on a very particular command, but he calls our attention to the fact that the command is tightly linked to promises. “By faith Abraham emigrated from the land of his fathers and became an alien in the promised land . . . By faith Abraham received the promise that in his seed all the generations of the earth would be blessed.”12 Already this means that the intentionality of this phenomenology will be an inverted intentionality.13 God is not given as the noematic content or theme constituted by an act of Sinngebung (meaning-bestowal) on my part. God is given as a...