ABSTRACT
Of those modern philosophies in which the self-imprisoned consciousness of idealism is aware of its own imprisonment and attempts to escape from its immanence, each develops an exclusive category, an undeviating intention, a distinguishing trait that, under the rule of the idea of totality acknowledged by all these philosophies, is intended to mollify the rigidity of this imprisonment. Ultimately, however, this category dissolves the idealist construction itself, which then disintegrates into its antinomies. Thus Hegel, the most extreme exponent of the idea of totality and to all appearances anything but a critic of idealism, developed a dialectical process that employed the claim to totality so dynamically that particular phenomena never result from the systematic subordinating concept; instead the system-from which reality truly results-is to be synonymous with the quintessence of fulfilled actuality. Kierkegaard tirelessly ridiculed Hegel for deferring every statement that would be binding for real existence until some imaginary completion of the system. But precisely in this regard Kierkegaard is more similar to Hegel than he would have cared to recognize. For through such deferment of the whole, the particular present-and even more the past-gains a concrete fullness that Kierkegaard’s repetitions seek in vain to procure.—Similarly, Feuerbach moved his enlightenment concept of humanity, as a corrective, to the center of his philosophy; a concept that can no longer be contained by autonomous spirit. Similarly, again, Marx ultimately subordinated all his thought to the category of exchange-value, of the commodity. Indeed even this category, as the quintessence of the phenomena of capitalist society, maintains allegiance to the concept of totality. However, it shifts the
emphasis of explanation from the side of consciousness to that of the “material” in such a fashion that the unity of the “idea” of capitalist society is destroyed by contents that do not arise continuously from any idea because they place the reality of the idea itself in question. Although all these categories originate in the self-enclosing infinity of the system, they draw the systematic structures into themselves like whirlpools in which they disappear. Kierkegaard’s case is no different. He becomes a critic of the system because consciousness, as consciousness of an existence that is not deducible from itself, establishes itself as the ultimate contradiction of his idealism. From the totality of consciousness, which is extensive yet produced in a single point, his thought returns to this one point in order to gain the single category that will break the power of the system and restore ontology. The point that he seizes, his own fulcrum, is the archimedean point of systematic idealism itself: the prerogative of thought, as its own law, to found reality. The category that dialectically unfolds here, however, is that of paradoxical sacrifice. Nowhere is the prerogative of consciousness pushed further, nowhere more completely denied, than in the sacrifice of consciousness as in the fulfillment of ontological reconciliation. With a truly Pascalian expanse, Kierkegaard’s dialectic swings between the negation of consciousness and its unchallenged authority. His spiritualism, the historical figure of objectless inwardness, is to be understood according to the immanent logic of the crisis of idealism. For Kierkegaard, consciousness must have pulled itself free from all external being by a movement of “infinite resignation”; through choice and decisiveness, it must have freely posited every content in order finally, in the face of the semblance of its own omnipotence, to surrender its omnipotence and, foundering, to purify itself of the guilt it acquired in having supposed itself autonomous. The sacrifice of consciousness, however, is the innermost model of every sacrifice that occurs in his philosophy. It constitutes the nexus of the mythical and the intrahistorical in his categorical structure. For sacrifice indeed wants to absolve nature, and nature has its determining power at Kierkegaard’s historical moment and even for his knowledge in the spirit of the isolated individual. Just as, for Kierkegaard, the spirit of the individual stands as the archetype not only of all spirit, but of nature itself, which does not appear except as “spirit,” so sacrifice, the final category of nature to which he raises himself and at the same time the final category of the destruction of the natural, is in his terms a sacrifice of spirit. With the greatest tension of which systembuilding idealism was still capable, he carried out this sacrifice both for the system as a whole and in all phenomena that fall within the system. The category of sacrifice, by means of which the system transcends itself, at the same time and fully contrary to expectation, holds Kierkegaard’s philosophy systematically together as its encompassing unity through the sacrificial abstraction of all encountered phenomena. In intellectual sacrifice the mythical origin of sacrifice appears most unalloyed; its historical function appears most spontaneously.
