Continuing from my last post on 'Style of Living versus Juridification in Foucault', there seems to be me to be something to be gained by thinking about Kierkegaard's ethics here, even if Kierkegaard's Christianity and Foucault's aesthetic self seem rather distinct. The emphasis in Foucault on style or aesthetics of life or existence seems to be be already the object of criticism, in Kierkegaard's account of the aesthetic (as a mode of life rather than with regard to the appreciation of art and beauty). However, Foucault does refer on occasion to the self as acting on itself in Kierkegaard. So Kierkegaard has a particular importance in suggesting that the self is not just an observing consciousness.
Kierkegaard's attitude to the self , and modes of living, is in some degree structured by an understanding of the relation between individuality and the state as a political entity. It is an understanding that draws on Hegel, but which tries to resist what Kierkegaard takes to be an absorption of the self into history and communal morality in Hegel's philosophy. That continuation of aspects of Hegel includes a distinction between antique and modern communities, which itself draws on an enormous amount of earlier thought going back to the Renaissance regarding the distinction between antiquity and the present.
The main Hegelian point, for Kierkegaard, is that the antique community is less divided between communal ethics and some more absolute source of ethics. Individuals experience themselves as part of a state or a family, or as dominated by some pagan style of fate. The modern world places a burden of the individual lacking in antiquity, since in theological terms there is no intermediary between the individual and God in Christianity (particularly given Kierkegaard's Lutheran Protestant assumption), and in social terms the world is less that of the lived community of a polis (so Kierkegaard seems to restrict antiquity to small city states, thoıgh maybe thinks their essential aspects may apply in less pure forms to other forms of antique political community) in which the individual experiences deep belonging.
As in Hegel, the transition is in some part due to the emergence of Christianity, as a way of structuring experience, and presumably as a way of structuring politics, once it becomes the state religion of Rome. This is not just a belief that world history expresses deep theological categories. Kierkegaard is strongly aware of the naure of law, and though he does not go into the development of sovereignty and law in Rome and then the Middle Ages, in the way that Foucault does with his understanding of 'juridification''. However, Kierkegaard does have a lot to say about the role of the judge, particularly with regard to Judge (or Assessor) William in Either/Or I, who also appears in Stages on Life's Way.
William expresses a devotion both to law and to a socially diluted understanding of Christianity as a set of general rules (even if he is aware in principle that Christianity should pose a deeper challenge), which makes him something of a stand in for Hegel, as a well as a representative of an Aristotelian understanding. Kierkegaard seems inclined to take up Descartes plus Luther scepticism of Aristotelianism, including its Medieval Scholastic expression, even though Kierkegaard's theology and philosophy go some way beyond the author of the 95 theses of Wittenberg and the the supposed Father of Modern Philosophy. In that context, Kierkegaard might seem remote from the Medieval revival of Roman law and the Enlightenment or Hegelianised Enlightenment advocacy of a legally defined state, which has the sovereignty to enforce that laws that allow civil society.
Kierkegaard is not rejecting the world of 'jurdification', or legalistic state plus legalistic civil society, as his comments on Danish politics suggest an acceptance of a contract between sovereign and subjects, which should sometimes be revised. The struggle between traditional sovereignty and revolutionary demands for a new contract can even suggest a desire for the absolute beyond relative political positions, that can bring us to the verge of a proper understanding of Christianity, presuming we do make the transition from thinking of th political state as absolute to the absolute in all experience.
The absolute of the Christian god is something we can have some grasp of, according to Kierkegaard, through understanding in a very experiential implicit sense of understanding the absolute nature of our own subjectivity. We cannot grasp our self as a series of discrete moments, a mode which is aesthetic, but as something absolute in relation to moments of experience. In one sense, the absolute in Kierkegaard leads us to a metaphysical god external to the world and us, but that is not what is emphasised by Kierkegaard who explores subjectivity as what is constantly dealing with the tension between relative and absolute in experience, and can only do so successfully through some distance from the world of legality and abstract sovereignty. The concrete sovereignty experienced in the struggle between monarchist reaction and democratic revolution is itself part of the experience of the more than 'juridical'.
Kierkegaard suggests a kind of aesthetics of existence in which we should be aware or our changing imaginative and inventive capacities, which is the aesthetic as such, but see that a way or taking up and exceeding both inner aesthetics and external law is necessary to an experience of the self over time that as some form of unity, in a tension with the more momentary and relative aspects of the self. Replacing references to Christianity with something like 'self-affecting subjectivity' may get us quite close to Foucault or maybe we can just think of Christianity in Kierkegaard as the kind of religion which has a style of living as something more than simple asceticism or obedience
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