2. RECONTEXTUALIZATION
A Westphalian Aufhebung?
RECONSTITUTING AND DESPOILMENT: WESTPHAL’S APPROPRIATIONS
William Desmond describes Westphal’s style of appropriation as similar to the Israelites’ despoilment of the Egyptians. However, Westphal’s is a gentle despoilment: the fidelity he shows superficially to sources appears to be an agreement between him and his source, but he is actually enacting a piecemeal acquisition of certain key ideas within that source.1 It is not a hostile takeover—it is not a takeover at all—rather, it is a form of retrieval; he takes parts of an author’s idea while also diligently critiquing the idea as a whole. A charitable reading of this method would call it a recontextualization, but perhaps “gentle despoilment” is more honest.2
Nowhere is this despoilment more evident in Westphal’s thought than in his reading of Hegel and Westphal’s use of Aufhebung. As Desmond notes, Westphal will take Aufhebung, that contentious term, and, in a gentle despoilment, he will make it do all sorts of “productive, indeed benign, work for him.”3 Therefore, we continue our exploration of Westphal’s hermeneutics by exploring how he appropriates Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung, to reveal how his appropriation reconstitutes the concept itself. Moreover, the exploration here highlights three important facets of Westphal’s style of philosophy: First, it shows how Westphal employs a Hegelian structure within his philosophy, which makes a further exploration of Westphal’s critique of Hegel all the more necessary. Second, it problematizes Westphal’s textual fidelity by revealing the (hermeneutical) gap between the text in question and Westphal’s own reading. While there is a hermeneutical gap for all readers, it is important for our study because we now know that Westphal grants heavy authority to the text itself, particularly when that text is Scripture. Last, and most important, our exploration in this chapter will give us insight into the way this type of recontextualization works across Westphal’s thought, demonstrating how Westphal’s dialogues between texts and authors build toward a central idea while also negating arguments found within those texts or made by those authors. In short, his dialogues often function as (“Westphalian”) Aufhebungen.4
To understand Westphal’s appropriation, we first need to understand Hegel’s own use of Aufhebung. Once we have a grasp on what is admittedly a tricky word, let alone concept, we can explore and compare Westphal’s reconstitution of the term. Doing so will reveal the differences in usage, as we first explore how Westphal uses the term in his Hegelian writings, to prove that he has a solid grasp of how Hegel used the term himself. From there, we will see how Westphal employs the term to understand Kierkegaard in order to prove how his own Aufhebung differs from Hegel’s. We conclude by analyzing how Westphal’s Aufhebung reveals his recontextualization of his sources, recontextualizing them—or despoiling them, if you prefer—into his own thought.
Hegel’s use of Aufhebung
The German word Aufhebung is a word with a common meaning that is not philosophical, yet its tricky double meaning quickly lends itself to becoming one. The definition of Aufhebung is to cancel out something while simultaneously preserving it; however, this overly simple definition does not completely encapsulate its everyday use or its appropriation by Hegel. Therefore, we must begin by unpacking the term itself. As Ralph Palm notes, the trickiness of understanding the concept of Aufhebung in Hegel’s works confounds several scholars, particularly English translators of Hegel, who do not know whether to translate the word as suspension or sublation, or to simply leave it in its German form.5 While suspension does not quite do justice to the negation involved in Aufhebung, the use of sublation in English is all but obsolete, thus rendering it little to no help in explaining the word’s meaning. Likewise, use of the German form can appear to evade the question of its meaning while also causing headaches between the German-English grammatical crossover when conjugating the term (i.e., aufheben, aufgehoben).6
When Hegel uses the term, he explains it only in four sections of his works, the most important being in Science of Logic, in the first chapter of book 1, titled “The Doctrine of Being.”7 In the Zusätz, Hegel refers to its everyday German usage, which implies that there is a preservation—the picking up can be seen as a form of preserving—and also a cessation, but what matters most to him is the simultaneity of this action; it is not an if-then movement, but a double action. “That which is sublated,” Hegel remarks, “is thus something at the same time preserved, something that has lost its immediacy but has not come to nothing.”8 As Walter Kaufmann notes, this is akin to picking up a fallen book from the floor and putting it on a shelf: you have removed the book from its present state (the negative or cancelling action) and have preserved its condition (the positive or conserving action).9 However, this explanation goes only so far, given that after Hegel notes the double action of Aufhebung, he goes on to add a third element to the term: it not only cancels and preserves but also elevates the object in question. He does this through contrasting Aufhebung with the related but etymologically distinct Latin term tollere.10 Tollere means “to take or lift up,” as in placing the book on the shelf, but Aufhebung, through its negating act, goes one step further and implies an elevation of the book’s concept, its bookness, into something else altogether. More precisely, Hegel characterizes tollere as merely an affirmative action, whereas aufheben involves the unity of affirmation and negation. Something is taken away in the act, which makes aufheben a much more impactful concept since the object in question is no longer the same.
Although Aufhebung is directly related to the dialectic—Palm goes so far as to call it “the heart of the dialectic”—it should also be understood as its own distinct, speculative (i.e., infinite) term.11 This is perhaps best seen in Hegel’s concept of becoming found within being and nothingness, the topic that Hegel addresses in Science of Logic, where he first reflects on Aufhebung. Therefore, let us pivot our examination of Aufhebung to his concept of becoming in order to better grasp the term’s meaning. However, it is important to note that because our interest is not in Hegel’s concept of becoming, our treatment will be all too brief and simplistic, focusing primarily on Aufhebung and not the larger implications of Hegel’s thought.
Becoming and Being: A Case Study of Hegel’s Aufhebung
For Hegel, being (Sein) begins with the concept of pure being (reine Sein), which is distinct from any concept of determinate being, where existence takes shape and forms into a thing unto itself.12 In other words, before there is ‘a being’ (determinate being), there must be a general concept of pure being, indeterminate and unconstructed, from which a being emerges. Pure being, according to Hegel, cannot have “any determination with respect to an other, so too it cannot have any within”; it is devoid of content and thus has no mediated distinction with or against an other.13 Any distinction or determination would thus render it as something else, a being, that would exist with other beings (from which it is distinct and determined).
Interestingly, this sounds much like nothingness but for one great difference: the intuitive meaning behind the concept of nothingness. Hegel calls this “pure nothingness,” which he goes on to describe as “complete emptiness, complete absence of determination and content; lack of all distinction within.”14 So far, pure being and pure nothingness sound like the same thing; however, to think of nothing intuits a meaning—even if it is the absence of meaning. “So,” Hegel concludes, “nothing is [i.e., concretely exists] in our intuiting or thinking; or rather it is the empty intuiting and thinking itself, like being.”15 Paradoxically, this renders pure being and pure nothing as the same—both are indeterminate and empty—but they are different with respect to their intuitive meaning, and therefore they are not the same.16 Pure being intuits an existence, however indeterminate, whereas pure nothingness intuits an absence of existence.
This paradox exists because of the unity of pure being and pure nothingness. This unity, however, dissolves in an instant when pure being “passes over” pure nothingness in its becoming determinate being.17 As far as becoming is concerned, the ‘purity’ of being is thus negated through this passing over into determinate being. Hegel plainly sees that his notion of being and nothingness coming together to create a being is paradoxical and astonishing to most people, since they fail to see the relationship between indeterminacy and determinacy. So, to clarify, he remarks on how this paradox correlates with various creation motifs and concepts of existence within Christianity, which uses similar ex nihilo concepts, and Buddhism, which emphasizes a similar notion of indeterminate nothingness.18 Let us turn now to how paradoxes function as a transitional aspect of Hegel’s logic and its relationship to Aufhebung.
As Palm notes, the key to understanding the paradox of pure being and pure nothing becoming a determinate being is in noticing the location of the paradox within the transition (or becoming) itself.19 In becoming, two things happen: (1) pure, indeterminate being and nothing are distinct and opposing yet also the same, and, as such, (2) they immediately proceed to cancel out the contradiction of the paradox (their ‘opposite-yet-the-sameness’) while preserving and forming a determinate being. As Hegel states:
But the truth is … that they are the not the same, that they are absolutely distinct yet equally separated and inseparable, and that each immediately vanishes into its opposite. Their truth is therefore this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which the two are distinguished but by a distinction which has just immediately dissolved itself.20
The coexistence of pure being and pure nothingness immediately causes a reaction that becomes something new, a distinct determinate being. This unity is better understood through its double sense: at the level of sameness they are an abstract unity (abstrakte Einhheit), and at the moment of union, in their becoming, they are a determinate union (bestimmte Einheit). Therefore, in their becoming or unifying, the indeterminacy of being and nothingness is removed—their ‘pureness’ is taken away or ceased—as pure being passes over pure nothingness into becoming something: a determinate, distinct, and individual being. For Hegel, this is an Aufhebung: “In this unity, therefore, they are, but as vanishing, only as sublated [aufgehoben]. They sink from their initially represented self-subsistence into moments which are still distinguished but at the same time sublated.”21
Aufhebung, therefore, is what makes this process of becoming a determinate being possible. More precisely, it is the key to explaining what happens in becoming a determinate being. The in here is operative since the Aufhebung is not an external happening; rather, it happens within the unity of being and nothingness; there are no outside influences or forces causing the negation. Pure being and pure nothingness, Palm remarks, “sublate themselves” through an “internal determination from within a given moment operating on itself.”22 This is absolutely crucial to understanding Aufhebung because one must recognize that no outside factor can cause the negating act, only the two concepts (either concretely or abstractly) coming into union within themselves. Nothing from the outside causes this sublation, nor can another factor catalyze this unionizing: they come together, negate and preserve, and elevate by their own attraction. This may not be applicable to pure, indeterminate being and nothingness, which are abstract concepts that Hegel uses to convey a particular thought, but, for our purposes of understanding Aufhebung, we must remember that Hegel sees this movement as contained in the process itself.
Regarding the dialectic, this process of becoming can be reasonably deduced from determinate being to indeterminate being and nonbeing. The dialectic, in this manner, presupposes a negation within this becoming, where the process inherently posits a negation of another concept, in this case indeterminate being’s negation of indeterminate nonbeing.23 As David Gray Carlson notes, “According to Dialectical Reason, Becoming has a second aspect. It is ceasing-to-be (Verstehen), which starts from Being and ends at Nothing. It concedes the Understanding’s point that Nothing turns into Being. But it embarrasses the Understanding by pointing out that the opposite is just as true: Being turns into Nothing. It has ‘ceased to be.’”24 Embarrassed, here, is how dialectical reasoning challenges the understanding by revealing what it has negated and, consequently, that this negation could have been an opposite movement from being to nothing.
Dialectical reasoning thus reveals the negative aspect of these movements within the Aufhebung, which enables one to deduce what has been negated. Just as speculative reasoning enables one to explore the act of becoming in the Aufhebung, its counterpart, dialectical reasoning, allows one to explore the exact opposite by reasoning back from this act of becoming to discover what was negated, and also what was preserved or elevated, in this process.25 In regard to this negative aspect of the dialectic, Hegel states:
Taken quite generally, this determination can be taken to mean that what is at first immediate is therewith posited as mediated, as referred to an other, or that the universal is posited as a particular. The second universal that has thereby arisen is thus the negative of that first and, in view of subsequent developments, the first negative. From this negative side, the immediate has perished in the other; but the other is essentially not an empty negative, the nothing which is formally taken to be the result of dialectic, but is rather the other of the first, the negative of the immediate; it is therefore determined as the mediated—contains as such the determination of the first in it.26
Dialectical reasoning matters to understanding Westphal’s use of the Aufhebung because it shows how the Aufhebung can be deconstructed: rather than two opposing concepts moving to create a new idea, one can also reason from the final idea to the two opposing concepts that created it. Westphal’s Aufhebung works against this dialectical aspect in that the concepts he elevates or suspends into another concept cannot be dialectically reasoned back to the moment of sublation, since they are not contradictory, antithetical concepts. For example, when Westphal claims that the teleological suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling is synonymous with the concept of Aufhebung, Westphal does not show how the ethical is directly antithetical to the religious; thus, one cannot dialectically reason toward the moment of sublation of the ethical into the religious. His use of the term through Kierkegaard, as shown later in this chapter, lacks this opposition and thus is not exactly a Hegelian Aufhebung. Rather, Westphal recontextualizes Hegel’s Aufhebung to connect opposing (yet still not antithetical) concepts.
Through exploring Hegel’s concept of determinate being, we have thus come to the following understanding of Aufhebung: two distinct, opposing, and antithetical (hence, related) concepts pass through a moment together in which each immediately cancels out the other while also simultaneously preserving the essential, elemental concept that formed the union in the first place. This preservation, while negating that which initially caused the opposition, elevates the essential, elemental concept insofar as what is preserved holds a different, rational status. This status, as seen in the example of a determinate being, still holds a hint of the negation in that the primary opposites (pure being and pure nothingness) can be dialectically traced back to the moment before the sublation (and so it is a speculative-rational moment). This explanation of Aufhebung has given us enough of a foothold with the term to allow for us explore how Westphal utilizes it and how he sees it working within the writings of others, particularly in the works of Kierkegaard, who is often seen as Hegel’s greatest critic and historical counterpoint.
Westphal’s Aufhebung: A Suspension of Hegel in Kierkegaard?
As previously noted, Westphal uses Aufhebung throughout his work and not only in reference to Hegel, but he first uses the term within his early scholarship on Hegel, as in Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity. This book is therefore a good starting point for our exploration of Westphal’s Aufhebung because it shows that his original use of the term was strictly Hegelian in nature, and only in his more mature works does he reconstitute it.
Merold Westphal’s 1991 address to the Hegel Society of America (expanded on in Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity) is an examination of Hegel’s theory that society, in its proper function, is an Aufhebung of church and state articulated through the term Sittlichkeit.27 He sets up this Aufhebung by quoting Hegel, stating that Hegel repeatedly claims that “religion is the foundation of the state” and that “the state is the foundation of religion.”28 Not unlike Hegel’s understanding of being and nothingness, both hold to the fact that the other is united but different, as in two sides of the same coin. From these two quotes, Westphal then pivots from Hegel to his own sociohistorical context in 1991, at the end of both the Cold War and the Gulf War, to reflect on what he sees as opposing yet inextricably linked forces at work in society.
Westphal articulates these opposing forces as “old secularism” and “new theocracy,” both inhabiting the respective spaces of Hegel’s concepts of state and religion.29 Westphal’s aim in coining the term old secularism is that he wishes to highlight the state’s current movement toward “absolutizing pre-ethical goods”—namely, pleasure (food, sex), wealth (materialism), and honor (social class, prestige)—and this is indeed an old thread that has been woven into the function of the state for some time.30 Autonomy without moral (i.e., religious) constraints emerges as the state’s primary motivation since it is “central to the pursuit of wealth and status,” revealing that old secularism (in its deification of pleasure, wealth, and honor) is liable to be charged with idolatry. Or, in the case of its instrumental use of religion, old secularism can often perversely fashion a god as an enabler of our desires.31
In opposition to old secularism, Westphal describes a new theocracy arising as an “ethico-religious” movement, popularly known through its “charismatic television personalities and massive, computerized direct-mail fund raisers”; this became known as “the Moral Majority,” a political movement in the 1980s and 1990s based on religious, so-called family values rhetoric.32 The new theocracy’s emphasis on morality rather than religion puts them on equal footing with old secularism’s absolutizing of pre-ethical goods; thus setting up a good-versus-evil narrative that fashions new theocracy as the advocate for “right” morality. Westphal, in line with his caveats on using the term old secularism, recognizes the differences between traditional theocracy and his own use of the term, noting that none of these members of the “Moral Majority” wishes to establish a state church. However, he does state that “the spirit of theocracy is present” in their political actions, particularly in their appeal to religious authority.33
However, in their ethico-religious protest, the new theocracy echoes old secularism’s sectarian pursuit of personal interest by advocating a “selective morality,” that is, a morality that appeals only to the tastes and causes that reflect those they hold themselves.34 They are against the aforementioned pre-ethical goods, but only selectively and when it is in their self-interest to be against them. Therefore, in their distaste for old secularism’s sexual revolution, for example, the new theocracy comes out tenfold to protest, but when that new theocracy comes to challenge other ethical offenses such as the unreserved pursuit of wealth and status, it actually moralizes those pursuits and reframes them as godly, making itself just as idolatrous.35 The result of this idolization is an approving god for our personal pursuits, such that, Westphal sarcastically exclaims, “God wants us to be rich, personally and nationally, and God wants us to have a bigger military budget, for we are the shining city set on a hill to save the world from the evil empire.”36
Hegel enters the scene for Westphal via his notion of Sittlichkeit, which is a sublation of private, personal religion into a common sense of reason, to create an ethical society—often expressed and understood through the customs and mores of that society. In the case of old secularism and new theocracy, Westphal notes that each opposes the other not as contradiction, where one “must be true, but as contraries, both of which may be, and in this case are, false.”37 Through his prior quotations of Hegel that church and state must be separate but are also inseparable, Westphal first peels back any idea that Hegel would support a theocratic state as contrary to his concept of freedom, the very essence of the state’s existence.38 This results, more or less, in a comparative relationship between old secularity and Hegel’s concept of a purely secular state.
Yet just as the relationship is established, Westphal retreats from the notion that Hegel’s Sittlichkeit would support an entirely secular enterprise given that, just like the new theocracy, old secularism is “only selectively critical of the primacy given to pre-ethical goods.”39 Moreover, and again in line with the critique of new theocracy, old secularism—through its unchallenged elevation of certain pre-ethical goods—encourages a de facto “civil religion which hovers around the fringes of political life and in churchly religion which hovers around the fringes of everyday life in general”; paradoxically, and as foreshadowed by the critique of idolatry, old secularism has turned into a self-legitimating religion whose foundation is just as inept as new theocracy.40 Thus, for Westphal, old secularism and new theocracy are contrary opposites but not such that the denial of one entails the affirmation of the other.
For Westphal, these oppositions show what can go awry when a society overly concerns itself with being either too secular or too religious: idolatrous self-legitimization and selective enforcement of principles go unchecked in both, inevitably leading to an unjust, unequal society.41 Contrariwise, Hegelian Sittlichkeit gives the state an ethical foundation that unites the core principles of religious life with that of the greater society. Regarding old secularism and new theocracy, he utilizes the well-established self-legitimizing nature that unites them to argue that, in their unity, the inherent paradox of each holding an opposing, cynically pious pursuit of selfish fulfillment is canceled out. What is preserved is ‘the ethical’: the desire to orchestrate a cohesive theory of governance.42 Westphal argues that the ethical that is described here is a version of Hegelian Sittlichkeit. “Correspondingly,” Westphal argues, “the state is not to be the instrumentalism of the secular life but its Aufhebung.” Religion’s “universal principle of truth” thus infiltrates “all the particular realms of national life,” and therefore its critique of the secularity within “old secularism is also the critique of” religion’s own idolatry: “The Aufhebung of secular life in the Hegelian state, whose foundation is religion, is the systematic de-absolutizing of pre-ethical goods and their subordination to and incorporation into a life determined by ethico-religious values.”43
In sum, Westphal’s concepts of old secularism and new theocracy are simply contemporary versions of an existing problem in modernity, and Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, “as the ethico-religious Aufhebung of pre-ethical goods into their truly human form,” serves as a theory of the state that holds up the best of what these contrary movements have in common while negating their destructive self-interests. Note that this negation or preservation happens within their unity and not by virtue of an outside source. What is significant for us is not Westphal’s correlation of contemporary politics and religion, or his creative use of Hegel to describe them and to address a remedy through Hegel’s Sittlichkeit (even though this further emphasizes the political nature of Westphal’s philosophy). Rather, what we can see here is an example of Westphal using Hegel’s Aufhebung in a manner somewhat faithful to Hegel himself. We can see that his use of the term in his later work is intentional and deliberate and that he is, in the vein of despoilment, taking the term from Hegel and making it his own.44
Suspending Hegel: Westphal’s Kierkegaardian use of Aufhebung
Westphal’s primary use of Aufhebung typically centers on his critique of Hegelian Sittlichkeit as the end point of a religiously based ethics. In sounding out his critique, Westphal often employs Kierkegaard’s critique against Hegelian ethics and Sittlichkeit as a challenge to the types of cultural theocracies and secularities as mentioned earlier. In numerous places, Westphal will also relate Sittlichkeit to Christendom.45 Furthermore, Westphal often finds himself agreeing with Kierkegaard on the idea that one must go beyond Sittlichkeit (or, in Kierkegaard’s words, ‘the ethical’) to get to a truly religious based morality that places faith in, and obedience toward, God above all political, secular ethical systems.
One of the surprising ways that Westphal expands on his critique of Sittlichkeit is through detailing the interplay between Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous ‘authors,’ where he sees each author as an individual voice discussing with another Kierkegaardian author.46 In this vein, Westphal addresses the Kierkegaardian corpus as a whole, attempting to tease out the prevailing themes that run through it. It is as if Kierkegaard is performing a dialogue with himself and Westphal is moderating it for his readers.47 For example, he sees Judge William in Either/Or discussing Hegelian Sittlichkeit, which informs him of the idea of the ethical that is taken up by Johannes De Silentio in Fear in Trembling. Likewise, the teleological suspension in Fear and Trembling informs him of the teleological suspensions first seen in Frater Taciturnus’s section in Stages on Life’s Way, which Johannes Climacus expands on in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Finally, all of these works culminate in Kierkegaard’s self-authored Works of Love, in which Kierkegaard details how the love commandment is the highest act of faith and a task of a lifetime. In this way, Westphal sees Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous dialogue reaching its conclusion through Kierkegaard himself, who gets the final word.48
Westphal introduces the concept of Aufhebung through Judge William’s account of marriage in Either/Or, which Westphal describes as a form of ethical Sittlichkeit, given how marriage tames sexual desire. For Judge William, this is where the sensual, pleasure-seeking desires of sex are “ennobled” through marriage, which is “the transfiguration of the first love [i.e., aesthetic love, sex] and not its annihilation.”49 Sexual pleasure is seen as a preethical good that is aufgehoben in marriage as an ethical or ‘rightly ordered’ act. Marriage elevates—transfigures even—sexual desire into something beautiful, just, and worthy. This structure leads Westphal to argue that Judge William is a Hegelian, “whether he knows it or not.”50 In Philosophy of Right, for example, Hegel notes that “marriage, as the elementary social relation, contains firstly the factor of natural life” and that “marriage is essentially an ethical relation.”51 He goes on to remark that various accounts of marriage’s relation to the foundation of the state are inadequate because they do not take into view the loving aspect of the relationship. Additionally, traditional thoughts on love as the foundation of marriage are also woefully inadequate.52 Continuing, Hegel remarks that “the ethical side of marriage consists in the consciousness that the union is a substantive end. Marriage thus rests upon love, confidence, and the socializing of the whole individual existence.”53 Thus, it is an Aufhebung of the pre-ethical sexual desire, transfigured in love between the couple and ennobled in duty toward the family and state.
For Westphal, this is exactly the form of the ethical that Johannes De Silentio remarks is teleologically suspended by Abraham in Fear and Trembling. According to Westphal, De Silentio’s commentary in Fear and Trembling marks the “transition from the ethical to the religious” where “Judge William falls short of the religious” through his fidelity to the ethical. Sittlichkeit can take one only so far, and it definitely cannot comfort Abraham as he walks toward Mount Moriah. The ethical, therefore, must be teleologically suspended for this journey to happen. On this matter, Westphal is explicit: stating that this suspension is “nothing but a Hegelian Aufhebung, in this case the relativizing of the ethical by recontextualizing it within the religious as its higher principle. But while the form of this teleological suspension is Hegelian, its content is anti-Hegelian, for it is an all-out assault on the Hegelian understanding of Sittlichkeit.”54
How De Silentio remedies the epistemological ramifications of suspending the ethical—a mediated, reasoned ethics—into the religious is a discussion for chapter 4. What is important presently is that this reveals the paradigm for how Westphal sees subsequent teleological suspensions in Kierkegaard’s writings. Westphal elaborates on this particular form of Aufhebung:
Another Hegelian name for such mediation is Aufhebung; in the language of Fear and Trembling, we are talking about a teleological suspension. In both cases the process of recontextualization has negative and positive implications, cancellation and preservation. When X is aufgehoben, or teleologically suspended in Y, the immediate, self-sufficient form of X is canceled, and whatever belongs to that mode of its being is relativized as something insufficient by itself. But this has positive significance, for the claim is that Y is the truth, or telos, of X, and that in this process X realizes itself, or at least moves to a higher level of its normative development.55
Westphal sees an X that is taken up and recontextualized within Y, which thereby cancels or negates the telos of X—the true purpose or end goal for X—while also preserving some aspect of X. In other words, the aim of the ethical toward the good and righteous is preserved, recontextualized, and taken up into the religious. The self’s walk toward righteousness falls short in and of itself because of humanity’s fallen nature; however, when the self surrenders its claim on righteousness to God, then and only then can it truly feel that it is on the path toward righteousness, because the self is following God first and its own intellect second. This is why Abraham takes up his task and follows God’s command toward Mount Moriah.
Two things are striking about Westphal’s reading. First, it is remarkable and enlightening to see how Kierkegaard undoes Hegel’s work through Hegel himself. This reading of Kierkegaard reveals the Dane’s ingenious wit and clever critique by at once showing how Hegel is the greatest philosopher of them all while also showing that Hegel is still but a fallen man when compared to God and revelation.56 Hegel is not wrong, but he is not right either; his concepts of Sittlichkeit and Aufhebung are correct when he talks about taking up and elevating a base notion, such as pre-ethical desires, but they fail once they mistake the true telos of the self (or selves) as one that is free and understood as ethical, communal living. Rather, the true telos of the self is to love God above all things and to love your neighbor as yourself.
This leads to the second striking element of Westphal’s reading: that this is not really an Aufhebung in the strict Hegelian sense. In this reading, X and Y are not paradoxes of each other. Nowhere in Westphal’s account (or in Kierkegaard’s) is the religious or anything else paradoxically equated to the ethical. In Hegel’s account of becoming, pure nothingness and pure being were exactly contrary. In his account of Sittlichkeit, this was somewhat or partially so, in that private religious sentiment and secular social ethics were equal in their aims (i.e., how should I live?) but contrary in their executions and goals. But in the teleological suspension of the ethical—if it is indeed Sittlichkeit as Westphal argues—the religious is hardly on par with the ethical as an opposing force, and making it into a dialectic somewhat softens Kierkegaard’s critique of the ethical.
Westphal’s rebuttal to this, I imagine, would follow that it was on par once Abraham received the command from God. “Should I follow what I’ve been told is right, which is to not kill my children,” Abraham would have asked himself, “or should I follow what my God tells me to do, with the hope that God will give Isaac back to me or somehow make this all OK?” Westphal might argue that this dilemma poses Sittlichkeit and the ethical against the religious command to follow God. At the onset, this makes sense: Sittlichkeit is negated but preserved in the justness of God, and the religious is also thereby lifted into righteousness because it suspends all human ethics within faith and duty toward God. This is tenable and possible.
However, is it tenable throughout Kierkegaardian scholarship? That is a much more difficult question. As we have previously covered, Westphal argues that this teleological suspension is a paradigm that Kierkegaard follows throughout his work, particularly in his theory of stages. In short, the aesthetic (pre-ethical) is teleologically suspended in the ethical, which is then suspended in Religiousness A, which is then suspended in Religiousness B, and (for Westphal) completed in Religiousness C.57 Westphal argues that these follow the exact same pattern of suspension or Aufhebung seen in Fear and Trembling. But again, what are the contraries in these patterns?58 The critical questions thus become these: How and in what way does X negate Y? And once Y has taken up X, how does one logically deduce this moment of sublation? Furthermore, it appears as if Westphal often forgets the necessity of negation in the process. It almost reads as quasi-eschatological, where all things get taken up or otherwise reconciled into a higher, (more) complete purpose. Is there an actual negation happening in a Westphalian Aufhebung, or is it all merely suspension? Sometimes it can be hard to tell.
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard addresses Hegel’s use of Aufhebung as a philosophical term through the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Exploring Climacus’s critique thus should provide clarification in regard to how Kierkegaard himself perceived the relationship between his teleological suspension and Hegel’s Aufhebung. Following Hegel, Climacus places the concept within the realm of subjective thinking and inward speculation, and he then focuses on how it is perceived in Christian thinking, particularly in relation to Christianity’s paradox of faith. What is at stake, for Climacus, is how the concept of Aufhebung, through its suspension of “various and indeed opposite meanings,” functions as an explanation of paradoxes, which thus renders Christianity as something one can reasonably understand.59 In regard to Christianity, Hegel’s Aufhebung represents a hubristic attempt to logically grasp the truth held within the paradox of Jesus Christ. The speculative nature of Aufhebung, Climacus argues, reduces the paradox to a relation of opposites, which makes the paradox logical, thus no longer rendering it as a paradox. “But suppose,” Climacus states, “that we let the word aufheben mean reduction to a relative factor, as indeed it does when what is decisive, the paradox, is reduced to a relative factor. What this says is that there is no paradox, no decision, for the paradox and the decisive are what they are precisely by being unyielding.”60 For Climacus, the problem with Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung is not that it renders Christianity, and the paradox of Jesus as divine yet man (the primary paradox of Christianity, for Climacus), as false or untrue. Quite the opposite. Climacus’s primary concern is that such speculation has the audacity to believe that it can grasp and logically understand this paradox, thus missing the point of Christianity altogether.61 Relating this back to our exploration of determinate being in the prior section, Climacus might agree with Hegel that there is a paradox between the relation of being and nonbeing; however, he would criticize the reduction of becoming, or of the creation of determinate being, into this simple act of negation-preservation: there is more happening in becoming than a simple movement of being passing over into nonbeing. Although Hegel acknowledges that this is an abstract understanding, it still attempts to know too much and it assumes that the paradox can be understood, making it no longer a paradox.
Climacus argues that Hegelians are gullible. Specifically regarding Christianity, these great thinkers have mistaken logic as the truth rather than beholding the paradox of Christianity as the actual truth that the average Christian accepts naturally within faith.62 One might kindly say that they have overthought the paradox; less charitably, one might argue that they have tried to seize the truth of Christianity as their own:
For Christianity as it is understood by the speculator differs from what plain folk are presented. [For the plain folk] it is a paradox, but the speculator knows how to suspend the paradox. So it is not the Christianity that is, was and remains the truth, and the speculator’s understanding is not that Christianity is the truth; no, Christianity’s truth is the speculator’s understanding of Christianity. The understanding is thus something other than the truth; it is not that once the understanding has understood everything contained in the truth, then truth is understood…. The truth is not first given and its understanding what one then awaits; what is awaited is the completion of the speculative understanding as that which alone can bring about the truth. Speculative knowledge thus differs from knowledge in general, as something indifferent to what is known, so that the latter does not change by being known but stays the same. No, speculative knowledge is itself the object of knowing.63
Climacus thus makes it clear that he has concerns about the use of Aufhebung to properly understand the paradox of Christianity, and this explains why he forgoes the use of the term in describing his theory of stages. It would be philosophically inconsistent to critique the speculator’s use of Aufhebung to remove, or to ‘render out,’ the logical impossibility of the paradox, and then to go on to explain how one arrives at the paradox of Christianity through a process of stages that are aufgehoben in each other. This reveals a particular concern missing in Westphal’s argument that the teleological suspension and Aufhebung are synonymous concepts: he does not explain why, if this is true, Kierkegaard opted to call these transitions teleological suspensions. As one can see with the passage just previous, Climacus’s concern with Aufhebung runs parallel to De Silentio’s concern against Sittlichkeit: Hegel is not wrong, but he is not right either. Through Aufhebung, Hegel and his followers make the correct observation that there is a dialectical relation between opposing concepts, but they fool themselves once they mistake this observation as a method to explain a paradox’s full truth within a dialectical relation, especially within the paradox of Christianity and within Jesus’ dual nature.
Westphal has received similar critiques from Jack Mulder, who argues against Westphal’s conviction that the teleological suspension completes a dialectical movement, and Henry Piper, who argues that Westphal wrongly fashions Kierkegaard as quasi-Hegelian.64 Mulder and Piper’s arguments vary, but the covalent element of their critique is Westphal’s use of Hegel to understand Kierkegaard: either Westphal reads Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms too dialectically, as if they are Hegelian progressions of Kierkegaard’s thinking, or he reads the teleological suspensions too dialectically, as if the suspensions themselves ‘complete’ the progression on life’s way or that the self can otherwise ‘return’ to a respective stage as if it were a Hegelian dialectic.65 In Westphal’s rebuttal, he does not revise his position but essentially retraces his steps as detailed earlier.66 Debates about the proper reading of Kierkegaard aside, what is important to our own investigation comes into view when Westphal addresses Piper’s concern that Kierkegaard is not a Hegelian:
So [after restating or proving that Kierkegaard is indeed using Hegelian themes, as seen with Judge William], a more careful formulation than “Kierkegaard is not Hegelian” would be that Kierkegaard is not substantively Hegelian even when he (or his pseudonyms) employ Hegelian forms. The question is about the how: are these forms employed as Hegel employs them? Piper understands this when distinguishing the “logical” dialectic of Hegel from the “non-dialectical,” “existential” dialectic of Kierkegaard. The difference is between a dialectic in which differences are “mediated” and brought to ‘resolution’ and one in which they remain in “tension” and “paradox.”67
Hegel does not have the final say on how Hegel’s concepts can be used, according to Westphal. To say that something is Hegelian does not have to mean that it is Hegelian in the proper sense: the dialectic does not need to find resolution but can be in tension and taken up by another Aufhebung. Here, Westphal reveals himself as a despoiler of Hegel. Hegel no longer has control over his own concepts, and while we should be mindful of the way Hegel developed these terms, we do not need to limit their usage to Hegel’s own. This is not to say that one can do whatever one wants with concepts such as Aufhebung; philosophical concepts have legacies, and to ignore their original usages is abuse. A proper appropriation is mindful of this legacy while still exploring its possibilities; appropriation explores the tensions within the concept’s original meaning and context in relation to our own while not breaking the concept. Last, these tensions open up the elasticity of the term by placing its original meaning in relation to a contemporary, evolving usage: Hegel’s Aufhebung is taken up by Kierkegaard’s usage of the term (and in Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel), which is then taken up by Westphal and his own philosophy.
Consider whether this is what Hegel did with the term Aufhebung when he adapted it for his philosophy. In our first exploration of Hegel’s use, we noted that he took the term in its everyday form and explored its philosophical ‘usefulness’ for understanding how things are, thereby canceling out its everyday usage for a higher purpose. The everyday, common Aufhebung is—once its paradox is genuinely reflected on—aufgehoben into a philosophical Aufhebung! The unity of the sublation here is the notion of paradox itself: on the one hand, the common, everyday perspective in which contrary actions have practical meaning (to pick up a fallen book), and, on the other hand, from a theoretical perspective in which paradoxes have a different but similar meaning (to say yes and no to the same question). The fact that the sublation happens within the term itself and with no external additions (or prefixes or suffixes) completes this idea.
Now, it would be perfectly sane to argue that this is grasping at straws and is linguistic sophistry—a charge that has been levied by several critics against Hegel.68 Additionally, it could be argued that stretching a term to its limits—or, as I did earlier, turning a term against itself—is bad philosophy in the sense that it eschews rigor and fidelity for a (faulty) attempt to find meaning and understanding. Philosophy requires and demands from its practitioners a certain rigor in order to prevent concepts from falling into etymological wordplay and nonsense.
Westphal does not see this as softening or weakening rigor for the sake of finding understanding.69 Rather, it is about being mindful of the sources and then recognizing the tension already within the source itself. Throughout his Kierkegaard scholarship, Westphal has, with remarkable consistency, characterized the connections and tensions between Kierkegaard and Hegel. His prior expertise in Hegel is undoubtedly the catalyst for this reading. It ultimately comes down to whether one finds his claims convincing. Moreover, his philosophy of religion may hinge on whether you grant him this understanding of Aufhebung, since it founds the structure of his all of his work.
Desmond is right in claiming that Westphal uses Aufhebung to do work—profound and benign work—and that there is a degree of despoilment in his philosophy as a whole. But Westphal does not arrive by taking any intellectual shortcuts: there is still a great admiration toward his sources (or the “Pharaoh,” as Desmond puts it), and he does not blindly take from them. Rather, as Desmond notes, it is a gentle and agreeable despoilment. Yet, unlike the Pharaoh-Israel metaphor employed here, this is always a three-part dialogue between X, Y, and Westphal himself. The term dialogue could not be more important, because, for Westphal, what is happening here is grounded in a hermeneutics that simultaneously appropriates while also being faithful to its source: ‘What does X say to Y, what is or would be negated in their dialogue, and what could be taken up from it into my own thought?’ Westphal’s thinking is, therefore, always a recontextualization of his sources into something else, something higher. However, it is a particular type of recontextualization; it is a Westphalian Aufhebung.
NOTES
1. GTPD, 21–23. Desmond is referencing Exodus 3:21–22, 11:2–3, 12:35–36, and Psalm 105:37. His intent is playful but also evocative of Westphal’s biblical roots in its relationship to his politics and ethics.
2. GTPD, 26.
3. Ibid., 23. Westphal’s most creative use of Aufhebung comes from his reading of Kierkegaard, particularly when describing Kierkegaard’s concept of the teleological suspension. On several occasions and in varying contexts, Westphal equates the two terms as meaning the same thing. See, for example, LKD, 47; TST, 11n29; Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard and the Role of Reflection in Second Immediacy,” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. Paul Cruysberghs, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 174.
4. Calling this a “Westphalian Aufhebung” should not conflate Merold Westphal’s thought with the Germanic region of Westphalia or the Peace of Westphalia. I use the neologism to separate Westphal’s Aufhebung from Hegel’s and from those who use it in Hegel’s own manner.
5. Ralph Palm, “Hegel’s Concept of Sublation: A Critical Interpretation” (PhD diss., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2009), 1–2, 8, 13–15. With regard to its resistance to translation, Palm gives a valuable anecdote (1n2) in which Hegel’s translators had such a dispute over translating the term in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic that they produced two different introductions. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. and ed. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. W. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1991), xxvi, xxxv–xxxvi. See also Ralph Palm, “Hegel’s Contradictions,” Hegel Bulletin 32, nos. 1–2 (2011): 134–158.
6. For the sake of clarity, I use only Aufhebung except when specifically discussing its other forms, since Westphal’s own work uses that term.
7. Palm, “Hegel’s Concept of Sublation,” 8. The three instances are PS, 68 (HW 3/94–TM); EL, 154 (HW 8/204–205); and SL, 107 (HW/114). The third of these instances pertains to the differences between the first and second editions of Science of Logic. Note that this is Hegel’s explanation of the term, not its usage.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 82 (SL 107; HW 5/114–EA), emphasis mine. To give easy references to nonspecialists, I cite direct quotations from Di Giovanni’s translation while making every effort to cite other translations when referencing secondary sources such as Ralph Palm.
9. Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), 114. Taken from Palm, Hegel’s Concept of Sublation, 9.
10. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. Di Giovanni, 82 (SL 107 [HW 5/114–EA]).
11. Palm, Hegel’s Concept of Sublation, 30. The use of Aufhebung here is understood as speculative or infinite reasoning, according to Hegel, insofar as its relation to thinking and metaphysics. In The Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel distinguishes infinite reason from the finite reason that dominated philosophy before Kant. This finite form of reasoning had not yet understood what reason could or could not do (which is why Kant’s critique of reason was so important for Hegel), and thus took for granted that one could reason about things-in-themselves with no attention to their predicates or relation to other things (EL §26–27). “The presupposition of the older metaphysics,” Hegel summarizes, “was that of the naïve belief generally, namely, that thinking grasps what things are in-themselves, that things only are what they genuinely are when they are [captured] in thought” (EL §28Z). Accordingly, older metaphysics took up “the abstract determinations of thought immediately,” which allowed the thinker to consider these predicates—these attachments to the thing-in-itself under consideration—as a part of what makes the thing a thing, what makes it “true” as a thing in relation to the thinker (EL §28Z).
In contrast, speculative thought after Kant opens the thing in question to be considered from an “infinite form of reason” by expressing that it has certain qualities that cannot “be brought to consciousness through what is finite”; that is, the thinker cannot fully bring about the abstract qualities of the thing in question through rationalization (EL §28Z). Infinite thinking thus turns inward toward speculation and sublates this acknowledgment of finite thinking, accepting its limitations—what reason can and cannot do—while also cancelling these limitations in respect to finite thinking’s naïveté (that it can think of things-in-themselves). This allows the thinker to proceed toward an infinite speculation of the thing in itself. Hence, one transitions from thinking about things-in-themselves to thinking about thinking, which thus makes this an infinite form of thinking for Hegel: there is no limiting opposition when one is thinking about thinking since no object stands over against cognition as that which is not-cognition. Thus, Hegel states: “Infinite or speculative thinking, on the contrary [to finite thinking’s restriction to determinations], makes determinations likewise, but, in determining, in limiting, it sublates this defect again. Infinity must not be interpreted as an abstract, ever-receding beyond” but in a simple manner of negation of limitation while cognizant of those limitations (EL §28Z). Quotes are from Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic (trans. Geraets, Suchting, and Harris).
12. SL 82; HW 5/82; Hegel, Science of Logic, 48, 59.
13. Hegel, Science of Logic, 48.
14. Ibid., 59.
15. Ibid.
16. By ‘intuitive meaning,’ Hegel refers to the initial, primal meaning of being and nothingness. Intuition, and the verb intuit, pertain to their basic meanings: that being connotes that some-thing exists and that nothing connotes that no-one-thing exists.
17. Ibid., 60.
18. Ibid., 60–82. See also Palm, Hegel’s Concept of Sublation, 42–56.
19. Palm, Hegel’s Concept of Sublation, 51. Location here is to be understood as the paradox’s position in the logical sequence of becoming.
20. Hegel, Science of Logic, 60 (cf. Palm, Hegel’s Concept of Sublation, 51; Hegel, SL 83; HW 5/83–EA). The emphasis is Hegel’s.
21. Ibid., 80 (SL 105; HW 5/112–EA); 53–54. The emphasis is Hegel’s.
22. Palm, Hegel’s Concept of Sublation, 56.
23. Hegel, Science of Logic, 741–744.
24. David Gray Carlson, A Commentary on Hegel’s Science of Logic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 21.
25. Hegel, Science of Logic, 744–746.
26. Ibid., 744 (12.245). The emphasis is Hegel’s.
27. HFM, 165. Sittlichkeit is also a difficult term that Hegel employs throughout his work. Perhaps an oversimplistic translation would be the concept of ethical life or order within society.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 166.
30. Ibid. In an aside on page 166, Westphal readily admits that this is not the standard definition of secularism and that by calling into question the concept old secularism, his intention is “to call attention to an important observable feature of the secularization process,” namely its relationship to the adage “if God is dead everything is permitted.”
31. Ibid., 168–169. On the point of idolatry, Westphal argues this is particularly clear in the case of “nuclear nationalism,” where “we are prepared to incinerate millions … simply because they happen to belong to another people.” Invoking the term holocaust, a religious word used to denote burnt offerings and sacrifices for personal sins, he argues that it has come to stand for a sacrifice to a different god: “If we ask who is the god to whom human life on this unprecedented scale, along with human civilization and the earth’s atmosphere, are to be sacrificed, the answer is clear: the nation” (169).
32. This American political movement gained in popularity through the 1980s and 1990s; Vice President Dan Quayle evoked it when reprimanding the television character Murphy Brown (in the eponymously titled show Murphy Brown) for having a baby out of wedlock. Westphal’s example is dated but still relevant given the rise of popular conservative cable television news and radio programs that trace their roots to the rise of the Moral Majority. For a history, see David Bromley and Anson Shupe, New Christian Politics (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), esp. “Part II: Sources of Social Support for the New Christian Right,” 61–113. For the specifically televangelical bent, see Doug Banwart, “Jerry Falwell, the Rise of the Moral Majority, and the 1980 Election,” Western Illinois Historical Review, no. 5 (Spring 2013): 133–157.
33. HFM, 170.
34. Ibid., 172.
35. It seems that Westphal anticipated the “prosperity gospel” movement that emerged in the coming decade.
36. Ibid., 172.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 172–174.
39. Ibid., 177.
40. Ibid.
41. Westphal calls this a sectarian epistemology, denoting that it is not just society turning a blind eye toward its own principles; instead, society comes to know and understand the world only through this self-interested selectivity. One not only sees what one wants to see, but one is fooled by one’s own self-interests into thinking that this is all there is to see. See ibid., 174.
42. Ibid., 178.
43. Ibid., 178.
44. Looking at Westphal’s source material on religion’s role in the state, primarily Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, helps us understand his use of the term. In section 270, Hegel details his notion of the state where, in the Zusätz, he states that religion can be used as a tool of indifference or, at worse, oppression. However, religion’s necessity to the state can be seen “when we go back to their conception,” or before religion is taken up by the state. “Religion has as its content absolute truth,” Hegel continues, “and, therefore, also the highest kind of feeling.” G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, 2001), 206. Religion’s orientation toward absolute truth found in God, as the “unlimited basis and cause of all things,” lends itself to becoming the foundation of the state’s ethics. However, the purely secular state concerns itself with laws and duties, Hegel argues, which lends the ethical system its determinate reality. “Religion, so interpreted,” Hegel concludes, “is the foundation of the ethical system, and contains the nature of the state as the divine will; yet it is only the foundation. This is the point at which the state and religion separate. The state is the divine will as a present spirit, which unfolds itself in the actual shape of an organized world” (Philosophy of Right, 207). Hegel, here, is explicating the ethical system as an Aufhebung of religion and the secular state, which Westphal then takes as the paradigm for his old secularism and new theocracy.
45. LKD, 133: “Similarly,” Westphal argues, “Kierkegaard’s positive account of the self is in ethical terms, for example the absolute duty to God with which De Silentio explicates the teleological suspension of Sittlichkeit and Christendom.” See also LKD, 53–54, 72, 105, 106, 133–136, 160n18; KCRS, 76–82, 109; BS, 29. These are but a few examples of a recurring theme.
46. Westphal is consistent when introducing his concept of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspensions—as if he always takes the minority position (or, at least, is talking to non-Kierkegaardian scholars) and therefore has to explicate it nearly every time. This creates a pattern in his work, but to simplify things, we primarily examine Westphal’s thought in Becoming a Self.
To find the pattern yourself, see LKD, 53–57; BS, 24–29, 91–93, 115–123, 154–158, 160–167, 194–199; KCRS, 30–32, 76–83; TST, 207–213, 217–219; Merold Westphal, “Johannes and Johannes: Kierkegaard and Difference,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, ed. Robert Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer Press, 1994), 14–15, 19–25, 31–31; Westphal, “Kierkegaard and Hegel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76–101. This latter essay, in addition to describing the complicated relationship between the two thinkers, excellently describes how Westphal’s sees the connections and dialogue between Kierkegaard’s authors that develops into a cohesive narrative and discussion on Hegelian concepts such as Sittlichkeit and Aufhebung.
See also Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B,” in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (London: Humanities Press, 1992), 111–114; Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Religiousness C: A Defense,” in International Philosophical Quarterly 44:4 (2004): 537–542, 546–548; Westphal, “Abraham and Sacrifice,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 50:3–4 (2008): 320–321; Westphal, “Kierkegaard on Language and Spirit,” in Language and Spirit, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 72–73, 78–79 (see also the dialogue between Westphal and other scholars at 87–88).
47. For further elaboration on how these pseudonyms engage in dialogue with each other, see Westphal, “Johannes and Johannes.”
48. Note the Hegelian character of Westphal’s reading of these ‘authors.’ For reference, the first three chapters of Becoming a Self set the stage for Westphal’s method of reading Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, see especially BS, 20–21, 25–26, 29–30. With regard to Kierkegaard having the final say in Works of Love, what Westphal will eventually call Religiousness C, see BS, 194–200. I explore these matters further in chapter 4.
49. BS, 24–25. He is quoting from Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part II, trans. William and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 31. See also Either/Or Part II, 21, 30, 56–57, 61, 94, 253.
50. Westphal, “Kierkegaard and Hegel,” 106.
51. Philosophy of Right, §161. Westphal also uses this example of marriage in HFM, 179–180.
52. Philosophy of Right, §162.
53. Ibid., §163.
54. BS, 26, 39.
55. Ibid., 145. The context in which Westphal raises this comparison of Aufhebung and teleological suspension is in discussing the relationship between Philosophical Fragments and its sequel, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. On pages 303–309 of Postscript (Cambridge, 2009), Climacus—the author of both works—discusses the relationship between Hegel and Christendom, particularly as regards ‘becoming’ a Christian through baptism. The issue at hand is whether simply performing a ritual can legitimate the act of becoming Christian; the child cannot assent, and many baptize their children out of custom. This concerns Climacus (echoed by Westphal on pages 144–148 of Becoming a Self) about the role of mediation in faith, particularly with respect to Sittlichkeit and its ‘regulating’ of faith. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, chapter 4, §1.
56. At page 102 of “Kierkegaard and Hegel,” Westphal draws this out to show how Kierkegaard is simultaneously mocking and praising Hegel through his allegory of the dancer who could leap so high that he thought he could fly (Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 124). The dancer represents Hegel, and the dancer can clearly leap higher than any other dancer to great praise. The dancer fails by believing that a great leap is equal to flight.
57. For Religiousness C, see chapter 4. In short, Westphal discovers this hidden stage when placing the theory of stages alongside Works of Love.
58. For example, when Religiousness A (a religious sentiment with divine aims but settles for self-legitimization/Sittlichkeit) is taken up by Religiousness B (a Christ-centered religiousness that focuses the believer toward living Christ-like), does it negate anything within Jesus Christ or his teachings?
59. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 186.
60. Ibid., 187.
61. At page 187 of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus states: “Speculation says by no means that Christianity is untruth; on the contrary, it says that speculation grasps its truth.” This, for Kierkegaard, is the greatest act of hubris (see 189–196).
62. Although Climacus regards this ‘average Christian’ as “plain folk,” it is partially untrue; in various places Kierkegaard recalls the difficulty that all Christians face in accepting the paradox of Christianity and of Jesus’ nature, which is why Religiousness B is the last stage. However, here the ‘average Christian’ is an idealized concept—like the term simple soul he uses on 191—to distance the true Christian from the Danish Hegelians and Christendom that is his primary target.
63. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 187–188, emphasis is mine.
64. Jack Mulder Jr., “Re-radicalizing Kierkegaard: An Alternative to Religiousness C,” in Continental Philosophy Review 35 (2002): 303–324; Henry Piper, “Kierkegaard’s Non-Dialectical Dialectic or That Kierkegaard Is Not Hegelian,” in International Philosophical Quarterly 44, no. 4 (December 2004): 496–518. See chapter 4.
65. Mulder, “Re-Radicalizing Kierkegaard,” 304, 309, 311–312, 314, 321; Piper, “Kierkegaard’s Non-Dialectical Dialectic,” 498–499, 503, 510–518.
66. Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Religiousness C.” For example, Westphal asks, “Is it not evident that a teleological suspension has the form of an Hegelian Aufhebung?” and notes that while “Judge William does not use the language of teleological suspension or Aufhebung,… the structure is plainly visible, the same structure that [De] Silentio calls a teleological suspensions in a case where it is the ethical (society’s requirements) that is relativized vis-à-vis the religious (God’s requirement)” (546).
67. Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Religiousness C,” 547, emphasis is mine.
68. Also, picking up a fallen book is not paradoxical, but I stand with Kaufmann in believing that this is a typical everyday usage of the term.
69. “There is something (formally) Hegelian in my account of Kierkegaard’s dialectic, but if by ‘temporizing’ is meant a softening that calls for a re-radicalization of Kierkegaard, as it clearly does for Piper, I ask the court for a verdict of directed acquittal on the grounds that a plausible prima facie case has not been made.” Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Religiousness C,” 547–548.