Rethinking Philosophy in

Light of the Bible

 Graven Images
Series Editor
Leonard V. Kaplan
University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Graven Images Series is intent upon publishing intellectual contemplation from the
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Titles in the Series

The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law

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Edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and Charles L. Cohen

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Cognitive Justice in a Global World

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Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible: From Kant to Schopenhauer

By Brayton Polka
Rethinking Philosophy in
Light of the Bible

From Kant to Schopenhauer

Brayton Polka

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Polka, Brayton.
Rethinking philosophy in light of the Bible : from Kant to Schopenhauer / Brayton Polka.
pages cm. – (Graven images)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 1

2 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 21
3 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique
of Christendom 53
4 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the
Essence of Christianity 93
5 Conclusion 153

Bibliography 159
Index 167
About the Author 177

v
 Acknowledgments

I want to thank the faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York
University for the financial support that it provided for the publication of my
book. I am additionally grateful to friends, colleagues (at York University
and elsewhere), students (both former and current), and staff members (at
York) for their kindness and generosity in helping me bring my book to
completion. But they are too numerous to name here. Still, I do want to
thank, in particular, four individuals without whose kind and generous sup-
port I would not have been able to make my book a reality. It was Andrew D.
Weiner, then professor of English at the University of Wisconsin and coedi-
tor of Graven Images, who originally introduced me to his series by inviting
me to contribute to what was at that time an annual volume of essays. His co-
editor, Leonard V. Kaplan, professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin
and now the editor of Graven Images as a book series, enthusiastically wel-
comed my book to his series. I am truly grateful to both Andy and Len for
their warm support. I also thank Judith Hawley, Graduate Program Assistant
in Social and Political Thought at York University, for ensuring the prompt
dispatch of my manuscript to the publisher. Finally, I want to thank Jason
Hoult, a graduate student at York, who, as my Research Assistant, helped me
make the final revisions to my book.

vii
 Chapter One

Introduction:
The Kantian Revolution in
Metaphysics

The aim that I have in my book is to show that, if we are to have a true
concept of philosophy, a concept of philosophy that is true to itself, we must
comprehend philosophy as biblical in origin, both ontologically and histori-
cally. Consistent with my earlier studies, the most recent of which have been
on Shakespeare and Spinoza, I argue how important it is to overcome the
dualistic opposition, so common today, between philosophy and theology,
between reason and faith, and between the secular and the religious. I con-
centrate here on the three philosophers that I consider the most important in
modernity: Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard (dwarves standing on the shoulders
of giants: Descartes and, above all, Spinoza). It is gripping to encounter
Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard when and as situated within a shared ontologi-
cal and historical framework. While they are, as distinctive thinkers, signifi-
cantly different from each other, their differences, we shall see, are to be
understood within a common philosophical framework that presupposes bib-
lical, not Greek metaphysics. I conclude my book, however, with Feuerbach
and Schopenhauer in order to show how untrue philosophy becomes insofar
as it is based on a distorted and, indeed, false conception of biblical ideas,
above all, in their Christian representation.
The issues, then, that confront us—both author and reader—in this study
are at once endlessly challenging and profoundly engaging. For we take on
the most demanding of modern thinkers in placing them, historically and
ontologically, within the context of the question that was famously posed by
Tertullian, the first Christian theologian who wrote in Latin, c. 200 CE: What
does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What is the relationship between
1
2 Introduction

philosophy (the love of wisdom) and theology (the logos or Word of God)?
What, in other words, is the relationship between reason and faith, between
philosophy and theology, between, we can say, Plato and Aristotle, on the
one hand, and Moses and Jesus, on the other. It will be evident, then, that, in
addition to considering the relationship between modern (biblical) and an-
cient (Greek) philosophy, we shall also be required to think through the
relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (keeping in
mind that the Christian Bible includes the “Old” Testament of the Jews),
between Judaism and Christianity. (I shall not be concerned here with the
third Abrahamic religion, Islam.)
I shall argue, consistent with Kant and Hegel, that the fundamental myth
of modernity is the biblical story of the Fall, of the “fall” of Adam and Eve
from paradisiacal ignorance into conscious responsibility for knowing good
and evil. As Spinoza points out, Adam and Eve “before” the fall were not
free to fall: freedom is coincident with knowledge of good and evil. Both
freedom and the responsibility for knowing good and evil, for doing good
and combating (overcoming) evil, come into existence with the covenantal
relations that, in the beginning, from the beginning, the ancient Israelites
constitute with God according to the accounts of the five books of Moses and
then as elaborated in the subsequent histories, prophecies, and wisdom litera-
ture of Hebrew Scripture and re-elaborated in the four Gospels and in the key
Epistles of Paul, 1 John, and James of the New Testament. In other words,
the inspired authors of Genesis narrate the story of Adam and Eve (in fact,
they tell two stories brought together in one) as if it takes place in the real,
physical space and the actual, chronological time of a garden of nature,
although with a serpent unnaturally sapient and with two trees bearing unnat-
ural fruit, one of the knowledge of good and evil and the other of immortal
life.
But what the authors of Genesis actually show us—what they show us to
be their aim—is that their story, in violating the inviolable law of contradic-
tion, must and, therefore, is to be understood as paradox. The contradiction
central to the story of Adam and Eve—recall Spinoza!—is that human beings
who are made in the image of God do not begin, naturally, ignorant of good
and evil. The contradiction is that the state of nature is contradictory. The
paradox is that human beings begin their lives, not in nature but in the
covenant with the responsibility of knowing, like God, good and evil in
loving their neighbor as themselves. The paradox is that life lived eternally in
and through relationship with God and neighbor in the covenant involves
conception in both flesh and spirit, labor in both flesh and spirit, and the
death of the flesh the comprehension of which by spirit as history involves
what the Latins call the saecula saeculorum, the historical age comprehend-
ing all the ages subject to natural chronos and so representing the kingdom of
God. Thus, Paul, citing the prophets Isaiah and Hosea, writes:
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 3

Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting? (1 Cor. 15.54–55 1 )

The immortality of the soul that flourishes naturally, that is, contradictori-
ly, in the Bible’s Garden of Eden is championed by Plato and Aristotle as the
logical conclusion that follows naturally from the indemonstrable first princi-
ple of the law of contradiction. According to the fatal logic of contradiction,
you can know if someone (say, Priam or Oedipus) is a happy man only if he
is not, i.e., only if he has attained his end (in death). Because the end (of life)
is known only in death, it is solely the immortal (dead) man who can truly be
said to have attained the end of his life, life’s end. For, just as the living man
can be said to be only when he is at his end, i.e., when he is not (living but
dead), so it is solely the dead man who, as immortal, can be said truly to be
(living). Yet, this is also patently contradictory. For, as Achilles (contradic-
torily) tells Odysseus, who (in violation of the law of contradiction) visits,
according to Homer’s account in the Odyssey, Book 11, the dead hero in the
underground, it is better to be (a) living (mortal), unheroic peasant who is not
(at his dead end) than to be an immortal hero who is at his (dead) end. But
thus we see that, according to the law of contradiction, to be (living) is not to
be (dead) and not to be (living) is to be (dead). But which is one: living or
dead, being or non-being? The answer, however, is unknowable. For, since,
according to the Greeks, nothing (living) can come from nothing (dead),
everything (living) comes from everything (dead). (This proposition is
contradictorily reversible.) To be (living) can be and is knowable only in and
through its contradictory end, not to be (dead); and not to be (dead) can be
and is knowable only in and through its contradictory end, to be (living).
This contradictory conception of natural life as found in paganism, ac-
cording to whose fatal law of contradiction immortal life is the end of mortal-
ity, i.e., its dead end, is not that which is presupposed by the authors of
Genesis in their story of Adam and Eve. They tell their contradictory story in
order, rather, to show that it is only in and through the covenant, in embrac-
ing life as the end of death, that pagan contradiction can be overcome by
paradox: the paradox that life is created from nothing, from nothing that is
found in the contradictory space and time of nature, from nothing that is
dead. But, paradoxically, then, to live (to be) means to embrace death, not as
the end of life but as the redemption, the liberation, of life from death. So
Edgar, in King Lear, after coming upon his father Gloucester, who, having
earlier, blindly ordered his son’s death, is now blind and, overwhelmed by
the despair in willing to be himself, 2 seeks his own death, remarks in an
aside, with infinite compassion, love, and hope: “the worst is not / So long as
we can say ‘This is the worst’” (4.1.28–29). Or as Spinoza writes in the
Ethics: “No one can desire to be blessed, to act well and to live well, who at
4 Introduction

the same time does not desire to be, to act, and to live, that is, actually to
exist” (4.21). The good life, the blessed life is not found outside of the desire
to be, to act, to live, “that is, actu existere.”
Death for those in the biblical tradition is not the end of life. Rather,
life—the desire to exist—is the end of death. Death can be truly compre-
hended only by those who desire, actually, to exist. Indeed, Edgar proceeds
to stage for his despairing, blind father the paradox of the Fall, whereby
Gloucester, in falling (he thinks) from the Cliff of Dover to (his anticipated)
death, finds that, as his son informs him: “Thy life’s a miracle.” In answer to
Gloucester’s question—“Is wretchedness deprived [of] that benefit, / To end
itself by death?”—Edgar responds:

Therefore, thou happy father,

Think that the clearest [i.e., most illustrious] gods, who make them
[i.e., for themselves] honors
Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee. (4.6.55–74)

The (divine) miracle of life, whereby human beings overcome the contradic-
tory impossibilities of life, is the paradox that one is not blessedly immortal
(at one’s dead end) either prior to or posterior to coming into existence. For
immortal blessedness is the self-conscious realization that death is not the
worst so long as I can say, actually existing, it is the worst. But what if I say,
with Schopenhauer, that death, the extinction of all desire actually to exist, is
the best, the true blessing of life? Is not, however, the desire to extinguish
desire, the desire not to desire the ultimate contradiction whose impossibility
reflects the illusory reduction of life to the very nothing from which it is
created? This illusory contradiction is unknown in paganism but is the risk,
always, for those in the biblical tradition to whom the return to the Garden of
Eden, from which they have been eternally expelled into life, is barred.
Nihilism—the view that the sacrifice of life, what Kierkegaard calls self-
denial (in loving the neighbor), is in the service of death, and not of life—is
the dark side of modernity. It is brilliantly portrayed, as we shall see, by
Schopenhauer with his view that individuals, in their struggle for existence,
are but the illusory representation of the eternally unchanging will, the-thing-
itself, whose true reality is the extinction of all consciousness, of all desire, of
all will—utter nothingness. Yet, the issue that is central to this study is how,
recalling Edgar, we can speak of this nothingness without embracing the
paradox, without experiencing the miracle that so long as I can say my life is
nothing it is not “nothing.” Indeed, Nietzsche, in the final sentence of On the
Genealogy of Morals, provides the ultimate refutation of Schopenhauer: man
would rather will nothing than not will.
That existence (life) is the good and nonbeing the evil insofar as death is
made the end of life is but the ontological representative of the golden rule:
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 5

do unto others what you desire others to do unto you. It is true that I may, in
sadomasochistic perversion of the golden rule, undertake to hurt another
individual because I want that individual to hurt me. Still, if I kill the other, I
cannot then want that other in reciprocation to kill me. It is little wonder,
then, that the heroic life of the Greeks is utterly contradictory: it is better for
the hero to kill the other (hero) than to suffer death done to him (the hero) by
the other (hero). Or, in Socrates’ no less heroic and equally contradictory
version: it is better to suffer harm (done to you by others) than to do harm (to
others)—with which, by the way, the Athenian jury, as reported in the Apolo-
gy, fully, i.e., contradictorily, agrees in ordering the death of Socrates.

KANT

Kant initiates self-consciously what I call the modern revolution in meta-

physics with his demonstration that reason is—critically, absolutely, primor-
dially—practice, not theory. To reason is to think the good, to desire the
good, to will the good, to do the good as a subject, now and always. To
reason is not to know the good as a theoretical object that is separate from the
subject and indeed knowable solely by the soul when separate from the body
(i.e., when the subject is dead to life). Kant famously argues that we can
know the thing in itself, what the thing in itself is, solely as an object of
possible, i.e., of empirical or scientific, experience. But we cannot know the
thing in itself, what the thing is in itself. For what the thing is in itself, Kant
demonstrates (yet never tells us directly, so far as I am aware), is the human
person, the human subject, Kierkegaard’s single individual. Indeed, Kant
elegantly demonstrates that that by which we know something (empirically)
we cannot know as we know that thing. Reason is, paradoxically, transcen-
dental yet practical, i.e., what Hegel, following the biblical tradition, calls at
once divine and human. Thus, we can understand that Kant, in distinguishing
between practice and theory, subject and object, person and thing, freedom
and nature, value and fact, ought and is, states at the beginning of The
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that there is one thing only,
whether in or even outside of this world, that can be called good—and, I
would add, evil—in itself, and that is the will. The will, whether human or
divine, is the source of all good—and evil.
Thus, Kant is absolutely consistent with Spinoza who demonstrates in the
Ethics that the good is not what we desire but that, on the contrary, what we
desire is the good—or the evil, I add. Spinoza, in other words, articulates the
absolute difference between Platonic (Greek) metaphysics and biblical meta-
physics. Because the good, for the ancient Greek philosophers, is the object
of desire, it is the good of which human beings remain fatally ignorant. To
desire the good, to seek the good is to demonstrate that you are ignorant of
6 Introduction

the good. As Socrates tells us in the Apology, he knows that he is ignorant

but he does not know what (the good in itself is that) he is ignorant of. In
order for human beings to know what they are ignorant of, as the good in
itself, is to be the good (without any consciousness of the good, i.e., to be
dead). We see, consequently, that Greek metaphysics is shaped by the contra-
dictory opposition between consciousness (thinking), which is ignorant of
the good (of being), and the good of being, of which there is no human
consciousness (thinking). To think—to seek or to desire knowledge—is not
to know what you are (in yourself): all you know is that you know that you
are not what you seek, the good in itself. To know the good in itself is to be
the good, in being identical with it, without any consciousness of it. Thinking
(consciousness) is without being (the good). Being (the good) is without
consciousness. Either consciousness lacks its object in contradictory opposi-
tion to it (following the law of contradiction) or consciousness is its object in
identity with it (following the law of identity). Thus, Spinoza’s demonstra-
tion that the good is not what we desire but that what we desire is the good is
the ethical (and political) articulation of the Cartesian demonstration that
thinking (consciousness) entails existence (the good of life) and vice versa.
It is useful, consequently, to remember that Aristotle sums up Greek
philosophy—following Socrates and Plato—with the observation that things
are knowable in two ways: relative to us and in themselves. The first is what
Socrates, in Platonic dialogue, calls appearance (which is multiple, change-
able, and knowable relative to us). The second is what he calls the form of
the good (which is one, unchanging, and knowable in itself). Socrates thus
teaches that to seek knowledge of the good (as virtue, justice, wisdom, piety)
is to demonstrate that you lack it, that you are ignorant of it. In contrast, to
know the good (in itself) is to be the good (in itself). It follows, then, that
consciousness in the Greek world is ignorance of the good (as the Greek
tragedians, not to mention the comic playwright Aristophanes, demonstrate
in their plays). While, then, consciousness of the good is not to be the good
(to be conscious, to think is to contradict the good of being), to know the
good is to be the good (to be identical with the good is to be without con-
sciousness of the good). We can well understand, then, that Aristotle, in the
Metaphysics, defines God as thought thinking itself (consistent with his anal-
ysis of the activity of soul, in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, as con-
templative imitation of the gods who have no interest in the political or
ethical lives of human beings).
It is little wonder, then, that Kant shows that what he calls transcendental
logic—the logic of desire or the will—is not founded on the Greek logic of
either deduction or induction, both of which are equally powerless to demon-
strate their premises, i.e., their first principles. Indeed, Aristotle acknowl-
edges in the Metaphysics that the first principle of demonstration, the law of
contradiction, is itself indemonstrable. In other words, it rests on our ignor-
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 7

ance (on what is shown to be moira, fate, in Greek tragedy.) We can well
understand, then, that Descartes, in his little-known philosophical dialogue,
entitled The Search for Truth, shows that the principle of modern (i.e., bibli-
cal) metaphysics is not the law of contradiction (together with, we can add,
its two sister laws of identity and the excluded middle) but the law of doubt.
For to doubt everything that exists is to prove the existence of, at one and the
same time, the subject doubting and the subject doubted. Thus, we have the
ontological argument, which Descartes, following in the footsteps of St. An-
selm in the late eleventh century, makes the basis of his Meditations on First
Philosophy and that Spinoza formulates at the beginning of his Ethics: there
is one thing that cannot be thought, by me, without necessarily existing, and
that is God, i.e., the other, the neighbor. As Hegel summarizes the ontologi-
cal argument in the Introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit: conscious-
ness thinks something: consciousness has an object. We can well understand
that St. Anselm, true to the Bible, shows that the doubting Thomas of the
Psalms, the fool who, more than two millennia before Nietzsche, says in his
heart that there is no God, has to be saying (communicating) something
meaningful both to himself and to us. For, if he is speaking nonsense,
then . . . God may not be what others (in the Bible) say God is, but to doubt
the existence of God, to doubt that God exists, is to demonstrate that you are
thinking something. There is content to your thought. Something exists that
is other than your thought, however adequate or inadequate your conception
(thought, image . . .) of it may be.
It is Kant, as I indicated above, who brings to a climax the revolution in
modern metaphysics inaugurated by Descartes and Spinoza in the seven-
teenth century. He poses in the preface of the second edition of The Critique
of Pure Reason (1787) what he recognizes, with unprecedented lucidity, to
be the rational choice, the faithful decision in distinguishing, between ancient
metaphysics and modern (biblical) metaphysics—in solidarity with Kierke-
gaard and Hamlet. Either/or: to be or not to be. Either the mind depends on
objects (as found in the traditional and hopelessly contradictory metaphysics
that Leibniz champions and Hume consigns to the flames). Or objects de-
pend on the mind (as represented paradoxically in the brilliantly successful,
revolutionary new science of Copernicus and Galileo and their successors).
Kant famously declares in his preface that he discovered that he had to limit
knowledge (i.e., theoretical reason) to objects as found in the space and time
of nature in order to save metaphysics as the (historical) realm of practical
reason (will), of subjects.
Kant demonstrates four critically significant points, at once ontological
and historical, in posing his either-or choice. First, it is only when objects are
understood to depend on the mind that we can properly claim to possess not
only universally and necessarily valid, scientific knowledge of nature (the
objects of possible experience, Kant calls them)—which Hume denied—but
8 Introduction

also, yet more importantly for Kant, universally and necessarily true princi-
ples of ethical relations—of which Hume despaired—according to which
self-determining human subjects, who, in doing unto others what they desire
others to do unto them, are freely responsible for treating all human beings as
things-in-themselves, as persons, and not as instrumental means (or things of
nature). The paradox, then, that Kant makes central to modernity is that we
can have truly reliable, scientific knowledge of the objects of nature or, in
other words, properly objective knowledge, if and only if it is understood that
objects depend on the mind of subjects, for whom reason constitutes and is
constituted by their moral practice.
The second point that Kant demonstrates, in posing his either-or choice—
with all of the irony of the indirect communication of Kierkegaard!—is that
we have no choice. We have already chosen (we have already been chosen).
For, as Rousseau had previously made clear, human beings, notwithstanding
the profound alienation that they experience in and through the unnatural,
social relations prevailing today, cannot choose, cannot freely will to give up
their own freedom and return to the state of nature (for the only basis of
judging social relations as unjust is the free, unalienated self). We cannot
choose not to choose. We cannot choose to enslave our mind, our will, our
self to objects (or to those who would treat us as objects or things). We are
not free not to be free. (All choices not to choose, all claims to deny freedom
will always, and must always, be freely interpreted as distortions or perver-
sions of freedom.) In Kierkegaard’s terms: either believe (that objects depend
on the mind) or be offended (by your failed attempt to turn your free mind or
self into an unfree object or thing dependent on or enslaved to nature).
In showing that objects depend on the mind Kant makes yet a third point.
He demonstrates that it is only then that we are able to justify (to show the
justice of) metaphysics as constituting and being constituted by the practical
postulates of morality (practical reason): freedom, God, and immortality.
Metaphysics belongs, not to theoretical reason (whose domain is scientific
knowledge of objects), but to practical reason, which he identifies with will,
thinking, and desire and thus with the practice of human subjects in deter-
mining for and among themselves the kingdom of ends. Human beings are
free only when they are subject to the laws of which they are themselves the
author (which Rousseau calls the general will). In other words, metaphysics
is the domain of ethics (and politics). To recall the radically succinct formu-
lation of Spinoza: we do not desire the good (as that on which the mind is
ignorantly dependent); rather, what we desire, as thinking individuals, is the
good (as that which is dependent on the mind, which Spinoza calls conatus
and Kant desire or will). Truth belongs to subjects; it does not adhere in
objects. Truth is the self-determination of subjects. Thus, we have seen that
Kant dramatically begins The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
with the avowal that there is one thing only in or even outside of the world
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 9

that is good (and so also evil) in itself, and that is the will (whether human or
divine). “Truth is subjectivity”—in the inimitable formulation of Kierke-
gaard.
But thus we arrive at Kant’s fourth point, where ontology (the metaphys-
ics of morals) directly engages history. The either/or choice is, historically,
the “choice” between the new metaphysics of modernity and the “old” meta-
physics of the Greeks—with the second generally known within Christen-
dom in and through the variously diverse versions of Neoplatonism (as based
on the conflation of Christian doctrines with ideas taken from Plato, Aristo-
tle, and the Stoics). But the new metaphysics is, mirabile dictu, the original
(creative) ontology of the Bible, according to which human beings as self-
determining, free subjects are created from nothing, from nothing that is
found in natural objects. Indeed, human beings are made in the image of God
(God is the true image of man)—knowing (i.e., determining within the cove-
nant) good and evil. The story of the Fall, of Adam and Eve, as Kant and,
above all, Hegel show us, as we shall see in the next chapter, is the story, not
of the punishment of humankind, as found in distorted versions of Christian-
ity, including Schopenhauer’s, but of their salvation, of their liberation in and
through the covenant of knowing good as the golden rule of loving your
neighbor as yourself and evil as not treating others as you desire to be treated.

HEGEL AND KIERKEGAARD

Having outlined in some detail the Kantian revolution in modern metaphys-

ics, I shall, in this introductory chapter, indicate more briefly how Hegel and
Kierkegaard advance boldly and resolutely along the critical path of subjec-
tivity cleared by Kant, whereupon the desire on the part of human beings
actually to exist determines for them the good (in contrast to the ancient
Greeks for whom the good is that on which they fatally depend as the end of
their life, as the dead end of life, as that which brings their life to its end in
death). Both Hegel and Kierkegaard are absolutely true to the Kantian con-
cept of reason as practice, to the idea that reason as will constitutes the good,
together with the evil, in our life. But each of these two thinkers advances the
Kantian concept of will as rational practice, as willing the good that is uni-
versally true for all human beings, in distinctive ways. 3 Hegel comprehends
the human will as Spirit (Geist), a uniquely biblical concept (as found in the
prophets and Paul, among others). Hegel conceives of Spirit as historical,
indeed, as history, as the infinite self-consciousness of history. For it is
precisely what Hegel calls the historical process of mutual recognition—
Spirit recognizing Spirit—that constitutes history, consistent with the story
of creation in Genesis that human beings are created from nothing, from
nothing that is not creative. They are not generated by and from nature, as all
10 Introduction

extrabiblical peoples hold about themselves and their gods, but are created in
the image of God. The paradox that God is not found outside his image—
which is man—and that man is not found outside his image—which is
God—shows us how fundamentally different is the imago dei from Platonic
appearance. Images, human reflections, human ideas are real—as the prac-
tice of thinking, desiring, willing human beings, consistent with Descartes’
demonstration that the reality of the world is constituted by cogito, ergo sum:
To think is to exist (to exist is to think). However, because images, or ideas,
are the product of human thinking, of human will, of human practice, we
constantly have to distinguish them from idols, from false ideas. It is little
wonder, then, that, as we shall soon learn from Kant and Hegel, it is only
when Adam and Eve are to be expelled from immortal life of the natural
garden of paradise for the covenantal life of conception, labor, and death that
God reminds them of the serpent’s message: you are like me in knowing
good and evil. Sin, we see, is a blessing—what St. Augustine calls the felix
culpa, the happy sin. For it is only in willing the good that we become
responsible for knowing evil, for the evil things that we do. It is important,
consequently, to remember, always, that “knowledge” of good and evil
means not knowledge of objects but the responsibility of subjects for the
good and for the evil that they do.
Kierkegaard is particularly interesting for us when situated in the context
of Kant and Hegel, because he writes, he tells us, as a private individual. He
is not a professor of philosophy, like his two great predecessors. Nor is he an
official of the church, whether theologian or priest. Indeed, Kierkegaard
makes clear to us that he writes without authority, without the authority of
either lectern or pulpit. Thus, he does not claim to write as a Christian. At the
same time, however, he makes absolutely clear that he knows what it means
to be a Christian, something that he finds that most of his contemporaries,
whether Christians or not, have forgotten. For, as his pseudonymous author
in Fear and Trembling tells us, everyone today, in our progressive nineteenth
century, thinks that, while they cannot go beyond Hegel, they can go beyond
Abraham, beyond faith, beyond loving their neighbor as themselves, to recall
the later Works of Love that Kierkegaard wrote in his own name. The distinc-
tive note that Kierkegaard then adds to Kantian reason as practice and to
Hegelian Spirit as infinitely historical self-consciousness is what it means to
be a loving, faithful human being who, in being constantly tested by coming
historically, now and forever, into existence, experiences the fear and trem-
bling of Abraham. Indeed, we learn in the work of that title that, if faith has
always existed, then it has never existed. It follows, then, that, if God has
always existed eternally, then God never existed eternally. It is evident, to
recall Kant, that God is not an object to be known but the subject of truth that
I bring necessarily—freely—into existence by thinking, desiring, willing the
good. I cannot and do not think (will) outside of (without) the existence of
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 11

the other. The other cannot and does not exist outside of (without) my think-
ing (desiring, willing).
And so we return to the ontological argument: there is one thing that
cannot be thought, willed, desired, . . . by me without existing necessarily
(freely), and that is the necessary existence of the neighbor, whom I am
commanded to love as myself. The paradox of love (as of faith, as of
thought) is that there is no love outside of self-love, the love of self. But it is
no less true that you cannot think, you cannot exist outside of (without) the
necessary (i.e., the free) existence of the other whose thinking, desire, love
brings you into existence. There is no first person and, equally, no second
person—whether historically or ontologically. In the beginning, Martin Bu-
ber tells us, is the relationship of self and other, the I-thou relationship of
neighbors, in which each person in the relationship is at once I and you. I
address you, the other person. But you are I in addressing me as you. I do not
exist outside of (without) you—both you the other person whom I address
and I the other person whom you address. You do not exist outside of (with-
out) I (me)—both you the other person who addresses me and you the other
person whom I address. But thus we see that God, no less than man, is at
once I and you: I in addressing the other (you) and you in being addressed by
the other (I). God, like man, is a subject, not an object. So, just as God is not
a supernatural object but a covenantal partner, so man is not a natural object
but a partner in a loving relationship. Kierkegaard, it turns out, as we shall
see, is no less radical or revolutionary than Kant and Hegel in confronting us
with the truth, at once historical and ontological, of (the biblical inheritance
of) Christianity.
Hegel, in writing as one authorized by occupying a preeminent chair of
philosophy (although he cannot and does not claim to speak with the doctri-
nal authority of a church theologian) and Kierkegaard, in writing as one
unauthorized by occupying no public position and denying that he speaks by
his own authority (but only pseudonymously) or that he writes as a Christian
(although he has no doubt that he knows what it means to be a Christian):
these two thinkers constitute for us, their successors, an extraordinary alli-
ance, a remarkable confluence of ideas (one that few philosophers and schol-
ars, and perhaps only theologians, have subsequently grasped). They see,
from radically different yet altogether convergent perspectives, that, precise-
ly because biblical religion (they call it Christianity) is founded on the doc-
trine of creatio ex nihilo, of creation from nothing that is found in the space
and time of nature as subject to the law of contradiction, ontology and history
enter into paradoxical relationship. Ontology, the logos of being, is the crea-
tion of history. History, then, is the creative story of ontology. God and man
meet in and through the relationship that is at once ontological and historical
and is known in the Bible as the covenant. We find, then, the following,
extended question posed on the title page of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical
12 Introduction

Fragments (1844): “Can a historical point of departure be given for an eter-

nal consciousness; . . . can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowl-
edge?” The paradoxical answer, already provided by Kierkegaard in Fear
and Trembling, is that, if God always existed (eternally), prior to creation, as
it were, then he never existed (creatively). In the terms of Fragments, God,
together with man, comes into existence historically. If eternal being is not
historical, then it does not exist (but is merely cyclical like the natural turning
of the seasons). If historical being is not eternal, then it does not exist (but is
merely relative like the natural passing of individual human beings from
birth to death). Thus, Hegel writes in his Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion, surely his greatest work, yet one that is virtually ignored by modern
thinkers and scholars, that, because the divine attributes of God (omnipo-
tence, omniscience, eternity, etc.) articulate his relationship with human be-
ings, God is not known or knowable outside of his historical relationship
with human beings. God, like man, does not exist “prior” to creation from
nothing—from nothing that does not constitute the paradoxical relationship
that is history.
Both Hegel and Kierkegaard are acutely aware, consequently, that it is the
historical self-consciousness of biblical man—his self-referential awareness
that, because God is the eternal good of his existence, God is and must be the
historical creation of his desire—that at one and the same time distinguishes
biblical ontology from the ontology of the ancient Greeks and constitutes it
as modern in being at once the beginning and the end of history. Thus, let us
attend, yet again, to the mordant theme whose dissonant note is sounded
throughout Fear and Trembling: that in our advanced and ever advancing
nineteenth century everyone wants to go further. Everyone wants to go fur-
ther than Abraham, further than faith, further than Christianity—by returning
to Socrates, together with Plato and Aristotle and the tragedians. But Socra-
tes, Kierkegaard dryly observes, never claims to go further, further than
Homer and his successors, the tragedians. For what the poets show us in their
ignorance of the good, Socrates observes, is that, because you cannot begin
without knowing your end, you never begin in the world of appearances.
Thus, he points out in the Phaedo that the philosophos, in desiring wisdom,
must be dead in order to arrive in the end at knowledge of the good as his
beginning. In the Electra of Euripides we learn that the entire drama of the
Trojan War, concluding (apparently) with Athena’s arbitrary decision to save
Orestes from the furies (for the goddess declares that, on the scales of divine
justice, the killing of unheroic mothers, e.g., Clytemnestra by Orestes, is
outweighed by the killing of heroic husbands, e.g., Agamemnon by Clytem-
nestra), never began. Helen

never went to Troy.

Zeus fashioned and dispatched a Helen-image there
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 13

To Ilium [i.e., Troy] so men might die in hate and blood. (1281–83)

The abduction of Helen by Paris is a “myth” or a “lie” told by the poets in

whose web of endless contradiction human beings are enveloped. Indeed,
Socrates points out in the Apology (and also explains to Phaedrus in the later
dialogue of that name) that the poets (like the philosophers) are ignorant of
the truth: they do not know what they are talking about—given the radical
opposition between rhetoric (persuasion) and wisdom. To speak is not to
know the good. To know the good is not to speak. Where speech is, the good
is not. Where the good is, speech is not. To speak to, for, and of the living is
to demonstrate that you are, all of you, living within speech and so ignorant
of your end, of your good. To have knowledge of your end, your good, is to
be dead to speech. What is spoken (by the living) cannot be known as the
end. What is known (by the dead) as the end cannot be spoken.
The idea that advanced thinkers and artists of the nineteenth century—for
example, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and Wagner—want to go further than
Abraham, further than Christian faith, further than the myth of Adam and
Eve by returning to the Greeks, to the pagan myth of the universality of
nature, is brilliantly captured by Kierkegaard in the hermeneutical distinction
that he makes between Christianity and Christendom. While Christianity
represents, we can say, historically critical, self-conscious man whose desire
(practice) determines existence as the good, Christendom represents Chris-
tianity rationalized behind the façade of pagan rhetoric and includes, above
all, the illusory idea that salvation for Christians involves their reward in an
afterlife (the immortality of the soul), to whose supernatural end natural
existence on earth is for bodily men and women but a means. Everyone in
Christendom wants to go further, further than faith in this life, further than
faith in the creativeness of history, consistent with rationalized paganism
according to which mortal life (as lived in the body) represents the death of
life and immortal life (as lived in the soul) represents the life of death. The
other name, then, of Christendom is idolatry, which was unknown in the
pagan world.
The reason that idolatry (like false prophecy) lurks within the shadow of
Christianity as Christendom and is not found in paganism is precisely be-
cause speech (what Derrida calls writing) within the biblical tradition embod-
ies the good. The good is not known outside human self-consciousness,
outside human thought or desire, outside human community, outside human
history, outside human communication or expressiveness (there is no outside
text, no outside good). In the beginning (as in the end) is the logos, i.e.,
speech as the conversation rationally carried on by human beings of good
faith. But the fact that speech does not exist outside of the good (of what we
will to be the good) and that the good (the ensemble of our human values)
14 Introduction

does not exist outside of speech explains why it is that our speech hides
countless idols and that idols shadow all our speech.
Indeed, Kierkegaard points out that the greatest challenge confronting
those who are born Christians in the nineteenth century is to become a Chris-
tian, i.e., a human being whose faith involves coming historically into exis-
tence as the contemporary of the truth of the God-man. The individual who is
contemporaneous with the truth is not satisfied with being a disciple at first
hand, i.e., with being the one who can directly testify to having seen the man
Jesus with his own eyes or heard him with his own ears or touched him with
his own lips or hands yet cannot actually testify to having “seen” or “heard”
or “kissed” the God-man, that is, his neighbor as the other whom he must
love as his very true self, as the divine (absolute or infinite) truth of himself.
Nor is the individual who is contemporaneous with the truth satisfied with
being a disciple at second hand, i.e., with being the one who, a faithful
congregant, can testify to the reality of the historical Jesus as directly trans-
mitted to him by church tradition. Indeed, direct communication as found in
Christendom, whether that of immediate sensation (according to which see-
ing, by way of immediate perception, is believing) or that of immediate
cognition (according to which knowing, by way of immediate tradition, is
believing), is idolatry. All true communication, all communication of the
truth involves what Hegel calls mediation or relationship (Spirit recognizing
Spirit) and what Kierkegaard calls freedom, conscience, action, decision: I
must will, I must decide, I must choose to believe. Faith is not doctrine but
practice. It is precisely because communication involves and expresses an act
of responsibility, an act of faith, that we human beings are subject, always, to
the sin of idolatry. In contrast, neither immediate sensation nor immediate
cognition—the first contingent and relative (inductive logic), the second nec-
essary and eternal (deductive logic)—deceives or errs (sins). For their errors
are correctable, for example, as a mistaken fact or an incorrect application of
logic. Consequently, immediate sensation and immediate knowledge are not
the ground of what Kant calls transcendental illusion, which is the sin of
basing values on false premises, of falsifying the principles or priorities that
constitute our human values and that are the creation of practical reason, of
our will or desire.

FEUERBACH AND SCHOPENHAUER

But so we arrive at Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. I have chosen these conti-

nental thinkers of the earlier to the mid-nineteenth century to demonstrate
negatively, in contrast with Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, the philosophical
consequences that result from the failure to conceive of philosophy as bibli-
cal in origin, both historically and ontologically. I have sketched above the
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 15

ontologico-historical, the hermeneutical, perspective of my book in order to

provide the reader with a concrete, if preliminary, sense of the basis of my
critique of Schopenhauer, in particular, as a self-contradictory modern who
accepts, uncritically (unthinkingly), a conception of Christianity that is utter-
ly untrue no less to Jesus than to the New Testament (and to their profound
and unique rootedness in Jewish Scripture with its radical ideas of creation
and covenant as paradoxically portrayed in the myth of the Fall of Adam and
Eve).
Both Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, as we shall see, end in abject self-
contradiction—Feuerbach seemingly unconscious and Schopenhauer shock-
ingly self-conscious of the fact—precisely because of their false and falsify-
ing concept of Christianity, together with the Bible. They are both astonish-
ing and in that sense truly appalling examples of what Kierkegaard calls
Christendom, as distinct from Christianity. Whereas Christianity, Kierke-
gaard shows us, represents the single individual who is not simply born a
Christian but who wills, rather, to come into historical existence fully respon-
sible for his Christian life, Christendom represents the single individual who,
born a Christian, lives a life of paganism baptized as Christian, i.e., a life
whose Christian values are rationalized in pagan terms. We shall find that,
while both Feuerbach and Schopenhauer belittle Hebrew Scripture (the Old
Testament), the first has a concept of humanity that he locates in the Greeks
while the second argues that Jesus, although a Jew, represents the values, not
of Moses and the prophets, but of eastern religion (Hinduism and Buddhism).
Thus, whereas Feuerbach holds that man has alienated his natural exis-
tence (his species-being) in worshipping a supernatural God, Schopenhauer
maintains that the earthly existence of individuals itself is alien to the univer-
sal (divine) being of man. Feuerbach’s anthropological solution to human
alienation is to argue that, since God is a mythical projection of man, God as
a supernatural being, as a false myth, must die so that man may redeem
(liberate) his alienated being as properly natural. Schopenhauer’s theosophi-
cal (Hindu-Buddhist) solution to human alienation is to argue that, since sin
is visited on human beings as punishment for their existence, for their sinful
fall into existence, the sacrifice by Jesus of his life on the cross represents the
true way of human beings. Redemption of human beings from the sin of
earthly existence means, then, for Schopenhauer, not the liberation of life
from death but the liberation of life in and through death, as the sacrifice of
life to death. The death of God is Feuerbach’s anthropological solution to
human alienation. God dies so that man may live in unity with the universal
nature from which he has been alienated. The death of man is Schopen-
hauer’s theosophical solution to human alienation. Man dies so that divinity
may live in unity with the universal nature from which it is no longer alienat-
ed. God for Feuerbach is alienated man (alienated from his universal nature).
16 Introduction

Man for Schopenhauer is alienated divinity (alienated from its universal

nature).
Both Feuerbach and Schopenhauer are uncritical (unthinking) atheists,
unlike Nietzsche, whom I hope to treat in a future work and who comes to
acknowledge that what he calls his “unconditional honest atheism” embodies
the critical truth of Christianity (which the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in
our day identifies with deconstruction). How, we may ask, is one who is not
truly a theist to struggle with (or oppose) God? (How is one who is not truly a
humanist to struggle with, or oppose, man?) This is precisely what the three
friends of Job could not fathom: that it is the atheist, the one who stands up to
God in demanding justice from him, who in the end, while humbled, is no
less exalted with the knowledge that it is he, like his forbearers Adam and
Eve, who spoke truly of—because truly to—God. Indeed, it is true atheism
(as self-critical theism) that is inspired and necessitated by the all-too-com-
mon false conceptions of humanity and divinity that are held by Feuerbach
and Schopenhauer. Both philosophers, in appealing to an uncritical concept
of universal nature—to which Feuerbach reduces the human and to which
Schopenhauer reduces the divine—are unable, consequently, to develop a
critical concept of the originality of existence, of ontology as history and of
history as ontology. They do not see that, just as biblical man is not “natural,”
so the God of the Bible is not “supernatural.” Both man and God in the
biblical tradition are, rather, infinite Spirit. Man is made in the image of God.
Man is the imago dei, God’s image—in both senses of metaphor or transfer:
man is God’s metaphor; God is man’s transfer.
We shall see that Feuerbach, although a so-called left-wing Hegelian,
evinces no understanding whatsoever of Hegel’s profound conception of
infinite spirit as relationship—that human self-consciousness is God. He
equally does not comprehend the paradox that universality (together with
necessity) is not given in nature but is determined historically by human
beings. It is no less the case that Schopenhauer, in claiming to build on the
critical foundation of Kant, completely falsifies it by not recognizing, with
Kant, that reason is fundamentally practice. Thus, Kant, while not yet fully
aware that universality comes into existence historically, to use the Kierke-
gaardian formulation, does see, with inimitable lucidity, that human beings
determine, in and through practical reason, their existence as at once univer-
sal and necessary, in other words, as free, self-determining subjects and not
as naturally determined objects.
Feuerbach betrayed Hegel (and ignored Kant). Schopenhauer betrayed
Kant (and ignored Hegel). Further, both Feuerbach and Schopenhauer view
the myth of the Fall as showing that human existence is originally evil
(sinful). However, since this is the basis on which Feuerbach dismisses and
Schopenhauer embraces it, they each contradict Kant and Hegel’s demon-
stration that the Fall of Adam and Eve is the story whereby human beings
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 17

come into historical existence as rational, free, self-determining subjects.

Indeed, Schopenhauer holds that the New Testament is rooted, not in Hebrew
Scripture but in the theosophy of Hinduism with its concept of individual
existence as irredeemably illusory. Thus, he undertakes to replace the para-
doxical myth of Adam and Eve, which redeems human beings from the
fatally contradictory, because nonhistorical, concept of the universality of
nature, with an idea of myth conceived as universally natural (and so nonhis-
torical) and involving, consequently, the contradictory identity of universally
natural existence with death and of death with universally natural existence.
He does not see that it is solely the paradoxical myth of the Fall that liberates
human beings from the contradictory garden of nature, in which man is
natural and God is supernatural. He does not see that it is only the paradoxi-
cal myth of the Fall that provides the human story as Spirit recognizing Spirit
and thus as truly redeeming man (and God) from the death of contradiction
on behalf of the life of paradox in which human beings (and God) must yet
again, and eternally, create their existence from nothing, from nothing that is
given directly (or immediately) in nature. He does not see that the life of man
(and God) is metaphor, the transfer, as we shall see Kierkegaard call it, from
natural simile to spirit, whether human or divine. Human beings, when
viewed as divine transfer, live in the earthly city (of contradictory nature) but
of the heavenly city (of paradoxical spirit).
It is precisely the dialectic of St. Augustine’s two cities—civitas terrena
and civitas dei—that our great contract theorists of democracy, above all,
Spinoza and Rousseau, make the very basis of modern (as distinct from
ancient Greek) democracy. Spinoza and Rousseau show that modern democ-
racy, as the rule of all the people over all the people on behalf of all the
people—in stark contrast with the politics of the ancients in which either one
(king), or some (nobles), or, finally, many (the demos) rule over others—
provides the sole (ethical and political) redemption (liberation) of human
beings from the contradictory state of nature as the war of all against all:
either rule over others or be ruled by others; either kill or be killed. It is little
wonder, then, that Spinoza views caritas, love of neighbor—the command to
do unto others what you desire others to do unto you—as the very basis of
democratic sociality (and equally of biblical hermeneutics). Redemption is in
and through the city of God as the standard of human ethical and political
truth. There is no salvation outside of (without) democracy, outside of (with-
out) what Kant calls the kingdom of ends.
The issues, then, that arise in addressing philosophy as biblical and the
Bible as philosophical are immense. They involve ethics, politics, and aes-
thetics, understood at once ontologically and historically. I invoke the con-
cept of ontology (for which the equivalent term is metaphysics), as distinct
from philosophy, in order to signal the importance of seeing that the logos of
being is to be understood as no less religious (theological) than philosophi-
18 Introduction

cal. Indeed, I focus on the ideas (perspectives) of Kant, Hegel, and Kierke-
gaard in my ontologico-historical assessment of modernity since the very
reason that they are (in addition to Spinoza) our three greatest modern think-
ers, the three greatest thinkers of modernity, is because they explicitly ac-
knowledge that philosophy does not go further than biblical faith, although it
must, indeed, advance that far in order to be true to itself. Consequently, they
relinquish the typically modern illusion that philosophy goes further than
Abraham (the Bible) by returning to Socrates (Greek philosophy). What,
then, does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Why, nothing at all.

NOTES

1. I cite the Revised Standard Version of the Bible unless otherwise indicated. I want to
outline here in five points the documentation protocol that I follow in my book. (1) Details on
the texts that I cite are to be found in the Bibliography. (2) When I cite more than one passage
consecutively from the same page of a text within the same paragraph, the pagination is given
at the end of the last quotation from that page. (3) Regarding texts like the Bible and literary
and (some) philosophical works, citation references reflect their internal structure. (4) Empha-
sis is found in the original text unless otherwise indicated. (5) Because I engage in my study an
enormous range of texts that cover a vast expanse of time and involve detailed analysis of the
most complex of issues in setting forth comprehensively and lucidly the structure of ideas that
constitute modernity as biblical, I have eschewed critical commentary on scholarly, philosophi-
cal, and theological works that are relevant to my study. I felt that merely brief references to
learned studies would be diverting, while not truly informative, and that detailed analysis of the
claims of others would, in distracting from my already dense argumentation, make it yet more
challenging to grasp. I would ask readers who are interested in my critique of what I consider to
be the inadequate views of modernity, at once ontological and historical, that are advanced by
others to consult my publications, both books and essays, as found in the Bibliography, in many
of which I directly engage those views. Let me note, finally, that I use “man” (homo), and
related terms, in the non-gendered (universal) sense consistent with the authors whom I cite and
not in the sense of man (vir) in the gendered sense.
2. Despair as the sickness unto death is formulated at the very beginning of Part One of
Kierkegaard’s work of that title with incomparable depth of lucidity. Despair, as the sickness of
the spirit or the self, is said there to take three forms: (1) the despair in not being conscious of
having a self (which, as the non-biblical despair of paganism, is found, for example, in the
ancient Greeks) and is not strictly despair; (2) the despair in not willing to be oneself; and (3)
the despair in willing to be oneself, which is the strict form of despair. It is important to recall
the entire title of the work—The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition
for Upbuilding and Awakening. For we learn in the work that the despair in willing to be
oneself is both a curse and a blessing: the curse of misrelation and the blessing of relationship.
“The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal; to be aware of this
sickness is the Christian’s superiority over the natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the
Christian’s blessedness.” (15) When the self overcomes its despair, we have the following
situation: “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the
power that established it.” (14) This power is, we can say, the God of the covenantal relation-
ship, the neighbor, the other.
3. The reader is aware, I am sure, that, in undertaking to show in my book that we cannot
comprehend modern philosophy, philosophy as modern, without comprehending it as biblical,
at once historical and ontological, I am not writing a standard history of philosophy. Conse-
quently, I perforce omit many details that I view as secondary. But I do want to mention here
that, while, as is well known, Kierkegaard constantly polemicizes against Hegel and Hegel
frequently criticizes Kant, it is important not to allow Kierkegaard and Hegel’s attacks on their
 Introduction: The Kantian Revolution in Metaphysics 19

great predecessors to obfuscate the common structure of ideas that they share with them.
Indeed, we may say that Kierkegaard and Hegel, while often appearing to dismiss the ideas of
their predecessors, show us, rather, how not to read them.
 Chapter Two

Hegel and the Myth of the Fall

Hegel advances and deepens the Kantian revolution in ontology by demon-

strating that existence, what he typically calls Spirit (infinite self-conscious-
ness), at once human and divine, is essentially at one with both religion and
history. While Kant shows, as I indicated in the previous chapter, that meta-
physics is constituted by freedom, God, and immortality (infinite progress) as
the moral postulates (demands/desires) of practical reason, of reason viewed
as first and last practice, he does not yet fully grasp the rational as truly
comprehensible solely in light of the religious when understood as the histor-
ical. It is true that he is glad to remark on the compatibility of the moral law
(the categorical imperative) with the golden rule 1 and the congruity of reason
with biblical revelation. 2 Indeed, Kant, as we shall see, playfully conjectures,
while at the same time seriously arguing, that the biblical story of the Fall
provides the essential account of humanity’s “transition” from (animal) na-
ture to (human) freedom. Still, it is Hegel who sets about in his mature works
to demonstrate systematically that the content of reason, of philosophy, is to
be found in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity when understood as
articulating the essential relatedness of God and man with the result that what
characterizes the “nature” of both God and man is their historical relation-
ship, their relationship in and as history. In other words, it is the relationship
of God and man—and so also the ethical and political relationships of human
beings with each other—that constitutes history. History is thus the mutual
creation of man and God, their mutual creativeness. Just as Hegel famously
remarks that the rational is—must be constituted as—the actual and that the
actual is—must be constituted as—the rational, so we can say that Spirit (the
spiritual) is and so must be made the historical and that history (the histori-
cal) is and so must be made Spirit (the spiritual). The “is” linking reason and
actuality, and so Spirit and history, is not that of the ancients’ law of logical

21
22 Chapter 2

identity (which, consistent with the law of contradiction, inexorably falls into
contradictory opposites). Rather, the “is” linking reason and practice, Spirit
and history, is performative, categorical, imperative, practical, covenantal,
creational, dialectical: it signals that what God and human beings do practice
is what they must (choose to) practice in order to become that which they are
in truth—beings whose Spirit creates history and whose history is the crea-
tion of Spirit.
Hegel provides, consequently, the content, at once ontological (both relig-
ious and philosophical) and historical, which he typically calls the Concept
(der Begriff), to undergird, to upbuild, as Kierkegaard would put it, the
Kantian revolution in metaphysics. In the Logic and the Philosophy of Mind
(which constitute Parts I and III of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences), and, above all, in his three historical lecture series on the philoso-
phy of History, Art, and Religion, he shows that the mind, to which the
objects of nature conform, is the infinite self-consciousness of Spirit whose
practice freely establishes the rationally thinking subject as the truth of histo-
ry. 3 This is the very Spirit that, created from nothing, from nothing that is
finite, contradictory, or natural, is made in the image of God, who is himself
as Spirit the lord of covenantal history, of history as covenantal. Every hu-
man being is commanded to enact the historical as the eternal covenant of
Spirit. It no less follows that human beings are inspired to create the histori-
cal world of the covenant in the (subjective) image of God, not in the (objec-
tive) image of nature. However, since the image of God is the image of man,
what human beings portray in their artistic creations is no less the divine than
the human Spirit.
Do we not find that art, the great works of art—the plastic, musical, and
literary arts—portray, always, the transition from nature to Spirit and so
demonstrate that the objects of the world depend on the Spirit of creation, as
found in the subjectivity of both artists and their viewers/audiences? Precise-
ly because, as Kant puts it, we cannot know things in themselves—what
things are in themselves, the essence of things—except as objects of possible
experience that are found in the space and time of nature, human beings are
liberated from blind, ignorant dependence on the objects of nature, what
Hegel calls the out-and-out Other of existence (e.g., Plato’s Form of the
Good). They are, consequently, free to create their very own selves as things
in themselves, as subjects, whose practical reason constitutes, as will, desire,
thinking . . . , the values—religious, aesthetic, historical, ethical, and social—
of their existence. To paraphrase Kant, while all art begins (indirectly) in
experience, in the experience of nature, no art arises (directly) from the
experience of nature. 4 Indeed, Hegel indicates that Spirit is self-manifesta-
tion, the revelation of self. Consequently, we must be prepared to see that the
transition—as articulated in religion, in art, in politics, in ethics—from na-
ture to Spirit, in and through which the historical Spirit of subjectivity consti-
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 23

tutes itself, is dialectical or, in the language of Kierkegaard, paradoxical.

Thus, Hegel writes in the Philosophy of Mind that “Spirit [mind] has for its
presupposition Nature, of which it is the truth, and for that reason [is] its
absolute prius. 5 In this its truth Nature has vanished, and Spirit has resulted
as the ‘Idea’ that has taken possession of itself” 6 (8). He observes further that
“the transition from Nature to mind is not a transition to an out-and-out
Other, but is only a coming-to-itself of mind out of its self-externality in
Nature. . . . [F]or Spirit does not proceed in a natural manner from Nature”
(14). Because the transition in terms of which Spirit proceeds from nature is
not natural or objective but creative, artistic, practical and subjective, we see
that it is historical, with history comprehended, then, as the account in and
through which subjects reveal (come into possession of) their infinite self-
consciousness.
Insofar, consequently, as it is held that Spirit, the self, human or divine,
proceeds naturally or, in other words, finitely from finite nature—i.e., that
Spirit conforms to natural objects (and not natural objects to Spirit), that
Spirit is made in the image of nature and so is a natural simile and not a
divine likeness, a metaphor or a transfer from nature to spirit—it follows that
the self is found in contradiction of itself, in ignorance of itself. It is other
than itself (and so is not the biblical self that is known in and through the
other, God and neighbor, as the likeness of itself). It is the Socratic self,
which, in being reliant on the Delphic oracle’s pronouncement that it is the
wisest self in Greece in knowing that it is ignorant of itself, is fated not to
know what it is ignorant of (it does not know, in contradiction of itself, what
the self is of which it is ignorant or what it is of which the self is ignorant). It
is no less the Aristotelian self, god (theos), which, in being identical with
itself, is the very other of itself: thought thinking itself.
But the contradictory, finite self that is ignorant of itself is also, it appears,
the self that we find in the account of Adam and Eve, including their relation-
ship to God, that is known (in the Christian tradition) as the story of the Fall.
We thus arrive at the critical moment in this study, at the turning point of
world history, at the axis on which (my) history turns. There is a fundamental
issue at stake here. That issue, as I outlined it in the previous chapter, is
simply how we are to understand the “fall” of Adam and Eve, of humankind.
What is the Paradise from which our original progenitors fall and what is the
covenant in(to) which they fall? What is the “cause” of their disobedience in
defying the divine command that prohibits their eating of the fruit of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil? How are we to understand their original
innocence, their ignorance of good and evil? Do Adam and Eve simply know
in their natural innocence that they are ignorant of good and evil? Or do they
rather know in their innocence of spirit what the good and evil are of which
they are ignorant? How are we to understand the prohibition of God against
knowing good and evil, given that Adam and Eve are required to know good
24 Chapter 2

and evil in order to be responsible for obeying the divine command not to
know good and evil? For, surely, to obey a prohibition in ignorance of it is
utterly contradictory. What, in the most fundamental sense, then, is sin?
It is typically held by Christians (including Hegel) that Jesus (as the
Christ) is sinless. But Jews no less typically hold that God, as the savior of
humankind, is sinless. Yet, God (for Christians) becomes incarnate in Christ
as the man Jesus who teaches his people that the law, the absolutely infinite
law, is to love God above all others and your neighbor as yourself. God
becomes historical (for Jews) in and through the covenant that he establishes
with his chosen people, who, we are told, are holy not only in being chosen
by God but also in choosing God as the holy one. Is the love of God and
neighbor sinful or sinless? Is life in the covenant of God sinful or sinless? (It
is evident, surely, that love of God and neighbor and covenantal life are
identical.) While in this study I am primarily concerned with Christianity and
its role in constituting modernity—for all of the figures central to my study
(from Kant to Schopenhauer) were brought up in Christian families—it is
critically important to recall, always, the rootedness of Christianity (of the
Gospels, of Jesus, of the letters of Paul, 1 John, and James) in Jewish Scrip-
ture. Jesus saw himself wholly within Jewish tradition. He did not address a
Gentile audience. He did not travel outside ancient Israel. Still, the world, in
the guise of the Roman Empire, entered Israel. We have the story of Jesus
regarding the Roman (pagan) centurion who, in contrast with Jews, is shown
to believe. Furthermore, when Saul on the road to Damascus converts from
the persecutor of the Jewish followers of Jesus to Paul the apostle to the
Gentiles, his message is that in the universal covenant of love there is no
difference between Jew and Gentile (even as he reminds the Gentile faithful
in Romans 11 that they are an unnatural branch grafted onto the tree whose
natural root is Israel). It is inconceivable that from any tradition outside of
that which commands love of the other as the neighbor—without regard to
the individual’s race, ethnicity, rank, or gender . . .—there would or could
have emerged the Kantian imperative that spells the doom of the Roman
empire: render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is
God’s (Matt. 22.21). Either Caesar or God. Either the mind conforms to
finite objects (the Spirit is finite and is treated as a finite thing). Or finite
objects conform to the mind (the mind of all human beings is infinite Spirit
and is, as an end in itself, worthy of being treated with absolute dignity).
Everything that is Caesar’s is God’s. Everything that is God’s is not Caesar’s
but the neighbor’s.
It is true that Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans that all persons “are
subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from
God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (13.1). Then, follow-
ing his observation that “the authorities are ministers of God,” he continues
with the imperative: “Pay all of them their dues”: taxes, revenue, respect,
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 25

honor. Still, he proceeds to add without a break: “Owe no one anything,

except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the
law. The commandments . . . are summed up in this sentence, ‘You shall love
your neighbor as yourself. . . .’ Love is the fulfilling of the law” (13.6–10. In
this passage Paul cites Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus as his scriptural
authorities.). Render unto the emperor Caesar and his ministers what you
owe them. Render unto your neighbors what you owe them. Again, it is
evident—to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear—that love of neigh-
bor as the single commodity that we owe others spells the doom of the
Roman Empire with its contradictory subordination of the Spirit of human
beings to what the Bible calls idols. This is what Marx characterizes as
commodity fetishism and Kant as the transcendental (rational) illusion
whereby the infinite Spirit of subjects is made, in contradiction of itself, to
conform to finite objects (things).
The reason that, in pursuing the issue of how sin is to be understood in the
story of the Fall, I have, in the preceding paragraphs, called upon central
passages of the Gospels and Paul, passages which have been so very widely
distorted, when not simply falsified, in Christendom—which, we recall, fol-
lowing Kierkegaard, represents the rationalization of Christian values in pa-
gan terms—is that what is at stake in them, as in the story of the Fall, is
precisely contradiction. The relationship between Caesar and man is contra-
dictory. The Emperor, together with his ministers, contradicts the Spirit of
man by treating it as but one commodity among other things (and so repre-
sents the relationship between master and slave as depicted by Hegel in the
“initial,” i.e., in the finite stage of the process of mutual recognition). But,
surely, the relationship between man and God is that, not of contradictory
opposites (the finite or natural mind of man and the finite or supernatural
mind of God) but of reciprocal equals, both infinitely self-conscious Spirit,
united in and through covenantal love. Still, Paul, in his polemic against
those who challenge belief in the resurrection of Christ, opposes the first
(original) man, Adam, who, in coming from the dust of the earth, brings us
(mortal) death, to the second (last) man, Christ, who, in coming from heaven,
brings us (immortal) life. “The sting of death,” he writes, “is sin, and the
power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory [over
death, citing Isaiah] through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15.56–57).
Nevertheless, we recall the paradox that the man whose flesh is the dust of
the earth and who, thereby, is subject to death, is created from nothing, from
nothing that is finite dust, in the image of infinite God. We remember, too,
what Paul writes in Romans: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin?
By no means. Yet, if it had not been for the law [commanding love of
neighbor], I should not have known sin. . . . Apart from the law [i.e., in
paganism] sin lies dead. . . . So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy
and just and good” (7.7–12).
26 Chapter 2

There is, then, no sin outside of the law, outside of the covenant, outside
of love, Spirit, God or man. But the law, the covenant, love, Spirit, God, and
man are not sin but the very standard by which we distinguish sin, by which
we know the difference between good and evil. Indeed, we may recall that
Jesus comes to save, not the righteous, but the sinners. So, we return to our
question. What is the relationship between salvation (redemption, liberation,
freedom) and sin? Is salvation from sin? Is salvation through sin? Is salvation
sin (itself)? If man were not a sinner, he would not be saved (because, we
recall, outside of the law there is neither sin nor salvation). Still, while there
is no salvation outside of sin, just because an individual is a sinner is no
guarantee of salvation. Indeed, Paul is horrified to learn about the distorted
conception of sin that is held among his followers in Rome, and he sternly
reminds them that they are not to sin or to do evil so that grace may abound,
i.e., in order to be saved (See 3.8 and 6.1.). It is, consequently, as sinners that
we are saved. In loving our neighbor as ourselves, do we not acknowledge,
not that the neighbor is sinful as I am sinful (or vice versa) but that, rather, it
is precisely our mutual love that serves to guide us both, in knowing good
and evil, to grow ever more adequate (we may hope) in distinguishing love
from its endlessly sinful distortions?
It is important, consequently, to see that the issue of how we are to
understand sin, as embodied in the story of the Fall, involves two critical
distinctions, each of which entails the risk of contradiction. The first distinc-
tion is that between a true and a false (or idolatrous) conception of sin. The
second distinction is that between, on the one hand, life under the law of
covenantal love and, on the other hand, life “apart from the law,” where, e.g.,
in the Roman Empire or the Greek polis, “sin lies dead,” where, in other
words, human beings, like their gods, are ignorant of good and evil.
The first distinction, through entailing the risk of contradiction, is that
between a true and a false conception of sin. It involves the critical difference
between a true image and a false idol, between representations made in the
image of Infinite Spirit and idols whose images, whether human or divine,
are reduced to or reified as finite objects (or things). It is little wonder, then,
that, following the first divine word (commandment) of Torah, according to
which the people of Israel are commanded to have no other gods “before
me,” the second word forbids the making of graven images, i.e., idols. The
original, the truly creative image of man is God. The original, the truly
creative image of God is man. Idols, then, are basically, always, of two kinds:
(1) the reduction of man to God who, reified as a finite, i.e., a supernatural,
object, is rendered unknowable and unknown to man and hence made his
contradictory other; and (2) the reduction of God to man who, reified as a
finite, i.e., a natural, object, is rendered knowable and known to man and
hence is made identical with his self. There is no idolatry outside of the
creation of man in the image of God. Human creativity is not sin or idolatry,
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 27

yet it always risks the sin of idolatry. So easily do the images of God and
man become idols!
The second distinction that entails the risk of contradiction is that be-
tween idolatry and paganism. Idolatry always implies (presupposes) knowl-
edge of good and evil that is suppressed, evaded, ignored. . . . Idolatry, sin, is
not ignorance of good and evil. Paganism, on the other hand, however, is
ignorance of good and evil: ignorance of sin. The sin, the evil of Christen-
dom is that “Christians,” in suppressing knowledge of good and evil, hide
their ignorance behind pagan opposites that become perverse, idolatrous du-
alisms opposing man and God, the human and the divine, finite and infinite,
natural and supernatural, mortal and immortal, life and death (afterlife), earth
and heaven, body and soul, sin and salvation. These are precisely the dual-
isms, so pervasive in Christendom, that are, we shall see, central to the
philosophy of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. They are also the very dualisms
that Kant, in effecting the metaphysical revolution of modernity, shows to be
the basis of the transcendental illusion whereby subjects conform their minds
to objects as things in themselves—Hegel’s out-and-out other—on which
they make themselves blindly dependent and by which, consequently, they
find themselves endlessly contradicted.
We have now seen how critically important it is to distinguish not only
truth from idolatry but also idolatry from paganism. Additionally, Hegel
shows us that, if we properly learn to distinguish the Greek gods from the
biblical God, we shall be in a position to grasp the fundamental difference
between finite and infinite representations of both the human and the divine.
While truth is (sinfully) falsified in idolatrous representations of man and
God, truth, together with falsity, is altogether absent from pagan representa-
tions of the human and the divine. Indeed, the paradoxical point that Hegel
makes is, we can say, that, because the Greeks, he holds, produce their gods
out of their human imagination, they do not have a true (or false) image of
the human. In contrast, because human beings in the biblical tradition view
themselves as made in the image of God—i.e., as created from nothing, from
nothing that it is not in the beginning divine—they possess a true conception
of man, yet also one that runs the risk, always, of being reduced to the false
image of an idol. In the context, then, of demonstrating in the Philosophy of
History that in any given culture anthropology and theology share a common
spirit, Hegel states that the “conception of God, therefore, constitutes the
general basis of a people’s character” (50). In other words, how a people
conceive of their god is how they conceive of themselves. The image that
they have of their god is the image they have of themselves.
Hegel points out, consequently, in the Philosophy of Religion that the
“Jewish commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thyself any image of
God’”—he cites here the second Commandment, as found in Exodus 20.4
and Deuteronomy 5.8, banning graven images—“refers to the fact that God is
28 Chapter 2

essentially for thought . . .” (II. 660). In contrast, “the gods of the Greeks are
the products of human imagination. . . . They originate in a finite manner, one
produced by the poets, by the Muse” (657). It is thus incorrect for modern
writers like Schiller, he states, to claim that the advantage of the Greek gods
over the Christian God is that they are represented in human form. He cites
two lines from Schiller’s poem, “The Gods of Greece”: “‘While the gods
remained more human / The Men were more divine.’” He notes, however, in
his Aesthetics that Schiller modified his conception of the Greek gods in
writing in the later version of his poem: “‘Torn from the flood of time, they
hover, saved, o’er Pindus height; what shall live undying in song must pass
away in life.’” “With these words,” Hegel observes, “there is wholly ratified
what we have just mentioned: the Greek gods had their seat only in ideas and
imagination; they could neither maintain their place in the reality of life nor
give final satisfaction to the finite spirit” (I.508). He declares, consequently,
that “the Greek gods must not be regarded as more human than the Christian
God. Christ is much more a man: he lives, dies—suffers death on the cross—
which is infinitely more human than the humanity of the Greek Idea of the
beautiful” (Philosophy of History, 249). He observes yet further that the fact
that the Greeks see themselves in the representations of the gods made in
their own human image is consistent with two additional elements central to
their lives: their blind dependence on the imageless “subjectivity” of Fate,
which is superior even to the gods; and “the fact that men derive their re-
solves not yet from themselves but from their oracles. Neither human nor
divine subjectivity, recognized as infinite, has as yet absolutely decisive
authority” (250).
The paradox involved in the distinction between finite imagination and
infinite thought, we can say, then, is that the Spirit of infinite self-conscious-
ness, including aesthetics as an infinite “stage” of Spirit, comes into exis-
tence with the creation of man from nothing, from nothing originally founded
on finite, natural images. Man is made in the image of God, in the image of
that which, as Infinite Spirit, is without any image—outside of the infinite
self-consciousness of human beings. The paradox deepens as we grasp the
implications of Hegel’s observation that the biblical commandment, in ban-
ning the making of graven images, shows that God is essentially for thought.
Thinking for Hegel, as for Kant—i.e., reason as practice—is the infinite
capacity of human beings to abstract from anything natural, immediate, or
finite and so to be able to render it actual as truly rational and rational as truly
actual, that is, to represent man as he is in and for himself. The idea that man
is made in the (unnatural but creative) image of the Infinite Spirit of God
means, we see, that human beings can truly represent (create) their selves
solely in and through the image of what is infinitely other than themselves—
God and the neighbor. True art is neither immediate reflection nor natural
description. True thought, like true art, represents the transition from nature
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 29

to freedom, from the finite reflection of the divine as human to the infinite
self-reflection that is found in the representations in which human beings
reveal what it means for them to live in the finite city of earthly mortality but
of the infinite city of divine eternity. This is what Kant and Hegel undertake
to show us in their meditations on the myth of the Fall, to which we now turn.

THE MYTH OF THE FALL

The myth of the Fall, as we find it represented in the early chapters of

Genesis, is the test, the test, at once ontological and historical, of the Spirit
than which there is none greater. It is the test taken on directly by Kant and
Hegel, and indirectly by Kierkegaard, and passed by them. It is the test that
Feuerbach and Schopenhauer fail. The test involves how we are to under-
stand myth and so story, narrative, account, in other words, history. While
Adam and Eve are presented as the first individuals in history, they also
represent the universality of humankind. In telling the story of Adam and Eve
the authors of Genesis narrate their own story, which is also our story, the
story of the author and the reader. History and ontology are no less herme-
neutics—involving what it means to reflect on the issue of beginnings, of
origins, and so of creation. Indeed, in the most fundamental sense the story of
Adam and Eve is the link between (divine) creation, which culminates in the
creation of man and woman, and the covenant between God and his chosen
people (which begins, in Genesis 12, with the call of Abraham, i.e., with his
“fall” from the natural garden of paganism into the loving embrace of his
stern, demanding creator).
What does the story of Adam and Eve add—to the stories of creation and
of covenant? Nothing and everything. Nothing, in the sense that it is but
another beginning, like creation and covenant, all three of which are begin-
nings without precedent. Everything, in the sense that it self-consciously
shows us, as I indicated in my introductory, first chapter, that we must submit
to the test of contradictory beginnings, of beginning in contradiction, if we
are to find ourselves free to think through the concepts of creation and
covenant in terms that, at once ontological and historical, are not contradicto-
ry but paradoxical. But I shall now let Kant and, above all, Hegel tell us what
is so extraordinary about the myth of all myths, the myth that demytholo-
gizes, demystifies, and deconstructs all (pagan) myths—the myth of the Fall.
Two features characterize the accounts that Kant and Hegel each provide
of the story of the Fall. First, their commentary, as philosophers, on the
biblical story is casual and informal, yet also serious and exacting. Kant’s is
found in a separate, brief essay and that of Hegel in separate, brief passages
interspersed in three of his major works. Second, both thinkers demonstrate,
with the systematic rigor that we associate with the logic of their philosophy,
30 Chapter 2

that the myth of the Fall accounts for—it is the ontological and also (for
Hegel) the historical account of—reason, freedom, Spirit, infinite self-con-
sciousness. . . : the very concepts in and by which our two great thinkers
constitute modern philosophy. They show us, in other words, that the Bible is
modern from the beginning and that modernity is biblical unto the end. They
show us that the Bible is rational from the beginning and that philosophy is
faithful unto the end. They also show us—in spite of themselves? in order to
spite those who do not grasp the revolution in metaphysics that Kant initiat-
ed, ontologically, and that Hegel then carried through, historically?—that
their philosophy, that philosophy tout court, is biblical commentary.
It is striking to realize, consequently, that Kant and Hegel do not appeal to
Greek myth—whether epic, tragic, or philosophic—as constituting the origin
of philosophy. In their superb silence they utterly eschew the claim that
Aristotle puts forth, in the second chapter of Book I of the Metaphysics, that
“it is owing to their wonder [thaumaturgy: miracle work] that men both now
begin and at first begin to philosophize [i.e., to love wisdom].” In finding
themselves ignorant of and wondering about how the genesis of the cosmos,
together with its various divine bodies, came about, we see, Aristotle contin-
ues, that “even the lover of myth—philomythos—is in a sense the lover of
wisdom—philosophos—for myth is composed of wonders.” Consequently,
“they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance. . . .” Aristotle goes
on, in chapter 2, to observe that, because philosophic knowledge, as the best
kind of knowledge, is divine, “the acquisition of it must in a sense end in
something that is the opposite of our original inquiries.” For, while we begin
in ignorant wondering, “we must end in the contrary and . . . the better
state. . . .” Consistent, then, with his observation that the philosopher, if he is
to possess knowledge of the divine as the highest good, will find that his
beginning is contrary to his end, i.e., that his end is opposed to his beginning,
Aristotle proceeds in the Metaphysics to establish two fundamental points.
(1) The first principle of philosophy, the law of contradiction, cannot itself be
demonstrated (with the result that the logos of demonstration rests on the
logos of rhetoric). (2) God—theos—constitutes divine knowledge (knowl-
edge of the divine) as the unmoved mover, i.e., as thought thinking itself.
Surely, for us moderns, there can be no greater wonder (in the pagan
world) than the indemonstrable, contradictory end at which the philosopher
arrives—having begun as the lover of myth in the wonder of ignorance (in
the ignorance of wonder) and having in the end been moved by that which is
in itself unmoving, thought thinking itself. Thought thinking itself, thought
identical with itself, is the ultimate object of the old (extrabiblical) metaphys-
ics—the thing knowable solely in itself, the out-and-out other—on which the
mind of human beings contradictorily depends. This is the metaphysics that
Kant, as we have seen, utterly rejects. What he shows us, then, in his com-
mentary on the myth of the Fall is that the biblical story contains (it both
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 31

grounds and is grounded in) the revolutionary metaphysics of the Critique of

Pure Reason. The divine command that Adam and Eve receive not to know
good and evil posits either the contradictory opposition between man and
God or their paradoxical union. Either to be like God in knowing good and
evil renders covenantal life the sin from which only death can liberate human
beings (and God). This is the fundamental contradiction characterizing
Christendom of which Schopenhauer is so prominent a representative. The
end of life is death. Death is the end of life. Or to be like God in knowing
good and evil renders covenantal life the sin through which the love of God
and neighbor liberates human beings. Life is the end of death. The end of
death is life. Either the mind conforms to objects, by which it is contradicted
(by which it is rendered contradictory)—for all time. Or objects conform to
the mind, with the result that the mind overcomes (appropriates) contradicto-
ry otherness through conforming to the neighbor as the mind desires the
neighbor to conform to itself—for all time.
What is at stake here, then, is the fundamental incompatibility between
two utterly different concepts of myth. In the first (pagan), as we have seen in
Aristotle, time (appearance) and eternity (reality), beginning and end, the
human and the divine are contradictory, irreconcilable opposites. In the sec-
ond (biblical), these opposites become transformed in and through the pro-
cess of mutual recognition—Spirit recognizing Spirit—wherein reason is
constituted as the covenantal practice of doing unto the other (God and
neighbor) that which you want the other to do unto you.
But it is important to keep in mind that not only are we contrasting two
different concepts of myth (biblical and pagan) but also we are distinguishing
between true and false conceptions of myth, biblical and idolatrous. The
critical distinction between a truly biblical and a falsely idolatrous concep-
tion of myth is epitomized in the very ambiguity of the (Christian) concept of
“Fall.” Truly conceived, the “Fall” constitutes the paradox that the story of
the expulsion of man and woman from the natural garden of paradise means
that, in showing themselves to be worthy of sharing knowledge of good and
evil with God in the covenant, they will, as sinners, be subject, in the fullness
of time, to the trials of conception (physical and spiritual), of work (self-
creation), and of death as the true guarantor of life. So we have the classic
Christian hymn O felix culpa: O happy sin. Without sin there is no happiness.
Without death there is no life. But when the Fall is falsely (idolatrously)
conceived (as in Christendom), it degenerates into a perversely contradictory
view of life whose oppositions are viewed as irreconcilable and so as only to
be overcome in and by death. Then it is held that there can be happiness
solely without (after) sin and life solely without (after) death. Furthermore,
the contradictory or idolatrous concept of the Fall typically involves a confla-
tion of biblical and Greek myth. Consequently, as we shall now learn from
Kant and Hegel, how we read the story of Adam and Eve—how we find our
32 Chapter 2

own life contained in the myth of the Fall—determines the very history of the
world.
In his essay “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (1786) Kant
lightheartedly tells us, as if writing a parody of philosophy, that it is only by
means of “conjecture,” which is not, however, he assures us, a mere fiction,
like a novel, that we can fill in the gaps for which we have no historical
documentation and so provide an account of the “first beginning” of “human
actions” by making “the transition [to them] intelligible.” This conjecture is
no fiction, he repeats, since it “presupposes that human actions were in the
first beginning no better and no worse than we find them now. . . . Hence, a
historical account of the first development of freedom from its original pre-
disposition in human nature is something altogether different from an [histor-
ical] account of the progression of freedom.” (53) Because, he tells us, con-
jecture is not, however, the serious business of documentary history and is
“undertaken for the sake of relaxation and mental health,” he seeks the indul-
gence of the reader in using “as a map for a mere pleasure trip . . . a sacred
document” and also in fancying

that my trip—undertaken on the wings of the imagination, albeit not without a

clue rationally derived from experience—may take the very route sketched out
in that document. Let the reader consult it (Gen. 2–6) and check at every point
whether the road that philosophy takes with the help of concepts coincides
with the story told in Holy Writ. (53)

In order to avoid “irresponsible conjectures,” Kant continues, he must begin

with that which “human reason cannot derive from prior natural causes— . . .
the existence of man” (54). Indeed, this must be adult man (who is not
maternally dependent), a pair (who can perpetuate their own kind), and a
single pair (who avert, from the beginning, the war of all against all, given
that the highest end of man is community [Geselligkeit]). Furthermore, the
first human beings must be understood to possess the full range of human
skills, including speech and thinking in concepts, all of which they had to
acquire for themselves (for they are not hereditary). Kant tells us, however,
that the skills on which human culture is grounded remain instinctual until
the first man and woman find themselves, with the awakening of their rea-
son, subject to a standard fundamentally different from that of instinct. For
reason, he observes, “has this peculiarity that, aided by imagination, it can
create artificial desires which are not only unsupported by natural instinct but
actually contrary to it.” Thus, man becomes “conscious of his reason as a
power which can extend itself beyond the limits to which all animals are
confined. As such, its effect was very important and indeed decisive for his
future way of life” (56).
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 33

Kant then proceeds to outline four critical steps by which reason makes
its revolutionary appearance. The first step of reason is free choice. Man
“discovered in himself a power of choosing for himself a way of life, of not
being bound without alternative to a single way, like the animals.” While this
was, he tells us, undoubtedly a source of delight for man, it also brought with
it necessity, anxiety, and alarm. “He stood, as it were, at the brink of an
abyss. Until that moment instinct had directed him toward specific objects of
desire. But from these there now opened up an infinity of such objects, and
he did not yet know how to choose between them.” Still, “it was impossible
for him to return to the state of servitude (i.e., subjection to instinct) from the
state of freedom, once he had tasted [the fruit!] of the latter” (56). Indeed,
reason now intervenes in the sexual instinct, which serves to preserve the
species, by showing man and woman that by means of the imagination they
can prolong and increase sexual attraction beyond transient and largely peri-
odic impulse. The second step, then, that reason takes is refusal, which in-
volves “the passage from the merely sensual to the idealizing,” from mere
animal desire to love, to a taste for beauty, and to morality as respect for
others, “which is the real basis of all true community (Geselligkeit).” Al-
though this step is a small one, Kant observes, it is, nonetheless, “epoch-
making. It is then more important than the whole immeasurable series of
expansions of culture which subsequently spring from it” (57). The third
step, consequently, that reason takes involves “the conscious expectation of
the future.” The capacity to envisage the future, “instead of being wholly
absorbed by the enjoyment of the present, is,” Kant observes, “the most
decisive mark of the human’s advantage” (57–58). But it is also true that the
uncertainty of the future entails cares and troubles unknown to animals. For
now man and woman are faced with the responsibilities brought on by chil-
dren, work, and death. Still, reason takes a further, its fourth, step whereby
man sees that, in contrast with the animals, “he is the true end of nature.”
This means that, because his fellow human being is “an equal participant in
the gifts of nature,” he cannot treat him like an animal (58). Thus emerge the
restraints on man’s will that lie at the very basis of the establishment of civil
society.
With this fourth and decisive step on the part of reason, Kant observes,
“man had entered into a relation of equality with all rational beings, whatever
their rank [i.e., whether human, angelic, or divine], with respect to the claim
of being an end in himself, respected as such by everyone, a being which no
one might treat as a mere means to ulterior ends.” While rational beings are
not equal in their possession of natural gifts, which Kant, in the Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals, calls the natural endowments of skills, talents,
etc., man is, nevertheless, “without qualification equal even to higher beings
[i.e., angels and God] in that none has the right to use him according to
pleasure.” This is because of his reason, which is considered, not insofar as it
34 Chapter 2

is an instrumental tool concerned with means “but insofar as it makes him an

end in himself. Hence, this last step of reason is at the same time man’s
release from the womb of nature . . .” (59). Still, it is true that, because the
world that man now inhabits is, unlike the garden of natural paradise, fraught
with cares, anxieties, and dangers, his wretchedness would often lead him to
dream of the bliss of paradise. Nevertheless,

restless reason would interpose itself, irresistibly impelling him to develop the
faculties implanted within him. It would not permit him to return to that crude
and simple state from which it had driven him. . . . From this account of
original human history we may conclude: man’s departure from that paradise,
which his reason represents as the first abode of his species, was nothing but
the transition from an uncultured, merely animal condition to the state of
humanity, from bondage to instinct to rational control—in a word, from the
tutelage of nature to the state of freedom. Whether man has won or lost in this
change is no longer an open question . . . [for history] consists in nothing less
than progress toward perfection, be the first attempts toward that aim, or even
the first long series of attempts, ever so faulty. (59–60)

Still, Kant continues, with the awakening of reason, prior to which “there
was as yet neither commandment nor prohibition and hence also no violation
of either,” evils arose due to the conflict of weak reason with powerful
animality “and (which is worse), along with the cultivation of reason, also
vices such as had been wholly alien to the state of ignorance and innocence.
Morally, the first step from this latter state was therefore a fall; physically, it
was a punishment, for a whole host of formerly unknown ills [including
death] was a consequence of the fall. The history of nature begins with good,
for it is the work of God, while the history of freedom begins with wicked-
ness, for it is the work of man” (60). In proceeding, then, to acknowledge the
justness of Rousseau’s critique of human inequality regarding civil right,
Kant remarks that it is true that conflict between culture and impulse arises
since reason interferes with natural impulse by transforming the conditions to
which it is suited. Still, because “in itself and as a natural disposition impulse
serves a good purpose,” we await the providential time when “finally art will
be strong and perfect enough to become a second nature. This is indeed the
ultimate moral end of the human species” (62–63).
Kant then concludes his conjecture on the beginning of human history
with the observation that, because man could not be satisfied with his “origi-
nal state,” he could neither remain in nor return to it. Consequently, he must
“ascribe his present troublesome condition to himself and his own choice.”
Man thus learns neither to blame Providence for his ills nor “to attribute his
own offense to an original sin committed by his first parents. (For free
actions can in no aspects be hereditary.) Such an exposition teaches man that,
under like circumstances, he would act exactly like his first parents, that is,
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 35

abuse reason in the very first use of reason, the advice of nature to the
contrary notwithstanding. He must recognize what they have done as his own
act, and thus blame only himself for the evils that spring from the abuse of
reason.” The lesson, therefore, “taught by a philosophical attempt to write the
most ancient part of human history [is this]: contentment with Providence
and with the course of human affairs as a whole.” For history shows us “not a
decline from good to evil, but rather a gradual development from the worst to
the better; and nature itself has given the vocation to everyone to contribute
as much to this progress as may be within his power” (68).
What Kant shows us, then, in his essay on the “Conjectural Beginning of
Human History” is that, just as, we say, fiction is truer than fact, i.e., that
fiction is the truth of fact, so conjecture, he says, is truer than philosophy, i.e.,
that conjecture is the truth of philosophy. We cannot “know” our human
beginning, our human origin, as we know the facts of human history. For
reason cannot derive “human existence,” the existence of man as an end in
himself, as the end of nature, from prior natural causes. Indeed, what the
posterior historical facts show us is that human beings are today what they
are originally in the beginning—free, equal, and loving (to recall the three
principles of the French Revolution), in other words, moral, communal, and
rational and bearing, consequently, the burden of addressing, in all constan-
cy, the evils (of the ancien régime) that the fall into the rights of man brings
without end into the world.
In “conjecturing” that human beings adhere to the map provided by Scrip-
ture in effecting their transition from nature to freedom, from ignorance to
knowledge of good and evil, Kant does not, however, directly acknowledge
that this transition, according to which man is effectively revealed to be
rational, is paradoxical (if it is not to end in contradictory impasse). Still, he
leaves us in no doubt that it is on the basis solely of freedom and reason, not
of nature and ignorance, that human beings are originally free and rational.
Reason compels human beings to be free: they are not free not to be free.
They are not free to remain ignorant of good and evil. They are not free to
remain in paradise. They are not free to return to paradise. Indeed, they have
never lived—freely and rationally—in paradise. For the story of the Fall of
Adam and Eve, the creative authors of Genesis show us, is purely a myth, a
conjecture, whose express purpose is to provide its readers with a critique of
pure reason as freely rational practice. We are provided, in other words, with
a critique of mythology whereby we can distinguish true from false myths.
False myths are precisely those that contradict human existence by locating
the origin, the originality, of freedom and reason in nature. Kant rejects as
false (contradictory) the direct association of the Fall with sin as originally
inherited through sexuality (with woman then viewed as the seducer of man),
which is the conception of the Fall that has been dominant in Christendom
(as distinct from Christianity). To locate sin in the flesh, in nature, is untrue
36 Chapter 2

no less to religion than to philosophy. Sin is original, not in the sense that it is
naturally (or biologically) inherited but in the sense that each of us, as the
heir of our forebears, shares their responsibility in knowing good and evil, in
knowing that it is precisely because of our evil (sin) that we must will the
good. Freedom and reason “begin” with the moral responsibility of willing
the good in acknowledging evil (sin). Indeed, Kant boldly asserts that, just as
commandment and prohibition are unknown (they do not exist) prior to rea-
son (to knowing good and evil), their violation is also unknown (it does not
exist) prior to reason. This means that God’s command prohibiting knowl-
edge of good and evil on the part of man and woman exists solely as contra-
dictory. It contradicts both God and man. It does not exist in truth. God, in
other words, does not possess the power to forbid knowledge of good and
evil, i.e., to be self-contradictory. For knowledge of God is the knowledge of
good and evil. To know good and evil is to be like God. Nor is it in man’s
power to be ignorant of good and evil. The transition to reason and freedom
bears, consequently, the paradox that, while it is only on the basis of nature
(the body) that we exist—reason and freedom are embodied in historical
practice, they are not theoretical, disembodied entities—the transition to rea-
son and freedom is their creation from nothing, from nothing that is natural.
Creation is not opposition to or denial of nature but, rather, its artful (practi-
cal, moral, aesthetic . . .) embodiment, appropriation, articulation, representa-
tion. The transition to “human existence” represents the creation, in the be-
ginning, of a second nature, of the birth of the spirit as a second birth.
There is, however, a critical element of paradox, begging contradictory
distortion, which, while clearly present for us moderns in Kant’s conjectural
representation of the story of the Fall, would appear to be less obtrusive in
the original story, one that, additionally, it is not evident, he would himself
acknowledge, although, as we shall see, Hegel clearly does. I refer to the
historical and, consequently, also the ontological identity of original man
who, in being created, in the beginning, as free, rational, moral, and commu-
nal, views himself as the end of nature and looks upon all human beings as
ends in themselves. The man that Kant describes here is at once biblical and
modern. This man is not, however, pagan man, as found, for example, in
ancient Greece and Rome. He is not the man whom Aristotle represents, as
we saw, in the guise of the philomythos who, in beginning in the wonder of
ignorance, is contradictorily reversed in the end as the philosophos who is no
less ignorant, surely, of the mythical wonder of thought thinking itself. In
contrast to the contradictory reversal of ancient, pagan man, consistent with
his myths that show him in the end to be fatally contradicted from the begin-
ning, the reversal, the transition, the Fall of modern (biblical) man is original.
Modern man begins, paradoxically, as the end of nature, as the end of crea-
tion. In being originally created from nothing, i.e., in the image of God, his
end, from the beginning, is to know good and evil. The contradictory rever-
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 37

sal, then, with which modern man is faced occurs when he undertakes to
depict the free, rational self, whether human or divine, in the images of
nature, i.e., in the graven images of contradiction.
In turning, now, to consider the commentary that Hegel devotes to the
myth of the Fall, as found in several passages of his mature works, we shall
see that his philosophical appropriation of the biblical story is altogether
consistent with Kant’s conjectural essay. 7 But Hegel is more explicit than
Kant both about the contradictions contained in the narrative and about what
he views as the limitations of narrative representation. He points out that man
“is supposedly forbidden [by God] to eat of the tree of knowledge of good
and evil; yet this knowledge is what constitutes the nature of Spirit—other-
wise the man is a beast.” Indeed, he avers that it has been traditionally
ignored that what the Genesis story makes clear is that man and woman, in
knowing good and evil, are truly like God and so also (like God) divine,
eternal, and infinite in Spirit. Thus, he observes that “a deep, speculative [i.e.,
an adequately philosophical] content cannot be portrayed in its true and
proper form in images and mere representations, and hence it essentially
cannot be portrayed in this mode without contradiction” (Philosophy of Re-
ligion, III.105). But Hegel does not stop to consider the paradox that, just as
he, like Kant, shows that Adam and Eve cannot and do not begin in contra-
dictory ignorance of good and evil, given that there is no (noncontradictory)
transition from nature to freedom (to infinitely self-conscious Spirit), the
narrative in which their story is told is properly or truly contradictory. In
other words, he does not consider the idea that the truth of its contradiction is
the paradox that its letter and its spirit are not directly (immediately) coinci-
dent. He does not reflect on the paradox that, because the image of God
cannot be expressed without (outside of) its human representations, these
representations are always embodied in the images of nature. We recall:
either the mind conforms (contradictorily) to objects (as idols). Or objects (as
metaphors) conform (paradoxically) to the mind.
Still, it is deliciously ironic that Hegel, like Kant, has the prescience to
read the contradictions of the myth of the Fall as paradox (sans nom). It is
even more ironic that Hegel, unlike Kant, has a comprehensive conception of
aesthetics (of art) as the true depiction of Spirit yet claims, perversely, that
philosophy represents a stage in Spirit higher than either art or religion.
Indeed, it is supremely important to gain a just appraisal of the conception
that Hegel has of the historical stages of Spirit (as it is of Kierkegaard’s
concept of stages or spheres of existence, as we shall see), in order, as he says
about the story of Adam and Eve, not to be misled by their contradictions. In
his four-lecture series on the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history,
the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of fine art (aesthetics), Hegel
undertakes to provide his readers with an all-encompassing account of the
history of Spirit—from its merely conscious beginnings (when, still im-
38 Chapter 2

mersed in finite nature, Spirit remains implicit or in itself) to the infinitely

self-conscious realization on the part of Spirit as not only in itself but also
truly (explicitly) for itself. However, because he does not directly acknowl-
edge that his historical stages of Spirit elaborate, in nuce, the myth of the
Fall, his histories easily lead to contradictory readings. Typically, the contra-
dictions present in Hegel’s account of the three historical stages of spirit—
Oriental (Eastern), Western (Greek and Roman), and Modern (Christian)—
are either uncritically accepted (and so repeated as true) or uncritically re-
jected (and so repeated as false), when they are not simply ignored.
Hegel argues, always with penetrating insight into the individual civiliza-
tions that he discusses, that Spirit develops (makes its transition) from lower
to ever higher stages, from, first, its immersion in nature (in the Oriental
world); to, next, its emergence as conscious (finite) spirit (in, above all, the
Greek world); and, finally, to its consummate realization as infinite self-
consciousness in Christianity (in the modern world). But, just as Hegel
shows us, as we shall see, in his commentary on the myth of the Fall, consis-
tent with the Kantian conjecture, that there is and can be no transition from
ignorance to knowledge of good and evil, from nature to freedom, so he
understands, in principle, that there is and can be no transition, in the history
of Spirit, from natural or finite consciousness to infinite self-consciousness,
from what is in itself to what is in and for itself. There is and can be no
transition from what is finite—for the finite is in itself contradictory as ignor-
ant of the relationship of what is for itself—to what is infinite. For the infinite
appropriates finite oppositions in and through the mediating process of mutu-
al recognition. Spirit recognizes Spirit in, as, and through its relationship
with the other. Thus, Hegel writes in the Lectures on the Philosophy of
History that in Christianity God is “recognized as Spirit only when known as
the Triune. This new principle is the axis on which the History of the World
turns. This is the goal and the starting point of History” (319). Spirit, as the
infinite self-consciousness of mutual relationship—embodied in the cove-
nantal love of neighbor—is both the beginning and the end, both alpha and
omega. Spirit, as at once the starting point and the goal, is what the Prophets
call the way of the Lord, the holy way of life for his people. This way leads
no less from God than to God. To begin with God is to make God your end.
To keep to the way of the Lord, whose infinite amplitude involves strict
obedience, is to love your God above all others and your neighbor as your-
self. To deviate, to lose your way, is to reduce your God and your neighbor to
instrumental means in serving one in opposition to (in contradiction of) the
other, as distinct from one serving the other in loving relationship.
But this is precisely where contradiction arises in Hegel’s account of the
stages in and by which Spirit enacts its historical transition. He is right that
the transition is the way, both the beginning and the end. Just as there is no
transition to infinite Spirit from what is other than (or without) Infinite Spirit,
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 39

so there is no transition from infinite Spirit to what is other than (or without)
Spirit. Spirit is the transition (to what is higher or to what is lower). Spirit is
the way, the incomparable way. There is no way to be compared to Spirit. It
is not so much that Spirit is beyond comparison or that it eschews compari-
son, although both these claims are true. Rather, because Spirit is the incom-
parable standard, the standard both of what is truly and so infinitely (loving-
ly) incomparable and of what is falsely and so finitely (idolatrously) compar-
able, Spirit itself represents (the creation of) the stages, just as it is the way
and the transition. There is and can be no concept of stages (comparisons)
outside Spirit. The very concept of stages, as created by Spirit, is thus either
contradictory or paradoxical. It is contradictory if it is unthinkingly held that
there is a way of making a transition from nature to freedom, from ignorance
to knowledge of good and evil, or from the finite (consciousness) to the
infinite (self-consciousness of) Spirit. It is paradoxical if it is thoughtfully
held, consistent with the myth of the Fall, that Hegel’s intention in elaborat-
ing the historical stages of Spirit is to reveal the paradox that is infinite Spirit.
This is the revelation that Spirit is the infinite axis of world history, that,
because it is at once the goal and the starting point of history, it is the way of
reason, of human dignity, on which all human beings are revealed to walk.
Two contradictions bedevil Hegel’s account of the historical stages of
Spirit, then, insofar as we fail to read them as the paradoxes that are revealed
in and through the Spirit as the way, the transition, i.e., the stage that, pre-
cisely because it is no less individual than universal, can be truly (infinitely)
various (different) only within the Spirit itself. While finite differences (com-
parisons) are contradictory and false if taken as the truth of infinite Spirit,
differences that are properly infinite and incomparable embody the truth of
Spirit. The discerning reader will see, then, that implicit here is the difference
between paganism and idolatry that I introduced earlier. While paganism
remains within the ignorance of finite (contradictory) differences, idolatry
conflates the finite and the infinite by directly reducing infinite Spirit to finite
images or directly raising finite images to infinite Spirit. Historically, and so,
also, ontologically, Hegel makes two claims regarding the history of Spirit
that are contradictory. Each claim violates his concept of infinite Spirit as at
once the beginning and the end, historically and ontologically, of Spirit.
The first contradictory claim that Hegel makes involves the relationship
between the first and the second stages of the history of Spirit, together with
their relationship to the third stage. Hegel invariably writes as if Spirit attains
a higher level of consciousness in the second stage, above all, in ancient
Greece, than in the first stage of the ancient peoples of the East (India and
China, together with Persia and Egypt). In other words, he writes as if the
Greek Spirit reaches a higher stage than the Spirit of Eastern civilizations and
that, therefore, it involves a further step along the way to the third stage of
Spirit. At the same time, however, because he consistently demonstrates that,
40 Chapter 2

because the finite Spirit is in itself contradictory (yet ignorant in itself of the
contradictions from which it knows no exit), we see that there cannot be and,
consequently, is not any essential difference between the first and the second
stages of finite Spirit. One finite Spirit cannot be superior to another finite
Spirit, except finitely (relatively or comparatively). Equally, one finite Spirit
cannot be closer to infinite spirit than another finite Spirit. There is no com-
parison with the infinite. In other words, all comparisons are revealed from
the point of view of the Infinite Spirit to be contradictory. In comparing one
finite representation of the Spirit with another there is no standard by which
to constitute their truth—outside of the contradictory duty that each of them
is instructed to fulfill: either rule over (kill) the other or be ruled over (killed)
by the other.
Indeed, it is instructive to see that the heroic code of the Iliad is in spirit
not fundamentally different in itself from the Bhagavad-Gita (The Song of
God), which is that section of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, in
which Krishna (a divine avatar of the great god Vishnu) instructs Arjuna on
his duty as a warrior to do battle against his enemy (even though the warriors
on the two opposing sides are members of the same family). In counseling
Arjuna to conduct himself according to an ethics of moderation, whose end,
ultimately, is absorption back into the one of Brahman, Krishna’s teaching
accords with the golden mean of the Nicomachean Ethics, in whose conclud-
ing Book X Aristotle shows contemplation of the divine one to be the single,
truly self-sufficient activity of the wise man. Indeed, Aristotle remarks that,
since we view the gods as blessed and happy above all other beings, we may
ask about the kinds of actions that we would properly assign to them. Surely
not, he observes, actions involving, for example, justice, bravery, liberality,
or temperance, for all these, he assures us, are “trivial and unworthy of
gods.” However, since we do know that the gods are alive and active, “what
is left but contemplation? Therefore, the activity of God, which surpasses all
others in blessedness, must be contemplation [i.e., thought thinking itself];
and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be
most of the nature of happiness” (1178b8–23). So Krishna instructs Arjuna:
because the Atman (the godhead within every being) is unborn and undying,
never ceasing and never beginning, deathless and birthless, “Therefore you
must fight.” You must do your duty as a warrior, to kill or to be killed by
your enemy, with the end of breaking the cycle of desire and liberating
yourself from the wheel of rebirth and death in and through becoming one
with Brahman.

The Lord is everywhere

And always perfect;
What does He care for man’s sin
Or the righteousness of man?
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 41

The Atman is the light:

The light is covered by darkness:
The darkness is delusion:
That is why we dream.
When the light of the Atman
Drives out our darkness
The light shines forth from us,
The sun in splendour,
The revealed Brahman. (36, 58)

We come, then, to the second contradictory claim that is involved in the

conception of the historical stages of Spirit that Hegel advances: the place of
Judaism in the history of Spirit. It will be remembered that Hegel specifically
identifies the Spirit that constitutes the alpha and the omega of history with
the Christian Trinity, without reference to Judaism. In which stage of histori-
cal spirit, then, does he locate Judaism? In the third stage of infinite Spirit? In
one of the first two stages of finite Spirit? Does Judaism, as the father of
Christianity, share with its son the Spirit of infinity? Or does Christianity,
while the daughter of Judaism, supersede the finite Spirit of its mother? But
how, we ask, would it be possible for Christianity, as founded on the myth of
the Fall, to go further than Judaism? How would it be possible for Judaism,
as the founder of the myth of the Fall, not to go so far as Christianity? Is
Hegel to be found among those whom Kierkegaard mocks in Fear and Trem-
bling for claiming that, while it is easy in the advanced nineteenth century to
go further than Abraham, the father of faith, it is surely impossible to go
further than the patriarch of Christian philosophy, Hegel himself? My answer
to this question, put simply here, is that we (moderns) do not go further than
Hegel precisely because what he demonstrates, if, at times, with considerable
ambivalence, is that philosophy does not go further than faith and that it goes
so far as faith solely to the extent that it is truly faithful in its comprehension
of biblical religion. My elemental point regarding Hegel’s claim about the
Greeks is that it is precisely his principle of infinite Spirit that allows us,
paradoxically, to deconstruct the contradictions of this claim, which reflects
the nostalgia on the part of moderns regarding the glory that was Greece, a
nostalgia that continues today to rob so much of modern philosophy of its
critical significance.
Still, Hegel’s error regarding the Jews is more serious, especially because
of the terrible history of oppression that Jews have suffered within Christen-
dom. (The anti-Judaism rife in Christendom, of which Hegel is a typical heir,
is the necessary, if not the sufficient, condition for the emergence of anti-
Semitism among subsequent nineteenth-century, especially German, intellec-
tuals, including Wagner, but not, however, Nietzsche, and that then underlies
the Holocaust in the twentieth century.) It is true that, in his various lecture
series on the history of Spirit, Hegel (contradictorily) locates Judaism at the
42 Chapter 2

end of both the first and the second stages of Spirit, as if the Spirit of the
Hebrew God and his chosen people were finite! Still, just as Hegel makes
clear that, because the Spirit of the Greeks is finite, it cannot and does not
represent a transitional stage on the way to biblical religion any more than
the finite Spirit of the ancient Indians, so, in his account of the Jews, he also
no less clearly indicates that, because their Spirit is infinite, they also do not
and cannot represent a transitional stage on the way to Christianity. For they
are the stage, the transition, the way of Infinite Spirit in and for itself. The
God of the Hebrews is, he knows, absolutely infinite, unlike anything ever
before seen in either the first or the second stages of finite Spirit. (I am not
concerned in this study with the question, however important it is in itself, of
what is involved in analyzing the incomparable differences between Judaism
and Christianity within their shared framework of infinite Spirit, the frame-
work that Islam also shares with them.)
Concerning, then, the two contradictory claims that Hegel makes regard-
ing the historical stages of Greek and Jewish Spirit, there are three critical
points that I want to emphasize. These three points are closely related to one
another in that each of them bears directly on how we are to understand what
is involved in the concept of the stages of history, i.e., of historical transition
(of development or progress). First, and foremost, Hegel shows us that the
third stage of Infinite Spirit (as found in biblical religion) is, both rationally
and actually, the first, last, and only stage of history. There is no stage that
leads to, there is no transition to Infinite Spirit from outside of Infinite Spirit,
i.e., as found in finite Spirit. Infinite Spirit is the incomparable stage than
which none is greater or other. It is the stage that cannot be thought without
necessarily existing as the relationship of self and other. Second, he shows us
that the first and second stages, those of finite Spirit, come into existence,
i.e., into relationship with the Infinite Spirit, only in and through their crea-
tion by Infinite Spirit. The very concept of the stages of finite history—of
prehistory, of what is in itself nonhistorical, of what is prior to Infinite Spirit,
of what is out-and-out otherness, of what is knowable solely in itself (as
thought thinking itself) and, consequently, is ignorant of being for itself—is
saved from the ignorance of self-contradiction solely from the point of view
of Infinite Spirit that knows that what it is in itself is for itself. But thus we
have introduced, yet again, the critical difference between paganism and
idolatry. The finite Spirit of paganism, in knowing that Spirit is finite in
itself, does not know what Spirit is, which is to be infinitely for itself. The
Infinite Spirit of idolatry reduces what is infinitely for itself to the finite
knowledge that is in itself. We learn, consequently, the significance both of
comprehending Greek (and other nonbiblical) Spirit as in itself finite and of
recognizing how very contradictory and misleading the concept of stages is
when not viewed as the paradox that Infinite Spirit creates in articulating the
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 43

relationship that it bears to those civilizations that do not, in themselves,

possess the concept of Spirit as infinite relationship.
My third critical point is that, because Hegel makes explicitly clear, as we
shall now see, that the difference between Judaism and Christianity is not and
cannot be finite, he shows us, indirectly, how very contradictory is his claim,
in adhering to the pretension of Christendom that the Christian Spirit (the
Trinity) goes further than the Jewish Spirit, to locate Judaism within the
stages of finite Spirit. The Christian Trinity, when truly understood as the
dialectic of psychical relationships (as articulated, for example, by St. Au-
gustine in his great work On the Trinity), is a profound concept, as Hegel
himself demonstrates in his various works. But it is in no sense fundamental-
ly different from the Jewish Trinity of the covenantal relationship that
Kierkegaard in Works of Love identifies as the triad of self, other, and love,
with love viewed as the third, which self and other each possess not in itself
but only for itself. 8
We arrive, then, at the account that Hegel gives of the myth of the Fall. In
the Lectures on the Philosophy of History he locates it as arising from the
intersection of the Roman, the Jewish, and the Christian stories. He writes as
if the Jewish myth of the Fall emerged (paradoxically) as the truth of Chris-
tianity from what he calls the nothing of Roman contradiction. But the devi-
ousness of his brilliant account will easily become contradictory if we fail to
note the care that he takes in pointing out to us that there is not and cannot be
a transition either from the finite Roman Spirit to the infinite Jewish and
Christian Spirit or from the Infinite Spirit of Judaism to the infinite Spirit of
Christianity. In the first case, the transition is impossible (for finite Spirit).
Transition is complete in Infinite Spirit. In the second case, the transition is
impossible (for infinite Spirit). Transition is complete in Infinite Spirit. But
this does not mean that Hegel will not proceed to claim (contradictorily) that
Christianity supersedes the Jewish fall into the covenant through what he
calls the reconciliation that Christ brings, consistent with the opposition that
Paul posits (contradictorily) between the first, finite, earthly man, Adam,
whose life is mortal, and the second, infinite, heavenly man, Christ, whose
life is immortal, which I discussed earlier.
Hegel proceeds to point out that in the Roman Empire (at the time of
Christ) the (finite) One, the emperor as monas modadum (the monad of
monads), rules over all other (finite) ones in the complete absence and ignor-
ance of the (infinite) right of personality and subjectivity (as at once rational
and actual). “This contradiction is the misery of the Roman World,” he
observes. Indeed, he continues, the contradiction of the one serves as “the
discipline . . . that compels personality to display its nothingness. But it is
reserved for us of a later period,” he adds, “to regard this discipline as a
training; to those who are thus trained [trainés, i.e., dragged], it seems a blind
destiny, to which they submit in the stupor of suffering” (emphasis added).
44 Chapter 2

The “higher condition” in which Spirit, consequently, finds itself, i.e.,

“[w]hat has been reflection on our part, must arise in the Spirit of the subject
of this discipline that in himself he is miserable and null” (320). Man must, in
other words, self-consciously internalize his external sorrow, which does not
and cannot occur within the Roman (pagan) contradiction of the one.

Man must feel himself as the negation of himself; he must see that his misery
is the misery of his nature—that he is in himself a divided and discordant [i.e.,
self-contradictory] being. This state of mind, this self-chastening, this pain
occasioned by our individual nothingness—the wretchedness of our self and
the longing to transcend this condition of soul—must be looked for elsewhere
than in the properly Roman World (emphasis added). It is this which gives to
the Jewish People their world-historical importance and weight; for from this
state of mind arose that higher phase in which Spirit came to absolute [i.e.,
infinite] self-consciousness. (320)

Hegel remarks additionally that “the thirst of the soul after God, its profound
sorrow for its transgressions and the desire for righteousness and holiness,” is
most purely and beautifully expressed in the Psalms and the Prophets. “Of
this Spirit,” he continues, “we have the mythical representation at the very
beginning of the Jewish canonical books in the account of the Fall” (321).
Thus, Hegel makes it evident to us that the contradiction of the finite one,
to which the Romans are fatally subject, provides the basis for the emergence
of the One as infinitely self-conscious Spirit—solely from the point of view
of that Spirit. The one, finite contradiction of paganism, the misery of being
nothing finite in itself, can be suffered self-consciously and so accounted for
only from the position that the creation of the infinite Spirit is from nothing,
from nothing that is in itself finite and contradictory. The suffering of contra-
diction, we may say, is now made actual and rational: it is comprehended as
the story of the Fall from the contradictory paradise of ignorance into the
sinful knowledge of good and evil. The infinite oneness of humanity is made
the story of covenantal relationship according to which everyone is com-
manded to love the other as the true image of what the one is. Hegel notes
that in the Genesis story man, who is created in the image of God, is said to
have lost his paradisiacal happiness in eating of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil. Sin replaces natural happiness. “This is a deep truth, that evil
lies in consciousness,” he writes, “for the brutes are neither good nor evil, the
natural man quite as little.” This “is no casual conception but the eternal
history of Spirit,” he continues (321). “For the state of innocence, the paradi-
siacal condition, is that of the brute. Paradise is a park, where only brutes, not
men, can remain. . . . The Fall is therefore the eternal mythus of man—in
fact, the very transition by which he becomes man. . . . Opposed to the
universal fatum of the Roman World, we have here the consciousness of Evil
and the direction of the mind Godwards. . . . Sin is the discerning of good and
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 45

evil as separation; but this discerning likewise heals the ancient hurt and is
the fountain of infinite reconciliation” (321–23). But Hegel, as I noted above,
will then argue, in full contradiction of Hebrew Scripture, that reconciliation
is brought about only within Christianity by Christ.
In the Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel observes that it is fitting for him to take
up consideration of “the Mosaic myth of the Fall”; for, just as the Logic is
concerned with knowledge, so “the myth, too, deals with knowledge, with its
origin and significance.” We must, consequently, he remarks, resist two
modern prejudices—that philosophy has no intrinsic interest in religion and
that religious myths have become obsolete. For what the myth of the Fall
shows us, he observes, is that it is of the essence of Spirit to overcome the
immediately natural state of ignorance and innocence. It “does not abide in
its being-in-itself but is for itself” (61). Still, the schism from nature must
itself also be overcome such that Spirit is reconciled with itself. “It is think-
ing that both inflicts the wound and heals it again.” Hegel observes further
that the innocence of a child that we find so naturally appealing is actually
the creation of Spirit. “The harmonious union that we see in children as
something natural is to be [understood as] the result of the labor and culture
of the Spirit. Christ says [to his disciples], ‘Unless you . . . become like
children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ [Matt. 18.3], but that
does not say that we must remain children” 9 (62).
Hegel then proceeds to observe that, while, according to the story of
Adam and Eve, it was the serpent that instigated their departure from inno-
cence, “in fact, the entry into the antithesis, the awakening of consciousness,
lies within human beings themselves, and this is the story that repeats itself in
every human being” (62). The antithesis between man and nature is further
represented, he points out, in the curse whereby God imposes on Adam and
Eve the burdens of conception and labor. But what this means, he tells us, is
that human beings are responsible for bringing forth (for creating) their own
lives. Indeed, when God, in driving man and woman from paradise, remarks
that they have now become like him in knowing good and evil, we learn that
knowledge is divine, although earlier it was said to be prohibited. “So in this
story there lies also the refutation of the idle chatter about how philosophy
belongs only to the finitude of spirit; philosophy is knowledge, and the
original calling of man to be an image of God can be realized only through
knowledge” (62–63). The fact, then, that man is driven out of the garden of
Eden so that he will not eat of the tree of immortal life means, Hegel tells us,
“that man is certainly finite and mortal on the side of his nature but that he is
infinite in knowledge” (63).
Before pursuing further Hegel’s analysis of the close relationship between
man’s expulsion from the eternal life of natural ignorance into the mortal life
of death, which brings with it eternal life as the infinite knowledge of the
Spirit, it is instructive, first, to recall the penseés in which Pascal remarks on
46 Chapter 2

the intrinsic relationship between the consciousness of death (the finite) and
what he calls the dignity of human thought (the infinite). He observes that,
while man is the weakest reed in nature, “he is a thinking reed.” Indeed,
while it takes the universe merely a drop of water to kill him, still, man is
“nobler than what kills him, since he knows that he dies and [knows] the
advantage that the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of it.
All our dignity consists, then, in thought. It is upon thought that we must
raise ourselves up and not on space and time, which we cannot fill. . . . By
space [and time], the universe envelops me and swallows me up like a point.
By thought, I envelop it” (30–31). It is evident, then, that Pascal, in holding
that, although the (finite) universe of space and time encloses me physically,
I enclose it (infinitely) in my thought, anticipates the Kantian revolution in
metaphysics whereby (finite) objects conform to the (infinite) mind and not
the mind to objects. It is no less evident that the critique that we saw Hegel
launch at the end of the previous paragraph against modern philosophy, with
its idle chatter that philosophy shows man to be finite in spirit (as if a natural,
i.e., a nonthinking, reed), reveals his solidarity with Pascal.
In his commentary on the myth of the Fall in the Lectures on the Philoso-
phy of Religion (1824), Hegel richly enlarges on the (Pascalian) concept of
man as mortal and finite in body yet no less eternal (immortal) and infinite in
thought. He observes that human beings in their separation from finite nature

are defined as being for themselves. As consciousness, being-for-self is self-

consciousness. It is infinite self-consciousness. . . . This is the infinite pres-
ence-to-self that did not come to consciousness in this way in the earlier
religions, where the antithesis [between Spirit and nature] did not progress to
this absoluteness, this [infinite] depth. Because this has now happened, human
dignity is simultaneously raised to a much higher plane. Because of it the
subject acquires absolute importance and becomes an essential object of the
interest of God. . . .

Since human beings are “the object of divine interest, elevated above fini-
tude, dependence, and external conditions,” they have, Hegel explains fur-
ther, the freedom to abstract from everything finite and natural. It is because
the infinite antithesis puts humanity beyond mortality, he continues, that the
idea of the immortality of the soul becomes important. He then formulates
his understanding of immortality, in its antithesis to mortality, by way of
contrasting it with the essentially different antithesis that exists between
things that are “combustible” and “incombustible.” His point is that, when
we say that something is combustible or incombustible, we refer to its deter-
mination as an external possibility. The determination of the being of a
thinking subject is not, however, a future possibility, he observes, “but an
affirmatively defined quality that . . . [it] already possesses in itself” (III.
208). Thus, it follows that the immortality of the soul is not a possibility that,
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 47

it is imagined, will emerge at some time in the future. Rather, “it is a present
quality. Spirit is eternal, and for this reason it is already present. . . . Eternity
is not mere duration but knowing—the knowing of what is eternal. Hence,
the eternity of Spirit is brought to consciousness at this point, in this knowl-
edge, in this very separation that has attained to the infinitude of being-for-
self, which is no longer entangled in the natural, the contingent, the external”
(208–209). For this reason, Hegel concludes, “those who have compre-
hended their infinitude cannot be contented either with the natural will or
with the state of the world” (211).
Hegel has thus shown us, consistent with Pascal, that there is no infinite
or eternal Spirit outside of (without) finitude, mortality, and death. In other
words, the paradox of the story of the Fall is that, insofar as human beings in
their innocence do not die naturally, they do not know the eternity, the
infinity, of the Spirit, whether divine or human. Insofar, however, as human
beings know that they die, they know what nature does not know, which is
that, while finitude—nature, mortality: death—swallows them up, they, in
the infinitude of their Spirit, in knowing good and evil, swallow up death.
The paradox of the immortality or eternity of the Spirit is, to recall Kant, that
man is the end of nature. Nature is not the end of man. Man (created in the
image of the infinite Spirit of God) is the end of death. Death is not the end of
man. Life is the end of death. Death is not the end of life. Eternal life (the
immortality of the soul) is the end of death. Death (finite mortality) is not the
end of life. The infinite life of the Spirit is the end of death, of finite contra-
diction. The death of finite contradiction is not the end of life. You have to
lose your finite life in order to gain (save) it infinitely. Let me add here that,
when Hegel claims that there are no true concepts either of immortality or of
reconciliation (the overcoming of sin) in Hebrew Scripture but solely in and
through Christ, he simply apes the contradictory rhetoric typical of Christen-
dom, consistent with his claim that the triune God is absent from Judaism.
Yet, what he in fact shows us is that the eternal mythus of man is unthinkably
contradictory except insofar as it is understood that to know good and evil is
to be like God and that to know God is to constitute the eternity of infinite
Spirit as the covenantal love of reconciliation.
Hegel proceeds, then, in the Logic to show that critical misconceptions
regarding the concept of original sin arise from the failure to grasp the
contradictory (i.e., the paradoxical) relationship between what is original and
what is natural. He ascribes this failure both to theology (as found, we may
say, in Christendom) and to modern (he calls it Enlightenment) philosophy.
He points out that original sin is natural—but not in itself and so only from
the perspective of Infinite Spirit. Sin is not originally natural according to the
contradictory teaching of the theology that holds that man originally possess-
es the freedom not to fall, the freedom not to know good and evil and so not
to be free. Yet, it does belong to the concept of Spirit, Hegel writes, to know
48 Chapter 2

“that man is by nature evil, and we must not imagine that this could be
otherwise.” What is sinful, then, for man is to act in a merely natural (imme-
diate or finite) way. It is sinful for man to remain in the natural garden of
paradise. However, while natural life in paradise is sinful, or contradictory,
the sin of this contradiction (the contradiction that is this sin) can be compre-
hended and so worked through as at once actual and rational solely from
within the fall into the covenant of knowing infinite Spirit. “Spirit is to be
free and is to be what it is through itself,” Hegel declares. “The [truly]
profound doctrine of the Church concerning Original Sin is confronted by the
modern Enlightenment doctrine that man is by nature good and should there-
fore remain true to nature” (63). However, just as man is originally evil by
nature solely because nature is not in itself evil (because evil is not originally
natural), so man is originally good by nature solely because nature is not
good in itself (because good is not originally natural). Good and evil are
originally the creations of Spirit. Yet, man would not sin—man would not
fall into knowing good and evil—if he were not the paradoxical being that
Pascal describes in the Pensées: “The nature of man is completely natural,
thoroughly animal. There is nothing that he cannot make natural to himself;
there is nothing natural that cannot be taken away from him” (32). The
paradox here is that it is solely because the being of man, in the dignity of his
infinite thought, is unnatural that he can make anything natural (finite or
mortal) to himself and that anything natural (finite or mortal) can be taken
away from him. Thus, Hegel writes in the Logic that, “insofar as man wills
this state of nature [i.e., the war of all against all as formulated by Hobbes,
Spinoza, and Rousseau], he wills singularity [i.e., immediate self-interest]”
(63).
In the Philosophy of History Hegel shows that the false conception of the
original nature of human beings results in two errors that are common in
modern philosophy. The first error arises from viewing man as naturally free,
i.e., as free by nature. For what is not grasped here, Hegel observes, is that
“freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural does not exist as
original and natural. Rather it must be sought out and won . . . [through our]
intellectual and moral powers. The state of nature is, therefore, predominant-
ly that of injustice and violence, of untamed natural impulses, of inhuman
deeds and feelings. . . . To the ideal of freedom, law and morality are indis-
pensably requisite . . . Society and the state are the very conditions in which
freedom is realized” (40–41). The second error that arises from the false
conception of the original nature of human beings also reflects, like the first,
the failure to view the civil state (the biblical covenant) as primary in consti-
tuting the nature of man’s original freedom. This is the view that man is
naturally (originally) born within the family. In other words, it is the view
that the family (which Hegel calls patriarchal) naturally precedes and thus
serves as the origin of the civil state, as the originally natural state of man.
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 49

But what Hegel has already shown us through his commentary on the story
of the Fall is that, because human beings are like God (who is not a finite
patriarch) in knowing good and evil, they are first (and last) members of the
covenant. They belong to the holy, to the original (not to the natural or
biological) family of covenantal humanity, which they constitute through
God and neighbor. Their birth as Infinite Spirit in the covenant, in the com-
munity as the civil state, is originally a second birth. Their nature as actual
and rational Spirit is originally a second nature.
We have now seen that Hegel, in presenting the myth of the Fall as
constituting the eternal mythus of man, shows us that the transition, by which
human beings become what they are and are what they become, involves the
paradox of making what is rational in itself actual for itself and making what
is actual in itself rational for itself. In and through the transition that is the
Spirit of history as the history of Spirit, human beings, at one and the same
time, are—now—eternally Spirit and—yet—ever becoming eternally Spirit.
Eternal Spirit—at once divine and human—is the history, the transition in
and through which human beings, together with God, create the covenantal
life in which love is the third “person” comprising the relationship of the one
and the other. To fall from the paradisiacal innocence of ignorance into the
knowledge of good and evil is to find that, in the end, you are free like God,
from the beginning of creation, to suffer the covenantal sin of knowing good
as the overcoming of evil, of knowing paradox as the appropriation of contra-
diction, of knowing the infinite as the surmounting of the finite, and of
knowing life as the encompassing of death. Just as Hegel, like Pascal, shows
us that outside of (without) death there is no immortal life, so we see that
knowledge of the good, together with the infinite knowledge of paradox,
does not exist outside of (without) the contradictory knowledge of evil (the
evil of contradiction). While the one in the pagan world of, say, Greece and
Rome knows that the one is finite (as thought thinking itself), this one does
not know what the finite is. This pagan one does not know that what the
finite is is to be contradictory in itself. This one does not know that the
contradiction of ignorance (the ignorance of contradiction) can be known as
contradiction—as the evil of contradicting the other as oneself—solely in and
through the eternal mythus of man whereby the transition to the knowledge
of good and evil is the paradox of beginning with the infinite knowledge of
God. There is no transition to the knowledge of God outside of the knowl-
edge of God. There is transition to the knowledge of God solely in beginning
originally with the knowledge of good and evil.
In embracing the story of the biblical Fall as the eternal mythus of man,
Hegel, together with Kant, shows that the Bible is modern from the begin-
ning and that modernity is biblical unto the end. Modernity, we see, is ration-
al solely insofar as it is understood to be actually biblical. The Bible is
faithful solely insofar as it is understood to be actually modern. For, as we
50 Chapter 2

learn from Kant, the myth of the Fall accounts for (recalling Hegel) the
intelligibility of history as rational and of reason as historical. But it is always
critically important to remember that the knowledge of good and evil as the
infinite knowledge of God is, according to Kant, the practice of willing the
good in the overcoming of evil as finite contradiction and, according to
Hegel, the practice of negating what is actually finite in and through its
infinite appropriation. Hegel is particularly eloquent in showing, consistent
with Kant, that what constitutes the dignity of human beings is infinite Spir-
it—that they are, as Kant says, the (infinite) end of (finite) nature. Thus,
Hegel is also particularly important in showing us how truly to comprehend
the biblical dialectic of mortality and immortality, of the finite and the infi-
nite, of the temporal and the eternal, of, in short, death and life (body and
soul, flesh and spirit). Like good and evil, the mortal and the immortal, the
finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, and death and life are not
contradictory opposites (such as the one and the many, appearance and real-
ity, and body and soul are in the Greek world). The law governing their
relationship is not the law of contradiction but the categorical imperative of
love: the command to love God as the standard of your relationships and the
neighbor as the truth of yourself.
It is idle chatter, then, for modern philosophers to repeat the nostrum that
man is finite. For the finite can be known—as contradictory—solely from the
point of view of the knowledge of good and evil, of the knowledge of (God
as) the infinite. Man dies. But the death of man is the tragedy and the comedy
(in the biblical conception) of life solely because the Spirit of man is infinite.
God dies. But the death of God is the tragedy and the comedy of life solely
because the Spirit of God is infinite. The Bible is unsparing of us. God dies
as man on a pagan cross. But is the death of God and man in the Hebrew
story of Adam and Eve, not to mention in the story of Abraham and Isaac (in
Genesis 22), any less tragic (and comedic)? Death of the spirit, it is important
to remember, is never far from the comedies of Shakespeare (nor comedy
from his tragedies, with, for example, the fool in King Lear or the porter in
Macbeth, not to mention the gravedigger clowns whose gallows-humor
Hamlet takes over for himself). Central to the deadly, serious humor of the
myth of the Fall, as I have emphasized in my presentation of it, is the
paradoxical comedy involved in liberating it from fatal, contradictory trage-
dy (in the idolatrous sense) and so in seeing it as the paradox whose deep
tragedy is truly comedic. It is human beings who are responsible either for
failing to see that the myth of the Fall is contradictory, with the result that the
death of man embodies the death of God, or for truly seeing that it is para-
doxical, with the result that the life of man embodies the life of God. Hegel
and Kant save the myth of the Fall from the contradictions that are inherent
in its idolatrous reception in Christendom, according to which Christians, for
whom God is dead, conceive of God as the one who, because his life is death,
 Hegel and the Myth of the Fall 51

punishes human beings (now) with life as death and rewards them (then)
with death as life.
The idolatrous reading of the myth of the Fall as the sacrifice of life to
death is consistent with the failure to see that the ending of the famous
thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians on the infinity of
love—now (death), then (life)—is utterly contradictory if love as the transi-
tion from love now to knowledge then is not understood as the eternal para-
dox that knowledge is then only insofar as love is now. Knowledge of good
and evil, like love of neighbor, constitutes the practice of face-to-face en-
counter with the other. For it is solely in the light of the other that we can
account for the darkness of the Pauline glass through which we see life.
Indeed, what did Jesus see when, dying as a criminal on a Roman cross, he
cried out face-to-face (citing Hebrew Scripture): My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me? What did Abraham see when he was summoned by God
face-to-face to go forth to Mount Moriah and there sacrifice his son Isaac as a
burnt offering to the Lord? Face-to-face encounter with the other is the light
that shines in the darkness of the glass, and the darkness has not overcome it.
What is now dark is the light it then becomes, and what then is dark is the
light it now becomes. Like good and evil, the (paradoxical) light of infinite
Spirit is not found outside of (without) the (contradictory) darkness of finite
Spirit. Yet, the finite Spirit of the contradictory darkness of ignorance can be
comprehended solely from within the light of the knowledge of the Infinite
Spirit of paradox. Who among us, truly sinners, claims to grasp either evil or
death, to say nothing of the infinite goodness of love, except darkly through
the glass of life?
The biblical myth of the Fall sets, then, the stage for modernity as at once
secular and religious, both rational and faithful. It is the eternal myth accord-
ing to the infinity of whose truth human beings, who are created from noth-
ing in the image of God, constitute their life as the sinful fall into the liberat-
ing knowledge of good and evil. It reveals their life to be, eternally and
infinitely, the transition from nature to freedom, from what is contradictory
in itself to what is paradoxical for itself. Kant dubs the historical process of
liberating transition the progress inherent in the practical postulate of immor-
tality. But the paradox of transition, of history, as we have now seen, is that
the transition, history itself, is always at its end and, yet, from the beginning,
still to be repeated and so amplified, deepened, and expanded by every hu-
man being, when it is not simply made regressive.
The myth of the Fall is the myth of myths. To paraphrase Spinoza, the
myth of the Fall is its own standard of truth, the standard both of true myths
and of false myths. False myths are precisely those which, because they have
always been (finitely) eternal and universal, have never existed eternally or
universally (infinitely) for single individuals. What Kierkegaard shows us, as
we shall see in the next chapter, is that the transition to the life of faith and
52 Chapter 2

love, what he calls the coming into existence of the religious stage of exis-
tence as the absolute (or infinite) relationship to the absolute, involves a
beginning that, if it has always existed eternally, then it has never existed for
the single individual as, we may say, the eternal mythus of man. For we
remember Kant’s observation that all human beings have the responsibility,
in the beginning, of willing as their end the original dignity of the fall of their
forbears into the freedom of knowing good and evil.

NOTES

1. See Critique of Practical Reason.

2. See The Conflict of the Faculties, Part I.
3. These are the works on which I principally draw in my presentation of Hegel. While the
Logic and the Philosophy of Right are important, mature works of Hegel and The Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit (1805) is remarkable as Hegel’s first significant, published work, they are less
important for my purposes. I do not take into consideration here the earlier works of the 1790s
in which Hegel began to ponder the ideas central to his conception of ontology and history and
their relationship that would mature only later. He did not undertake to publish the works of his
philosophical apprenticeship in his own lifetime.
4. Kant writes in the Introduction of the Critique of Pure Reason that, “although all our
knowledge commences with [natural] experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from
[that] experience” (B1).
5. Two points are to be kept in mind regarding the formalities of the German language. (1)
All nouns, e.g., Geist (Spirit, spirit), in German are capitalized. (2) Geist means (and can be
properly translated as) both spirit and mind.
6. I modify the translation to make it consistent with standard English.
7. Hegel discusses the Fall in brief sections of both the Encyclopaedia Logic and the
Lectures on the Philosophy of History and in several brief sections of the Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion. While these accounts vary in detail, they are altogether consistent with
each other.
8. Needless to say, Kierkegaard does not directly acknowledge that the trinity of covenan-
tal love is Jewish.
9. I complete the passage from Matthew that Hegel cites only in part.
 Chapter Three

Kierkegaard on Coming into

Historical Existence as the
Critique of Christendom

The significance that Kierkegaard possesses for us in this study is that he

provides, in addition to Kant and Hegel, truly critical insight into what repre-
sents the values of modernity in and through his profoundly exacting engage-
ment with Christianity. In his works, both pseudonymous and authored,
which appeared in the relatively short period from 1843 to his death in
1855—and written in Danish far from the cultural capitals of Europe—
Kierkegaard provides a critique of Christianity, including a demonstration of
how its values not only differ fundamentally from those of pagan antiquity
but are also fundamentally falsified in what he calls Christendom (the ration-
alization of Christian values in pagan terms), the concept that I invoked in
earlier chapters, that is without parallel in modern times. Consistent with
Kant, who acknowledges that the critique of pure reason is consonant with
Christian faith understood as practical reason, i.e., as willing the good, and
with Hegel, who sees his philosophical task as that of rescuing the truth of
the Christian religion from its abject surrender to spiritless (he calls it En-
lightenment) philosophy, Kierkegaard writes, he tells us, as I indicated earli-
er, without authority (whether priestly, professorial, or political) and so
merely as a private (secular) individual. He makes no claim either to be a
Christian or to judge whether or not others are Christians. Still, he is confi-
dent that he knows what it is (what it means) to be a Christian. He throws
down the gauntlet to his readers: either believe (what I show to be the truth of
the God-man) or be offended (by the truth of Christianity).
Why the critical insight that Kierkegaard has into Christianity, along with
his no-holds-barred attack on Christendom, is so valuable for us is precisely
53
54 Chapter 3

because he profoundly challenges what we understand by the religious and so

also, then, by the secular. While I shall be addressing here only indirectly
whether, or in what sense, in the multicultural globalism of the twenty-first
century, faith in the God-man is relevant to the majority of the inhabitants of
the world who are not Christian (and do not trace their ideological roots to
the Bible)—not to mention those rooted in the three religions of Abraham
who either are not Christians or are nonobservant Christians—the relation-
ship between faith and reason, between theology and philosophy, and be-
tween the religious and the secular remains an abiding issue, at least within
our democratic societies. Are the great concepts that are central to our de-
mocracies, like love, duty, responsibility, freedom, equality, the dignity and
worth of all human beings . . . religious or secular? My point in raising this
issue is to underline a central paradox of this study. I shall be showing that
there is no greater authority, along with Kant and Hegel, on what it is that
constitutes modern values as the dialectic of the religious and the secular, on
what it means to be faithful and of what it means to be rational, than Kierke-
gaard, the Christian philosopher. We shall see that his either/or challenge—
either believe or be offended—is the “religious” counterpart of the philo-
sophical either/or of Kant that I have made central to my study: either the
mind depends on objects (thus eliminating human freedom and responsibil-
ity) or objects depend on the mind (with the result that human self-determi-
nation embodies the golden rule of loving others as you want others to love
you). I have little doubt that both Kantians and Kierkegaardians (both philos-
ophers and theologians, both secularists and Christians) will be offended!
Still, we can rephrase the imperative of Kant in terms of his Enlightenment
call to arms—sapere aude (dare to know): either think critically (and em-
brace consciously the crisis thus freely created), or refuse to think critically
(and suppress consciousness of the crisis thus servilely created).
Not only does Kierkegaard believe that Christian faith, faith in the God-
man, throws the life of human beings into crisis—in demanding choice,
freedom, decision on their part regarding what he calls coming into exis-
tence. But also he no less throws into crisis our very understanding of Chris-
tianity. His formulations typically appear so dogmatic, so one-sided, so ex-
tremist—in opposing God and the world, God and the human being, the
inward and the external, the religious and the poetic—that there is a sense in
which I view my hermeneutical task as one of saving (liberating) Kierke-
gaard from himself just as Hegel views his philosophical task as one of
saving (liberating) religion from its servile surrender to (anti-religious) phi-
losophy. Indeed, just as Hegel so powerfully shows that it is the revelation of
Christian truth that constitutes philosophy, so it is my endeavor to show that
Kierkegaard, in the wake of Kant and Hegel, reveals to us that the truth of
modernity is no less secular than it is religious, indeed, that it is religious
solely insofar as it is truly secular.
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 55

Before undertaking this task, however, it is important, first, to address an

issue that, while hardly of interest to general readers, continues to bedevil
Kierkegaard scholarship. I refer to the question of the relationship between
the pseudonymous works of Kierkegaard and those authored by him (i.e.,
those he issued under his own name). For example, Fear and Trembling
appeared as written by Johannes de Silentio (with no indication that Kierke-
gaard was its author). Works of Love, in contrast, appeared as written by
Kierkegaard himself. Furthermore, later pseudonymous authors often refer to
works by earlier pseudonymous authors and also to works authored by
Kierkegaard, etc. There is no question but that Kierkegaard is unique, in the
history of philosophy, in making the form of the communication central to its
content (message), i.e., in making how one writes central to what one writes.
Still, there are two elemental points that I want to make (without directly
undertaking to justify them here). First, the content of Kierkegaard’s works,
both pseudonymous and authored—at least through 1848 (the date of the
pseudonymous Practice in Christianity, although it is said to be edited by S.
Kierkegaard), which are the latest works that I draw upon in my study—is
absolutely consistent. 1 Consequently, I shall cite both pseudonymous and
authored works as expressing Kierkegaard’s own point of view. Second,
what Kierkegaard actually shows us, through his use of pseudonyms, is that
all works—by any author, including the Bible (with its divine author!)—are,
in the most fundamental (critical) sense, pseudonymous. Even when, as is
normally the case, we know the name of the author of a given text, we must,
as Spinoza says about the Bible, read it from itself alone. In other words, any
text (including the Bible and works of art) that is properly a text is consti-
tuted by what Kierkegaard calls indirect communication. In receiving—criti-
cally, lovingly, faithfully—the communication of a text, we readers must
enter into community with it: we must be free to choose, to decide how to
read it, to determine what it means for us. This is what Kierkegaard means by
coming into existence. If a text has always existed eternally—in the sense of
its traditional reading—then it has never existed . . . eternally. The task of
readers is to determine if a text bears eternal (absolute, infinite, reliable,
salutary . . .) significance for themselves. Their task is to bring it ever again
newly into existence, eternally—for themselves, for their contemporaries.
For what coming into existence as the eternal means is to become historically
contemporary with the truth, to make the truth one’s historical contemporary.
What is radically new and so revolutionary about the God of Christianity (the
God of the Bible), Hegel says, is that God is revealed to all as their contem-
porary, that God is known to and by all, equally and freely—precisely be-
cause, Kierkegaard adds, revealed truth, the truth of revelation, the truth of
Christ is indirect communication. All direct communication, of whatever
source, including both church and state, represents the idolatry (the rational-
ized paganism) of Christendom.
56 Chapter 3

But reading, like life itself, eternally risks idolatry. In reading the Bible I
learn that, like all human beings, I am created in the image of God. Conse-
quently, I determine that what this means, indirectly, for me, is that, in
bringing God, in whose image I am created, into existence as the one who is
eternally my true contemporary, I have, following Hegel, according to whom
the image that human beings have of themselves is their image of God, made
God in my own image. But then, having avoided the treacherous shoals of
Scylla, I may be sucked into the whirlpool of Charybdis. In steering clear of
dogmatic shipwreck on the shoals of reducing man to God, I may be swept
into the whirlpool of relativism by reducing God to man. Since my book,
overall, is dedicated to thinking through, systematically and lucidly, what it
means to run this risk, I shall simply note here, in taking up Kierkegaard, that
it is precisely this risk that Kant and Hegel meet so magnificently in their
reading of the Myth of the Fall.
Another version of the distinction between direct and indirect communi-
cation, in Kierkegaard, is that between contradiction (dualism, idolatry:
Christendom) and paradox (dialectic: Christianity). Thus, we see that the
Myth of the Fall is at once anonymous, indirect, and paradoxical in its com-
munication. In order to bring the Fall into historical existence as the eternal
mythus of our humanity, we readers must see that the story of Adam and Eve
does not show what both Feuerbach, in his rejection of it, and Schopenhauer,
in his acceptance of it, hold: that it demonstrates life to be the original sin
from which human nature can be redeemed only in and through death. For
this is the view that the city of man (death), as fallen, contradicts the city of
God (life), as redeemed. But this is the sin that which there is none greater,
the sin against the Spirit (which, Jesus tells us in Matthew 12.31, is irredeem-
able). This is the belief, as I shall continue to emphasize, that life serves
death at its contradiction (we live in order to die). What we readers must see,
however, is that the Myth of the Fall, as we have learned from Kant and
Hegel, is, in its very self-contradictory indirection, the paradox that is life
itself. The teacher of life is, paradoxically, death, as we shall learn from
Kierkegaard. Death is the paradox of life, not the contradiction of life. Death
is the paradoxical servant of life (we die in order to live). The truth revealed
to us as the Myth of the Fall is that you have to give up, willingly, in fear and
trembling, your paradisiacal (contradictory) life of sin. You have to accept
death as the human condition by relinquishing eternal life, as naturally given,
in order to live paradoxically, truly and with dignity, in the earthly city as the
eternal gift of covenantal love that is bestowed on mortal men and women. In
taking responsibility for knowing good and evil, human beings know that
they die. Pascal writes, as we saw in chapter 2, that the knowledge that we
die constitutes, paradoxically, the dignity of our thought. Either we die faith-
fully. Or we die offended that there is no life outside of (without) death.
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 57

In his works Kierkegaard powerfully illuminates the Kantian conception

of the Fall as the eternal mythus of faithful thinking, of thinking faithfully, as
I shall now undertake to show. Either death (as known in and through the
objects of natural time and space) transcendently serves life by conforming to
the mind, Hegel’s and Kierkegaard’s (biblical) Spirit. Or life serves death by
conforming Spirit to objects (as found in the natural space and time) and the
knowledge of which constitutes transcendental illusion. What Kierkegaard
shows, as I have already intimated, is that we, each of us as the single
individual, must bring into existence for ourselves the eternal mythus of the
Fall into the covenantal knowledge of loving the neighbor as ourselves. If the
myth of the Fall is either merely temporal or merely eternal, then it has never
truly existed—for me as the temporality that I bring into existence as what
truly abides for me eternally and as the eternity that I bring into existence as
what truly abides for me temporally. Either/or. Either temporality and eter-
nity are the paradoxical truth of each other such that I live eternally as the
temporal now and live temporally as the eternal now—in what Kierkegaard
calls the moment of paradox. Or temporality and eternity are the illusory
contradiction of each other such that, in order to win temporal life, I must
abjure or escape the eternal or, in order to gain eternal life, I must renounce
the temporal.
Kierkegaard shows further that this coming into existence, whereby we
make the eternal mythus of the Fall truly timely for ourselves, is—history.
What history is, we consequently learn from him, is that it is neither merely
temporal nor merely eternal, in the mutual opposition of their contradictori-
ness. For history is, in actuality, the paradoxical relationship of the temporal
and the eternal. Indeed, history is the absolute, the absolute relationship to
the absolute, which is precisely the concept of the religious that we find in
Fear and Trembling. Indeed, because history constitutes the domain of exis-
tence, no less (or more) of God than of man, Kierkegaard holds that what he
calls the organ of history is faith. I know that the past, my past, was given in
space and time (I was born in a specific place at a specific time . . .). But I do
not know what my past—now—is. For, although the past is unchanging, it is
not necessary; for it, too, has come into existence. Its “necessity” (its truth,
significance, or interest . . .) lies in what I make of it—as I bring it into
existence as my future. The structure of existence as historical, of history as
what it is that actually constitutes the existence of the single individual, is,
Kierkegaard then shows us, commensurate with both faith and freedom. We
thus see that his concept of faith as the free decision to come historically into
existence is what Kant calls practical reason (the self-determination of think-
ing) and is consistent with Hegel’s demonstration that philosophy is knowl-
edge of God (i.e., the content of Christian faith constitutes philosophy).
This, then, is the background—the paradoxical union of the temporal and
the eternal that the single individual brings faithfully into historical existence
58 Chapter 3

as the religious—to which I shall be constantly returning in my presentation

of Kierkegaard. It allows me, consequently, to foreground two themes, each
of which is critically important in comprehending history as the paradox that
makes it possible for us to overcome (to appropriate) the contradictory oppo-
sition of faith and reason, of the religious and the secular, of the biblical and
modern so typical of Christendom, including its secular representative called
modern philosophy. These two themes are, first, what Kierkegaard calls the
like-for-like and, second, metaphor as spirit, which he identifies, as I noted in
chapter 1, with the transfer (the transition!) from nature to spirit. The like-
for-like, our first theme, represents the likeness of man to, at once, God and
neighbor. Man is both the likeness to (as the image of) God—and so Kierke-
gaard makes constant reference to the creation of human beings from noth-
ing, from nothing that is not made in and as the divine image—and the
likeness to (as the image of) the neighbor. It is evident, then, that the theme
of like-for-like is intimately related to our second theme of metaphor as
spirit, of the likeness of Spirit to Spirit (God and neighbor) in the transfer
from nothing (natural in space and time) to the Spirit of creative metaphor.
Analysis of these two themes will allow me, then, to deal with, as I have
already indicated, the, at times, extreme opposition that Kierkegaard appears
to erect between

• God (the God-man: Christ) and man. But is man not like God as God is
like man in being revealed, indirectly, paradoxically, in and as the image
of humanity?
• the invisible and the visible. Yet, we shall see that for Kierkegaard the
hidden, as found, for example, in the silence of Abraham, is the disclosed
as the indirect communication of revelation.
• inwardness (Spirit) and externality (worldliness). But is not love of neigh-
bor manifested, revealed, disclosed in the world?

These two themes, the like-for-like and metaphor as spirit, will also allow me
to articulate a comprehensive (and comprehensible) concept of art that is at
once modern and biblical (modern because biblical and biblical as modern).
Yet, Kierkegaard, for all his commitment to the like-for-like of paradox,
indirect communication, and metaphor, often appears extremely hesitant
about (when not simply hostile to) accepting any notion of the likeness of the
aesthetic and the religious, of the (worldly) poet and the (biblical) prophet.
He shows the same apparent anxiety regarding marriage (i.e., adult love
relationships). How, or in what sense, can a man (or a woman) whose mar-
riage unites love and the erotic (the aesthetic) be religious, when the relig-
ious, as the absolutely singular love of God, constitutes what Kierkegaard
calls self-denial, sacrifice, and, indeed, hatred of the world? Still, Kierke-
gaard also knows that the divine imperative of love demands that I love my
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 59

enemy as myself. Additionally, because our two themes are central to the
critical insight that Kierkegaard has into the fundamental difference between
Christian (biblical) man and pagan man, they will also help us gain a yet
deeper understanding of the role that this difference plays in constituting
modernity as coming into existence in and through values that are fundamen-
tally religious (biblical). Still, how easily the like-for-like of paradox (the
absolute relation to the absolute) is conflated with the naturally universal
images (myths) of paganism. How easily metaphors as spirit (the transition
from nature to spirit) are reduced to idols. The paradox of love—as the work
of love that is no less the work of art—is, however, that its visibility (direct-
ness) must be, and so is, its very invisibility (its revelation as the indirect
communication of the Spirit).

THEME ONE: LIKE-FOR-LIKE

The distinction between themes one and two, like-for-like and metaphor as
spirit, together with the order of their presentation, is largely a matter of
formal (expository) convenience on my part. As I have already indicated,
they are profoundly interrelated and together constitute coming into exis-
tence as the critique of the contradictory opposition between temporal life
and eternal life within Christendom. Both themes Kierkegaard explicates in
Works of Love. In addition to that work, I shall primarily call upon Fear and
Trembling and Philosophical Fragments, plus works like Practice in Chris-
tianity, in my exposition of these two themes. I begin with the theme of like-
for-like since Kierkegaard uses it to articulate what is surely the fundamental
imperative of the covenant through which is established the unity of God and
human beings, together with the unity of human beings both with each other
and with themselves (what Hegel calls the self-consciousness of Spirit): the
command to love God above all others and your neighbor as yourself. The
human being is created in the image, in the likeness of both God and neigh-
bor. No human beings are in themselves the neighbor, although every human
being, Kierkegaard observes, is the neighbor, is like the neighbor, is created
in and through the image of the neighbor and so is both in and for itself,
recalling Hegel. Thus, Kierkegaard writes in Practice in Christianity that
truth “is in itself, is in and for itself—and Christ is the truth” (159). Only
spirit, he continues, “can draw spirit to itself . . . through a choice—therefore
not immediately but mediately” or indirectly (160-61). Since human beings
are in themselves the neighbor as Spirit solely in and through others, i.e., in
and through the practice of the categorical imperative, it follows that no
human beings are the truth, no human beings are God simply in identity with
themselves. But surely, then, there is no essential (ontological) difference but
only situational (formal) difference among neighbor, truth, and God. I am
60 Chapter 3

commanded to love God as the truth, the truth of God—above all other
truths—and to love the neighbor as the truth, the truth of the neighbor, as the
truth of myself. It is the truth of God and neighbor that constitutes the very
standard of my life, of my existence. Yet, because it has traditionally been
the formal convention within Christianity to privilege the language of the
divine (God) over the language of the human (the neighbor), all too frequent-
ly the essence of Christianity has been understood within Christendom to
involve a hierarchical (and ultimately contradictory) relationship between
God as infinite and the human being as finite, between divine love and
human (neighborly) love (as we shall find in Feuerbach and Schopenhauer).
Not only does Kierkegaard himself frequently indulge in this common Chris-
tian rhetoric, but also scholars commonly repeat it as evincing Christian
belief in the superiority of the God-man over sinful, mortal, finite man. Or
the hierarchical subordination of man to God has simply been rejected by
those moderns who have become impatient with Christian imperialism, with
what Kierkegaard calls the triumphant Church of Christendom as distinct
from the militant church of Christianity that bears witness in fear and trem-
bling to the truth of God and neighbor. (It is interesting to note that Kierke-
gaard has little interest in atheism. His real concern is with the death of God,
and hence with the death of man, within Christendom.)
Kierkegaard tells us that the eighteen “Christian deliberations” (plus the
Conclusion) that constitute Works of Love are “not about love but about
works of love” (3). He observes further that, because he is dealing with the
works of love, he considers “love in its outward direction” (282). Indeed, he
states that “in this little work [of nearly four hundred pages in the standard
English translation] we are continually dealing only with the works of love,
and therefore not with God’s love but with human love” (301). However we
evaluate the intention or purpose that Kierkegaard has in making such
claims, what he shows us, what he demonstrates to us in Works of Love, as in
the other works on which I principally draw in my study, is that any distinc-
tion between love and a work of love, between divine love and human love,
or between love that is inward (spiritual) and love that is outward (worldly) is
subject always to the fundamental hermeneutic in terms of which we proper-
ly make true distinctions—the critical difference between Christianity and
Christendom. This is the difference that, in constituting the critique of pure
faith, throws us into crisis—into being responsible for our choice of exis-
tence. Either believe that love as a work of the spirit, in commanding us to
love the other—God and the neighbor—as ourselves, is always at once di-
vine and human and so no more inward (divine, personal) than outward
(human, communal). Or be offended (as a believer in idols, whether religious
or secular). Love of God that does not commit us to the work of loving the
neighbor is absolute idolatry. Love of neighbor that does not commit us to
seeing our neighbor as the image of God is no less idolatrous. Indeed,
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 61

Kierkegaard writes that “only love for the neighbor truly leads to life. Just as
Christianity’s joyful message is contained in the doctrine of humanity’s in-
herent kinship with God, so is Christianity’s task humanity’s likeness to God.
But God is love, and therefore we can be like God only in loving, just as we
also . . . can only be God’s co-workers—in love. . . . [W]hen you love the
neighbor, then you are like God” (62-63). Kierkegaard here cites 1 John 4.8:
“He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.” To which I add
verse 12: “No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in
us and his love is perfected in us.” Kierkegaard also writes that “love be-
comes known and recognized by the love in another. Like is known only by
like; only someone who abides in love can know love, and in the same way
his love is to be known” (16). Like-for-like: like God, like neighbor.
Still, when Kierkegaard discusses the double command of love in Mat-
thew 22.37, 39—that you are to love God in the fullness of your heart, soul,
and mind and your neighbor as yourself—he tells us that what this means is
that you love God “more than yourself” and not simply “as yourself” (19).
Yes, it is true that, while Christians worship God, pray to God, and adore
God, they do not worship or pray to the neighbor or love the neighbor in
adoration. Not only, however, is there much false or self-serving (idolatrous)
worship, prayer, and adoration; but, further, how can divine love be (compar-
atively) more (or greater) than the absolutely infinite like-for-like in the
image of which human beings are created? Indeed, just a couple of pages
later in the same deliberation of Works of Love Kierkegaard writes that the
“concept ‘neighbor’ is actually the redoubling of your own self; ‘the neigh-
bor’ is what thinkers call ‘the other,’ that by which the selfishness in self-
love [i.e., the “as yourself”] is to be tested.” He observes further that the
merely erotic lover erroneously believes that “he loves the other person even
more than himself” (21). But thus the erotic lover fails to see that the neigh-
bor, as the other, is the redoubling of himself. What Kierkegaard makes clear
to us, consequently, is that the neighbor, like God, is the other (for us). For
both test the self to see whether it comprehends itself as its double, as its
likeness, as its other: God and neighbor. It is little wonder, then, that Kierke-
gaard points out that, “in order to determine what love is, it begins either with
God or with the neighbor, a doctrine about love that is the essentially Chris-
tian doctrine, since one, in order in love to find the neighbor, must start from
God and must find God in love to the neighbor” (140). Thus, near the end of
the Conclusion of Works of Love he sums up his conception of the likeness of
the love of God and neighbor in writing: “In the Christian sense, to love
people is to love God, and to love God is to love people—what you do unto
people, you do unto God, and therefore what you do unto people, God does
unto you. . . . No, like-for-like. God is actually himself this pure like-for-like,
the pure rendition of how you yourself are” (384).
62 Chapter 3

Notwithstanding the fact that the like-for-like unites the human being as
neighbor with God as the other, Kierkegaard writes that the God-man is
“eternally different from every human being” even as he was incarnated “a
true human being, tested in everything human” (155). He also observes in
Practice in Christianity that God “is separated from what it is to be human by
an infinite qualitative difference” and invokes there what he calls “Christ’s
(the God-man’s) heterogeneity to all individual human beings . . .” (28-29,
202). In Philosophical Fragments he associates “the god” 2 with the Absolute
Paradox, which, as the unknown, is “the absolutely different” (44&ff).
When, therefore, Kierkegaard undertakes to explicate his claim that “God is
not like a human being,” notwithstanding the like-for-like of God and man,
he introduces yet another set of distinctions—between the visible and invis-
ible, between the external and the inward, and between the worldly and the
spiritual. Still, what he shows us is that, just as these distinctions dissolve
before our very eyes, so the absolute difference between God and man van-
ishes with them. He remarks that it is precisely because we lack “visible
evidence” for seeing God that we “are weaned from the worldly point of
view that insists on visible evidence” (Works of Love 145). Thus, while he
would appear to associate God with the invisible and human beings with the
visible and the worldly, he soon reminds his readers that “you never see and
no human being has ever seen Christian love, in the same sense as no one has
ever seen humanity. Yet ‘humanity’ is the essential specification, and yet
Christian love is the essential love . . .” (147).
So, while Kierkegaard thus makes it clear to us that the invisible applies
equally to God and man, what about his concepts of external and worldly?
Although he proceeds to write that, while “Christianity does not want . . . a
decision in the external sphere,” he is quick to add that sacramental signs
such as Baptism offend the worldly because they are, like love, at one and the
same time inward and external, spiritual and worldly. “The world,” he de-
clares, “is always diametrically opposed; where Christianity wants to have
inwardness [love of God], worldly Christendom wants outwardness, and
where Christianity wants outwardness [love of neighbor], worldly Christen-
dom wants inwardness”—with the result that Christianity always involves
the either/or: either believe or be offended (146). He also points out that “The
Work of Love in Praising Love” (as one of the deliberations in Part II is
entitled) must be done both inwardly, in self-denial, and outwardly, in self-
sacrificing unselfishness. “Truth,” he writes, “must essentially be regarded as
struggling in this world” (366).
We see, consequently, that the only real difference that counts, the abso-
lutely different “difference,” is not that between God and man or between the
invisible and the visible, the spiritual and the worldly, or the inward and the
external but between Christianity (faith) and Christendom (the offence of
worshipping idols). For, just as the “visible” neighbor is truly invisible, ex-
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 63

cept in the eyes of those who love the neighbor as themselves, so the invis-
ible God is truly visible in the eyes solely of those for whom God as the other
is the truth of their self. It is evident that love of neighbor, because not
worldly (immediately external or visible) but truly inward, is in the world. It
is no less evident that love of God, because not visible (immediately external
or worldly) but truly inward, is in the world. Spirit, whether divine or human,
is not visible as worldly things are visible. But it is no less true that Spirit, at
once divine and human, is visible as worldly things are not visible.
Indeed, Kierkegaard is careful to point out that, just as there is a worldly
(false) worldliness, which, in not abiding by the imperative to love God and
neighbor, he at times calls the secular, so there is also an inwardness that, in
its secret hiddenness, is falsely inward. In associating hidden inwardness
with the hypocritical piety of Christendom, he observes in Practice in Chris-
tianity that, because we all are born Christians, Christianity as the confession
of “Christ in the midst of Christendom” on the part of the single individual
has been abolished (220). In Works of Love he associates false or hidden
inwardness with the refusal to be disclosed, in contrast with true inwardness
(as the invisibility of the Spirit) of disclosure (revelation). He writes that,
“because existence has to test you, test your love, or whether there is love in
you,” it follows “that as you now judge, that is, as you now in judging
choose, what dwells in you must become disclosed.” He points out that
people “think that judgment is something reserved for the far side of the
grave, and so it is also, but they forget that judgment is much closer than that,
that it is taking place at all times because at every moment you live existence
is judging you, since to live is to judge oneself, to become disclosed” (227-
28). How much hiddenness may continue to reside in a person, Kierkegaard
exclaims! Indeed, how “inventive is hidden inwardness in hiding itself and in
deceiving or evading others, . . . [because it is] mortally afraid of being
entirely disclosed!” (229). The reason that “this secretive inclosing reserve is
the most dangerous kind of faithlessness” is not, he explains, because a
person breaks faith but because he “continually leaves it vague whether he is
bound by his faith” (166). In Fear and Trembling he associates hidden in-
wardness with the demonic, as distinct from the divine. “Silence is the de-
mon’s trap,” he writes there, “and the more that is silenced, the more terrible
the demon, but silence [as found in Abraham, as we shall see] is also divin-
ity’s mutual understanding with the single individual” (88).
The distinction between true and demonic silence, like the distinction
between disclosure (the judgment of revelation) and hiddenness (the hypocri-
sy of bad faith) or between indirect and direct communication, is, we see yet
again, the difference, not between the divine and the human but, rather,
between what is truly both divine and human, on the one hand, and what is
falsely (demonically) either divine or human, on the other hand. It is the
difference between Christianity and Christendom, between truth and idolatry,
64 Chapter 3

between true image and idol. Kierkegaard calls this difference in Works of
Love “infinity’s change.” It is the infinite change that Christianity brings into
the world by making “every human relationship between person and person a
relationship of conscience.” While Christianity, he observes, has never in-
tended to topple governments by taking the place of kings on the throne—it
“has never wanted to conquer in a worldly way”—“yet it has infinitely
changed everything. . . . In other words, just as the blood pulses in every
nerve, so does Christianity want to permeate everything with the relationship
of conscience. The change is not in the external, not in the apparent, and yet
the change is infinite” (135).
The Christian deliberation from which the above passage is taken and
from which I cited key passages in preceding paragraphs is entitled “Love Is
a Matter of Conscience.” It is one of the most remarkable of the whole set of
remarkable deliberations in Works of Love. Like many of the others, its form
is that of a commentary on a passage from the New Testament, in this
instance, 1 Timothy, where (the putative) Paul tells his readers that the focus
of his teaching is on “the love that issues from a pure heart and a good
conscience and sincere faith” (1.5). The infinite change that Christianity
brings about, Kierkegaard continues, is as if it “wants to breathe the eternal
life, the divine, into the human race” (135). This is why, he observes, that
Christians have been called a “nation of priests” and why, “bearing in mind
the relationship of conscience, that it is a nation of kings” (135-36). So, while
the king is the only person who in “a worldly sense” acknowledges no other
duty than conscience, even the most lowly charwoman, in earning her mea-
ger wages, “has the right, in the Christian sense, to say regally to herself
before God, ‘I am doing it for the sake of conscience!’” (136). Thus, it is the
miracle of Christianity, Kierkegaard remarks, a miracle greater than turning
water into wine, to make “everyone a king in the divine sense . . . for the sake
of conscience . . .” (136-37). Indeed, he points out that Christianity is not
indifferent to our common, worldly relations involving friendship, marriage,
the family, or patriotism (love of country). Christianity “is not indifferent in a
worldly way to anything; on the contrary, it is concerned about everything
simply and solely in a spiritual way. . . . It does not wish to bring about any
external change at all in the external sphere; it wants to seize it, purify it,
sanctify it, and in this way make everything new while everything is still old”
(144-45).
The infinite change that Christianity—in and through the Bible, begin-
ning with the creation, the Fall, and the covenant of man—brings into the
world is, we see, love as a matter of conscience, conscience as the matter of
love. Christianity infinitely (absolutely) transforms all human relationships
by making them a matter of conscience, of love. In light of this infinite
change, it is surely clear, now, how we are to interpret the distinctions be-
tween divine and human, inward and external, individual and social, ethical
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 65

and political, between love (of persons for each other) and justice (the rights
of all). For it is patent that it is the infinite change, the absolute difference
that is now in the world and that, consequently, is indifferent to nothing
human as it creates the new by seizing, purifying, and sanctifying the old,
which constitutes the critical distinction that Kierkegaard makes between the
infinite spirit of Christianity (the Bible) and the finite spirit of Christendom.
What this means, as we learned from Hegel, is that the infinite, infinite Spirit,
in showing us that finite Spirit is contradictory yet in revealing to finite Spirit
that it is blind to its contradictions (involving the one and the many, the ruler
and the ruled, etc.), is the infinite light that dwells in the finite darkness and
is not overcome by it. While it would be unreasonable for us to demand
profound political insight from Kierkegaard, it is, nevertheless, incumbent on
us to acknowledge that it is always his tendency to associate politics—and so
here kingship—with the worldly as merely finite. Still, surely, he would
himself have recalled the counsel of Jesus: render unto (the finite one) Caesar
that which, as finite, is Caesar’s and unto (the infinite one) God that which,
as infinite, is God’s. No human being (in the pagan world) possesses (owns)
the finite for, as contradictory, it contradicts its possessor. Every human
being (in the biblical world) possesses (owns) the infinite, for, as paradoxi-
cal, it is the revelation that what one owns or possesses is owed in love, in
service, to the other. So we know that the political—as democratic—truly
embodies infinitely transformative power (insofar as it is not reduced to
finite power relations that reflect the contradictions of injustice and inequal-
ity). Indeed, the miracle that makes everyone a king in the divine sense is no
less the miracle that makes all persons kings in the human sense. The revolu-
tionary spirit—the spirit of revolution—is in the world. What is important,
however, for us to grasp in this study, which is at once historical and ontolog-
ical, is that, with the introduction of the infinite into the world of humanity,
the very concept of finite Spirit, at once divine and human, that is found in
paganism is infinitized.
The difference, then, that Christianity brings into the world is a double
one (i.e., it is dialectical). It is the difference between, in Hegel’s terms,
viewing Spirit, at once human and divine, as either infinite or finite. The true,
the critical distinction that is to be made is not between the divine and the
human but rather between the infinite and the finite versions of each. But
thus there are two versions of the finite (and in that sense also of the infinite).
We have, first, the distinction between the finite (contradictory) Spirit of
pagan man and his gods and the infinite (paradoxical) Spirit of biblical man
and his God. But, then, we also have, second, the idolatrous conflation of the
finite and the infinite. Idolatry involves the reduction either of the infinite
spirit of man to God conceived finitely or of the infinite Spirit of God to man
conceived finitely, each resulting in the death of God no less than the death
of man. For Hegel, the consciousness of finite Spirit is the contradiction that
66 Chapter 3

is exposed and appropriated by the Spirit of infinite self-consciousness. For

Kierkegaard, infinite Spirit is the Absolute Paradox that finite understanding
encounters as the unknown, i.e., as the contradiction of itself. The contradic-
tion of self, i.e., the self-contradiction in which the finite understanding finds
itself enmeshed as a result of its collision with the Absolute Paradox as the
unknown, constitutes offense. The contradiction is that the absolute or infi-
nite Paradox cannot be known as finite things are known. Self-contradiction
is, consequently, offensive to the self because it depends on (it reflects in
contradictory fashion) the very distinction that the Absolute Paradox itself
brings into existence between (infinite) faith and (finite) understanding as our
test, our judgment, our either/or choice. The infinite difference that Chris-
tianity brings into the world is also what I earlier identified as coming into
existence as the historical. We are, consequently, now in a position to exam-
ine what Kierkegaard understands by “the religious” in Fear and Trembling
as the absolute relation to the absolute and by faith in Philosophical Frag-
ments as the passionate commitment to history as the infinite change in-
volved in coming freely into existence. We shall see that the religious and
faith, like love, exist infinitely in the world—as they make absolute demands
on the world by transforming the finite world of external things, together
with the finite world of internal spirit, into the infinite world of loving rela-
tions.
Consequently, it has surely become clear to us that the religious and faith,
as Infinite Spirit, are indistinguishable, as such, from what Kant and Hegel
view as (transcendental or infinite) reason, the practice of making the rational
actual and the actual rational through the categorical imperative of loving
your neighbor as yourself. In other words, we possess concepts of the relig-
ious/faith and of reason both as infinite (and so truthful) and as finite (and so
resulting in what we saw Kant call transcendental illusion). It is surely evi-
dent, additionally, that the infinite change that the Absolute Paradox of infi-
nite Spirit brings historically into the world is that constituted by the Kantian
revolution in metaphysics—whereby the world of (finite) things (objects,
nature) is shown to conform to the mind of the (infinite) subject. Or as
Kierkegaard remarks in the Postscript: “truth is subjectivity.” Hegel, we may
note, entitles the third and last part of his Science of Logic “Subjective
Logic” and the final section of the third part “The Absolute Idea.” The
Absolute Idea is the subject who, in his infinite self-consciousness, idealizes
the finite world such that he makes it conform to the covenantal ideals of
humanity. The Absolute Idea is in the world, and the world in its finiteness
does not overcome it. How fundamentally different this is from the Platonic
idea (or form) which, as finite, as the end (thing) in itself, is the contradictory
opposite of what is in and for itself, i.e., for others, who, because they are in-
finite, find themselves opposed to and so contradicted and reversed by their
end, as we saw earlier in Aristotle. The finite Idea of the pagan world,
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 67

thought thinking itself, is what Hegel calls the out-and-out other, that which,
as knowable solely in itself, is eternally the contradiction of everything that
is, as infinite and imperfect, fatally ignorant of and blind to what this contra-
diction is. What this contradiction is, then, is the Absolute Idea, the Infinite
Spirit, the Absolute Paradox of the Bible, which, as the infinite other, God
and neighbor, I am commanded to bring into existence as the subject of my
truth, as the truth of my subjectivity. The miracle of Infinite Spirit—at once
divine and human—is that it is in the world as the self-determining power of
historical critique and transformation.
What Kierkegaard undertakes, then, to show us in Fear and Trembling
(1843) is that the religious and in Philosophical Fragments (1844) that faith
come freely into historical existence as the critical difference between the
purely human, as known historically in the ancient, pagan world of the tragic
hero Agamemnon and the philosophical tragic hero, Socrates, and the essen-
tially human, as known historically in the biblical/modern world of the
knight of faith, Abraham. It is Abraham, the father of faith, who, as the single
individual, is the disciple of God, the contemporary of the truth. It is Abra-
ham who exemplifies (but is not an example of) the faithful individual who
can be and so is and must be, yet again and always, tested—by existence, by
the Absolute Paradox that you cannot directly know on the basis either of
prior experience or of future expectation. Indeed, because you cannot begin
other than faithfully, now, or in the moment, and because you cannot go
beyond faith, now or in the moment, you continue, in fear and trembling, on
the holy way of your choice in loving the lord your God with all the fullness
of your heart, and soul, and mind and in loving your son as you love yourself.
You have faith that what you shall do to Isaac God shall do to you. Like-for-
like. But what is involved in being like Isaac, in being like your neighbor,
whom you love as yourself? What is involved in being like God, whom you
love above all others? Fear and trembling—what Kierkegaard in later works
identifies with self-denial, sacrifice, hatred of the world, and, nearly at times,
martyrdom: the crucifixion of the God-man. The absolute paradox is that it is
only the faithful individual whose life is marked with fear and trembling.
Neither the dogmatist nor the skeptic—both faithless individuals—undergoes
(consciously) the trials of existence.
It is significant that Kierkegaard, like Hegel, conceives of the religious
life of the faithful individual as the ultimate, the absolute, and the infinite
stage of existence on life’s way, to recall the title of one of his later works.
But thus it is critically important to see that Kierkegaard, like Hegel, is
absolutely clear in Fear and Trembling that the religious stage of existence,
the third stage of existence—following upon the first and second stages of
existence, the aesthetic and the ethical (the universal)—is, as the final stage
of existence, at one and the same time the first stage of existence, indeed, the
sole stage of existence. The religious way, the way of faith, the way of the
68 Chapter 3

single individual as the essentially human is at once the beginning and the
end, both alpha and omega. You cannot begin outside of (without) faith—
faithlessly—and arrive at faith. You cannot begin except faithfully. You
cannot stop being faithful (you are not free not to be free). Bad faith, sin-
consciousness Kierkegaard calls it in subsequent works, is the offence that
you are responsible, eternally, as a faithful individual. As Sartre smartly puts
it, it is only persons of good faith who, conscientiously and honestly (faith-
fully), acknowledge that they are in bad faith, that they are sinners. To have
sinned, to have fallen into the knowledge of good and evil means, precisely,
that, as disciples of the truth, we must, to begin with, in the beginning, begin
by acknowledging that we are in error, that the other, God and neighbor, is
the truth of our sinful life. The three stages of existence, which Kierkegaard
presents in Fear and Trembling, are, then, like Hegel’s three stages of the
history of human existence, of the existence of human history, really only
two stages—the historical difference between finite consciousness and infi-
nite self-consciousness, between pagan singularity and the single individual
of the Bible for whom love of God and neighbor constitutes his covenantal
existence. But, again, it is critically important to keep in mind that the three
stages that are only two stages are, actually and rationally, only one stage, the
stage of Infinite Spirit. It is Infinite Spirit that brings into existence, from
nothing, from nothing prior to or posterior to itself, the concept of prior (i.e.,
posterior) historical stages of finite existence, of existence as historically
staged finitely.
Still, when the three stages of existence, which Kierkegaard presents with
such concentrated lucidity in Fear and Trembling, are seen in the light of his
analysis in Philosophical Fragments of history as the freedom of coming
faithfully into existence, whose profundity of insight has no equal in the
annals of philosophy, we gain ever yet new insight into faith as the paradox
of history and so into history as faith in the Absolute Paradox. But this is so
because of an added complexity that becomes evident in his presentation in
these two works of the absolute difference between the aesthetic and the
ethical heroes, on the one hand, and the knight of faith, on the other hand,
and so between the Socratic occasion of eternal recollection and the biblical
moment of being historically revealed in the truth as disclosed by the other.
The added complexity arises from the very contrast that Kierkegaard famous-
ly makes between, on the one hand, the aesthetic hero as temporal and the
ethical hero as eternal and, on the other hand, the knight of faith as histori-
cal—and so, in particular, the contrast between Agamemnon (together with
Socrates) as the tragic hero and Abraham as the knight of faith. While
Kierkegaard does not provide us with an historical analogue for the aesthetic
hero, the aesthetic hero, however, is no less pagan or Greek than the tragic
hero. For he represents, we can say, the individual who knows the Heraclei-
tian flux of ever-changing, endless, infinite temporality as chance, as that
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 69

which ceaselessly contradicts him in his knowledge of it. He is the mirror

opposite of and so not essentially different from the tragic hero who knows
the Parmenidean one as the universal, never changing, eternal fate, which, as
his finite telos (thought thinking itself), contradicts him in his ignorance of it.
The principal aim, however, that Kierkegaard has in contrasting the pagan
(Greek) with the biblical—the finite with the infinite—especially when
viewed in light of the Fragments, is to distinguish Christendom (idolatry)
from Christianity, without invoking that fundamental distinction by name
here. In other words, he provides us with unparalleled insight into the funda-
mental difference that, as I indicated above, involves two differences—the
difference between pagan man and biblical man and so the difference, within
the biblical tradition, between truth and idolatry. Agamemnon and Socrates,
within their worlds of finite consciousness, commit no errors (they have no
concept of error, no concept of sin, and thus in Sickness unto Death Kierke-
gaard contrasts what he calls, hyperbolically, the sin-ignorance of Socrates
with Christian sin-consciousness as the knowledge of good and evil). While
Kierkegaard seems, at times, to forget this duplex difference or even insou-
ciantly to conflate the two differences, there is no merit in our doing so. The
reason that it is of utmost importance for us (moderns) to have steely-eyed
clarity regarding the ancient Greeks is to be able to become ever more re-
sponsible for knowing good and evil. The Greeks have no concepts of either
good or evil: they have no concept of good as created from nothing or of evil
as the reduction of good to nothing. But we no longer have the choice, as we
have seen Kant remind us, not to know good and evil. For to know good and
evil is to have, always already, chosen to distinguish between them—in and
from the beginning. In simple terms, then, the first two stages of existence,
the aesthetic and the ethical, have two contrasting functions (which Kierke-
gaard does not specify as such). They are, taken in themselves, lucid repre-
sentations of the Greek (pagan) world. At the same time, however, they
represent idolatrous conceptions of existence, the true concept of which is
represented by the single individual who bears, in fear and trembling, the
infinite responsibility of coming faithfully into existence by making the abso-
lute relationship to the absolute his historical contemporary.
Whereas Kierkegaard largely presents the aesthetic hero in the third part
of Fear and Trembling—and I shall discuss the contrast between aesthetic
(demonic) silence and religious (faithful) silence in the context of my discus-
sion of the second theme—he devotes its first two parts to a systematic
contrast between the tragic hero and the knight of faith. The tragic hero is
also known as the knight of infinite resignation and is associated with what in
this text is called the ethical, the universal, and eternal consciousness. He is
the single individual who, “sensately and psychically qualified in immedia-
cy, . . . has his télos in the universal, and . . . [whose] ethical task . . . [is] to
annul his singularity in order to become the universal” (54). Whereas the
70 Chapter 3

aesthetic hero (in the style befitting a sophist) sacrifices the ethical universal
(fate) to his singular chance, the ethical hero, in the guise of Agamemnon (in
Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis), sacrifices the chance of the singular ethical (in
the guise of his daughter Iphigenia) to the universal telos of being the Greek
hero who realizes his fate. With the sacrifice of his daughter on the altar of
the goddess Artemis, who has, in becalming the winds, grounded the Greek
fleet of Agamemnon and Menelaus at Aulis, the winds arise, thus allowing
the Greeks to sail to their heroic destiny of revenging the rape of Helen, the
wife of Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon, by Paris, son of Priam, King of
Troy, by raping Troy. (We know, subsequently, that Agamemnon will be
murdered by his wife in revenge for his murder of her daughter, that Clytem-
nestra will be murdered by her son Orestes in revenge for her murder of his
father, and that, finally, Athena will bring peace to Orestes, who is pursued
by the Furies, in revenge for the murder of his mother, by preferring the
murders of mothers to the murders of fathers [it is preferable to murder
mothers than to murder fathers], thus giving birth to the spirit of Athens.)
What Kierkegaard means in writing that the ethical hero is sensately and
psychically qualified in immediacy is that, while possessing a finite body and
a finite soul, he is without Infinite Spirit. Although he provides us with true
insight into the structure of Greek tragedy, consistent with Hegel, my empha-
sis here will be on how Kierkegaard illuminates what he calls the absolutely
religious in contrast with the universally ethical.
Indeed, Kierkegaard proceeds directly to exploit this contrast—in terms
that are easily misconstrued. “Faith,” he states, “is namely this paradox that
the single individual is higher than the universal. . . . If this is not faith, then
Abraham is lost, then faith has never existed in the world precisely because it
has always existed” (55). While often repeating these claims—that either the
faith of Abraham is higher than the universal or faith has never existed
because it has always existed—his explication of them, although sure and
true, is far from pellucid. For we know that the single individual, who is the
knight of faith, cannot be comparatively (finitely) higher than the single
individual whose finite telos (end) exists eternally in the world as the univer-
sal fate by which he is moved but which he cannot and does not move. Still
more important, what is the point that Kierkegaard makes in writing that if
faith has always existed then it has never existed? When he subsequently
discusses the stories of the two fathers, Abraham and Agamemnon, whose
God/goddess commit them to sacrifice their beloved child, what he actually
shows us is that he is “comparing” two utterly incomparable concepts of
existence, at once human and divine, the Greek, finite, and the biblical,
infinite. The paradox of the infinite Spirit, man’s, like God’s—and here
Philosophical Fragments is so important to us—is that it comes into exis-
tence. If faith has always existed—eternally and universally—then it has
never existed, for me the individual whose existence is singular. Because
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 71

faith does not exist in the Greek (pagan) world, as Kierkegaard makes clear
to us, the faith that exists universally and eternally—without regard to the
truth of the single individual—exists only as the bad faith of idolatrous
Christendom.
Kierkegaard’s concept of Christian faith is radical, indeed. Rather, he is
one of a handful of thinkers who actually shows us how radical the concept
of biblical faith is. If faith has always existed—finitely, as our final end (or
first cause) and so eternally and universally (and so also aesthetically and
individually)—then it has never existed: it has not come into existence. It
does not bear, in fear and trembling, the mark of creation from nothing. If the
single individual has always existed, universally and ethically, then he has
never in truth existed as Infinite Spirit. If God has always existed, universally
and ethically, then he has never existed—as the Infinite Spirit of Abraham,
Jesus, and Kierkegaard—and the reader? Just as God comes into existence in
and through the faithful individual, so the single individual comes into exis-
tence in and through the God of his faith, in and through faith in his God, the
God who keeps faith with his people in establishing with them the covenant
into which they, in being like him in knowing good and evil, fall.
What we see, then, is that the concept of existence, which is truly biblical,
involves a concept of time that is illuminated for us through the contrast with
the aesthetic and the ethical, each of which is finite. The aesthetic concept of
time is temporal (the flux of chance). The ethical concept of time is eternal
(unchanging fate). The biblical concept of time is the paradoxical union of
both the temporal and the eternal; and it is this that Kierkegaard analyzes as
the Absolute Paradox of history in Philosophical Fragments. Still, as I have
already indicated, Kierkegaard’s main purpose in exposing the falsity of any
concept of eternity or universality that precedes (takes precedence over) the
temporal existence of either the human individual or his God is to expose the
idolatrous notions of the eternity and universality of God so widespread in
Christendom. Christendom, we remember, represents the rationalization of
Christian concepts in pagan terms, and, above all, as the Neoplatonic confla-
tion of the Platonic soul, together with the telos of Aristotle, with Christian
salvation. If the soul has always existed immortally—eternally and universal-
ly—then it has never existed. If the soul will always exist immortally—
eternally and universally—then it will never exist. Once again we see that
death—the knowledge that we die—is the teacher from whom man eternally
learns that he must sin in being reborn as the second nature whose infinitely
mortal Spirit, in being created from nothing, from nothing that is naturally
immortal, comes into historical existence in and through the covenant of
love.
Before proceeding to discuss the concept of history that Kierkegaard
presents in Philosophical Fragments as involving, we can say, three stages,
which directly parallel the three stages of existence in Fear and Trembling—
72 Chapter 3

aesthetic (temporal-individual), ethical (eternal-universal) and religious (his-

torical-?)—it is important, first, to address several issues that his concept of
the religious as exemplified by Abraham who, as the knight of faith, is the
single individual, raises. They all center on the question: who is the single
individual? The reader will have noted that I have placed a question mark as
to the character of his historical existence. It is, we know, singular. But is it
not, must it not also be covenantal (relational)? Kierkegaard contrasts Abra-
ham, as the singular knight of faith, with Agamemnon, who is “disclosed” (as
nothing substantial) by the fate of his universal telos to be for all Greece the
gloriously tragic hero who is eternally doomed, we may say, to kill and to be
killed. But Abraham is the single individual who, wrapped in the solitude,
isolation, and silence of fear and trembling, cannot, Kierkegaard writes, be
understood and cannot make himself understood—except as the Paradox is
understood. He cannot speak, and, when he does speak, in response to
Isaac’s question about where the sacrificial ram is to be found, his answer to
his son is that God is providential (he will provide). Faithful speech cannot
predict, cannot say in advance, what the result, what the end (telos) of history
is. Hegel’s version of the paradox is that no single sentence, and thus no
single set of sentences, is complete in itself. No single sentence can contain
the whole (infinitude) of truth (including that sentence itself). No single
sentence is complete in or sufficient unto itself. It is yet to be completed. Its
sufficiency is yet to be determined. Infinite Spirit is not sufficient in itself. It
is yet to be completed. It is little wonder, then, that Hegel understands Infi-
nite Spirit to be in and for itself—and we earlier saw Kierkegaard himself use
precisely this Hegelian formulation! Thus, we anticipate that it must also be
the case that the single individual is not and cannot be complete in or suffi-
cient unto himself. Indeed, Kierkegaard engages his readers in his commen-
tary on the story of Abraham by imposing on them, as the (pseudonymous)
author, the test of what it means for any human being to be, in fear and
trembling, the single individual who, in taking responsibility for himself, is
no less responsible for the other—God and neighbor.
So, in the third part of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard asks whether
Abraham can (should) tell his wife, and son, and servant why he is taking
Isaac on the three-day trek to Mt. Moriah to make a sacrifice to the Lord. But
he cannot. For Abraham is the true Machiavellian (i.e., Machiavelli is the
true son of Abraham). Abraham does not lie, and he has no intention of lying
to those in his household, including his beloved wife Sarah. He speaks the
truth to them—deceptively (he deceives them into the truth, as Kierkegaard
describes his own project in The Point of View for My Work as An Author).
He accepts, he must accept, as the prince (principal, principle) of faith who
looks to the end (Machiavelli writes: si guarda al fine), and so must undergo,
the test that the Lord has, in fear and trembling, imposed on him—alone. 3
Yes, if this were a nineteenth-century novel there would be no reason why
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 73

the husband and father could not engage his wife (and others) in discussing
his terrible trial. But, ultimately, he will still have to depart, silently and
alone, holding his dearly loved son by the hand, with “providence their
guide,” like Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost. In the last paragraph
of “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” Kant observes, as we saw
earlier, that “the lesson taught by a philosophical attempt to write the most
ancient part of human history” is “contentment with Providence, and with the
course of human affairs, considered as a whole” (68). Contentment with
Providence, when understood in the biblical and not in the Stoic or Neopla-
tonic tradition of Christendom, is precisely fear and trembling (not compla-
cent belief that this is the best of all possible worlds). The providential life
entails the fall from paradise into the freedom of knowing good and evil, of
knowing that, in being responsible to and for the good, you will doubtlessly
be faced with issues demanding the most terrifyingly personal trials of self-
denial, self-sacrifice, self-mortification. . . .
How Kierkegaard undertakes, principally, although indirectly, to have us
see that the single individual, who is the knight of faith, is at one and the
same time the covenantal (communal) individual who, in loving God above
all others, loves his neighbor as himself, is through the contrast with the two
finite individuals—the aesthetic and the ethical (the second in the guise, we
remember, of Agamemnon, together with Socrates). While the aesthetic indi-
vidual subordinates (sacrifices) the universal (the other) to his own self-
interest, the ethical individual subordinates (sacrifices) his individual self to
the selfless interest of the universal. But thus we see that the single individu-
al, who is the knight of faith, can be neither the individual who reduces the
interest of others to his own self nor the individual who reduces his own self
to the interest of others. Indeed, the single individual, as the religious hero,
enters into what Kierkegaard calls the absolute relation to the absolute. The
single individual is absolutely (infinitely) singular and individual solely in
relation, absolutely (infinitely), to the absolute—God, yes, but also the neigh-
bor. We have already seen Kierkegaard indicate in Works of Love that the
love of God is made actual in loving the neighbor and that in loving the
neighbor we actually love God. In other words, the single individual who, as
the knight of faith, enters into the absolute relationship to the absolute, as
God and neighbor, is at one and the same time individual and universal,
consistent with Hegel’s concept of Infinite Spirit. The single individual is
“higher” than the universal by being the singular one who, in and through his
absolute relation to the absolute, constitutes his individuality as absolutely
universal.
I want, additionally, to point out that, while Kierkegaard, as we have seen,
uses the terms ethical and universal in the finite (pagan) but, also as I indicat-
ed, in the idolatrous (falsely infinite) sense when contrasted with the absolute
singularity of the knight of faith, he also uses them in their biblical or moral
74 Chapter 3

(Kantian) sense in many of his other works, yet even, too, in Fear and
Trembling. In the context of arguing, in the second part of that work, that
there is an absolute duty to God, he points out that the absolute duty to love
God is completely different from Agamemnon’s duty to sacrifice the individ-
ual (Iphigenia) to the universal glory of Greece. Thus, he writes that “the
ethical receives a completely different expression, a paradoxical expression
such . . . that love to God may bring the knight of faith to give his love to the
neighbor—an expression opposite to that which, ethically [i.e., finitely]
speaking, is duty” (70). In Practice in Christianity he writes, in the context of
distinguishing the imitation of Christ, i.e., of what he calls there the proto-
type, from mere admiration, that an “imitator is or strives to be what he
admires . . .” (241). The prototypos, which the imitator is or strives to be as
the primitive, original or first type of humanity, is, he goes on to indicate,
“the universally human or that which every human being, unconditionally
every human being, is capable of, that which is not linked to any condition
save that which is in everyone’s power, the universally human, that is, the
ethical, that which every human being shall and therefore also presumably
can do” (242). We see, consequently, that every human being, in imitating
the prototype (who is not, we note, merely an admirable example of moral-
ity) and so in being like God in the infinity of his being, has the ethical duty
to do that which is unconditionally and universally (infinitely) human. Like-
for-like. In Works of Love Kierkegaard points out that for Christianity “there
is equality of all persons before God, and in the doctrine of loving the
neighbor there is equality of all persons before God” (140). Because, he
continues, we are “to love all human beings universally-humanly” and be-
cause in the relationship that is love “either God or the neighbor is the middle
term,” we see that the “category ‘neighbor’ is like the category ‘human
being’” (143-42-41). Every single human being, we see, is, universally, the
neighbor. The neighbor is, universally, every single human being. No single
human being is excepted from the universal category of neighbor. Every
human being is the exception who is universally the neighbor. 4
Kierkegaard summarizes what it means for the single individual to ad-
dress the universal obligation that ethically confronts every human being
when he writes, in the Appendix of Fear and Trembling, that no matter what
“one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially
human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation begins primitive-
ly, has no task other than what each previous generation had, nor does it
advance further, insofar as the previous generations did not betray the task
and deceive themselves.” We see, then, that the single individual has, in
imitation of the prototype of existence, the universal, the “essentially human”
task of beginning, yet again, as the first, as the primitive, as the original
human being, who, then, is surely not other than Adam (and Eve), or Abra-
ham, or Jesus in being like them. In light of the concept of coming into
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 75

existence, to the exposition of which Philosophical Fragments is committed

and which I now take up, we shall see that the single individual must, from
the beginning, bring the universal historically into existence as the absolute
relationship to the absolute. Otherwise, the universal does not exist histori-
cally in and for the individual because it has always existed eternally (and
thus is disclosed as not having been created from nothing, from nothing
finite, whether individual or universal). Indeed, Kierkegaard writes, if some-
one wants to go further than Abraham (or Adam and Eve), to go further than
faith “and not stop with loving as the previous generation did, this is foolish
and idle talk” (121).
In Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard uses the figure of Socrates to
deepen our understanding of the critical distinction that he draws between, on
the one hand, “the purely human” (or finite) stages of the aesthetic and the
ethical (the universal) and, on the other hand, “the essentially human” (or
infinite) stage of the religious in Fear and Trembling. 5 In the latter work he
notes that if “faith is nothing more than philosophy [as found, we can say, in
the Hegelianism of Christendom] makes it out to be, then even Socrates went
further, much further, instead of the reverse—that he did not attain it [i.e.,
faith]. . . . His ignorance is the infinite resignation” (69). Infinite resignation
Kierkegaard aligns with the position of the tragic hero, who is infinitely
resigned, in his eternal consciousness, to giving up existence. Thus, Aga-
memnon is infinitely resigned to (the contradiction of) sacrificing his daugh-
ter Iphigenia. The knight of faith, in contrast, is the one who, in fear and
trembling, lives the paradox that he can possess finite existence, not by his
own (purely human) strength but solely “by virtue of the absurd,” i.e., by
faith in and love of the other as the absolute relation to the absolute. (We
remember that Hegel teaches that the finite is, in itself, contradictory: it does
not exist in itself and for itself. Only when the contradictions of the finite are
acknowledged, overcome, and appropriated in and by Infinite Spirit can hu-
man beings make the earth their essential home.)
The contrast between the ethical-universal (Agamemnon and Socrates)
and the religious (Abraham), which Kierkegaard advances in Fear and Trem-
bling, he characterizes in Fragments as the contrast between two kinds of
relationships, the first purely human and the second essentially human only
insofar as it is also essentially divine. The issue raised here, consequently, is:
can the truth be learned? Can truth (or virtue, recalling Socrates) be taught?
We are immediately asked to recall Platonic dialogue in which Socrates
demonstrates “the pugnacious proposition,” i.e., the indemonstrable proposi-
tion of contradiction, that the truth cannot be learned or taught. If you begin
in ignorance of the truth, then you cannot learn or be taught the truth: truth
has no beginning in ignorance. If you begin in knowledge of the truth, you
equally cannot learn or to be taught the truth: knowledge of the truth has no
beginning in learning or teaching. The Socratic teacher, then, is simply the
76 Chapter 3

occasion for the learner to resign himself to the infinitely contradictory truth
of his eternal consciousness as ignorant recollection (as recollected ignor-
ance). In contrast, the (essentially) human disciple receives the condition of
learning the truth from the god, the divine teacher, in and as the moment—of
revelation (not recollection). The human disciple of the truth comes into
existence, from the beginning, with the truth. The moment of revelation for
the human learner is his recognition that he begins in error as the sinner who
knows the truth as the condition of his sin. The learner falls from the contra-
dictory ignorance of paradise into the Absolute Paradox of coming into exis-
tence, historically, in the beginning, from nothing, like God—the divine
teacher, the other, the neighbor—in knowing good and evil.
What we see displayed in the Socratic learner, whose eternal conscious-
ness is the occasion for unending (because never beginning) ignorance of
contradiction, Kierkegaard points out, is the fact that “between one human
being and another the Socratic relationship is indeed the highest, the truest”
(55). Here, in order to understand properly the critical distinction that Kierke-
gaard makes between the purely human and the essentially human—between
the Socratic and the biblical conceptions of the human (and the divine)—we
have to note his tendency to make claims that, while in themselves are
untrue, are found to be (wondrously) true when seen in light of the overall
structure of concepts that they illuminate. We found this same tendency, the
reader will recall, regarding his claim that the God-man is infinitely different
from human beings, when what he actually communicates to us, indirectly, is
the truth that infinite difference characterizes the relation between God and
human beings, as between human beings themselves. The point that Kierke-
gaard intends to make, in telling us that the Socratic relationship between one
human being and another is the highest or truest human relationship, is that it
is not high, true, human, or even a relationship. For human beings, in the
ancient Greek world, to encounter the teacher in Socratic dialogue, as in
Greek tragedy and also comedy, not to mention in the histories of Herodotus
and Thucydides, is to experience the (chance) occasion of recollecting their
consciousness of ignorance as fatally eternal (divine) contradiction. In the
language of Works of Love, when there is no third or middle term “between”
human beings, when love (God or neighbor, the “other”) is not their media-
tor, then meeting (communication, action . . .) is but the occasion for recol-
lecting the divine command—know thyself—that puts them in contradictory
opposition to themselves, to others, to their gods . . . , the other name of
which is implacable (unknowable, indescribable) fate. Kierkegaard observes
that, having placed “the god in relation to the single individual,” he “went
beyond Socrates” and then adds:

but who indeed would dare come to Socrates with such nonsense—that a
human being is a god in his relation to another human being? No, with a
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 77

heroism that in itself takes boldness to understand, Socrates understood how

one human being is related to another. And yet the point is to acquire the same
understanding within the formation as assumed—namely, that one human be-
ing, insofar as he is a believer, is not indebted to someone else for something
but is indebted to the god for everything. (101–02)

The issue that is raised in the above passage concerns what it is that truly
constitutes relationship, human and divine. The passage is complex and sub-
tle; and the patience that it takes in sorting it out properly is, I hope to show,
amply rewarded. The first thing to note is that, while Kierkegaard shows us,
we can say, that the story of the first man and woman is the story of the Fall
from the contradictory ignorance of, at once, the command of the Lord God
not to know yourself and the command of the god Apollo to know yourself,
he does not, in truth, go beyond Socratic ignorance of paradise. Indeed, he
has already shown us that Socrates did not “attain” faith: he did not begin. In
truly beginning, by becoming like God in knowing good and evil, human
beings do not go beyond the one who has not begun. The Bible, in the most
fundamental sense, does not go “beyond” paganism. Our relationship to pa-
ganism is not comparative (finite) but absolute (infinite). In the same sense,
the religious stage of existence does not go “beyond” the aesthetic and ethi-
cal stages, just as the third stage of history, infinite Spirit, is essentially for
Hegel the first and the only stage of history: it does not go beyond the two
(purely comparative) historical stages of finite spirit.
Second, and more demanding, is to understand why Kierkegaard writes
that it is evident that no one would come to Socrates with the nonsense that,
to cite the proverb that Spinoza, in the context of showing us that love of
neighbor is the basis of ethics (as of biblical hermeneutics and democracy),
tells us is found in the mouth of nearly everyone: man is god to man (homi-
nem homini deum esse). Why does Kierkegaard shift from the phrase “the
god [as the teacher] in relation to the single individual [as the learner or
disciple]” to the phrase “a human being is a god in his relation to another
human being”—with the second to be understood, seemingly, as so absurd
that even Socrates would have viewed it as nonsense? The simple answer is
that Kierkegaard has just indicated that every relationship that human beings
enjoy with the god (truth) involves contemporaneity—whether the learner is
a disciple at first hand (to whom the God-man comes immediately in the
flesh of Jesus) or a disciple at second hand (to whom the God-man comes
immediately in the tradition of the Church). His point is that in neither case
does the disciple, as the single individual, learn the truth of the God-man—
i.e., knowledge of good and evil—directly (immediately) from another hu-
man being. For the issue, we remember, is: how is the truth of the God-man,
how is the truth that man, in knowing good and evil, is like God—to be
learned (taught)? Indeed, Kierkegaard observes that the truth “did not arise in
78 Chapter 3

any human heart” (109). The truth is not given in nature, in the paradise of
nature: it is not innate. Nor is it learned through experience. Rather, truth, we
can say, is the gift of relationship that comes into existence for human beings
in loving their neighbor as themselves. But Kierkegaard concentrates so in-
tently on placing the god in relation to the single individual that we must be
sure that we do not forget that this is the relationship of Infinite Spirit, of
love, of the covenantal relationship to God and neighbor. So, indeed, man is
god to man—in the biblical but not the Socratic (pagan) sense. There is no
essentially human relationship except through the god, through love, through
the neighbor, through the other.
Thus, we see that, while Kierkegaard appears to reject the apothegm that
is cited by Spinoza, he absolutely agrees with it in showing us that the God-
man is the first, the original, the creative teacher of man only when it is
understood that one can be first solely in relationship to the other as first. In
the relationship between human beings that Kierkegaard calls Socratic, one is
always first in relation to the other as second (and the second contradicts the
one opposite him in claiming to be the first who is superior to or rules over
the other as second). It is uncanny, then, to take note of the fact that earlier in
Fragments Kierkegaard cites two famous dicta of Spinoza with which he
explicitly agrees and which are, we may say, the ontological and the episte-
mological versions of his ethical truth that man is god to man. The first is the
ontological argument for the existence of God: essence involves existence.
There is one thing that cannot be thought (conceived) by human beings
without essentially, i.e., necessarily, existing, which is God (substance, the
cause of itself) (41). Indeed, Kierkegaard himself just a page earlier points
out that we argue not to existence (from something not existing) but from
existence: the proof of existence is not a demonstration (in the logical sense
of either deduction or induction) but a resolution: to will the good, to love the
neighbor. . . .
The second, the epistemological dictum of Spinoza that Kierkegaard cites
he views as providing us with the truth of the Paradox: truth is its own
standard, the standard both of itself and of the false—in other words, truth is
knowledge of good and evil (51). The paradox that truth is its own standard is
that I can know it, not directly or universally but only by bringing it into
historical existence in and through my love of God and neighbor. For if truth
as its own standard has always existed, eternally, then it has never existed,
eternally. . . . The one thing, then, that I cannot, in good faith, deny is that I
exist, necessarily (free, lovingly . . .). For, in denying my existence, I prove
my existence (and so it is now evident that Descartes, like Spinoza, foresees
the Kantian revolution in metaphysics). But thus we see that existence is
inseparable from what Hegel calls self-consciousness: existence is what is in
and for itself. To think is necessarily (freely) to will existence. To exist is
necessarily (freely) to think willingly. But so we also see that the originators
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 79

of the ontological argument are the authors of Genesis. Adam and Eve, in
falling freely into the necessity of covenantal existence as the knowledge
good and evil, prove that they do not and cannot exist outside of (without)
their knowing God as necessarily existing, i.e., that God does not and cannot
exist outside of (without) their knowing him as necessarily existing. To know
God as necessary existence, to exist in the necessity of knowing God, is to be
like God in knowing good and evil.
What, consequently, we shall now see is that Kierkegaard shows us that
the necessary relation between God and man is the Absolute Paradox of
coming freely and faithfully into historical existence—each in and through,
as, the other. If God has always existed eternally (or temporally), then he has
never existed eternally—or temporally. If man has always existed eternal-
ly—or temporally, then he has never existed eternally—or temporally. Only
if God, as man, comes into existence historically does he exist eternally—
and temporally. Only if man, as God, comes into existence historically does
he exist eternally—and temporally. Like-for-like. The Absolute Paradox of
history is that, while it lacks the certainty of, in Kierkegaard’s words, either
the “immediate sensation” of temporal externality (seeing is believing) or the
“immediate cognition” of eternal internality (believing is seeing), it possess-
es a certitude that neither of them possesses. The other side of the Absolute
Paradox of truth is that, because it is neither certain nor uncertain, it involves
deception—doubt, sin, fear and trembling. Yet, the very proof of the truth of
history is that sin is the grace of coming into historical existence in and
through the other. We cannot escape, either temporally or eternally, knowl-
edge of our deception. Thus, one of the most brilliant deliberations in Works
of Love is entitled “Love Believes All Things—and Yet Is Never Deceived.”
Because love is its own standard, because love essentially involves existing
in and through, as, the other, love constantly runs the risk of being deceived.
For, to recall Kant, we do not know the other as a thing in itself. Whereas,
then, immediate sensation and immediate cognition are never deceived and
so never possess truth as the necessary standard of existence, belief (faith)—
because truth necessarily involves knowledge of good and evil—must con-
stantly combat deception (bad faith, hypocrisy, idolatry, etc.), yet is never
deceived. For human beings cannot be deceived without knowing—in the
fullness of time, i.e., historically, in the moment—that they are deceived.
Consequently, Kierkegaard points out in Fragments that, while I do not
believe that a star exists, for I see that it exists, I do not perceive or know that
it came into existence. “The same,” he writes, “is true of an event. The
occurrence can be known immediately but not that it has occurred” or is now
occurring right under our noses, as we say. This is why, then, Kierkegaard
observes, that, although what happened in the past is unchangeable—e.g., I
was born at a certain time in a certain place, etc.—it is not necessary histori-
cally, i.e., ontologically. For the past, too, has come into existence, freely.
80 Chapter 3

Logical necessity, whether deductive or inductive, is not the historical neces-

sity of ontology, whose alternative name, freedom, is that which Kierkegaard
chooses to use in opposition to logical necessity (which, to repeat, we must
not confuse with the ontological necessity of history). In order for me to
account, in truth, for my historical past, which is unchangeable, in order for
me to account historically for my past, I must bring it freely into existence.
“It is clear then,” Kierkegaard observes, “that the organ for the historical
must be formed in likeness to” what is at one and the same time illusive (it
cannot be known in itself) and truthful (81). The organ that corresponds
ontologically to history is, then, faith (belief). “Immediate sense perception
and [immediate] cognition do not have any intimation of the unsureness with
which belief approaches its object, but neither do they have the certitude that
extricates itself from the incertitude . . . ” (82). Thus, we see that Kierkegaard
here describes the fear and trembling of Abraham, consistent with the Fall of
Adam and Eve from the immediately secure yet contradictory sensation and
knowledge of paradisiacal certainty into the deceptive unsureness of being,
like God, absolutely committed to the truth in knowing good and evil. (It is
evident that the knowledge of good and evil is not immediate cognition.)
Kierkegaard reminds us that it was the ancient Greek skeptics who, in
relying on immediate sensation and cognition, suspended their judgment in
never drawing conclusions, with the result that they were never deceived. 6
“In contrast,” he writes, “it is now readily apparent that belief is not a knowl-
edge but an act of freedom, an expression of will. It believes the coming into
existence and has annulled in itself the incertitude that corresponds to the
nothingness of that which is not.” Belief is the conclusion, rather, belief is the
resolution that, ergo, it is “thus and so.” “When belief resolves to believe,”
Kierkegaard observes, “it runs the risk that it was in error, but nevertheless it
wills to believe. One never believes in any other way; if one wants to avoid
risk, then one wants to know with certainty that one can swim before going
into the water” (83). In other words, if one wants to avoid the risk of coming
into existence, then one wants to exist with certainty before existing. But
there is no existence, no necessary, i.e., no free existence before resolving to
come, and so taking the risk of coming, into existence. Indeed, Kierkegaard
notes that “the first mark of coming into existence is specifically a break in
continuity.” The continuity of history, we can say, is not given eternally but
comes into existence solely in my resolve to exist faithfully (Kant and Hegel
would say rationally): there can be continuity in my life solely insofar as I am
responsible for bringing it into existence (otherwise, continuity becomes the
complacency of Christendom). Belief, Kierkegaard notes further, is the deci-
sion by which we annul doubt. Belief and doubt are, therefore, not two kinds
of knowledge but opposite passions. “Belief is a sense for coming into exis-
tence, and doubt is a protest against any conclusion that wants to go beyond
immediate sensation and immediate knowledge” (84).
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 81

But, surely, then, the great question shaping this study has emerged yet
again. If belief or faith, as the will to come freely into existence, is historical;
if history comes into existence as the decisively faithful act on the part of the
single individual; if, in other words, faith is an historical act and history is a
faithful act; and if all acts, the acts of choosing to come into existence,
involve at once faith and history, then we ask: is coming into existence a
religious or a secular act? Or, in other words, is not coming into existence
religious only insofar as it involves the human (the secular) and secular only
insofar as it involves the divine (the religious)? But, since it is also clear that
an act of faith is an act of love and since love itself is at once religious and
secular—involving the love of God and the neighbor—we find ourselves, yet
again, reiterating the ontological argument whose demonstration of the nec-
essary existence of God on the part of human beings, rather, whose resolu-
tion on the part of human beings to come freely into existence is no less
human than it is divine. For, just as God does not and cannot exist outside of
(without) human thought (will: love and faith), so human beings do not and
cannot exist outside of (without) divine thought (will: love and faith). Still, as
we have seen before, Kierkegaard attempts to evade the dialectical necessity,
i.e., the freedom, of his own profound analysis of the relationship of faith
(love), freedom, existence, and history, by undertaking to distinguish, with
studied obscurity, between faith “taken in its direct and ordinary meaning as
the relationship to the historical” and faith “taken in the wholly eminent
sense, such that this word can appear but once, that is, many times but in only
one relationship” (87). He also claims, further, to distinguish between two
kinds of historical fact, one direct (or immediate) and the other involving
what he calls a self-contradiction. “The historical,” he writes, “is that the god
has come into existence (for the contemporary). . . . But precisely here is the
contradiction. In the immediate sense, no one can become contemporary with
this historical fact . . . , but because it involves coming into existence, it is the
object of faith. . . . Every time the believer makes this fact the object of faith,
makes it historical for himself, he repeats the dialectical qualifications of
coming into existence” (87–88).
The problem here, however, is that the distinction between an immediate
historical fact (the fact that I see a star) and the fact that the star exists (the
fact that it has come historically into existence) is not the same distinction as
that between ordinary (but real) faith and eminent faith, with eminent faith
said to be present “in only one relationship” (i.e., the God-relationship).
However, because ordinary faith is not based on either immediate sensation
or immediate knowledge, it possesses precisely the same illusive yet faithful
qualities as eminent faith, for it, too, involves the self-contradiction of a
break in continuity that characterizes all true faith (and love). There is, sure-
ly, “only one relationship,” the relationship with the Infinite, that I can have
in the whole of my life—with my God, with myself, with my lover, with my
82 Chapter 3

child, with my friend. . . . It is always this one relationship, in its many

variations, that I must constantly bring into existence as I constantly run the
risk of self-contradiction (deception) to which I am subject, always, as the
result of human sin. Another name for the self-contradiction that is the break
in the continuity of my one relationship is the Fall. Another name for the
freedom to choose to come historically into existence, ever newly, in ever
repeating the same old, the essentially human story, is forgiveness, the for-
giveness of grace and the grace of forgiveness.
That the eminent faith in the “one relationship” is essentially identical
with the ordinary faith of choosing, freely, to come into existence by resolv-
ing the self-contradiction of ignorance through taking on the risk of knowing
good and evil Kierkegaard makes clear to us in his anatomy of history as
involving three distinct concepts (or stages) of fact: relative, eternal, and
absolute. The relative fact and the eternal fact correspond to the aesthetic and
the ethical stages of existence in Fear and Trembling and to Hegel’s first two
stages of history as finite Spirit. Since the absolute fact of history, in corre-
sponding to the religious stage of existence as the absolute relation to the
absolute, constitutes the domain of faith, it is patent that it eliminates any
essential difference between eminent faith and ordinary faith. Indeed, it is in
bringing the absolute fact into existence—by breaking with the self-contra-
diction of purely relative (immediate) sensation and purely eternal (immedi-
ate) cognition—that the knight of faith, the single individual, the believer, the
ordinary human being establishes in and through the one continuing relation-
ship of contemporaneity. While what Kierkegaard calls “a simple historical
fact” can, he explains, be immediately relevant to the individual in being
close to him, still, if he overestimates it by making it absolute, he shows
himself to be merely puerile and stupid. Eternal facts, too, are immediately
relevant to the individual insofar as they are universally close to everybody,
but they are not, Kierkegaard observes, equally close “in faith, for faith and
the historical are entirely commensurate . . .” (99). What distinguishes the
fact, then, as absolute is that, in uniting the temporal with the eternal, it
overcomes the self-contradiction that is found in both temporal (aesthetic)
relativity and eternal (ethical) universality. For what every ordinary human
being must choose to do is to bring into historical existence the one fact that
absolutely (infinitely) counts in his life —the freedom to live lovingly and
faithfully in the covenant. But all that Kierkegaard writes, again with studied
obscurity, is that the “absolute fact is a historical fact and as such the object
of faith” (100). The historical, in other words, is the condition of essential
humanity that is given in the beginning by the god to the individual. Still, we
know that individuals, in beginning, must in the beginning no less them-
selves choose the condition of living an essentially human life of historical
continuity with their fellow human beings by willing, continually, to bring it
freely into existence as the covenantal life of love. The condition that the god
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 83

provides human beings they must choose as the absolute condition of their
life, as the choice of providence. Life is not given directly or immediately—
whether in experience (externally) or innately (internally: in the human
heart). Life is the gift of the Infinite Spirit, the grace of relationship, the like-
for-like that human beings bring into existence by loving God and neighbor
as their absolute standard of truth.
The like-for-like of heaven and earth—as absolutely distinct both from
the paradisiacal ignorance of the infinite likeness of God and neighbor and
from the satanic knowledge of evil as their contradictory (finite) likeness—is
the Absolute Paradox that comes into existence as the historical continuity
that constitutes the infinite break, the radical choice in beginning ever anew
with the love of God and neighbor as the absolute relationship to the absolute
that is true for all human beings. The paradox of history is that all beginnings
are historical: there is no beginning that does not have a history. There is no
history that does not constitute a beginning. One cannot cease to be histori-
cal, to exist historically. 7 Any idea that we can look forward to a new
type of man—Wagner’s Siegfried, Tristan, or Parsifal as Nietzsche’s
Übermensch?—who is free of the historical burden of fear and trembling, of
loving the past as the historical truth that one brings anew into existence, is
indulging in the fantasy of idolatrous nihilism. It takes patience, real forbear-
ance, on our part to learn to see that the infinite change brought into the
world by the God-man is the like-for-like of the divine and human, of the
eternal and the temporal, of the individual and the universal, of the inward
and the worldly. It is the revelation of history as faithful existence and of
existence as faith in history. Faith (belief) is not doctrine but action. History
is not what is necessarily given in the past, although the past is unchangeable,
but what human beings bring into existence as the basis of their future action.
Existence is not what is—whether relative (as immediate sensation) or eter-
nal (as immediate knowledge)—but what must be thought, i.e., willed. Still,
one cannot go further, further than Abraham, further than Adam and Eve—in
being a faithful, loving, thoughtful human being who chooses, in fear and
trembling, to view all human beings as bearing the likeness of God in whose
image, in knowing good and evil, they are made. The paradox of history is
that it is at once biblical and modern, both religious and secular. To face our
history, freely and in truth, yet again and always in crisis, demands at once
our most intensely critical faithfulness and our most intensely critical ration-
ality. The critique of pure faith is the critique of pure reason. Faith believes
all things and yet is never deceived. Faith without rational critique is blind.
Reason without faithful action is empty. Like-for-like.
84 Chapter 3

THEME TWO: METAPHOR AS SPIRIT

My second theme, metaphor as Spirit, while but a version, in the most funda-
mental sense, of the like-for-like of the single individual in regard to both
God and neighbor, which is the first theme that I discussed in the earlier
section, allows me to place particular emphasis on the work of love as a work
of art, on art as a work of love. It thus further allows me to continue to
develop the ideas that are fundamental to my study: the relationship (the
dialectic) of the secular and the religious, of the religious and the modern,
and so of the modern and the biblical as expressing values that are absolutely
(infinitely) different from those that inform ancient Greece and Rome (to-
gether with all extrabiblical cultures). Especially important here are the con-
cepts of language—of the Word (the biblical logos)—and of image—of the
image of God in which man is created—both critically different from the
ideas of language (words) and image in antiquity and intimately related to the
Kierkegaardian theme of indirect communication as it involves the dialectic
of the visible and the invisible, the disclosed (revealed) and the hidden (the
secret), the external (worldly) and the inner (spiritual), and so the finite and
the infinite.
As we may anticipate, there are idolatrous versions of the infinite (spirit)
as both worldly (external) and spiritual (inner). For, ultimately, metaphor as
Spirit is relationship, what Kierkegaard calls in Works of Love upbuilding, as
taken from 1 Corinthians 8: “‘Knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up. . . .
[I]f one loves God, one is known by him” (1–3). If one upbuilds God, one is
upbuilt by him. It is evident, then, as I discussed earlier, that when Paul
writes famously in 1 Corinthians 13.12—“For now we see in a mirror dimly,
but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even
as I have been fully understood.”—the distinction between now (in part) and
then (face-to-face) involves, not a nonspiritual (non-metaphorical) contrast
between partial or puffed up (finite) knowledge now on earth and full (infi-
nite) knowledge then in heaven but the dialectic of love as involving both
fear and trembling and upbuilding, each truly loving (when truly known and
understood). Face-to-face—like-for-like, metaphor as spirit—is always at
one and the same time peering into a mirror darkly and being fully known,
understood, loved, and upbuilt. Thus, Abraham, in submitting, in fear and
trembling, to the divine judgment, is upbuilt in his love both of God and of
neighbor (Isaac). There is no seeing in a mirror darkly, now, that is not seeing
face-to-face, then. There is no partial, upbulding (not puffed up) knowledge
then that is not full knowledge—of good and evil—now. The relationship of
seeing, in a mirror dimly, in fear and trembling, and knowing, fully, in the
upbuilding of love, is not immediately (finitely) either temporal (successive)
or eternal (circular) but absolutely (infinitely) historical. It comes into exis-
tence in and through the upbuilding love that believes all things and yet is
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 85

never deceived—by the never fully known or seen yet always fully loved
face of the other.
Kierkegaard initiates his deliberation entitled “Love Builds Up,” which
opens Part II of Works of Love, dramatically: “All human speech, even the
divine speech of Holy Scripture, about the spiritual is essentially metaphori-
cal.” Right from the start, then, he puts us on notice that Spirit (God) is
metaphor. Even more stunning, however, is the proposition that the divine
speech, the holy speech, of the Bible belongs to “all human speech.” Or is it,
rather, that, because all speech, human and divine, is spiritual and thus meta-
phorical, the divine speech of Scripture is truly the speech of human beings
and that human speech, insofar as it is spiritual and metaphorical, is truly
biblical, i.e., divine? Is all human speech canonical insofar as it is biblical
(divine) and all biblical speech canonical insofar as it is human? We may
recall that the ancient rabbis long pondered the paradox that the Word of
God, Torah, is written in the language of human beings. Indeed, because God
is not found (does not exist) outside of (without) the Torah, outside of (with-
out) his creative Word, and because the Torah is (exists as) the covenant that
God constitutes with his holy people, it follows that the words of love with
which human beings upbuild each other constitute the Word of God: they are
divine, covenantal, holy, spiritual, and metaphorical.
In explication of his twin propositions of the essential (infinite) oneness
of spirit and metaphor and of divine and human speech, Kierkegaard ob-
serves that, although human beings are Spirit from birth, they only later
become conscious of themselves as thinking beings. Or, following Descartes,
we can say that human beings, in realizing that they are thinking substance
(Spirit), know themselves to be extended substance, what Kierkegaard calls
here sensate-psychical (which we remember, from Fear and Trembling,
means body-soul, as distinct from what Descartes calls mind and Kierke-
gaard is now calling spirit). The point that Kierkegaard makes, then, is that,
when human beings awaken to being reborn as Spirit as their second na-
ture—when they come into existence historically as Spirit—they no more
cast away the sensate-psychical, their first nature, “than the awakening of the
spirit in contrast to the sensate-psychical announces itself in a sensate-
psychical way.” Indeed, Spirit takes over (Hegel would say aufhebt) the first
nature: “it becomes the metaphorical”—second nature (209). We remember
that Hegel writes that Spirit begins by making its nature the very basis of
itself as second, i.e., as the truly primal or original nature of man. As I
indicated in chapter 1, the Greek meaning of “metaphor” is transfer (in
Latin): to carry or to bear across. Thus, what Kierkegaard actually shows us
is that all human beings, as we learned from Kant and Hegel, “repeat” the
story of Adam and Eve as the eternal mythus of man: they make the transi-
tion from the sensate-psychical ignorance of paradisiacal innocence to being
86 Chapter 3

like God in knowing good and evil, in becoming the Spirit of God as upbuilt,
lovingly, in the divine image.
While the sensate-psychical individual and the spiritual individual,
Kierkegaard continues, say the same thing—they use the same (finite)
words—“there is an infinite difference” between the metaphorical and the
non-metaphorical (finite, literal) use of words: “one has made the transi-
tion . . . to the other side, while the other remains on this side; yet . . . both are
using the same words.” The difference, he explains, is that, while the person
who has become (who has made the transition to, who has come into exis-
tence as) spirit remains in the visible world of language, his language is
metaphorical, i.e., spiritual. Indeed, the metaphorical words that he uses are
not new but old: “the already given words” (209). But the difference is that,
as Spirit is invisible, “so also is its language a secret . . .” (209–10). Still,
Kierkegaard is careful to add that the difference that spirit makes is altogeth-
er different from the “noticeable difference” that we “rightly regard . . . as a
sign of false spirituality to parade a noticeable difference . . . , whereas the
spirit’s manner is the metaphor’s quiet, whispering secret—for the person
who has ears to hear” (210).
Thus, Kierkegaard shows us that human beings, in making the transition
from sensate-psychical nature to infinite Spirit, are revealed to be like God in
using language that is metaphoric, the upbuilding language of the Spirit,
language that, as incarnate in the world of the flesh, is the upbuilding love of
neighbor. But the paradox of language as metaphor that comes into historical
existence as spirit is that, while infinitely different from pagan speech in
which the sensate and the psychical, as the aesthetic and the ethical-universal
(of Fear and Trembling), are unendingly opposed to, as the fatal contradic-
tion of, each other, always demands interpretation. That is, the language of
spirit communicates indirectly, paradoxically, metaphorically—spiritually.
For, consistent with what we learned earlier, because the spiritual as meta-
phor, the metaphoric as spirit, lacks the certainty of immediate sensation or
immediate cognition, it can always be and must always be doubted, chal-
lenged, interrogated, tested, judged—interpreted—to see if it is truly spiritual
or, rather, falsely spiritual or idolatrous.
Because Spirit as metaphor, as the image of God, has no direct analogue
or similitude in sensate-psychical nature, there “is no word in the language,”
Kierkegaard observes, “that in itself is upbuilding, and there is no word in the
language that cannot be said in an unbuilding way and become upbuilding if
love is present.” What this means, he continues, is that upbuilding is not the
domain of the few gifted individuals of excellence. On the contrary, “every
human being by his life, by his conduct, by his behavior in everyday affairs,
by his association with his peers, by his words, by his remarks, should and
could build up and would do it if love were really present in him” (213). In
other words, every human being is his own creator in having the responsibil-
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 87

ity of bringing freely into existence the word of upbuilding love. We honor,
then, as our great artists and composers, we may say, those who use words,
including the wordless language of music and images, to upbuild their audi-
ence. Indeed, there is no word, sound, image, or combination of words,
sounds, or images that cannot be upbuilding. Equally, there is no word,
sound, image, or combination of words, sounds, or images that cannot betray
a false spirituality or metaphoricity in being radically reactionary. In the
second case, artists and composers do not find what is truly new and chal-
lenging in and as the historical truth of the past, which, while unchanging, is
not necessary. Or they do not find in the past what is truly new and challeng-
ing in and as the historical truth of the future, which, while unchanging, is not
necessary.
In the very first deliberation of Works of Love, entitled “Love’s Hidden
Life and Its Recognizability by Its Fruits” (with reference to Luke 6.44),
Kierkegaard illustrates the paradox that the fruits of the Spirit are metaphor-
ic. Every life, like the tree, he writes, “is as such hidden but is made manifest
in something else. The life of the plant is hidden; the fruit is the manifestation
[revelation]” (8). We see, taste, and enjoy the fruit of the tree in our garden.
But when we eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then
we make the transition from what is immediately (finitely) visible but is,
because contradictory in itself, utterly invisible, to what is truly visible, para-
doxically, as metaphor but yet invisible to the eyes of the flesh. We are
upbuilt by the fruits of the Spirit, which are visible only to the eyes of Spirit.
In the language of traditional Christian theology, just as faith without works
is empty, so works without faith are blind. Put otherwise, faith is always
incarnate in works of love; but works of love can be known to Spirit only as
the fruits of the Spirit: they demand, in fear and trembling, interpretation. For
as Kierkegaard writes here (as we have already seen him state): “There is no
word in human language, not one single one, not the most sacred one, about
which we are able to say, if a person uses this word, it is unconditionally
demonstrated that there is love in that person” (13). Just as two different
individuals can use the same word in opposite (in loving and in idolatrous)
ways, so one individual can use (traditionally) opposed (loving and idol-
atrous) words in the same way. Indeed, it is important to note that there is (in
our language) no greater idol than “God” and no word used more idolatrous-
ly (or hypocritically) than “love.” What then “is decisive in determining and
in recognizing love by its fruits,” Kierkegaard declares, is how the word is
said, how it is meant, how the work is done. “But here again it holds true that
there is nothing, no ‘thus and so,’ that can unconditionally be said to demon-
strate unconditionally the presence of love or to demonstrate unconditionally
its absence” (14).
Kierkegaard points out further that, when we read in the Gospel that “the
tree is known by its fruits,” we must interpret this to mean: “you are the
88 Chapter 3

Tree.” Indeed, we can say that “you,” the reader of Scripture, are com-
manded to bring into existence the trees of the knowledge of good and evil
and of eternal life as the upbuilding love of the covenant. “The divine author-
ity of the Gospel”—which, we remember, is written (spoken) in the words of
men—“does not speak,” Kierkegaard remarks, “to one person about another,
does not speak to you, my listener, about me, or to me about you—no, when
the Gospel speaks, it speaks to the single individual. It does not speak about
us human beings, you and me, but to us human beings, to you and me, and
what it speaks about is that love is to be known by its fruits” (14). Kierke-
gaard concludes his deliberation on the hidden life that is recognizable by its
fruits with the observation that “the last, the most blessed, the unconditional-
ly convincing mark of love remains—love itself, the love that becomes
known and recognized by the love in another. Like is known only by like;
only someone who abides in love can love, and in the same way his love is to
be known” (16).
That the word of love, as the work of love and so also as the work of art,
speaks to us as the revelation of love, and not about us descriptively, is surely
why works of human love (in their infinite variety) and works of art (also in
their infinite variety) create for us human beings among the most if not, in
fact, the most intensely moving, and so arousing—fearsome—and the most
profoundly fulfilling, and so satisfying—upbuilding—relationships that we
know. They abide in us. We abide in them. Again, art without work (love) is
empty. Work without art (love) is blind. Upbuilding without fear and trem-
bling is empty. Fear and trembling without upbuilding is blind.
That metaphor as spirit is the like-for-like that identifies God and neigh-
bor, the divine and the human, the eternal and the temporal, the religious and
the secular, and the biblical and the modern in the love of upbuilding that
constitutes the fear and trembling of the single individual founds the herme-
neutics of the word that Kierkegaard brings to us. No word and so no particu-
lar collection of words, including the Bible as the Word of God, is in itself
loving (upbulding), unless and until the single individual (the single commu-
nity) brings it into existence, yet again and always, as the absolute truth of
history. If the Bible, as the Word of God, has always existed eternally, then it
has never existed—eternally. The Bible is to be read—or lived—like any
other text, insofar as the standard of the text is metaphor when comprehended
as spirit, as the “transition” or transfer from the contradictory ignorance of
the immediate sensation and immediate cognition of space and time to the
knowledge of good and evil in being like God the paradox of loving the
neighbor in fear and trembling as the metaphor of spirit.
Thus, we see that Kierkegaard, in revealing modernity to us as the con-
temporaneity of the like-for-like of the metaphor of spirit that comes freely
into historical existence in constituting the covenant of the love of God and
neighbor, provides us with an exacting hermeneutics by which we are to
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 89

make the two interpretative distinctions that count: first, between, on the one
hand, the finite and so self-contradictory consciousness of Greek and Roman
humanity, and its gods, and, on the other hand, the infinite and so paradoxical
self-consciousness of biblical humanity and its God; and, second, between
true (indirect) and false (direct or idolatrous) conceptions of language, the
word, image, etc. All true speech embodies the fear and trembling of entering
into the covenant of knowing good and evil and so constituting the existence
of the other, God and neighbor, as the standard, the test, the teacher of our
lives, as our last judgment. True speech is not about you and me. True speech
is not what you write about me or what I write about you. True speech,
rather, is that speech in which you address me and I address you, in which
each of us brings the other into existence, yet again and always, as the truth
of our being.
Kierkegaard is especially memorable, however, in reminding us that, be-
cause truth is not found, as such, in words or images (or sounds), our task
remains, eternally, that of interpreting their meaning—their meaningful-
ness—in and as our mutual relationship. I will to interpret the other as I will
the other to interpret me. Like-for-like. Metaphor is the spirit of the transfer,
of the transition that I undertake in fear and trembling by assuming the risk,
yet again and always, of upbuilding the other as myself. We do not and
cannot go further than faith, further than loving the other as ourselves. Still,
in order to arrive at faith, in beginning to love faithfully, there is and must be
a break. The continuity of our lives that we bring historically into existence
always involves a break. Every single individual constitutes a break in uni-
versality as singular and equally a break in singularity as universal. Our
history is continuous with the past as unchangeable. But this continuity re-
mains idolatrously necessary and thus fatally inescapable insofar as we do
not make a break with it by continually willing to bring it newly into exis-
tence by interpreting its words and images (and sounds) as the absolute
relationship to the absolute Spirit of life. We must repeat the silence of
Abraham in so speaking the truth in fear and trembling that our love of the
past remains silent until and unless we bring it into existence by showing
how it speaks to us anew as our contemporary. Contemporaneity, however, is
not mere relevance to the present. For to be truly contemporary is to engage
the standard, the judgment of either/or. Either bring the past historically into
the present as the moment of truth. Or be offended by the uncertainty, the
silence, of history such that it speaks meaningfully only when the future is
disclosed (revealed) as the truth of the past and past revelation is disclosed as
the truth of the future. The like-for-like of the metaphor of spirit is the
revelation that our words, our speech, our communication, our art, our works
of love, our lives, in loving the other as our responsibility for knowing good
and evil, express, always, the singular myth that is the universal story of our
existence: that we must break, always, with our past as unchangeable, cer-
90 Chapter 3

tain, and finite in order to bring it into historical existence for ourselves as the
upbuilding love of the other in whose image we are freely disclosed as being
Infinite Spirit in and for itself.
Having thus shown that the like-for-like of the metaphor of spirit embod-
ies the eternal transition of the story of the Fall into knowing good and evil in
our conformation to the mind of the neighbor, who is created in the image of
God, we are now in a position to engage Feuerbach and Schopenhauer in our
next chapter. They challenge us to think through what constitutes philosophy
in light of the Bible. Feuerbach argues that the essentially supernatural God
of Christianity must die so that natural man can redeem the universal essence
of his alienated humanity. Schopenhauer argues that natural man must die in
order to have the universality of his divinity redeemed. It is Schopenhauer,
then, who represents for us, in particular, the challenge of thinking through
the question of what it is that in modernity truly constitutes philosophy as the
upbuilding of love in the face of our mortality. Does death serve life, or does
life serve death? Do we die in order to live, or do we live in order to die?
Either/or. Either die faithfully with Adam and Eve as finite, unknowingly
self-contradictory, immortal spirits ignorant of good and evil and so live with
them as infinite, self-consciously paradoxical, mortal spirits whose love of
God and neighbor comes into historical existence as the knowledge that good
and evil involve the fear and trembling that we die. Or live faithlessly with
Adam and Eve as finite, self-contradictory, immortal spirits for whom the
expulsion from the garden of innocence into sinful life constitutes the pun-
ishment from which death signifies eternal liberation. Either Christianity or
Christendom. Either the saeculum as the present age represents the infinite
liberation of the Spirit. Or the present, secular age represents the death of the
Spirit from which human beings seek eternal release. Either freely choose
infinite life in the knowledge that you die a finite mortal. Or die a finite
mortal offended by your ignorance of infinite life as the choice of freedom.

NOTES

1. I want to make here two points (elemental yet also complex) about the later works of
Kierkegaard. (1) While important, they add little of substance to his magna opera. Few readers,
who are not Kierkegaard specialists, could name any of these later works. (2) In some of these
later works Kierkegaard so intensifies, so sharpens his attack on Christendom that one wonders
if he does not reduce the dialectical tensions between the divine and the human, between
inwardness and the world, which he explores so acutely in his (earlier) great works, to the
idolatrous dualisms of Christendom itself. Gnosticism is always the risk of the zealous Chris-
tian. Indeed, I read Kierkegaard’s magna opera as showing us how to save (liberate) Christian-
ity (the Bible) no less from dualistic opposition to (as the rejection of) the world (Gnosticism)
than from simplistic identity with the world (which one might call Pelagianism). Both are
versions of Christendom.
2. In Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard calls God (the God-man) of Christianity “the
god.”
 Kierkegaard on Coming into Historical Existence as the Critique of Christendom 91

3. How to construe Machiavelli’s famous (and paradoxical) four-word phrase is a test

(trial) whose fear and trembling few translators or commentators reflect in their understanding
of it. The end justifies the means. But what is the end? How do we see it—when Machiavelli
holds, ultimately, that the prince must, in all truth (whatever his means), serve the good of the
people as his end? We are to judge the end by the results, by our success (or failure). By what
criteria? In what time frame?
4. See also Either/Or, Part II, and The Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing for additional
instances of Kierkegaard’s use of the terms ethical and universal in the (Kantian) sense of the
like-for-like, as distinct from their particular application in Fear and Trembling to the pagan
(finite) opposition between the individual and the universal (between the one and the many)
and so, also, to the dualism of idolatrously reducing the one to the other (as found in Christen-
dom).
5. For “the purely human” see, for example, pps. 49 and 88.
6. Unhappily, Kierkegaard views the ancient skeptical suspension of judgment as an act of
will without acknowledging that you cannot will to suppress your will without falling into
deception, the absence of which he accurately attributes to the ancients. Thus, while he correct-
ly notes that both “Plato and Aristotle emphasize that immediate sensation and [immediate]
cognition cannot deceive,” he errs in claiming that “Descartes says, just as the Greek skeptics
did, [that] the error comes from the will, which is in too great a hurry to draw conclusions”
(83). It is true that for Descartes error is due to will (what he calls mind). But what Kierkegaard
fails to make clear here is that Cartesian error (falsehood) is not suspension of judgment but
false judgment (Kant’s transcendental illusion). Error (falsehood) bears the same paradoxical
relationship to truth as does doubt. It is solely in doubting the truth of my existence that I prove
(affirm) it. My existence is not given in itself, for I come into existence solely in thinking,
solely through the activity of mind (i.e., the will), which, Descartes shows, involves the neces-
sary existence of God. The mind, Descartes tells us, knows that it is not perfect in itself, yet it
possesses an idea of perfection. In other words, the mind is perfect, not in itself but only in
relationship to the other (God and neighbor), i.e., in relationship to that which it cannot think
without necessarily existing. Indeed, we remember, one cannot think without (outside of)
existing.
7. In his deliberation entitled “Love Abides” Kierkegaard points out that whether love
“actually abides in this and that case or whether it ceases” to abide “is something that occupies
people’s thoughts in very many ways, is often the subject of their conversation, and is most
often the principal content of all the poets’ tales. . . . The point is that one cannot cease to be
loving; if one is truly loving then one remains that; if one ceases to be that, then one never was
that. . . . [W]hen one ceases to be loving, he has never been loving either” (303).
 Chapter Four

What Is Philosophy?
Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the
Essence of Christianity

Schopenhauer, together with Feuerbach, whose ideas I shall discuss as a

preface to Schopenhauer, who both precedes and succeeds him, undertakes to
ground modernity, our modern values, in traditions that, while he claims
them to be consistent with Christianity, although not with Judaism, altogether
betray it. Schopenhauer and Feuerbach appear to be so very dissimilar in
their conception of life, the self-proclaimed pessimist who championed he-
reditary monarchy in contrast with the radical optimist (as Schopenhauer
would surely have viewed Feuerbach) who inspired revolutionary activity.
But they are fundamentally alike in the critical sense that each claims that his
philosophy alone provides the true understanding of Christianity. While
Feuerbach’s conception of Christianity as contradictory contains intelligible
insights, we shall find that his own account of the contradiction that is Chris-
tianity is so very contradictory itself that it is sapped of any essential (non-
contradictory) value. Schopenhauer, in contrast, claims that Christianity can
be rendered non-contradictory only when its values are properly understood
to be rooted, not in Jewish Scripture but in the Hindu and Buddhist texts of
ancient India. But he then finds that he is compelled to acknowledge, expli-
citly (in several key passages of his magnum opus), that his own philosophy,
which he views as consistent with Christianity, is absolutely contradictory (in
being opposed to itself). Feuerbach begins with Christianity as implicitly
self-contradictory and ends in unacknowledged self-contradiction. Schopen-
hauer begins with Christianity as explicitly true (when properly compre-
hended) and ends in overtly acknowledged self-contradiction. What is impor-
tant for us, consequently, to see, in our study of modern philosophy as bibli-
93
94 What Is Philosophy?

cal in origin, in our study of the values that truly constitute modernity, is how
it is possible for serious thinkers like Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, whose
works were widely read by and profoundly influenced many thinkers and
artists in the last three-quarters of the nineteenth century (if not, however,
subsequently), to fail to articulate a coherent, non-contradictory conception
of modern values. How and why do they go wrong? What is the reason for,
what is the basis of, the contradictions that undermine their philosophies and
show them to be untrue?
In the previous chapters dealing with Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, I
have formulated the standards, i.e., the values, that constitute for us moderns
valid (non-contradictory) thinking, whose primary locus and end, we remem-
ber from Kant, is not knowledge of objects but the practice of subjects in
freely and lovingly willing the good in mutual self-relationship. I shall con-
tinue to call upon these values as the standard of modernity as I proceed.
What Feuerbach and Schopenhauer show us, in spite of themselves, what
they teach us is the responsibility of learning to think through, to address
subjectivity as the truth of modernity. While they each recognize love of the
other as central not only to Christianity but also to the ethics of modern life,
still, they both repudiate any notion of grounding philosophy in the subject,
in the human person, as at once individual and universal. Indeed, Feuerbach
even invokes, on several occasions, the concept of I-thou, and Schopenhauer
openly acknowledges the role of caritas in human relations. Nevertheless,
both champion, ultimately, the unchanging universality of Nature, the spe-
cies, which Schopenhauer identifies with what he holds to be the eternal,
unchanging Platonic Idea. They both conceive of philosophy as fundamental-
ly theoretical (contemplative), as a theory of knowing. Feuerbach calls him-
self a natural philosopher, and Schopenhauer asserts that his philosophy is
nothing but objective, empirical description, even as he claims (in contradic-
tion of himself) to embrace the idealism of his master Kant in making objec-
tive knowledge depend upon the subject. Both philosophers abhor subjectiv-
ity. Feuerbach views it as arbitrary self-interest set above the interests of
humanity, the species. Schopenhauer associates it with the unbridled egoism
that constitutes the essence of human relations (homo homini lupus, i.e., the
war of all against all).
Feuerbach and Schopenhauer each hold that subjectivity is founded on
that most fundamental of all errors, the preposterous idea of creatio ex nihilo,
the idea that something can come from nothing. This idea is for them outra-
geously false in two senses. It is false in itself, philosophically, and it is false
that what is true in Christianity is founded on it. Schopenhauer, however,
goes yet further in arguing that, precisely because Judaism is, indeed,
grounded on the concept of creatio ex nihilo, it is evident that its conception
of life as optimistic (egoistic) is false. It follows, then, he holds, that the true
conception of life as pessimistic that Christianity reveals to the world cannot
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 95

be rooted in Judaism with its false doctrine of creation. It equally follows for
him that the Christian message of redemption—that Christ, in revealing to
human beings that the debt of life can be paid back only in and through
sacrificial death, redeems human beings from the guilt of existing—is funda-
mentally akin to ancient Hinduism and Buddhism with the opposition that
they establish between Samsara (the ever-changing singularity of desire that
is never satisfied in time) and Nirvana (the never-changing one in which
subjective desire is eternally extinct). The guilt of individual existence, ac-
cording to Schopenhauer, is expiated in and by Christ’s sacrifice of life to
death.
For both Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, creation, as based on “nothing,”
means that there is nothing necessary in existence, that subjectivity consti-
tutes and is constituted by the miraculous, the arbitrary, the personal, and the
egoistic. They do not see that the concept that human beings are created from
nothing, from nothing that is finite, perfect, and knowable in itself (and so to
us contradictory, Hegel reminds us), constitutes the very ontology that is
consistent with the ideas of love, freedom, responsibility, and duty, as at once
personal and social. In other words, neither Feuerbach nor Schopenhauer
articulates a concept of temporality that pertains, not to objects (as natural
time) but to subjects (as historical self-consciousness). Neither of them
grasps (following Kant and Hegel) the importance of making a critical dis-
tinction between causal necessity as pertaining to finite things (in nature) and
what Kant calls the necessity of self-determination, that is, freedom as that
which begins from itself alone (i.e., it is creative). Feuerbach basically ig-
nores Kant and shows no grasp whatsoever of Hegel’s concept of historical
self-consciousness as Spirit recognizing Spirit (the dialectic of self and oth-
er). Schopenhauer is contemptuously dismissive of Hegel as he betrays Kant
by locating the individual ego in the phenomenal (natural) realm of changing
objects subject to time and so in opposition to the thing-in-itself (the subject)
as that which is eternal, universal, unchanging, timeless, and naturally given
in itself (and which, Schopenhauer is consequently forced to acknowledge, is
unknowable and incommunicable and so accessible only to mystical intui-
tion).
It is hardly surprising, then, that Kant and Hegel’s conception of philoso-
phy as but the retelling, i.e., the “rational” (practical) articulation, of the story
of Adam and Eve and thus the demonstration that it represents the eternal
(historical) mythus of humankind is entirely foreign to Feuerbach and Scho-
penhauer. Human beings, according to this myth of myths, are like God in
willing the good and thus in becoming responsible for the evil that results
from any immediate identification of the good with their own subjectivity
(and so as radically distinct from the dualistic opposition that Schopenhauer
erects between life, the existence of individual life, as evil, and death, the
extinction of individual life, as good). Neither Feuerbach nor Schopenhauer
96 What Is Philosophy?

comprehends the practice of loving your neighbor as setting the standard, as

providing the index of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, of philosophy. 1
They do not see that Adam and Eve are, indeed, like God—we recall what
Kierkegaard writes about the like-for-like!—in being faced, at least once in
their life, with, as Descartes observes in the Meditations on First Philosophy,
the exigency of confronting their lives as contradictory (i.e., as full of errone-
ous ideas or false opinions). Indeed, the cosmic task that God, the almighty
Lord, sets for himself (we may say) is to begin, once and for all, and always,
by disclosing to the chosen people that they can confront their lives as
contradictory solely if they comprehend themselves as created from nothing,
from nothing finite, from nothing natural. According to the word of the Lord
God heard by his people in and as the Bible, finite nature (in constituting the
finite objects or things of the world) is not in itself good or evil (holy or
idolatrous). But his people, according to the divine logos, will be unable to
become responsible for knowing (willing) the good and the evil that they
enact in their relations with each other insofar as they continue (in their
pagan life) to view themselves as natural, finite, and so the object contra-
dicted by the perfect telos of which they are eternally ignorant (and of which
Aristotle’s unmoved mover as thought thinking itself is, as we have seen, so
apt a representative). It is precisely on the basis of the doctrine of creatio ex
nihilo that idolatry (graven images) embodies the sinful version of subjectiv-
ity whereby good is converted into evil.
But how do we, like God, like Adam and Eve, begin in contradiction in
non-contradictory fashion? How do we begin as natural, finite beings and
become conscious, in the beginning, of the critical distinction between sub-
jects and objects, between persons and things, between Spirit and flesh,
between what Kant calls (noumenal or transcendental) freedom and (phe-
nomenal or empirical) nature, i.e., between practice (reason) and theory
(knowledge), between what Hegel calls infinite (absolute) knowledge and
finite (contradictory) knowledge, or, finally, between ethics (our social and
political existence as the relations of subjects) and science (our knowledge of
the objects of experience)? How do we begin with Kant in recognizing that
we can overcome the contradictions of metaphysics, as reflecting the finite
teleology of first and final causes, solely by beginning, yet again, with the act
of creatio ex nihilo, with the creative act of having objects conform (as
nothing) to the mind and not the mind conforming to objects as unknowable
(nothing)? 2 How do we begin by knowing not only that we are in contradic-
tion but also what the contradiction is? How do we begin with the knowledge
of contradiction that is itself free (liberated) from the ignorance of contradic-
tion (from contradictory ignorance) as found in the ancient world of Greece
and Rome (as in the entire extra-biblical world)?
Descartes tells us that, at least once in our lives (i.e., always and already),
we have to doubt all that we are and to think and even suppose that God
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 97

himself is the very devil, an evil demon who deceives us. But the story that
Descartes then relates to us is as familiar, as old, as the very myth of Adam
and Eve that it repeats. To doubt the contradictions of your life, to fall from
the contradiction of not knowing what, in being created like God, you are
obligated to know, is to demonstrate that you cannot doubt your existence as
contradictory (deceptive) without affirming your existence as a rational
(faithful) individual. It is to fall from natural ignorance into the holy cove-
nant of doing unto others what you want others to do unto you. As Wallace
Stevens writes in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,”

The first idea was not our own. Adam

In Eden was the father of Descartes. . . .
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete. 3

To begin in contradiction with Adam and Eve is to discover that your begin-
ning in the state of finite, contradictory nature is not your beginning, your
origin, your originality, your creation (creativity). You begin, always al-
ready, i.e., historically, with the demonstration—today we call it the ontolog-
ical argument—that, in Descartes’ words, to doubt your existence is to affirm
(to have faith in) the existence of the other (God and the neighbor). You can
doubt your self, your own very existence, only in and through the recognition
that your self is not complete, perfect, finite (or identical with itself accord-
ing to the law of contradiction), only in and through the affirmation of the
other as the standard (index) by which you exist and think. If you existed and
thought alone (as solitary, self-sufficient, finite, and so perfect), you would
not doubt—you would not think or exist—and, we may add, you would be
ignorant of yourself as the finite contradiction of thought thinking itself (as
the contradictory identity of thought or consciousness and existence). In
other words, we have to fall, we are not free not to fall, from the finite
(contradictory) solitude of nature into the infinite self-consciousness of the
other as that which (whom) we are commanded to love as the truth of our
very self, of our thought and existence. We have to recognize the good of
error, the good of contradiction, the good of sin, not in itself, of course, but as
the very incubator of doubting and so of affirming the good of existence.
Adam is the father of mankind, including Jesus, who, we remember, came to
save, not the righteous but the sinners.
Thus, we comprehend why Descartes observes in the Meditations that the
divine act of creation, as original in the beginning, is the divine act of preser-
vation, as original, now, in the present time. Creative time is the continuity
(and discontinuity) that we establish as the present relationship of our past
and future thinking and existing. The concept of creation involves the tempo-
rality that Hegel and Kierkegaard comprehend as history, as the story of
98 What Is Philosophy?

coming into existence—freely, creatively, lovingly, in relationship to the

other. The time of creation, the time of the fall of Adam and Eve from
contradictory ignorance, the time in which the Cartesian thinker begins to
doubt his existence is not the time of finite nature as at once linear and
circular (contingent and eternal) but the time in which infinite self-conscious-
ness comes freely and historically into existence. The time in which those
who recognize that they live in the contradictory state of nature, so vividly
described by our great contract theorists (Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau),
as the natural, finite, contradictory state in which all selves (subjects) contra-
dict (are at war with) all other selves, including their own self, is not itself
natural, finite, or contradictory. For, once again, we see that we can recog-
nize the contradictions involved in treating others as finite things or objects
solely from within the civil society of the covenant in which subjects have
the responsibility of viewing all human beings as ends in themselves, as
subjects of infinite (absolute) worth and not (merely) as natural objects or
finite things. But the challenge, always, of democracy (as the cradle of mod-
ern values) is that it exists as the domain of historical subjects who are
blessed, yet also cursed, by the time of subjectivity, by the subjectivity of
time: ars longa, vita brevis. More truly biblical, however, than this ancient
proverb describing the inherent tension between the expanse of collective
human culture and the brevity of individual human life is the artful engage-
ment, in fear and trembling, with the relationship of life and death. All that is
created in the beginning from nothing, all that comes freely, historically, and
lovingly into existence, is, in the end, nothing. What, then, is the relationship
between creation and nothing, between life and death? Does the idea of
creatio ex nihilo posit any notion of afterlife, of life after death, of life as a
supernatural, immortal soul set in opposition to a natural, mortal body? But
since, in the beginning, according to the doctrine of creation from nothing,
human beings are, in spirit, not natural, how in the end can they be supernatu-
ral? If doubt and sin are central to thinking and existing, do they (not)
continue to flourish in heaven? Do we live in order to die, or do we die in
order to live? Does life reveal death to be contradictory? Or does death reveal
life to be contradictory?
It is evident, surely, that how we conceive of life and death, of mortality
and immortality (eternity), is critically dependent on how we conceive of
time, on whether we conceive of time as natural (objective/finite) or as his-
torical (subjective/infinite). Does human time (as history) conform to the
(infinite) mind of the subject (consistent with St. Augustine’s extraordinary
exploration of time as adhering to the mind of human beings in Books 10 and
11 of the Confessions)? Or do human beings conform to the finite time of
natural objects? The concept of objective, natural time is, contradictorily, at
once linear (contingent) and circular (eternal). The concept of subjective,
historical time is, paradoxically, as Kierkegaard would say, covenantal or
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 99

relational. We recall his dictum that, if faith has always existed, then it has
never existed. If God has always been eternal, then he has never been eternal:
he has not come into historical existence as covenantal and relational for the
single individual. Feuerbach, while he rejects the idea of creatio ex nihilo,
does not directly address the issue of life and death. Yet, with his (inconsis-
tent) appropriation of the Incarnation, he does have a withering critique of
any concept of heaven (afterlife) as the denial of nature, the body, the flesh,
and sexuality. Schopenhauer, in rejecting not only the idea of creatio ex
nihilo but also the Incarnation (as an exemplar 4 [but not an example] of
covenantal/historical relationship), makes the issue of the relationship of life
and death the metaphysical center of his explicitly self-contradictory philoso-
phy. However, in viewing history as merely empirical (natural, finite), he is
left with the (contradictory, pagan, rather, idolatrous) opposition between
time as subjective (individual) and mortal and eternity as objective (univer-
sal) and immortal, between nature as multiple (individual) bodies and nature
as one (universal) soul.

FEUERBACH ON NATURAL MAN ALIENATED AS

SUPERNATURAL GOD

Feuerbach shows us, in spite of himself, two elemental things in The Essence
of Christianity, which originally appeared in 1841, 5 the first indirectly, the
second directly. First, in order to advance, systematically and coherently, a
true conception of philosophy, a conception of philosophical truth, the phi-
losopher has to have a rigorous understanding of the essence of Christian
theology, of the fundamental, Christian concepts or dogmas, 6 together with
thorough knowledge of the Bible, both Jewish and Christian; of the relation-
ship of Christianity to both Judaism and Greco-Roman (pagan) philosophy;
and of the ideas of major Christian thinkers like St. Augustine, Luther, and
Pascal. (The issue here is not one of personal faith. One might well be an
atheist, like Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, not to mention the present author.
But atheism is no excuse for not knowing God. Rather, the atheist is the very
one who takes God seriously. It is no less evident that the serious philosopher
cannot be a faithless person.) The great philosophers of modernity are ex-
pressly those who seriously engage Christian theology, the logos of God:
Descartes, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, together with
Nietzsche (following his break with Wagner and his repudiation of Schopen-
hauer), as I hope to show in a future book. 7 Indeed, it is these very philoso-
phers who eschew any simple dualism (opposition) between philosophy and
theology, between reason and faith. 8 They are in critical accord with the
stated aim of Spinoza in the Theologico-Political Treatise of separating phi-
losophy from theology, the outcome of which, he demonstrates, is the elimi-
100 What Is Philosophy?

nation of any hierarchical domination of one by the other. Neither is ancillary

to (neither serves as the ancilla or handmaiden of) the other. What Spinoza
shows us, in other words, is that the separation of philosophy from theology
cannot itself be made from a point of view that is merely philosophical (in its
opposition to theology) or that is merely theological (in its opposition to
philosophy). Thus, he shows us that, in truth, to separate philosophy from
theology is to demonstrate that both are true or, put otherwise, that each is the
truth of the other. Each embodies the ethical truth of caritas, of doing unto
others what you want others to do unto you.
The inadequacy of so much twentieth-century and contemporary philoso-
phy, in contrast, is due to the lack of knowledge, on the part of its propo-
nents, of the concepts of theology, indeed, of the Bible itself. Furthermore,
their lack of theological knowledge also means that they typically overlook
or are simply unaware of the profound role that theological concepts play in
the philosophy of their great predecessors (from Descartes to Nietzsche). But
contemporary philosophers like Jean-Luc Nancy are now addressing this
imbalance. 9 The second thing that Feuerbach shows us is but the reverse of
the first. If you fail to comprehend the essence of Christianity, then you fail
as a philosopher, as we shall now see. Another way of putting this second
point in light of the first is that any critically comprehensive assessment of
Feuerbach’s (and Schopenhauer’s) understanding of the essence of Christian-
ity itself presupposes having a critical understanding of the essence of Chris-
tianity.
The insight into the essence of Christianity as contradictory that Feuer-
bach truly attains in his analysis of it is also the very insight that undermines
his analysis of Christianity and renders it falsely contradictory. This contra-
dictory tension, unresolved and simply reinforced from the beginning to the
end of his work, lies at the very core of his hermeneutics. His insight is that
self-contradictory (Christian) theology is fundamentally anthropology. “As
you think God, such is your thought; the measure of your God is the measure
of your understanding” (34). Again: “By his God you know the man, and by
the man his God; the two are identical” (10). The critique of Christianity that
Feuerbach advances, then, is that, in separating God from man, it contradicts
its very essence. In worshipping God as separate from himself, the Christian
does not realize that he has alienated himself from his own true self. In
projecting himself into his God, he then worships this God as separate from
and superior to himself. This is the origin, Feuerbach contends, of the false
and falsifying opposition between God as supernatural and man as natural,
the result of which has been Christianity’s total disregard of, indeed, its
complete rejection of all that is truly human: nature, the world, the body,
sexuality, indeed, human relations. “Christians worship the human individual
as the supreme being, as God,” Feuerbach writes. “Not indeed consciously;
for it is the unconsciousness of this fact which constitutes the illusion of the
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 101

religious principle.” In showing, then, that theology is truly anthropology,

i.e., that anthropology is the truth of theology, Feuerbach renders the Chris-
tian unconscious conscious. He declares: “Man is the God of Christianity,
Anthropology the mystery of Christian Theology. The history of Christianity
has had for its grand result the unveiling of that mystery—the realization and
recognition of theology as anthropology” (286).
Feuerbach’s hermeneutical principle that how you conceive of God em-
bodies your own self-conception (that your conception of God is your con-
ception of self) is essentially sound. We have already seen it proclaimed by
Hegel. Descartes agrees: I think, ergo I am. I think—the other—as the per-
fect idea of myself. Ergo, God exists, as the subject of my thinking self. But
the critical issue, then, is how we conceive of the separation, i.e., the differ-
ence, between man and God (and so between man and man) and thus also
their relationship (identity), plus the relation (difference) between God and
man, on the one hand, and nature, on the other hand. Yes, theology is anthro-
pology (God is man). But is anthropology not theology (is man not God)?
This is where Feuerbach stumbles, like so many philosophers after him. He
recognizes, correctly, that man cannot find in God what is not (always al-
ready) in himself. Any concept of God as unlike man, of God as supernatural,
infinite, independent, eternal, perfect, sinless . . . and so of man as the
opposite of the divine (natural, finite, dependent, temporal, imperfect, sin-
ful . . .) falsifies man (as it falsifies God). We recall, yet again, Kierkegaard’s
like-for-like! Feuerbach’s insight that the concept of God as supernatural has
resulted, within the historical Christianity that Kierkegaard calls Christen-
dom, in the denigration of God’s creation, of all that naturally belongs to the
flesh, including the reduction of sexuality (the sexual act) to original sin,
stands forever as valid and important. Indeed, this is the version of Christian-
ity that Schopenhauer advances (in consonance, he argues, with the ancient
Indian religions), as we shall see. If, however, God is supernatural solely as
the illusory self-alienation on the part of man of his true nature, what, then, is
the true “nature” of man? If anthropology is the truth of theology, what, in
truth, constitutes the logos of man?
It is here that Feuerbach commits two fundamental errors, each but the
obverse of the other. First—and it is at this point that we see the dire result of
his rejection of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—he holds that the “nature”
of man is given in nature as the universally natural species of humanity.
Thus, while Feuerbach correctly sees that the concept of God as supernatural
is contradictory and in that sense false or illusory as involving human projec-
tion (wish-fulfillment) or alienation, he fails to see that the concept of man as
natural is no less contradictory (and in that sense no less a false or illusory
and so self-alienating projection). He does not see that, according to the
doctrine of creation, man is created from nothing, from nothing that is natural
and finite. Human beings are created (creatively) free to be like God in
102 What Is Philosophy?

knowing good and evil as neither supernatural nor natural. Good and evil are
covenantal concepts (they are unknowable outside our covenantal relation-
ships). They are given neither naturally nor supernaturally. Feuerbach is right
that, if good is identified with the supernatural (God), then it will follow that
evil is identified with what is natural (human). But his error is that, in revers-
ing the natural-supernatural opposition, in reducing, as he says, the supernat-
ural to the natural, he makes the knowledge of good and evil no less inaccess-
ible to human beings. For on what basis do we decide, then, if a human
action is natural or unnatural? If human beings are natural, is there anything
that they can do or think that is “unnatural”? Is nature its own (self-contradic-
tory) standard? We remember that, according to our great contract theorists
of democracy, Hobbes, 10 Spinoza, and Rousseau, it is the social state (of
covenantal relationships) that provides the standard of truth for the state of
nature as the war of all against all.
The second error that Feuerbach commits lies in his failure to distinguish
between true and false Christianity, between, in Kierkegaard’s terms, Chris-
tianity and Christendom, with the second understood as Christian truth ra-
tionalized as paganism (Greek philosophy), whence emerge historically the
supernatural concepts of the eternity of God and the immortality of the soul.
Feuerbach has no concept of history as creation, as the coming into exis-
tence, in the beginning, of the critical doubt that constitutes the thoughtful
(faithful) practice of existence. If Christianity, as theology, is contradictory
illusion, from the beginning, then Feuerbach will not have and will not be
able to provide a historical explanation of the emergence of anthropology as
the truth of theology. Indeed, he has no explanation. For, in opposing nature
to supernature and so anthropology to theology and man to God, he simply
replicates the very contradiction that he seeks to escape. The truth of Chris-
tian theology, as of Christian anthropology, however, is that critique, doubt,
thinking, practice, love . . . come into historical existence, in the beginning—
from nothing that is not historically thoughtful existence—as the covenantal
knowledge of good and evil. Otherwise, they remain eternally hidden within
the ignorance of the law of contradiction (whose contradictory opposite is the
law of identity: thought thinking itself).
Examination of key passages and ideas from The Essence of Christianity
will allow me to provide concrete evidence of Feuerbach’s naturalistic falla-
cy, as we might call it. In the passage in which Feuerbach indicates that how
we think of God is how we think of ourselves, which I cited above, he adds,
ominously, that “the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s
own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man’s thoughts and dispositions,
such is his God” (10). While Feuerbach might be understood in this passage
to use the terms subject and object loosely and so interchangeably, the fact is
that he fails overall to distinguish critically between subjects (as human
persons) and objects (as the things of nature). It is true that, when God is
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 103

falsely viewed as supernatural, he is the “object” of my commitment (love,

prayer, faith, etc.). However, when God is properly comprehended as the one
who constitutes the covenant of love and justice with his holy people, he is a
subject (in relationship), not an object of knowledge, just as human beings
are subjects of relationship, not objects of knowledge. This is precisely the
distinction that Feuerbach, in rejecting the subjectivity of practice (the prac-
tice of subjectivity) and in viewing man as “natural,” fails to comprehend.
Thus, he writes: “Man is what he is through Nature; . . . for even his sponta-
neity [or subjectivity] has its foundation in Nature, of which his particular
character is only an expression. Be thankful to Nature! Man cannot be separ-
ated from it” (149). Because, Feuerbach writes further, faith in an immortal
afterlife represents “the freedom of subjectivity from the limits of Nature”
and thus “the eternity and infinitude of personality, . . . God is pure absolute
subjectivity released from all natural limits; he is what individuals ought to
be and will be . . .” (152). What this shows us, Feuerbach concludes, is that
“Nature is the light and measure of reason . . .” (234). Since “reason is the
essence of Nature and Man, . . . it is the universal being, the universal God.”
In contrast, the heart, or what Feuerbach also calls feeling as the content of
faith (and so also of miracles), is what is private and personal: “the personal
God is the heart of man, emancipated from the limits or laws of Nature”
(235). Because reason, which Feuerbach also calls understanding, is, he
writes, “the self-subsistent and independent being . . . [, o]nly he who thinks
is free and independent. . . . In general, that only is self-subsistent and
independent which is an end to itself, an object to itself. . . . To be without
understanding is . . . to exist for another—to be an object: to have under-
standing is to exist for oneself—to be a subject. . . . [I]nsofar as we think, in
the activity of the understanding as such, we are dependent on no other
being” (34). While Feuerbach does continue, we see, to call the individual
thinker a subject and not an object, he persists, nevertheless, in associating
the thinking subject with the independence of existing in himself and the
feeling subject with having existence outside of himself. The understanding,
he writes, “is the essence perfectly self-subsistent, perfectly at one with itself,
perfectly self-existent” (35).
Just as Feuerbach continues to identify the subject with objectivity when
discussing reason, so he also persists in maintaining this identity even when
he invokes the concept of I-thou as constituting our humanity. He writes that
“there is a qualitative, critical distinction between the I and thou.” My fellow
human being “is my objective conscience. . . . The consciousness of the
moral law, of right, of propriety, of truth itself is indissolubly united with my
consciousness of another than myself. That is true in which another agrees
with me—agreement is the first criterion of truth; but only because the spe-
cies is the ultimate measure of truth. That which I think only according to the
standard of my individuality is not binding on another . . .” (131). What is
104 What Is Philosophy?

binding is “that which I think according to the standard of the species.” It is

for Feuerbach precisely the qualitative, critical difference between human
beings that Christianity dissolves by viewing all human beings “as one and
the same individual, because it knows no distinction between the species and
the individual. . . .” In exaggerating subjectivity, Christianity “knows nothing
of the species, in which alone lies the redemption, the justification . . . of the
individual.” Whereas Christianity only knows the supernatural miracle of
supernatural reconciliation, there is for us, happily, “a natural reconciliation.
My fellow-man is per se the mediator between me and the sacred idea of the
species. Homo homini Deus est [Man is God to man]” (132).
While Feuerbach here invokes the principle of the relationship of subjects
to each other—human and divine—he not only falsifies it by conceiving of it
as agreement with or conformity to the species but also constantly compro-
mises it by reducing subjectivity to individual (egoist) feelings, imagination,
aims, wants, and practice. The result is that that “which is the essential object
of theory—theory in its most original and general sense, namely, that of
objective contemplation and experience, of the intellect, of science—is re-
garded by religion as lying outside man and Nature, in a special personal
being” (154). Although the “world is nothing to religion,” he writes further,
“the world, which is in truth the sum of all reality, is revealed in its glory
only by theory. The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of
life; but religion knows nothing of the joys of the thinker, of the investigator
of Nature, of the artist.” Whereas the practical perspective is subjective and
egoist in placing “me in relation to an object above my own level . . . , the
theoretic view is joyful, self-sufficing, happy; for here the object calls forth
love and admiration; in the light of the free intelligence it is radiant as a
diamond. . . . The theoretic view is aesthetic, whereas the practical is unaes-
thetic” (162).
Consistent with his identification of reason, theory, art, and contempla-
tion, in opposition to what is subjective, individual, and practical, Feuerbach
argues that culture, “in general, is nothing else than the exaltation of the
individual above his subjectivity to objective universal ideas, to the contem-
plation of the world.” The Apostles and the Evangelists were not, he tells us,
“scientifically cultivated men” (110). Because they identified with the peo-
ple, the “decline of culture was identical with the victory of Christianity. The
classic spirit, the spirit of culture, limits itself by laws . . . [that are] inherent-
ly true and valid . . . [and] determined by the necessity, the truth of the nature
of things; in a word, it is the objective spirit.” The principle of Christianity,
“the principle of unlimited, extravagant, fanatical, supranaturalistic subjec-
tivity . . . [was] intrinsically opposed to that of science, of culture.” It is thus
characteristic of Christianity that it was revealed in a language that was not
that “of a Sophocles or a Plato, of art and philosophy, but the vague, un-
formed, crudely emotional language of the Bible” (111). The reason that
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 105

culture vanished with Christianity was because the “idea of man as a species,
and with it the significance of the life of the species, of humanity, as a whole
vanished. . . . Christianity does not contain with itself the principle of cul-
ture” (132-33). The absolute subjectivity of God replaces any fundamental
interest on the part of Christians in man, in the species, in culture, in theory,
in the world, in nature. Indeed, what Feuerbach calls the “necessary turning-
point of history” is the explicit recognition that “the consciousness of God is
nothing else than the consciousness of the species; that man can and should
raise himself only above the limits of his individuality” so that there is no
other essence that he “can think, dream of, imagine, feel, believe in, wish for,
love, and adore as the absolute than the essence of human nature itself” (221-
22). Instead of uniting man with God it is solely “by uniting man with
Nature” that human beings can “conquer the supranaturalistic egoism of
Christianity.” It is only in regarding the nature of man objectively that man is
no longer made secondary to God. “Love to man,” Feuerbach explains,

must be no derivative love; it must be original. If human nature is the highest

nature to man, then practically [sic!] also the highest and first law must be the
love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est: this is the great practical princi-
ple: this is the axis on which revolves the history of the world. The relations of
child and parent, of husband and wife, of brother and friend—in general, of
man to man—in short, all the moral relations are per se religious. Life as a
whole is, in its essential, substantial relations, throughout of a divine nature.
(222)

I have quoted this passage at length for two reasons. First, it would seem
to provide the clearest possible evidence that Feuerbach recognizes that the
truth of Christianity is constituted in and through love of the other. Indeed, in
declaring that human beings in their mutual relationships are God one to the
other and in describing these relations as moral, religious, and divine, not
natural, it would appear that he has identified the very principle of truth (of
hermeneutics) on the basis of which he can expose those elements within
historical Christianity that have falsified it (as Christendom). But, second,
even here Feuerbach continues to fall back into confusion, obfuscation, and
contradiction. While acknowledging that to love God is to serve one’s neigh-
bor, he holds that Christians make love of neighbor exclusive to loving
Christ. “But the God whom I serve in fulfilling a worldly or natural office,”
he declares, “is only the universal, mundane, natural, pre-Christian God.
Government, the State, marriage existed prior to Christianity, was an institu-
tion, an ordinance of God, in which he did not as yet reveal himself as the
true God, as Christ. Christ has nothing to do with all these worldly things;
they are external, indifferent to him” (278). Just as Feuerbach defends “the
free bond of love” as the “truly moral marriage,” i.e., marriage as involving
mutual consent and not external constraint, so he also holds that the world is
106 What Is Philosophy?

truly governed by its own laws of rational, natural morality, not by laws
arbitrarily imposed by religion (222). While these principles stirred liberals,
progressives, radicals, and socialists (communists) in the nineteenth century,
Feuerbach, we continue to see, remains confused about the relationship be-
tween nature and morality. He does not realize that it is only on the basis of
the Jewish doctrine of creation from nothing that the reduction of morality
(practice, freedom) to nature, of the subject to the object, of the individual to
the species can be overcome.
Indeed, we see this confusion clearly when Feuerbach undertakes, in
Chapter XVI of Part I of The Essence of Christianity, entitled “The Distinc-
tion between Christianity and Heathenism,” to differentiate between, on the
one hand, subjectivity and practice, centered on the freedom of the individual
self from the world, and, on the other hand, objectivity and theory, centered
on the contemplation of the world. What Feuerbach actually argues, howev-
er, is that, while the “ancients were free from themselves, . . . their freedom
was that of indifference towards themselves; the Christians [in contrast] were
free from Nature, but their freedom was not that of reason, not true freedom,
which limits itself by the contemplation of the world, by Nature—it was the
freedom of feeling and imagination, the freedom of miracle” (125). Heathens
subordinated the part to the whole, the individual to the species. “The idea of
man as an individual was to the ancients a secondary one, attained through
the idea of the species” (126). Later he writes that, while the “heart sacrifices
the species to the individual, the reason sacrifices the individual to the spe-
cies. . . . Reason is the truth of Nature, the heart is the truth of man. To speak
popularly, reason is the God of Nature, the heart is the truth of man . . .”
(233).
Thus, we see that Feuerbach holds that Christianity is the direct opposite
of Heathenism in subordinating the species to the individual—not, however,
he adds, “the Christianity of the present day, which has incorporated within
itself the culture of heathenism and has preserved only the name and some
general positions of Christianity . . .” (126). Indeed, what the “history of
mankind” shows us, Feuerbach observes, is that it “consists of nothing else
than a continuous and progressive conquest of limits” as is seen, above all, he
states, in the history of philosophy and of the natural sciences. This history,
he writes, “exhibit[s] in all its vanity the presumptuous notion of the individ-
ual that he can set limits to his race. Thus the species is unlimited; the
individual alone limited” (127). Then, Feuerbach proceeds yet again to in-
voke love—the I-you relationship—and explicitly the sexual love of man and
woman as showing us that the species is the perfect human being. “Without
species, love is inconceivable. Love is nothing else than the self-conscious-
ness of the species as evolved within the difference of sex [female and
male]” (129-30). What Feuerbach, however, is not able to explain is how
human love, embodied in the divine relationship of I-thou, emerged histori-
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 107

cally (philosophically, scientifically) as the turning point or axis of history.

For, as we have seen, he opposes to each other what he views as the ancient
subordination of the part (the individual) to the whole (the species) and the
Christian subordination of the species (the unlimited), to the individual (the
partial).
Consequently, we see that, for Feuerbach, while the freedom of the heath-
en involves indifference to the individual, the freedom of the Christian in-
volves indifference to the species. Heathens subordinate the individual to
culture (objectivity, contemplation, theory). Christians subordinate objective,
theoretical culture to the individual (subjectivity, feeling, practice). In other
words, Feuerbach provides no principle whereby he can show how history—
the history of philosophy and of the natural sciences—involves the progres-
sive overcoming of limits as set by the individual (i.e., subjectivity) in and
through the natural species (i.e., humanity). But a new element in his argu-
mentation does emerge in the above paragraph, his disdain for “the Christian-
ity of the present day,” which, in having absorbed Heathen culture, does not
acknowledge that, while still calling itself Christian, it is no longer truly
Christian. Just as Feuerbach cannot explain how culture emerged from the
ancients, with their subordination of the individual (the part) to the species
(the whole), he cannot explain how modern culture has succeeded in repudi-
ating its Christian (biblical) roots by absorbing ancient culture into itself,
except for the fact that what he views as its modern hypocrisy mirrors, we
can say, the originally superstitious faith of Christians in believing in a
supernatural God that performed the incredible miracle of creating the nature
of man from nothing, from nothing that was found in the finite (contradicto-
ry) nature of Heathen culture.
A telltale sign of the exasperation that Feuerbach feels regarding his
impotence to explain how Christianity, which, in the beginning, revealed
itself to be superstitious in rejecting Heathen culture as true, continues,
nevertheless, strong today in its hypocritical belief that it has absorbed
Heathen culture as true into itself—each the contradictory obverse of the
other—is his derisive dismissal of the Bible. We have already seen him
remark with scorn that the Apostles and the Evangelists were not scientifical-
ly cultivated men and that the Bible, with its crudely emotional language,
was vague and unformed, compared to the cultivated language that he finds
in the art of Sophocles and the philosophy of Plato. Since, however, it is a
critical principle of hermeneutics (of this study) that how you view (inter-
pret) the Bible indicates your overall principle of interpretation (of culture, of
existence), it is highly instructive to learn what it is about the Bible that
renders it incomprehensible to Feuerbach and so nothing more to him, as a
modern philosopher, than a contradictory tissue of superstition and sophistry.
What Feuerbach, a modern man of culture, finds so preposterous is that
Christians do not see how evidently self-contradictory is the claim that the
108 What Is Philosophy?

Bible is at once historical and true. They do not see that any claim that the
Word of God is historically (progressively, continuously, creatively . . .)
revealed as the truth to human beings in and through the Bible is patently
contradictory and so false. For what could be more self-evidently clear,
Feuerbach asks, than the fact that the Bible, as historically written by and for
human beings, is full of errors, contradictory passages, and absurd ideas?
Indeed, he points out that Christians, from the beginning to the present, have
bitterly contested the truth of the Bible and, in the name of its God, have
burned heretics, fought bloody wars, and generally shown themselves to be
culturally and socially intolerant. In order, then, to be consistent Christians
must support, Feuerbach contends, one of two patently and mutually contra-
dictory positions. Either they must argue that the Bible is true and unerring,
together with its theologically perfect, supernatural (non-historical) God—
with the result that human and historical error is raised to the supernatural
truth of God. Or they must argue that the Bible is false and erring, together
with its supernatural theology that is now unmasked (by Feuerbach) as the
anthropology of natural (but no less non-historical) man whose perfection is
realized in the universality of species—with the result that the supernatural
truth of God is reduced to human and historical error.
But the wicked irony here is that, while both sides of this either/or antino-
my—human error is supernatural truth; supernatural truth is human error—
are contradictory and false, they also reveal the contradiction from which
Feuerbach cannot escape and which the discerning reader will surely have
noted in my presentation of the either/or antinomy at the end of the preceding
paragraph. The contradiction from which Feuerbach cannot escape is that
anthropology cannot be the demystified truth of theology in either of the two
possible situations that he envisions. If, as I indicated earlier, the logos of
man is natural, then man will have no basis on which to account for human
error, sin, falsity, contradiction . . . , i.e., as unnatural. If the logos of man is
historical (i.e., human beings come historically into existence—from noth-
ing), then man will have no basis on which to explain how the truth can be
historical, practical, and subjective and not scientific, theoretical and objec-
tive. Feuerbach is right that the concept of God as supernatural is contradic-
tory. But, as always, he does not see that the concept of man as natural is no
less contradictory. What he does not and cannot grasp, consequently, is that
the only way out of this contradictory double bind is to conceive of both God
and man as historical—and so neither of God as supernatural nor of man as
natural—and thus of each of them, in their covenantal relationship of history,
as embodying the truth insofar as they err (sin) and as sinning (erring) insofar
as they embody the truth. Thus, we see, once again, that it is God and man
together who constitute the truth of modern culture, the truth of modernity as
paradox (to recall Kierkegaard): the dialectic of truth and history. Truth
comes into existence historically. History is truthful existence.
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 109

It is little wonder, then, that Feuerbach fails to see that the concept of
good and evil, knowledge of which on the part of Adam and Eve shows them
to be like God in having been liberated from the natural/supernatural immor-
tality of paradise (thanks to the intervention of a naturally immortal and
diabolical serpent!), comes into existence as historical. The story of Adam
and Eve is the eternal mythus of man precisely because truth is historical,
because history is truthful, because truth is writing: écriture (Scripture), be-
cause scriptura is truth, because, in sum, truth, history, and writing (commu-
nication, not natural language) are inextricably bound one to the other for all
time. We human beings are confronted, from the beginning unto the end,
with knowing good and evil, i.e., with the responsibility of willing the good,
historically, and thus with the responsibility of facing the historical conse-
quences that evil is constantly the product of human willing—for the simple
reason that truth is “written” (inscribed) historically, i.e., that history is scrip-
tural truth (the truth of scripture). Where there is no knowledge of good and
evil (as in the cultured world of Feuerbach’s ancient Heathens), there is no
knowledge of the “dialectic” of history and truth. Where there is no knowl-
edge of the dialectic of history and truth (as in the ancient world of Feuer-
bach’s cultivated Heathens), there is no knowledge of good and evil. Feuer-
bach has no idea that—consistent with Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Trea-
tise, Vico’s New Science, Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason
(plus Part I of The Conflict of the [Philosophical and the Theological] Facul-
ties), Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, and Kierkegaard’s contemporary Con-
cluding Unscientific Postscript—history without (outside of) truth is blind
and truth without (outside of) history is empty. Indeed, Kierkegaard remarks
at the very end of the final section of his pseudonymous Postscript, entitled
“A First and Last Explanation,” which he writes in his own name, that,
whatever the importance of the pseudonymous authors, of whose works he
here acknowledges for the first time publicly to be the author, it does not
consist in making a new proposal or discovery, i.e., in wanting to go further
(than Abraham or the Bible). On the contrary, it consists simply in wanting
“once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the
original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar
text handed down from the fathers.” 11
The original text of individual human existence-relationships is the Bible!
Anthropology is the truth of theology, because God is the truth of individual
human existence-relationships, because truth is historical and history is truth-
ful. Truth comes into existence historically. History comes into existence
truthfully. Feuerbach reveals to us the contradictions that emerge when, as a
typically modern philosopher (for whom philosophy begins with the Greeks),
he views as absolutely contradictory the covenantal relationship of writing,
truth (knowledge of good and evil), and history. He has no idea that it is this
covenant alone that will liberate him, together with the rest of us, from the
110 What Is Philosophy?

ignorance of paradise where the law of contradiction is held to be the first,

indemonstrable principle of metaphysics. Indeed, Feuerbach observes that
“just as necessarily as the belief in a determinate historical revelation is
associated with superstition, so necessarily it is associated with sophistry.
The Bible contradicts morality, contradicts reason, contradicts itself innu-
merable times; and yet [they say that] it is the Word of God, eternal truth, and
‘truth cannot contradict itself’” (174).
Before continuing with Feuerbach’s observations on the Bible, I want to
note here two things. First, Feuerbach is right: superstition and sophistry,
with the second understood as consciously intended deception, are unthink-
able, i.e., they do not and cannot exist, outside of a “determinate historical
revelation” as true. Precisely where truth is history (and there is no truth
outside of history), i.e., where truth is subjectivity, there (and then) supersti-
tion and deception are the constant evils that all human beings of good faith
must ceaselessly combat. Second, the passage that Feuerbach cites in the
above quotation at the end of the previous paragraph is taken from Peter
Lombard, the founder of medieval scholasticism, to which he adds the fol-
lowing comment in a footnote: “Similar thoughts are found in the Fathers”
(174). I mention this only to point out that Feuerbach is an exceptionally
erudite author who, in The Essence of Christianity, cites, in support of his
claims, a wide range of Christian authors (Church fathers, scholastic theolo-
gians, modern philosophers), in addition to many biblical passages. (I also
want to note that the fact that the Latin passages cited in the footnotes are
often not translated, which is not infrequently also the case, too, with brief
Latin passages that are cited in the body of the text, suggests an equally
erudite readership.)
We may apply to the manner (methodology) in which Feuerbach treats
the many sources that he cites his own scornful observation that “the Bible,
as everyone knows, has the valuable quality that everything may be found in
it which it is desired to find. . . . Divine revelation is as changing as human
opinion. Tempora mutantur” (241). He himself constantly plucks passages
from texts without providing any analysis of the context from which they are
taken. Regarding Lombard, it is certainly true that, together with his prede-
cessors and his successors, he believed that the Word of God was the un-
contradictory and uncontradicted truth. But these Christian thinkers also ac-
knowledged—some more forthrightly than others—that, because Scripture as
the divine Word is revealed in and through the language(s) of man, it is
(historically) full of anomalies (conflicts, gaps, inconsistencies) whose errors
thoughtful interpretation shows to serve (to be consistent with) the truth.
Indeed, they but follow the prophet Jeremiah in distinguishing between blind
ritual practice and loving service to others, between the circumcised flesh
and the circumcised heart, between what is said (mouth) and what is intended
(heart) or the apostle Paul in distinguishing between spirit and letter (histo-
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 111

ry). It is precisely because theologians and pastors (together with rabbis)

have faith in the truth as its own non-contradictory standard that they devote
their entire, intellectual life to biblical exegesis. They are committed to
showing their readers and congregations how contradictory scriptura must be
interpreted in order to understand the uncontradictory Word of God as the
historical truth, as the truth of history. Human subjects must learn to see God
as the exemplar of existence, as Spinoza puts it. 12
Indeed, one suspects that the reason Spinoza was banned as a young man
from the Jewish community in Amsterdam was because he, who was neither
rabbi nor theologian but simply “everyman” in embodying the first axiom of
Part 2 of the Ethics—“Man thinks.”—was already giving voice to the notion
that he would later make central to the Theologico-Political Treatise: that the
truth of the Bible cannot be known outside of (without) its errors, which does
not mean that it is known through its errors. How, indeed, we ask, could the
Bible, as written by human beings for human beings, not be erring or sinful
as all human beings are erring and sinful? Yet, “man thinks” truthfully and
historically, which is exactly what the Word of God reveals as the story of, to
recall Kierkegaard, “individual human existence-relationships,” i.e., as the
story of Adam and Eve. Sin (error) demonstrates the truth. We recall that
Descartes makes exactly the same argument: to doubt the existence of the
self is to confirm the truth of the other, the other as the truth of the self (the
subject). If the subject—self or biblical text—were perfect in itself, then it
would be unknowable as that which could not be thought to exist and could
not exist as thought. Feuerbach, however, in continuing to confuse the idola-
try of Christendom with the truth of Christianity, the errors of the Bible
(dogmatic literalism) with its truth (the Spirit), asks: “How does the believer
in revelation elude this contradiction between the idea in his own mind of
revelation as divine, harmonious truth and this supposed actual [historical]
revelation?” He answers:

Only by self-deception, only by the silliest subterfuges, only by the most

miserable, transparent sophisms. Christian sophistry is the necessary product
of Christian faith, especially of faith in the Bible as divine revelation. Truth,
absolute truth, is given objectively in the Bible, subjectively in faith. . . . The
believer can then prove revelations only by incurring contradiction with him-
self, with truth, with the understanding [reason], only by the most impudent
assumptions, only by shameful falsehoods, only by the sin against the Holy
Ghost. (174–75)

Not only does Feuerbach conveniently forget that Jesus, the savior who is the
exemplar of the one who forgives the sinners (but not the righteous) their
sins, declares (in Matt. 12.31–32) that there is one sin that is not forgiven,
which is the sin against the Spirit. But also he forgets that Jesus is the
complete Jewish storyteller. In his parables Jesus insistently shows that the
112 What Is Philosophy?

first will be last and the last will be first. It is precisely those who are smugly
secure (certain) in their faith (in knowing the revealed Word of God) who are
shown, like the disciples, to lack the faith to become like little children. Why,
for an adult, who knows good and evil, to say—“I think, therefore I am”—
and so to become like an “innocent” child (something which is impossible for
a child who is a child) is to have the capacity to move mountains. If Feuer-
bach were a serious student of the Bible, he would ask if we might not
undertake to interpret the miracles that were performed by Jesus as Jewish
ethical parables that test the faith of those attending to them, and not as pagan
fables, which, as exemplified by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, erase any real
differences not only between natural beings—between plants and animals,
including human beings—but also between natural beings and supernatural
beings (the gods).
Feuerbach is scandalized, then, that the Bible has become in modern
culture what, in his judgment, it was not originally: a source of thoughtful
critique. “It is only the believing unbelief of modern times which hides itself
behind the Bible,” he writes, “and [which] opposes the biblical dicta to
dogmatic definitions, in order that it may set itself free from the limits of
dogma by arbitrary exegesis.” But this only means, he adds, that faith has
disappeared, that “the determinate tenets of faith are [today] felt as [false]
limitations” (206). It is solely “religious indifference,” in hiding “under the
appearance of religion,” he continues, “that makes the Bible, which in its
nature and origin is indefinite, a standard of faith, and [that,] under the
pretext of believing only the essential, retains nothing which deserves the
name of faith” (206-07). Feuerbach then supports his argument that today
biblical criticism is not true to faith in falsely claiming to be its true standard
with an example of what he views as a patently contradictory and false
dogma: the belief that the Son of God was a sinless man.
There are here two closely related issues, the first hermeneutical, the
second theological. First, hermeneutically, Feuerbach is deeply offended by
the idea that today, in the modern world, the Bible is set up as the critical, as
the truthful standard of faith. In other words, given his incomprehension of
the dialectic of history and truth, he cannot conceive of modernity as consti-
tuted by the (Jewish!) trinity of truth, writing, and history and, we can add, as
revealed in and through the story of Adam and Eve. Modernity, he cannot
and does not see, is the ever-growing consciousness of (i.e., the responsibil-
ity for) the Bible as the original text of individual human existence-relation-
ships, the old familiar text handed down from our mothers and fathers.
Feuerbach cannot imagine that human history begins with Adam and Eve. He
would have found unimaginable, as a philosopher, the demonstration (dem-
onstration!) in Fear and Trembling that philosophy (consistent with Kant and
Hegel) cannot and does not go further than Abraham. When Kierkegaard
meditates, in fear and trembling, on the limit of Abraham, on the limit that
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 113

Abraham sets for us—that we cannot go further than the father of faith—he
makes it clear that this limit does not bring us to a stop, that we do not stop at
this limit. Rather, at least once in our life we must begin at the beginning in
doubting everything, in having it revealed to us (by God) that everything we
believe in (including God) is nothing—except the necessary, the free, the
loving, the creative relationship of thought and existence.
The second, theological issue is the one that Feuerbach raises, as I noted
above, regarding the dogma of Christ as the God-man: perfect, all-good
(supernatural) God and perfect, sinless (natural or historical?) man. Yes, if
God is supernatural, then any notion of sin vanishes. Feuerbach is right in
holding that the concept of God as supernatural is contradictory. He is
wrong, however, in not seeing, as I persist in showing, that the concept of
God as supernatural reflects Christendom, not Christianity. Further, as I have
also indicated, in positing man as natural, he simply reproduces the contra-
diction to which he reduces Christianity in opposing the natural to the super-
natural. Feuerbach is, to repeat, right that any notion that Christ as historical
man is sinless is patently contradictory and thus false. But, unfortunately, he
does not discuss the Incarnation in clear, systematic terms, doubtlessly be-
cause, in making Nature and the species the standard of the historically
existing individual, not to mention his rejection of the doctrine of creatio ex
nihilo, his conception of history remains critically inadequate. If, however,
the Bible, as the original text of individual human and so sinful existence-
relationships, is not sinful; if Jesus as the Christ, as the God-man, is not
sinful; if God himself, in binding himself historically in covenantal relation-
ship to his sinful creatures, is not sinful—then, yes, Feuerbach is right: theol-
ogy is a conspiracy against anthropology. But what we learn from Descartes
and Spinoza, consistent with the “happy sin” of St. Augustine (without sin,
without sinful man, there is no Christ, no salvation), is that it is precisely
error, sin, doubt that are the guarantors of truth (faith, hope, and love).
Indeed, as Montaigne writes in his essay “Of Presumption”: “He who is
disloyal to truth is also disloyal to falsehood.” 13
Feuerbach, we continue to see, has no conception of the difference be-
tween, on the one hand, Christianity (the Bible), as bearing the responsibility
of advancing error, sin, and doubt as the very engine of cultural progress, of
enlightenment—aude sapere—and so of being faithful to falsehood, and, on
the other hand, Christendom, as the rationalization of pagan culture decked
out in Christian dress. Consequently, he continues to lash out against what he
calls the frivolity of “modern Christians” for parading “themselves in the arts
and sciences of modern nations as products of Christianity!” (237). In
contrast, he contends, were the original Christians who, with their faith in
Christ, had no interest in the arts and sciences. I hardly need add that Feuer-
bach remains (insincerely) silent regarding Petrarch, Michelangelo, Caravag-
114 What Is Philosophy?

gio, Shakespeare, Milton, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven—to provide but a sam-

pling of our great Christian (secular) creators of modern art.
In the final paragraphs of Part II of The Essence of Christianity (prior to
the Appendix), Feuerbach invokes the Christian sacraments of Baptism and
the Eucharist to show that the claim that the doctrine that morality presup-
poses grace is true—“if, in place of imaginary, supernatural means of grace,
we substitute natural means. Moral feeling,” he writes, “can effect nothing
without Nature; it must ally itself with the simplest natural means. The pro-
foundest secrets lie in common everyday things” that “supranaturalistic and
[Hegelian] speculation ignore . . .” (226). The water of baptism, Feuerbach
continues, expresses “the power of a pure Nature-force; water is the element
of natural equality and freedom, the mirror of the golden age.” Still, he goes
on to observe that, because human beings are distinguished from plants and
animals, which, together with inorganic nature, “we comprehend under the
common name of Nature—we [human beings] are distinguished from Na-
ture. Hence we must celebrate our distinction, our specific difference.” What
this means, he adds, is that we have to distinguish between the matter and the
form of the sacramental elements of water, bread, and wine. They are at once
the material products of Nature and the formal (symbolic) products (crea-
tions) of human beings. While it is evident, Feuerbach declares, that human
beings need the elements of nature, water and bread, it is no less true, that
“Nature needs man. . . . In water, human mental activity is nullified; in bread
and wine it attains self-satisfaction. Bread and wine are supernatural prod-
ucts—in the only valid and true sense, the sense which is not in contradiction
with reason and Nature. If in water we adore the pure force of Nature, in
bread and wine we adore the supernatural power of mind, of consciousness,
of man. . . . [We] celebrate here the true relation of mind to Nature: Nature
gives the material, mind gives the form. . . . Bread and wine typify to us the
truth that Man is the true God and Saviour of man” (227). Feuerbach then
concludes Part II of The Essence of Christianity with the declaration that we
must be grateful to “holy Nature.” It takes only the interruption of “the
ordinary course of things . . . to vindicate to common things an uncommon
significance, to life, as such, a religious import. Therefore let bread be sacred
for us, let wine be sacred, and also let water be sacred! Amen” (227-28).
A Christian author (Augustine, Luther, Pascal) or a speculative philoso-
pher (Kant, Hegel) could not have said it better: nature is holy, nature is
sacred, not in itself but solely in conformity to the mind, to the Spirit of
human beings. Common things are uncommon. The common things of the
earth and flesh are, for us, religious in their significance. Glory be to God for
his creatio ex nihilo. Amen. It is only because the Spirit of man is sacred
(infinite) and not natural (finite) that we can and must look upon nature as
holy, not as an idol to be worshipped (in contradiction of himself) but as a
symbol, a metaphor, a transfer from Nature to Spirit, we remember Kierke-
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 115

gaard telling us. Feuerbach, however, does not tell us that, in concluding with
the avowal that, because humankind is not like nature, man is not natural and
the human mind is, consequently, “supernatural” (holy, religious, uncom-
mon), he has essentially revealed the entire argumentation of The Essence of
Christianity to be a tissue of contradiction. Indeed, in other parts of his work
he provides further, if only fleeting, indication that Nature cannot be and is
not the basis of his critique of Christian superstition as supernatural (or
otherworldly).
I shall provide here two examples in which we see Feuerbach draw back
from making Nature the standard of man. In the first, when discussing in Part
I the differences among savage (natural), cultured, and Christian man, he
reveals to us the terrible racial bias that lies hidden in making Nature the
standard of humanity. But my concern here is simply to point out that he
recognizes that his own standard (at least for cultured man!) is not Nature.
While the “rude [savage] child of Nature,” he observes, steps directly from
his natural life into the afterlife in “his natural nakedness . . . , [t]he cultivated
man, on the contrary, objects to the idea of such an unbridled life after death,
because even here he objects to the unrestricted life of Nature” (149-50). It is
typical, however, of Feuerbach that he does not inform us as to how the man
of culture, for whom Nature is the standard of reason, can, unnaturally
(supernaturally), i.e., freely, restrict the life of Nature.
I take the second example, in which Feuerbach denies that Nature is the
true end of man, from the Appendix of The Essence of Christianity. Here, the
context for his reversal is dramatic: his claim that, according to Christian
teaching, original sin arises from the natural pleasure of sexuality and is
transmitted, naturally, from Adam and Eve down to us their heirs through the
act of generation. He acknowledges, however, that, because Christians be-
lieve creation to be the work of God and consequently good, they do not view
matter or the flesh as in itself impure or sinful. Indeed, he points out that
Christian thinkers strongly condemned as heretical any claim that the flesh or
marriage was sinful. Still, he holds that, because Christians failed to recog-
nize “Nature as such” and refused to accept the inseparability of pleasure and
matter, Gnostic heretics only said overtly what Christians believed covert-
ly. 14 The individual who does not recognize “fleshly pleasure” as “natural,
normal, [and] inseparable from life . . . does not,” he declares, “acknowledge
the flesh. That which is not recognized as an end in itself (it by no means
follows that it should be the ultimate end) is in truth not recognized as such”
(261, emphasis added).
That Feuerbach is, as we have now seen, critically inconsistent (self-
contradictory) in making Nature the standard of truth in whose name he
condemns Christian supernaturalism as contradictory and false reflects the
fact, as I have shown, that his critique of Christian superstition and sophistry
(Christendom) possesses substantial, but only negative, value. He is right, as
116 What Is Philosophy?

indicated in the above passage, to expose as false and contradictory the

interpretation of the Fall of Adam and Eve (so very widespread in Christen-
dom) as showing that original sin arises from and is transmitted through the
flesh (sexuality), which, we remember, Kant, in particular, denied. But he is
wrong to claim that this interpretation is truly Christian (or Jewish). Indeed,
he acknowledges, as we saw, that this interpretation contradicts the concept
of creation (from nothing) and that Christian thinkers consistently and com-
prehensively rejected the claims made by heretics (Gnostics) that the flesh,
matter, or creation was itself sinful or evil. (It is salutary to recall that Paul, in
Romans, is absolutely clear that it is not the flesh that is sinful or evil in itself
but the Spirit insofar as it subordinates itself to the flesh.) However, because
Feuerbach has no concept of the difference between true and false Christian-
ity, between Christianity and (Gnostic) Christendom, the only way in which
he can claim to avoid the contradiction that the interpretation of the Fall that
he offers is (falsely) Gnostic and not (truly) Christian is in terms of the
blatantly absurd contradiction that Christians are really Gnostics in disguise,
i.e., that there is no fundamental difference between Christianity and Gnosti-
cism. Still, Feuerbach’s true but contradictory conclusion—his conclusion is
true in contradicting his own claim and thus in showing it to be false—is, as
we have seen, that, while the pleasures of the flesh are normal, natural, and
inseparable from life, they are not the ultimate end of life.
As always, Feuerbach shows himself incapable of thinking through, al-
though he does fleetingly acknowledge the need of formulating, a concept of
human existence as based on, not Nature but the knowledge of good and evil.
He never sees that the sole exit from the contradictory dualism between
supernatural theology and natural anthropology, which he simply repeats,
blindly, in reducing Christianity to it, is by way of the story of the “Fall” of
Adam and Eve. He does not see that it is only when we view the story of
Adam and Eve as the fall into the divine knowledge of good and evil that we
are able to comprehend the opposition between natural man and supernatural
God as a contradictory dualism and so to overcome it in and through the I-
thou covenant of love, which he does, however, invoke from time to time, as
we have seen. But, with his deep fear of subjectivity and personality, he
continues to champion the object over the subject, the species over the indi-
vidual, Nature over morality, theory (experience) over practice (existence),
science over history, knowledge (contemplation) over faith (feeling), and
matter over grace. Yet, he acknowledges, in complete contradiction of him-
self, that the mind (like God) is “supernatural” when we consider the essen-
tial difference between the common products of nature (e.g., water, grapes,
and grain) and the uncommon, i.e., the holy, sacred, and divine (the meta-
phorical) creations of human beings (e.g., the sacraments of bread and wine).
Schopenhauer, to whom I now turn, agrees with Feuerbach that Christian-
ity reveals the life of man to be nothing but contradiction. However, what is
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 117

so edifying (upbuilding) for us to see is that, in comprehending the contradic-

tory life of Christian man in contradictory ways, Schopenhauer and Feuer-
bach, at one and the same time, contradict themselves, contradict each other,
contradict Christianity, and contradict the values that constitute modernity.
We have seen Feuerbach concede, implicitly, that his concept of Christianity
is contradictory and so false. In other words, he acknowledges, indirectly
(and, except at the very end of Part II of The Essence of Christianity, only
fleetingly), the truth of Christianity—that the nature of man is not natural but
rather “supernatural.” Still, he fails to see that it is only in conceiving of the
covenantal (I-thou) relationship of God and man as historical that he can
extricate himself from the contradictory opposition between the concept of
God as supernatural and the concept of man as natural. Schopenhauer, in
contrast, not only explicitly embraces the truth of the Christian life as contra-
dictory but also directly acknowledges, at the end of The World as Will and
Representation, as we shall now see, that his claim that the end of life is
nothing but death, that existence is nothing, is inarguably (irredeemably)
contradictory. In accepting contradiction as the truth of Christianity, he holds
that human beings can be liberated from their contradictory life of suffering
the sinful guilt of individual existence solely in and through death. What the
saints show us, he holds, consequently, is that, in willing not to will, in
willing not to be, in willing to be nothing, they abolish their individual will as
nothing but its total extinction, as its reabsorption into the eternally one,
unchanging, and impersonal thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer accepts as truly
Christian the “Gnostic” interpretation of the Fall of man: that human beings
can be liberated from the world, nature, matter, the flesh, sexuality, from the
guilt of existing, solely by the external (unmerited) intervention of Christ (the
new Adam) whose self-sacrifice reveals life to be nothing but death. Addi-
tionally, he embraces, like Feuerbach, yet more relentlessly, the pagan doc-
trine that ex nihilo nihil fit: “nothing is made from nothing”—in contradic-
tion of the (Jewish!) doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. It is no wonder, then, that
nihilism is the spirit of Death that haunts modern life.

SCHOPENHAUER ON THE MYTH OF UNIVERSAL BEING AS

LIFE REDEEMED IN DEATH

What is so extraordinary about Schopenhauer is that the principal claim that

he advances in his philosophy and that he embraces with absolute consisten-
cy and coherence, i.e., with the unqualified acknowledgment that it is expli-
citly contradictory, is that contradiction is the truth of life—and of death. The
truth of life, as of death, is contradictory. What is life (the existence of the
individual human being) is truly death (as nothing but the annihilation of the
individual life). What is death (the essence of the species) is truly life (as
118 What Is Philosophy?

nothing but the eternity of the species). The purpose of life is to die (as the
individual). The purpose of death is to live (as the species).
Schopenhauer published his magnum opus, The World as Will and Repre-
sentation, in 1819. He brought out a second edition of the work in two
volumes in 1844. The first volume, in reprinting the original edition, remains
virtually unchanged, while updated. The second volume, considerably longer
than the first, consists of Supplements in fifty chapters to the individual
sections of the four books of the original volume. 15 By the time Schopen-
hauer published a third edition of his work in 1859, a year before his death,
he had become widely known and influential.
The fundamental premise that Schopenhauer advances as the structuring
principle of his philosophy is that the world (reality, nature, existence, being)
is constituted by the will as divided between (as opposed to itself as) the
phenomenal world of particularity (individuals) and the thing-in-itself (which
he associates with what he calls the Idea of Plato). He holds that we know
(experience) the will as it represents itself in and as the phenomenal world
both natural and human (with the second involving our political, social,
personal, and familial relations). Phenomenal existence is the world of indi-
viduals, whose egos, in embodying what Schopenhauer calls the principium
individuationis (the principle of individuation), experience life as ceaseless
desire, which is eternally unsatisfied, and so as unrelenting dissatisfaction,
pain, suffering, and, ultimately, sin and guilt. The debt incurred by the will
for having contradicted itself in affirming the life of suffering, sin, and guilt,
given that it is evident to all that it is better not to exist than to exist, can be
paid off only in and through death. The affirmation of the will-to-live is,
then, for Schopenhauer the fundamental evil, the original sin, that the will
must overcome. The ultimate purpose of the will is to quiet the will, to
terminate its willing. The true aim of the will is to exterminate the will. For
what the will is in itself is not phenomenally one individual, which is neces-
sarily subject to temporal life and thus to death, but universally one being,
which is liberated from time and thus from death. Existence is a phenomenal
accident, an error, which the will must will to overcome by extinguishing its
will-to-live as an individual.
But how do we know—how does Schopenhauer know—that the will, in
willing itself as an individual existent, is not what it is in itself and that the
will, in willing not to will, in not willing as an individual existing being, is
truly what it is in itself? How can the will be, i.e., become, its very opposite?
How can the will know itself as its very opposite? How can the will know
itself in opposition to itself? How can the will as the affirmation of life
oppose itself by annihilating itself? How, most simply, can the will not will
in willing not to will? If the aim of the will is to will nothing (at all, in itself),
how do we know nothing but the will, the will as nothing? Who, finally, is
“we”?
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 119

I shall arrange my exposition, and critique, of Schopenhauer’s philosophy

of will in two registers that, like a fugue, constantly move in counterpoint
with each other. The first register is that in which I expose two layers of
contradiction in Schopenhauer: the first explicit and acknowledged, the sec-
ond implicit and unacknowledged. These two layers of contradiction are
closely related; and I shall not attempt, as such, to keep them rigidly separate
from each other. The second register involves my addressing the critical
question of what it is that we (are to) learn from engaging Schopenhauer’s
philosophy. The short answer to this question is that Schopenhauer, in funda-
mentally misreading the story of Adam and Eve, together with the Bible and
Christianity, including its relationship to Judaism, is the most brilliant exam-
ple we have of the failure on the part of a philosopher (in the nineteenth
century) to comprehend modernity, to comprehend the values that truly con-
stitute our modern lives. The cautionary tale that is the philosophy of Scho-
penhauer involves us in adhering to two critical perspectives, each the mirror
image of the other. First, to comprehend philosophy is to see that, insofar as
it is true to (biblical) religion, it is true to itself. Second, to comprehend
religion (as biblical) is to see that, insofar as it is true philosophically, it is
true to itself. It is the very demonstration of Hegel and Kierkegaard, as we
have seen, that philosophy, insofar as it does not comprehend biblical reli-
gion as rational, is empty and that biblical religion, insofar as it does not
comprehend philosophy as faithful, is blind. The very basis of this compre-
hension is Kant’s demonstration that, because objects conform to subjects, it
is practice—the “knowledge” of good and evil—in and through which hu-
man subjects constitute modernity in willing to do unto others what they will
others to do unto them.
I shall first outline, before proceeding to discuss in some detail, the con-
ception that Schopenhauer has of the issues that are central to any reasoned
account of what it is that constitutes our modern values: those involving will,
knowledge, existence, history (both his conception of history and his under-
standing of the relationship of his ideas to the history of religion and philoso-
phy: biblical, ancient Greek, ancient Indian, and then to Kant, in particular,
among the moderns), nature, and ethics (love), including the state (political
relations). These issues are, it is evident, deeply interwoven with each other.
It is instructive to begin with the primal error that Schopenhauer commits
even as he claims to be true to the project of Kantian idealism, according to
which, as we have seen, the metaphysics of modernity is based on the dem-
onstration that the objects of phenomenal nature conform to the noumenal
(transcendental) subjectivity of human beings. (He is also severely critical of
what he considers to be Kant’s philosophical failings.) Schopenhauer claims,
in distinguishing between the will as represented in its phenomenal manifes-
tations and the will as the thing-in-itself, to maintain Kant’s distinction be-
tween phenomena and things-in-themselves. However, he essentially misrep-
120 What Is Philosophy?

resents it in erasing the distinction between objects and subjects, between

things and persons, between experience (as empirically known in light of
theoretical hypotheses) and existence (as categorically willed in practice as
the love of neighbor), between causal necessity and the self-determination of
free subjects, between nature and freedom, between knowledge and thinking
(i.e., will or desire), and between theory (natural science) and practice (eth-
ics: human relations as determined in and through the kingdom of ends). For
what Schopenhauer does, in betraying Kant, is to ascribe to the phenomenal
world the practical existence of individual human beings as dominated by
their affirmation of the will-to-live. This is for him the world of the princip-
ium individuationis, according to which the individual human ego, in striving
to satisfy itself, always finds itself opposed to and by the egos of others and,
consequently, no less opposed to and by its own ego. This is the world of
irremediable pain, suffering, sin, wrong, and guilt. This is the world in which
human beings are fatally determined by their selfish egos and from which
death alone frees them. Other human beings are, indeed, hell in this dog-eat-
dog world of nature, precisely as described by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rous-
seau as the state of nature, in contrast with the civil (social) state (which Kant
characterizes as the kingdom of ends). It is this reduction of the human
individual to finite (contradictory) egoism, knowledge of which is empirical
(theoretical)—“for nature never lies,” Schopenhauer states, even though he is
compelled to acknowledge that nature is essentially opposed to itself—that
gives rise, in the most fundamental sense, to the concatenation of contradic-
tions, in part acknowledged, in part unacknowledged, from which he knows
no exit. It is important to note that Schopenhauer takes the concept of the
principium individuationis from Leibniz. It is utterly foreign to and not found
in Kant.
The fundamental problem, then, that Schopenhauer faces is, as I noted
above, how the will can will not to will, how the affirmation of the will-to-
live can turn itself around, oppose itself, become itself the negation of itself
and life, and so through death be in itself—nothing. He appears to acknowl-
edge, although, even then, only equivocally, the Kantian dictum that, while
we know things-in-themselves as objects of possible (i.e., as theoretical or
hypothetical) experience, we do not know and cannot know (empirically)
what they are in themselves. According to Kant, as we saw in chapter 1, we
do not know human beings as we know the things of nature. Rather, we relate
to them, in practice, as freely thinking (loving) individuals, as fellow collabo-
rators actively involved in bringing into existence the kingdom of ends.
Schopenhauer, however, because he eradicates any distinction between phe-
nomenal knowing and the (ethical) practice of willing (thinking/desiring),
has no way, ultimately, of characterizing (of “knowing”) the will as the
thing-in-itself. Indeed, since he relegates practice, together with thinking, to
the phenomenal realm, he is compelled to take refuge in negative knowledge
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 121

(reflecting the time-worn negative theology of Neoplatonic Christendom)

that the only knowledge of the will that wills not to will that we legitimately
possess is negative: we know only what the will is not. Since we do know
that the will, in affirming life, is worthless, it must then follow that the
negation of life, i.e., death, is the true affirmation of life.
Consistent with his evasion of how we can know that the will is nothing
willing (or knowing) through his appeal to negative knowledge, in the tradi-
tion of Socratic ignorance, Schopenhauer dismisses history as merely phe-
nomenal. He has no idea that what Hegel, following Kant, shows us is that it
is history that constitutes the realm of human practice, the realm of human
willing, desiring, and thinking, what he calls absolute (infinite) knowledge.
Closely connected with the reduction of history on the part of Schopenhauer
to merely phenomenal contingency (together with his risible caricature of
Hegel as an incompetent philosopher, of whose conception of the dialectic of
truth and history he has no grasp whatsoever), is his rejection of the doctrine
of creatio ex nihilo (as representing Jewish optimism—the affirmation of the
will-to-live!). Further, like Feuerbach, Schopenhauer argues that the story of
the Fall of Adam and Eve shows that, because sin is transmitted by the sexual
generation of the species, human existence is irredeemably corrupt. But,
unlike Feuerbach, who rejects, as we have seen, this conception of the Fall of
Adam and Eve as simply illusory theology, Schopenhauer embraces it as the
truth of Christianity and so in harmony with the teachings of the ancient
Indian religions (a view that Feuerbach also rejects). The Savior, then, for
Schopenhauer is the one who reveals, through the unmerited (external) grace
of his own sacrifice of the will-to-live, that the guilt of existence can be
expiated through death and only through death.
Directly reflecting the above issues is the fact that Schopenhauer dis-
misses the ontological argument in failing to grasp its fundamental premise:
that existence (freedom) is affirmed, that it cannot not be affirmed, in the
very denial of it (we are not free not to be free). Like Hume (whose philo-
sophical acumen he highly praises), he commits the elemental error of not
seeing (with Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel) that we can doubt, reject,
deny . . . existence solely on the basis of affirming existence as the good of
human beings. Still, while claiming that the existence of the phenomenal will
and the will as the thing-in-itself are opposites (although he acknowledges
that he knows not how), there is an apparent exception to the opposition
between the evil of the phenomenal will (life) and the good of the will as the
thing-in-itself (death) that Schopenhauer cannot ignore. Like Feuerbach, he
finds himself compelled to address the role of ethics as the love of neighbor
in human life, even as he rejects the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo: that the
existence of human beings is created from nothing—from nothing that is not
good. Schopenhauer also acknowledges a role for the state (in preserving
social civility, e.g., in maintaining the right to private property). However,
122 What Is Philosophy?

since both ethical and social (political) relations are based on the principium
individuationis, neither ethics (centered on love) nor politics (centered on the
state) is, finally, distinguishable from egoism. Neither contributes nor can
contribute, ultimately, to the quietus (in settling the debt) of the human
individual in affirming the will-to-live. Let me also mention here, before
proceeding to examine key passages in which Schopenhauer takes up the
issues that I have outlined above, that he abjures both suicide 16 and sexuality
as affirming the will-to-live.
In distinguishing between the inner being, to which time as arising and
passing away does not apply (and of which we have no conscious knowl-
edge), and the individual, whose consciousness (knowledge) is a temporal
phenomenon, Schopenhauer states that it is the “sharp distinction between
will and knowledge [consciousness], together with the former’s primacy . . .
that constitutes the fundamental characteristic of my philosophy . . . [and] is
therefore the only key to the contradiction” that is constantly manifested in
consciousness. “This contradiction is that death is our end, and yet we must
be eternal and indestructible; hence it is the sentimus, experimurque nos
aeternos esse [we feel and experience ourselves to be eternal] of Spinoza.”
Schopenhauer remarks further that all philosophers, because they have erred
in placing what is “metaphysical, indestructible, and eternal in man in the
intellect,” have failed to see that it “lies exclusively in the will, which is
entirely different from the intellect and alone is original” (II. 495).
The fundamental problem that the total opposition between intellect (con-
sciousness, knowledge) and will, between the phenomenal individual and the
inner being (the thing-in-itself), or between time and eternity poses for Scho-
penhauer, however, is that it disallows the possibility of establishing a com-
mon perspective on both that in itself is not reducible to either one or the
other of these two contradictory opposites. In other words, it is impossible
for Schopenhauer to advance any claim or to assert any position that is not
itself contradictory. It is also important to note that Schopenhauer has com-
pletely misrepresented Spinoza in his application of the passage that he cites
(without acknowledgment from Part V of the Ethics). For, overall, Spinoza
holds that existence (as distinct from duration or natural time) is eternal—
now. Indeed, Schopenhauer completely distorts the history of philosophy in
claiming that he is the first philosopher to make will the basis of human
reality—in opposition to mind (consciousness). Not only were great scholas-
tic philosophers like William of Occam and his followers voluntarists, but
also what Descartes understands by “mind” (thinking substance)—as distinct
from quantitative substance (body)—includes the affects. Further, Spinoza
himself makes conatus 17 the very basis of human existence with his claim
that the good depends on (as the product of) the desire (will) of human
subjects. Desire is not dependent on an eternal good, e.g., a Platonic Idea, of
which human beings are forever ignorant. Thus, Spinoza provides a version
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 123

of the Kantian revolution in metaphysics that objects depend on the minds of

subjects. Finally, the most evident refutation of Schopenhauer’s claim is the
demonstration on the part of Kant that it is the human will (which he iden-
tifies with reason, thinking, and desire, as distinct from knowledge) that
constitutes the transcendental (“eternal”) realm of human practice. Hegel
fundamentally adheres to the Kantian revolution, as we have seen. What
Schopenhauer never grasps is that Kant’s distinction between thinking (as the
rational practice of will or desire) and knowledge (as theoretical) is rooted in
the biblical conception of human beings as being responsible for “knowing”
good and evil in their covenantal practice of the golden rule. It is also impor-
tant to note that there is no conception of will (as agency, practice, reasoning,
or thinking) in Greek or Roman antiquity (paganism).
We can well understand, then, Schopenhauer’s insistence on the fact that
“[w]hat gives our life its strange and ambiguous character is that in it two
fundamental purposes, diametrically opposed, are constantly crossing each
other” (II.638). One purpose directs the individual to attempt to find happi-
ness in the temporal present that is constantly becoming past. “The other
purpose is that of fate, directed obviously enough to the destruction of our
happiness, and thus to the mortification of our will, and to the elimination of
the delusion that holds us chained to the bonds of the world” (II.638-39).
What this means, Schopenhauer remarks, is that “the need for salvation from
an existence given up to suffering and death” and attainable solely “through
the denial of the will, hence by a decided opposition to nature, is beyond all
comparison the most important truth there can be. But it is at the same time
entirely opposed to the natural tendency of mankind, and . . . is quite inac-
cessible to the great majority of people” (II.628). The fact that “existence is
certainly to be regarded as an error or mistake,” i.e., that “nothing else can be
stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be
better for us not to exist . . . is the most important of all truths, and must
therefore be stated, however much it stands in contrast with the present-day
mode of European thought. . . . [Nevertheless, it is] the most universally
recognized fundamental truth in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, today
as much as three thousand years ago” (II.605). Schopenhauer formulates yet
more firmly this opposition between ancient thought and modern European
thought when he writes that, while

Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and
even better, for Europe it was nevertheless a new and great revelation. In
consequence of this, the spiritual tendency of European nations was entirely
transformed. For it disclosed to them the metaphysical significance of exis-
tence and accordingly taught them to look beyond the narrow, paltry, and
ephemeral life on earth, and no longer to regard that as an end in itself, but as a
state or condition of suffering, guilt, trial, struggle and purification, from
which we can soar upwards to a better existence, inconceivable to us, by
124 What Is Philosophy?

means of moral effort, severe renunciation, and the denial of our own self. (II.
627–28)

That Schopenhauer has no explanation of how modern European thought

repudiated the Christian past from which it emerged historically or how
original Christianity repudiated its past—both Jewish, theologically, and
Greco-Roman, culturally—and resumed, yet originally, the ancient teaching
of (non-Islamic) Asia reflects his reduction of history to the phenomenal time
of nature. But, as we shall now see, his failure to distinguish between natural
(phenomenal) time and human (practical) time, the second of which we know
as history (consistent with Hegel and Kierkegaard), follows from his reduc-
tion of human beings to the principium individuationis, as the principle of the
phenomenal realm, in opposition to the will as the unknowable and incon-
ceivable thing in-itself which, as will, must will not to will in order to be true
to, as the contradiction of, itself. Two basic elements are involved in evaluat-
ing Schopenhauer’s conception of and approach to history, as I indicated
above in my outline of his thought: (1) his philosophy of (universal) history
and (2) his history of (universal) philosophy. His philosophical conception of
history is deeply intertwined with the history of philosophy that he provides.
Schopenhauer sets forth his general philosophy of history in supplemen-
tary Chapter 38 “On History” in Volume II of The World as Will and Repre-
sentation. He informs us that history is not a systematic science since it does
not “know the particular by means of the universal, but it must comprehend
the particular directly, and continue to creep along the ground of experience,
so to speak.” Indeed, to be a science of particulars is a contradiction, for
history in knowing “everything only imperfectly and partially” is subjective
and not objective (II.440). Philosophy, in contrast, “considers things from the
most universal point of view, and has the universal as its express object”
(II.441). But what this means, Schopenhauer continues, is that “the really
essential content [of the history of all nations] is everywhere the same”
(II.442). He ridicules Hegel and his followers for claiming to make historical
events significant within a comprehensive whole, when, as Plato teaches,
“the object of philosophy is the unchangeable and ever permanent” and not
what is temporal and ever changing. They “have not grasped the principal
truth of all philosophy, that that which is at all times the same, that all
becoming and arising are only apparent, that the Ideas alone are permanent,
[and] that time is ideal. This is what Plato means, this is what Kant means.
Accordingly, we should try to understand what exists, what actually is, today
and always, in other words, to know the Ideas (in Plato’s sense). On the other
hand, fools imagine that something is supposed to come into existence”
(II.443). Such fools he calls simple realists, optimists, eudaemonists, “Philis-
tines incarnate,” and “bad Christians” who fail to see that “neither constitu-
tions, legal systems, steam-engines, nor telegraphs can ever make anything
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 125

that is essentially better” out of the empty happiness of earthly existence and
that “the true spirit and kernel of Christianity, as of Brahmanism [Hinduism]
and Buddhism also,” is that it views all earthly happiness with contempt and
rejects it (II.443-44). These philosophers should see, he observes further, that
a true philosophy of history is concerned, as Plato says, not with “that which
is always becoming and never is . . . [but with] that which is and never
becomes or passes away.” The true philosophy of history, in not elevating the
temporal aims of human beings to eternal and absolute aims, sees “that
history is untruthful, not only in its arrangement, but also in its very na-
ture. . . .” It grasps the truth that, notwithstanding all the endless changes
recorded in history, “we yet always have before us only the same, identical,
unchangeable essence, acting in the same way today as it did yesterday and
always. The true philosophy of history should therefore recognize the identi-
cal in all events, of ancient as of modern times, of the East as of the West,
and should see everywhere the same humanity, in spite of all difference in
the special circumstances, in costume and customs. This identical element,
persisting under every change, consists in the fundamental qualities of the
human heart and head, many bad, few good” (II.444).
Yes, time is ideal, but Kant, as we have seen, completely disassociates
himself from the Platonic Idea by distinguishing critically between the time
(and space) of empirical (theoretical) nature and the transcendental (ideal)
practice of individuals whose willing of the kingdom of ends constitutes, as
Hegel makes clear, the universal history of humanity. Yes, human individu-
als do come historically—absolutely—into existence in their recognition of
the other (God and neighbor) as the truth of their individual self. If they did
not, we would find ourselves enmeshed in what Kierkegaard calls in Fear
and Trembling, as we have seen, the universal (finite consciousness, Hegel
calls it) to whose telos the individual is subordinated. Schopenhauer perfectly
represents, as Kierkegaard designates him, the knight of infinite resignation
(as distinct from the knight of modern faith): the one who, secure in his
possession of eternal consciousness, is infinitely resigned to the loss of his
historical existence as the single individual.
Before amplifying my critique of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of history,
in light of Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, I want, first, to show how Schopen-
hauer conceives of the history of philosophy, of which, he believes, he is the
true and sole expositor in modernity, consistent with his view that the more
individual things change the more they reveal the unchanging qualities of the
human heart and mind: “many bad, few good.” It is here that his rejection of
the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and his conception of the Fall of Adam and
Eve as demonstrating the nullity of all existence becomes central, together
with his understanding of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, on the
one hand, and to the ancient Indian religions, on the other hand. His conflict-
126 What Is Philosophy?

ing statements about the relationship of Christianity to the ancient Greeks

and Romans must also be considered carefully.
Schopenhauer tells us that he views as “the fundamental difference of all
religions,” not whether they are monotheistic or polytheistic, pantheistic or
atheistic, but “whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, . . . whether they
present the existence of this world as justified by itself, and consequently
praise or commend it, or [whether they] consider it as something which can
be conceived only as the consequence of our guilt, and thus really ought not
to be. . . .” The reason that Christianity was able to overcome both Judaism
and Greco-Roman paganism, he declares, is that, in its pessimism, it con-
fessed our condition as sinful “whereas Judaism and paganism were optimis-
tic” (II.170). He writes further that the sole opposition in world history to
Christian pessimism is “the Old Testament” with its claim (as found in Gene-
sis 1.31) that “God saw all that He had done, and, look, it was very good.” 18
He observes that the early Christian father Clement of Alexandria (c. 200)
opposed the pessimism and asceticism of the Gnostic heretics, who viewed
human flesh as sinful, “merely with [the support of] Judaism and its optimis-
tic history of creation, with which the world-denying tendency of the New
Testament is most certainly in contradiction. But the connection of the New
Testament with the Old Testament is at bottom only an external, accidental
and in fact forced one . . .” (II.620). He reiterates that “it is not Judaism with
its ‘all was very good’ [again cited in Greek] but Brahmanism and Buddhism
that in spirit and ethical tendency are akin to Christianity . . . [which] belongs
to the ancient, true, and sublime faith of mankind. This stands in contrast to
the false, shallow, and pernicious optimism that manifests itself in Greek
paganism, Judaism, and Islam” (II.623).
It is important to see that Schopenhauer uses his idea that “original sin is
really our only true sin”—since, in arising “through the [sexual] act of the
first human couple,” it shows that human freedom is identical with the neces-
sarily guilty act of sinning—to combat what he calls “the fundamental dog-
ma of Judaism [the “all was very good” doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which]
did not admit of such an explanation” (II.604). He provides his general
rationale for rejecting the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the context of
discussing death in the lengthy, supplementary Chapter 41, entitled “On
Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature.” He tells
us, as he recalls that Socrates defines philosophy as the “preparation for
death,” 19 that it is because of the importance of the subject of death, outside
of which philosophy would scarcely exist, that he places it “here at the
beginning of the last, most serious, and most important of our [four] books
[in Volume I].” He observes that, unlike animals, which live without any real
knowledge of death, human beings have to face the terrifying certainty of
death. While all religious and philosophical systems are vitally concerned
with teaching man how to face death, he observes, only Brahmanism and
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 127

Buddhism, however, teach “man to regard himself as Brahman, as the origi-

nal being himself, to whom all arising and passing away are essentially
foreign. . . . [Thus, they] achieve much more in this respect than . . . those
religions that represent man as being made out of nothing and as actually
beginning at his birth the existence he has received from another” (II.463).
Indeed, to teach man “that he came but recently from nothing, that conse-
quently he has been nothing throughout an eternity, and [that] yet for the
future [he] is to be imperishable and immortal is just like teaching him that,
although he is through and through the work of another, he shall nevertheless
be responsible to all eternity for his commissions and omissions” (II.464).
Schopenhauer adds a few pages later that “he who regards himself as having
come out of nothing must also think that he becomes nothing again; for it is a
monstrous idea that an infinity of time elapsed before he was but that a
second infinity has begun throughout which he will never cease to be. Actu-
ally, the most solid ground for our imperishable nature is the old [pagan]
aphorism: Ex nihilo nihil fit, et in nihilum nihil potest reverti (from nothing
nothing is made, and to nothing nothing can revert).” He adds that it is only
because we are “unborn” that we are immortal, i.e., birth is death (II.487). It
“is only by means of the eternity of our real inner nature that an imperish-
ableness of it is conceivable; consequently such an imperishableness is not
temporal. The assumption that man is created out of nothing necessarily
leads to the assumption that death is his absolute end. In this respect, there-
fore, the Old Testament is quite consistent; for no doctrine of immortality is
appropriate to a creation out of nothing. New Testament Christianity has
such a doctrine, because it is Indian in spirit. . . . Brahmanism and Bud-
dhism . . . quite consistently, with a continued existence after death, have an
existence before birth, and the purpose of this life is to atone for the guilt of
that previous existence” (II.488).
In opposing the pagan doctrine of generation—nothing existent is gener-
ated from nothing existent (everything existent is generated from everything
existent)—to the biblical doctrine of creation—everything existent is created
from nothing (that is not creatively existent)—Schopenhauer shows us, unin-
tentionally, two essential things. First, the fundamental principle underlying
Greco-Roman culture, notwithstanding his claim that it is optimistic, is in
essential agreement with the central principle of the ancient Indian religions:
being (Brahman) is deathless (the immortality of the soul). Second, the pagan
opposition between life, as the perishable existence of the individual being,
and death, as the imperishable existence of the universal being (the species),
constitutes the contradiction that to live (mortally) is to die and that to die is
to live (immortally): life is death/death is life. Schopenhauer does not see,
however, that death has no (existential) importance for Greek philosophers—
for whom life is subject to the law of contradiction and death to the law of
identity (thought thinking itself)—or for the ancient Hindu sages and their
128 What Is Philosophy?

star pupil the Buddha—for whom life is Samsara (endless desire in eternal
contradiction of itself) and death is Nirvana (the extinction of desire as eter-
nally identical with itself). Death, however, is the teacher of life for those for
whom creation is from nothing, as we learned from Pascal in Chapter 2.
Further, it is evident that Schopenhauer, in writing that, according to the
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, individuals receive their existence from another
and are the work of another and yet are eternally responsible for their actions
(in knowing good and evil), reduces the concept of creation to the concept of
supernatural generation. He does not see that human individuals receive their
existence from another and are the work of another, not as finite products
(objects) but as infinitely creative subjects in relationship. It is only through
my relationship to the other (God and neighbor) that I receive my existence.
It is in my relation to the other that I acknowledge that I am not my own work
but the work of another—in loving the other as the very truth of myself. It is
precisely because Schopenhauer reifies the concept of creation as natural
generation that love of neighbor ultimately remains foreign to his thought, as
we shall see. So, yes, death is the teacher of life: you have to lose your life in
order to gain it. For it is the consciousness that we die that is the serious
teacher of life: we have the responsibility to ourselves (to history, to others)
to make of it what we can.
In claiming that Christianity agrees in spirit, not with the Jewish doctrine
of creation as good but with the view of Brahmanism and Buddhism and so
of the whole of mankind that the generation of life is evil, Schopenhauer also
writes, confusingly, as we saw, that it thus “stands in contrast to the false,
shallow, and pernicious optimism that manifests itself in Greek paganism,
Judaism, and Islam” (II. 623). He will even allow that, because the Fall of
man is Jewish in origin, it is only “Greek paganism and Islam [that] are
wholly optimistic . . .” (II.605). Indeed, he observes further that the truth that
“the Fall of Adam represents man’s finite, animal, sinful nature, in respect of
which he is just a being abandoned to limitation, sin, suffering and death,”
and that the life and death “of Jesus Christ represent the eternal, supernatural
side, the freedom, the salvation of man,” was “completely new . . . as regards
the Greeks and Romans, who were still entirely absorbed in life, and did not
seriously look beyond this” (II. 628). Still, Schopenhauer notes that, “remote
as the Greeks were from the Christian and lofty Asiatic world-view and
although they were decidedly at the standpoint of the affirmation of the will,
they were nevertheless deeply affected by the wretchedness of existence”
(II.585). Indeed, they invented tragedy. However, while their tragic heroes
do submit to “inevitable fate and the inflexible will of the gods,” they do not
give up the will-to-live. Consequently, Schopenhauer holds that, just as
“Stoic equanimity,” as the calm acceptance of necessary evils, is fundamen-
tally different from “Christian resignation,” so “the Christian tragedy . . .
shows the giving up of the whole will-to-live [as the] cheerful abandonment
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 129

of the world in the consciousness of its worthlessness and vanity.” His con-
clusion, then, is that “the tragedy of the moderns is at a higher level than that
of the ancients.” Shakespeare is much greater than Sophocles and Goethe
equally greater than Euripides, whose Bacchae Schopenhauer describes as “a
revolting piece of work in favor of the heathen priests” (II.434). Thus, it
follows for him that, while Greek tragedies do portray human beings as
dreadfully dominated by chance and error, they do not show “the resignation
[which] these bring about [and] which redeems us from them. All this was
because the ancients had not yet reached the summit and goal of tragedy or,
indeed, of the view of life generally” (II.434-35).
Schopenhauer’s observations about Greco-Roman paganism, generally,
and about Greek tragedy, in particular, are confusing in that they reflect the
fundamental inconsistency of the two fundamental claims that underlie them.
(1) Overall, Schopenhauer is right to oppose the (pessimistic) pagan notion
that “nothing comes from nothing” to the (optimistic) biblical notion of crea-
tion from nothing as supporting the will-to-live. (2) But he is wrong, then,
not only to identify the will-to-life with both the Greek tragedians and the
Jews but also to equate the Christians with the ancient Indians in their renun-
ciation of the will-to-life. For it turns out that the will-to-life is shared by
Jews and Christians and that there is no will-to-life in paganism. The associa-
tion of the denial of the will-to-life as Christian with the ancient Indians
reflects precisely what Kierkegaard calls, as we have seen, Christendom: the
rationalism of Christianity in pagan terms. Additionally, Schopenhauer, as
we know, makes Plato, although a Greek philosopher, not to mention Socra-
tes, the patron of his philosophy (as he falsely claims to identify Kant with
Plato). Further, he provides little concrete evidence of how he understands
modern tragedy, except for brief references to plays by Shakespeare, Goethe,
Schiller, etc. Yes, Schopenhauer is right that the tragedies of, for example,
Shakespeare are, in spirit, fundamentally different from ancient tragedy (but
this does not mean that they are “superior” to them as if we were comparing
like entities). Moreover, he uses the term “tragic” in the loose sense that,
since life is not able “to satisfy the spirit . . . [and so] is not capable of any
true bliss or happiness,” tragedy presents us with examples of “the unspeak-
able misery presented by experience and history . . .” (I.322-23). What trage-
dy shows us, according to Schopenhauer, is that, because the life-history of
every individual is one of suffering, no individual will ever want to repeat it.
“Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete non-existence. The
essential purport of the world-famous monologue in Hamlet is, in condensed
form, that our state is so wretched that complete nonexistence would be
decidedly preferable to it” (I.324). If, in light of the “to be or not to be”
alternative, suicide unconditionally offered us non-existence, he continues, it
would be “‘a consummation devoutly to be wish’d’” and so chosen as the
quietus of life. “There is something in us, however,” Schopenhauer observes,
130 What Is Philosophy?

“which tells us that this is not so, that this is not the end of things, that death
is not an absolute annihilation” (I.324).
Schopenhauer, here, fundamentally misconstrues Hamlet’s meditation on
existence and nonexistence, on life and death. The Prince of Denmark is
concerned, not with immortality (non-consciousness) but with the fact that,
from the point of view of existence, we human beings know nothing of the
realm of nonexistence from which no traveler has ever returned (because
none has ever ventured there?). What we know, as existing individuals, even
in the face of knowing the misery of our existence, is infinitely preferable to
what we do not know. Paradoxically, we strengthen (the actuality of) our
will-to-live in and through our meditation on (the possibility of) our death, on
our nonexistence. For it is solely the actually existing individual for whom
death is the teacher of life. Let us recall the observation of Edgar (in King
Lear) after he comes upon his blinded father Gloucester in the grip of suici-
dal despair, which I discussed in chapter 1: “The worst is not / So long as we
can say ‘This is the worst.’” What Schopenhauer altogether misunderstands
about modern “tragedy,” as dramatized by Shakespeare (and, we might add,
by the great painters, sculptors, and composers of modernity in depicting, for
example, the death of Christ in its various modes) is that it concentrates our
attention on existence by confronting us with the paradox that, in posing the
question of to be or not to be, it is only as living human beings that we can
address the question of death. Indeed, it is because we are conscious that we
are created from nothing, from nothing that is dead, that we can say, in good
faith: conscience doth make cowards, i.e., modern heroes, of us all. Schopen-
hauer has no conception of the paradox of existence, of the paradox that, as
Kierkegaard puts it, the greatest despair of life is in willing to be oneself. In
other words, the philosopher Schopenhauer, in his interpretation of Hamlet,
commits the elemental error of failing to comprehend the ontological argu-
ment—that to question life, to doubt existence, to deny the will-to-live is to
affirm existence as the self-conscious acknowledgment that, as Descartes
puts it, as we have seen, we are not alone: we are in the loving hands of the
other whose necessary (salvific) existence constitutes the reality of our indi-
vidual self.
We shall, then, next examine several key passages in which Schopen-
hauer directly takes up the question of existence. In the first, he appeals, not
to history as the realm of human creativity but to the natural “balance wheel
which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs
down. . . .” He remarks that it is this balance wheel that “is the clear knowl-
edge that this world’s non-existence is just as possible as is its existence. . . .
Even simple theism in its cosmological proof tacitly starts from the fact that
it infers the world’s previous non-existence from its existence; thus, it as-
sumes in advance that the world is something contingent. What is more, in
fact, we very soon look upon the world as something whose-non-existence is
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 131

not only conceivable, but even preferable to its existence” (II.171). Outside
of the fact that the cosmological argument (ultimately reflecting Neoplaton-
ism) presupposes, as Kant demonstrates, the ontological argument (the nec-
essary relationship of thought and existence)—and I shall strive mightily to
keep this discussion concise—the basic error that Schopenhauer commits is
in reducing existence to possibility. Yes, when consciousness is limited to
the knowledge of natural objects and is not viewed as the practical (impera-
tive) willing (desire) of subjects, existence is simply a theoretical possibility
(among infinite other possibilities). However, when Hamlet raises the ques-
tion of to be or not to be, his question is not theoretical but practical (existen-
tial): given that I actually exist (given that my life is the gift of the other),
what do I understand to be the possibilities of my existence? (I recall here the
fundamentally Kantian question: given that knowledge actually exists, how
is it possible? Kant does not ask why or if knowledge is possible.) Yes, any
person who seriously reflects on (his) existence will be impelled to confront
(his) nonexistence: death. But this person will also see (if he does not de-
spairingly lose himself in self-contradiction) that he can confront death only
living. We argue (think, question, doubt . . .) solely from within existence.
We do not argue to existence from without existence. We do not argue to
existence from nonexistence.
In the sentence omitted from the quotation that I cited in the third sen-
tence of the previous paragraph, as indicated by the ellipsis, Schopenhauer
remarks that Spinoza’s conception of the world as necessarily existing, i.e.,
“as something that positively and in every sense ought to and must be,” is
false (II.171). However, like most philosophers who view Spinoza as a pan-
theist, Schopenhauer fails to grasp the critical distinction that his great prede-
cessor makes between two conceptions of “world”: one necessary according
to the laws of nature, the other necessary according to the free determination
of human beings from themselves alone. In other words, Spinoza distin-
guishes between the state of nature as the common order of nature (i.e.,
Kant’s natural realm of theoretical objects subject to the necessity of causal
law) and the civil state as the democratic polity in which human beings,
following “the dictates of reason,” freely do unto others what they want
others to do unto them (i.e., Kant’s practical realm of subjects whose willing
constitutes every human being as a rational, free end in himself). It is precise-
ly because, according to Spinoza, human beings freely constitute the good in
and through their desire (will, reason) that existence is their necessary, i.e.,
their freely determined good within the covenantal polity. It is also important
to note that the conception of the world as necessarily existing and good,
which Schopenhauer ascribes to Spinoza and rejects as false, is fully in
accord with the passage from the Ethics that we earlier saw Schopenhauer
cite with approval: that human beings feel and experience themselves to be
132 What Is Philosophy?

eternal, which simply means that they recognize their social existence to be
necessary, i.e. to be freely determined from themselves alone.
In two additional passages on existence Schopenhauer reduces the contin-
gent existence of the individual to the necessary existence of the thing-in-
itself. In the first passage, he states that it is “absurd to regard non-existence
as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even
consciousness” (II.467). Notwithstanding the fact, however, that it is not
“non-existence” that is evil—for existence is created from nothing (that is
evil)—and that, consequently, evil is constituted through reducing existence
to nothing (e.g., through the murder of a fellow human being), Schopenhauer
soon belies his apparent appeal to the ontological argument. It is true, as he
states, that knowledge of good and evil presupposes conscious existence: to
think (to doubt) something presupposes the existence of both the thinker and
what he thinks. However, the fact that what Schopenhauer means here by
existence applies, not to the phenomenal individual who, in living, is dead
but to the deathless thing-in-itself (the species) which, in being dead, is alive,
he makes clear in our second passage. Here he observes that, while the
person who views existence as contingent fears losing it, the person who sees
that “his existence rests on some original necessity” does not view it as
temporally limited by death (II.488). Indeed, he continues, the person who
reflects on the fact that, in spite of the passage of an infinite time, with all
possible conditions, he still exists,

will recognize his existence as a necessary one. . . . If ever he could not be, he
would already not be now. For the infinity of the time that has already elapsed,
with the exhausted possibility of its events in it, guarantees that what exists
necessarily exists. Consequently, everyone has to conceive himself as a neces-
sary being. . . . Actually in this train of thought is to be found the only
immanent proof of the imperishableness of our real inner nature, that is to say,
the only proof that keeps within the sphere of empirical data. Existence must
be inherent in this inner nature, since it shows itself to be independent of all
states or conditions that can possibly be brought about through the causal
chain. . . . It follows from the fact that we now exist . . . that we are bound to
exist at all times. (II.488)

It is inconceivable, Schopenhauer continues, that what once exists would

ever become nothing for an infinite time. Consistent, then, with “the Hindu
doctrine of the constantly renewed creation of the world by Brahma, together
with the similar dogmas of the Greek philosophers” (sic!) and “the Christian
doctrine of the restoration of all things” is the idea “that the same thing that
objectively constitutes an infinite course of time is subjectively a [finite]
point, an indivisible ever-present present-moment . . . (II. 489). Schopen-
hauer’s conclusion, then, is that “birth is not the beginning of our existence”
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 133

and that what is indestructible through death is not the individual, who is
merely finite, but the species (II.490).
What we see, consequently, in these two passages on existence is that
Schopenhauer, in complete contradiction of the ontological argument as
founded on the “I think, ergo I am,” yet again opposes the contingent exis-
tence of the individual to the necessary existence of the thing-in-itself. But
how, we ask, once again, does an objective but infinitely changing (and
unnecessary) individual know or experience—empirically!—what is a sub-
jective but indivisibly unchanging (and necessary) point? We remember that
Schopenhauer’s fundamental premise is the absolute opposition between
knowledge (as phenomenal) and will (as the thing-in-itself).
In the final passage on existence to be considered here this contradictory
opposition reemerges in open view. In the context of commenting on the fact
that human beings have a natural fear of death, Schopenhauer writes that
man’s “boundless attachment to life . . . cannot have sprung from knowledge
and reflection.” For, since what we learn from knowledge and reflection, he
observes, is that “the objective value of life” is foolish and uncertain, “it
remains at least doubtful whether existence is to be preferred to non-exis-
tence. . . .” Indeed, if we consult experience and reflection, not to mention the
dead who would never choose again to exist, it will be clear, Schopenhauer
remarks, that “non-existence must certainly win” (II.465). It follows, then, he
continues, that “this powerful attachment to life is irrational and blind . . .
[and] can be explained only from the fact that our whole being-in-itself is the
will-to-live, to which life therefore must appear as the highest good, however
embittered, short, and uncertain it may be, and that the will is originally and
in itself without knowledge and blind” (II.465-56). What this means, conse-
quently, he declares, is that knowledge, “far from being the origin of that
attachment to life, even opposes it, since it discloses life’s worthlessness and
in this way combats the fear of death.” Schopenhauer’s conclusion is that the
will-to-live, in constituting the innermost essence of man, is without knowl-
edge and blind and that knowledge, as originally foreign to the will, conflicts
with the will “and our judgment applauds the triumph of knowledge over the
will” (II.466).
What is so extraordinary here is that Schopenhauer altogether reverses
(contradicts) himself. Previously, the opposition that he posits between
knowledge (as phenomenal and individual) and will (as the universal being-
in-itself) is in support of his argument that the aim of the will is to quiet the
will, to annihilate the will-to-live as located in the phenomenal ego. Now,
however, knowledge, as foreign (opposed) to the will, is to triumph over the
will. Previously, Schopenhauer argues that it is the individual who is blind to
the vanity and meaninglessness of the will-to-live as mere egoism. Now, he
argues that it is the will-to-live, which, in constituting the innermost essence
of man as blind and without knowledge, is to be opposed by the knowledge
134 What Is Philosophy?

of the vanity of life. What we see, then, is that there is no way out of
contradiction for Schopenhauer. Having begun with the opposition between
knowledge and will, between the individual and the thing-in-itself—in
contradiction of the critical Kantian distinction between empirical knowledge
of objects and the practice of thinking, desiring subjects who will, as individ-
uals, to treat others as they desire others to treat them—he replicates the
Kantian contradiction ad infinitum: thinking without will is empty (thought-
less); will without thinking is blind (willful).
Before showing how this contradiction leads Schopenhauer in the end to
conclude that the knowledge constituting his philosophy is contradictory—
like all philosophical knowledge, he adds!—I want, first, to show that he is
compelled to acknowledge that the ethics of love, involving what he calls
compassion, ultimately has no place in a conception of life where the purpose
of the will is to annihilate the will-to-live, i.e., to will nothing. Still, while
Schopenhauer holds that the vain will to live, as found in all human beings,
simply embodies the egoism of the principium individuationis, he is forced,
nevertheless, to acknowledge a difference between good and bad individuals
(even though they are ultimately indistinguishable). But, since what he calls
disinterested virtue cannot be based on the “abstract knowledge” of objects,
he is forced to conclude that “it is a direct and intuitive knowledge” that does
not involve reason and cannot be communicated. It is found, consequently, in
actions, not words: it simply “must dawn on each of us.” What this means,
then, is that the good man, unlike the bad man, sees through the veil of Maya
that is the principium individuationis: “he shows by his way of acting that he
again recognizes his own inner being, namely the will-to-live as thing-in-
itself, in the phenomenon of another given to him, merely as representation.
Thus he finds himself again in that phenomenon up to a certain degree,
namely that of doing no wrong, i.e., of not injuring. Now in precisely this
degree he sees through the principium individuationis, the veil of Maya. To
this extent he treats the inner being outside himself like his own; he does not
injure it” (I.370). Schopenhauer declares, then, that good conscience, togeth-
er with the enlargement of the heart, comes from recognizing all one’s fellow
human beings as fellow sufferers. To be cured, consequently, of the “delu-
sion and deception” of the principium individuationis “and to do works of
love are one and the same thing . . .” (I.373). Still, he reminds us that any
notion of “ought” or law is absent from the “purely theoretical truth” of his
philosophy, according to which the will as the in-itself of all phenomena is
itself free from all phenomenal plurality. The saying that best captures our
treatment of “the individuality and fate of others . . . entirely like one’s own,”
he declares, comes from the Veda: “This you are” (I.374-75).
That another human being simply reflects one’s own individual ego and
so is to be treated entirely like one’s own individual ego—“this you are”—
and that this knowledge is intuitive and not based on reason and cannot be
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 135

communicated are sure signs that Schopenhauer is trapped by the contradic-

tory opposition between knowledge and will. He gives us no idea whatsoever
how the individual, who is deluded by the veil of the principium individua-
tionis, can strip it away while remaining an individual. This is simply the
same problem of how the will-to-live can oppose itself in willing not to live.
It is also significant that Schopenhauer cites the statement of the Veda, which
allows for no difference between individuals, instead of the golden rule of the
Bible, according to which distinct individuals, as self and other, are brought
into the mutual relationship of love. Indeed, he proceeds to inform us that the
disinterested and self-sacrificial love, in terms of which we penetrate the
egoism of the principium individuationis, involves the abolition of “the dis-
tinction between our own individuality and that of others . . .” (I.378). In
taking upon ourselves the pain and suffering of others, we see the vanity of
all individual life. “The will now turns away from life; it shudders at the
pleasures in which it recognizes the affirmation of life. Man attains to the
state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true composure, and complete
will-lessness” (I.379).
It is hardly surprising, then, to see Schopenhauer proceed to argue that, in
order to make the transition from virtue to asceticism as the renunciation of
the will-to-live, it is not enough for us to love others like ourselves. Rather,
the individual must renounce his own individual will-to-live: “Essentially
nothing but phenomenon of the will, he ceases to will anything . . . and gives
the lie to the body; he desires no sexual satisfaction on any condition”
(I.380). Schopenhauer thus holds up for our emulation the saints and mystics
among Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists. Further, he states that the ethics of
Christianity, because it involves charity, human kindness, and renunciation,
“is entirely in the spirit we have mentioned. . . .” He adds, however, that,
while the “germ” of this ethic is found in the writings of the Apostles, “yet
only later is it fully developed and explicitly expressed.” The command to
love the neighbor as oneself, including, when possible, the denial of the
sexual impulse, is, he holds, but the first stage of asceticism, i.e., of the real
denial of the will. It was the penitents, anchorites, and monks who developed
this tendency more and more, which, however, was “quite unsuitable to the
great majority of people” (I.386). Indeed, he continues, “the denial of the
will-to-live [is] still further developed, more variously expressed, and more
vividly presented in the ancient works of the Sanskrit language than could be
the case in the Christian Church and the Western world.” For “Christianity is
composed of two very heterogeneous elements” (I.387). The purely ethical
element is exclusively Christian, as distinguished from the optimistic ele-
ment of “Jewish dogmatism with which it is found” (I.388). Indeed, this
ethic, he declares, is most variously and powerfully expressed in the maxims
and legends of Hinduism, which “ordains love of one’s neighbor with com-
plete denial of all self-love; love in general, not limited to the human race,
136 What Is Philosophy?

but embracing all that lives . . .” (I.388). Both the “Christian mystics and the
teachers of the Vedanta philosophy agree also in regarding all outward works
and religious practices as superfluous for the man who has attained perfec-
tion” (I.389). What they teach us, in sum, is that all evil and suffering,
equally “of the tormented and the tormentor, . . . are in themselves one
phenomenon of the will-to-live that objectifies its conflict with itself by
means of the principium individuationis. . . . [S]ince they ultimately see the
identity of the two, they reject them both at the same time; they deny the
will-to-live.” Schopenhauer adds that “the knowledge of the contradiction of
the will-to-live with itself can, through great misfortune and suffering, vio-
lently force itself on us, and the vanity of all endeavor can be penetrated”
(I.394). One learns to view one’s own individual suffering as simply an
example of the universal.
Having made apostolic love of neighbor but the first step along the way to
the asceticism of complete renunciation of the will-to live, thus revealing
Christianity to be truly rooted in the teachings, not of the Jewish prophets but
of the Hindu sages, Schopenhauer then argues in Volume II of The World as
Will and Representation that it is only in death that we live in other individu-
als. Because death, he writes, is “the great reprimand” to the egoism of the
will-to-live, it serves “as a punishment for our existence.” Indeed, he cites
Death as saying to us: “You are the product of a [sexual] act that ought not to
have taken place; therefore, to wipe it out, you must die.” In abolishing the
individual person, death teaches us that “man’s true nature, that is his will,
will henceforth live only in other individuals. His . . . whole ego lives only in
what he had hitherto regarded as non-ego; for the difference between external
and internal ceases.” This but shows us, he observes, that “the better person
is the one who makes the least difference between himself and others and
does not regard them as absolutely non-ego . . .” (II.507). In other words, the
spatial difference between another person and myself is found only in phe-
nomena, not in things-in-themselves. The loss of our phenomenal individual-
ity is, consequently, simply an apparent loss, not the loss of a real difference.
The empirical difference between the claims that “I perish” and that “the
world endures” has no meaning metaphysically: they are identical.
This is why, Schopenhauer explains further, that the “moral virtues are
not really the ultimate end but only a step towards” salvation from the origi-
nal sin as brought about by the Fall with its affirmation of the will-to-live.
“Therefore, what is moral is to be found between these two. . . . But the
Buddhists with complete frankness describe the matter only negatively as
Nirvana, which is the negation of this world or of Samsara” (II. 608). Scho-
penhauer then articulates the difference between Samsara and Nirvana as the
complete opposition that is to be found between, on the one hand, the affir-
mation of the will-to-live of the phenomenal world, including the diversity of
all beings, individuality, egoism, hatred, and evil and, on the other hand, “the
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 137

identity of all beings, justice, righteousness, philanthropy, [and the] denial of

the will-to-live. . . .” It follows, then, that “the virtuous action is a momentary
passing through the point, the permanent return to which is the denial of the
will-to-live. . . . Thus, because the inner essence of all things is at bottom
identical, all knowledge of it is necessarily tautological.” Stated otherwise,
“since all willing is error,” the last act of the will in abolishing the will “can
be only a transition stage to that which no knowledge can ever reach . . .”
(II.610).
What we see, then, in the above paragraphs is that Schopenhauer reduces
love of neighbor—the biblical command that we are to love others as our-
selves—to the universal love of humanity as a species, in which, practically,
neither we incur obligations to others nor others incur obligations to us
(whether personal, familial, social, or political). Further, still, love of others
serves only as a transition to that last act of will that is itself the final
transition to the total denial of the will-to-live, of which we shall never have
knowledge, i.e., of which we shall know nothing (of whose nothing we shall
never know). The extraordinary position, then, that Schopenhauer openly
adopts is that, while human beings live, all their love, desire, striving con-
forms to the egoistic deception of the principium individuationis and that,
consequently, it is only in death, with the cancellation of the error that is
individuality, that we (we?) love all human beings, precisely because the
difference between subject and object, the difference between individuals has
been abolished. Life is the (natural) hatred of individuals (without universal-
ity). Death is the (natural) love of universality (without individuals). Life is
the transition to that which is opposed to itself in endlessly suffering the guilt
of existing (the guilt of “knowing” that we should not exist). Death termi-
nates the will-to-live as transition by revealing it to be nothing in self-identity
with itself. It is little wonder, then, that Schopenhauer states that all knowl-
edge of the inner essence of things is tautological.
While no non-contradictory exit exists for Schopenhauer from the initial,
contradictory opposition that he posits between phenomenal nature (the indi-
vidual) and the thing-in-itself (the universal essence of nature), between
knowledge and will, between, ultimately, the will to-live and the will not to
will, still, he does conclude both volumes of his major work, as we shall now
see, with the explicit acknowledgment that his philosophy is contradictory
and incomplete. Our task, finally, then, is to comprehend how this acknowl-
edgment in itself simply reflects the critical elements of his philosophy that
lead him, in self-contradictory fashion, to reveal, to us, the contradictions
that emerge in his thinking as reflecting his contradictory opposition to the
values of modernity as biblical (to the values of the Bible as modern). We
saw earlier that, although he posits a fundamental opposition between nature
and will—with the result that the will-to-live has to oppose itself in reversing
itself in order to will not to will—he also claims that it is only the knowledge
138 What Is Philosophy?

that our will is blind and without knowledge that liberates us from the guilt of
the will-to-live. Indeed, he states that, just as contemplation of the beautiful
in art momentarily raises us above our individual desires and cares and
allows us to rid ourselves of our individual selves, so “we can infer how
blessed must be the life of a man whose will is silenced, not for a few
moments, as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but forever, indeed complete-
ly extinguished, except for the last glimmering spark that maintains the body
and is extinguished with it. Such a man who, after many bitter struggles with
his own nature, has at last completely conquered, is then left only as pure
knowing being, as the undimmed mirror of the world. Nothing . . . can any
longer move him” for he is no longer bound to the world by his will (I.390).
It is evident, however, that, so long as the individual remains alive, he
continues to be bound to the will-to-live, in the mirror of which he sees
reflected solely his suffering ego and which only death can extinguish. Sure-
ly, art, however, does not silence but rather amplifies the individual will-to-
live. What is beautiful about the representation of, say, the crucified Christ
(e.g., in Bernini’s sculpture) or the denial of St. Peter (in Caravaggio’s paint-
ing) or Othello’s snuffing out of the life of Desdemona (as portrayed by
Shakespeare and Verdi)? 20 But Schopenhauer finds it hard to give up claim-
ing to know what he knows he does not and cannot know. Indeed, he remarks
that “we have not, like Kant, absolutely given up the ability to know the
thing-in-itself; on the contrary, we know that it is to be looked for in the
will.” In addition to the fact, however, that Schopenhauer completely misrep-
resents Kant in refusing to see that for him that, while knowledge applies
solely to the objects of nature, the will is embodied in the rational practice of
thinking, desiring, individual subjects, it is not at all evident what it would
mean to relinquish knowledge of the thing-in-itself only partially. Indeed,
when Schopenhauer undertakes to explain how we—who are confined to the
phenomenal knowledge of the will-to-live—can, unlike Kant, have knowl-
edge of the will, he makes it clear that “insofar as I am directly this inner
being itself, I am not that which knows. . . . Strictly speaking, therefore, we
know even our own will always only as phenomenon, and not according to
what it may be absolutely in and by itself” (II. 494, emphasis added). Conse-
quently, Schopenhauer proceeds to reiterate that the fundamental characteris-
tic of his philosophy is the sharp distinction between will, as primary, and
knowledge, as secondary, as I indicated in initiating my presentation of his
philosophy. Consistent with this absolute distinction or opposition between
will as primary (unwilled) and knowledge as secondary (willed) is his fre-
quent acknowledgment that phenomenal knowledge presupposes a separa-
tion between subject and object (while in will they are identical), that will
and knowledge are incommensurable, that what is not knowledge cannot be
communicated, that we cannot go beyond consciousness. . . . Indeed, he
declares that “the necessary starting-point of all genuine philosophizing is the
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 139

deep feeling of the Socratic: ‘This one thing I know, that I know nothing.’ . . .
The . . . ancients are still our teachers in metaphysics” (II.186-87).
Outside of the fact that we have already seen Schopenhauer write that the
ancient Greeks remained committed to the will-to-live, it is also useful to
note here that Socratic ignorance, which Schopenhauer views as the origin of
all true philosophy—together with the oracular “know thyself” of Delphi—
provides the context for properly understanding the title that he attaches to
the Fourth Book of Volume I of The World as Will and Representation: “the
Attainment of Self-Knowledge. . . .” 21 Because, as we know, Schopenhauer
posits an unbridgeable opposition between knowledge as egoist (and so not
true to the self) and the self (as unknown in itself), between the individual
and the universal (species), “self-knowledge” is the ultimate contradiction or
tautology. It has nothing to do with the knowledge that the self attains by
seeing itself in light of the truth of the other (God and neighbor) and every-
thing to do with the Delphic Oracle, whose “know thyself” reflects the
contradictory opposition between the self in its ignorance of the good and the
good as that which is unknown by the self.
That Schopenhauer in his philosophy betrays the story of Adam and Eve
who, in being like God in knowing good and evil, embrace death as central to
mortal life in recompense for relinquishing immortal life as deathless, is
consistent with his “Epiphilosophy,” the title that he gives to the final supple-
mentary Chapter 50 of The World as Will and Representation. Here he sum-
marizes what is “beyond” his philosophy, i.e., what, he holds, his philosophy,
like all philosophy (as rooted in Socratic ignorance), is incapable of explain-
ing: the “ultimate grounds” of existence or in the terms of the question that
Heidegger makes central to What Is Metaphysics?—Why is there something
instead of nothing? Schopenhauer observes that he “sticks to the actual facts
of outward and inward experience as they are accessible to everyone. . . .”
His explanations are, consequently, he writes, “immanent in the Kantian
sense. . . .” In other words, he leaves unexplained the questions whose an-
swers are “really transcendent” (II.640). Because our intellect is forever
bound to time, to the distinction between subject and object, to conscious-
ness, to phenomena, he observes further, it will never know “the being-in-
itself of things.” Consequently, we “come up against insoluble problems
everywhere, as against the walls of our prison” (II.641). Since knowledge
itself is only an accident of phenomena, he continues, it remains forever
distinct from the “inner being-in-itself of things [that] is not something that
knows, is not an intellect, but [is] something without knowledge. . . . This is
why a perfect understanding of the existence, inner nature, and origin of the
world . . . is impossible. So much as regards the limits of my philosophy and
of all philosophy” (II.642).
The “epiphilosophy” of Schopenhauer, in expressing ignorance of the
beyond of philosophy (of the philosophical beyond), will doubtlessly strike
140 What Is Philosophy?

“everyone” as self-evident. For are we not limited (finite) beings, as Heideg-

ger says, consistent with the attitudes that constitute Christendom? But Scho-
penhauer fundamentally betrays Kant who, true to his forbearers, Adam and
Eve, limits knowledge, as theoretical, to objects as found in natural space and
time, in order to “save”—liberate—the will, as rational thinking and desire,
for the transcendental realm of human practice. While we know the thing-in-
itself in its objective appearances in nature, we are forever prohibited from
knowing the thing itself—as an object. For what the thing-in-itself is, as we
saw in chapter 1, is the human subject who is eternally freed to be truly
responsible for knowing good and evil, for willing to love his neighbor as
himself. Consequently, Kant’s limitation of knowledge to objects of possible
experience not only provides the justification for properly objective, scientif-
ic knowledge but also justifies (explains) human freedom—together with
love, justice, truth. . . . Adam and Eve give up, forever, the transcendent
illusion of immortal (deathless) perfection with their “fall” into the transcen-
dental way of the covenant in “knowing” good and evil, i.e., in being freely
responsible for doing good and overcoming evil. The transcendent illusion,
which Adam and Eve surmount with their recognition that the Fall is the
“happy sin” of knowing good and evil, is pervasive in Christendom (whether
“religious” or “secular”), of which Schopenhauer is an all-too-human repre-
sentative. The problems of existence that he claims are, as epiphilosophical,
insoluble must be understood, on the contrary, to be altogether soluble—
insofar as we distinguish, with Kant, between properly scientific knowledge
(as limited to objects) and truly ethical (socio-political) practice, the realm of
reason, i.e., of thinking (as limited to subjects).
Bien entendu! Every generation faces, once again and always, the “limita-
tion,” i.e., the freedom of being human. The question of the origin of the
universe, of existence, insofar as it is not objectively scientific, is “subjec-
tive”: it rests on the will of subjects who, in being created from nothing (from
nothing objective in nature), are free to determine their existence creatively.
There are always problems to solve. It may well be realistic (expedient?) for
me to recognize that a given problem (say, poverty) is not soluble in my
lifetime. But do I claim that it is forever insoluble—in the fullness of time
(when time is fulfilled)? It is certainly the case, however, that it is merely
sentimental (delusionary) on my part to think that all of life’s problems are
solved now (i.e., that we have reached the finite end of history). The only
explanation of freedom is in beginning freely. Freedom is its own origin. The
only explanation of existence is from the point of view of existing (whence
the ontological argument). Existence is its own origin. The human brain is
properly an object of scientific study: it is a finite organ (of extraordinary
complexity). The mind, however, is not a finite object of scientific study. The
mind or Spirit (Geist) of human beings (as of God) is infinite. It is “found,”
not in a finite place and time but in the infinite relations of human subjects
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 141

(and this is why Hegel shows with such profundity that the history of Spirit is
the Spirit of history). Without the concept of creatio ex nihilo there is no
human freedom. It is evident, then, that we do not have a choice between
creatio ex nihilo and the pagan position adopted by Schopenhauer, together
with Feuerbach: ex nihilo nihil fit. We are not free, as (infinite) subjects, to be
(finite) objects. When we reify (alienate or enslave) ourselves, we can com-
prehend, i.e., account (historically) for, this reification (alienation and slav-
ery) solely from the point of view of freedom (of love of neighbor).
I want, consequently, to point out, before concluding with Schopen-
hauer’s final reflections on the “nothing” of negative knowledge, that Kant,
in the Preface to the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, makes it
clear that he anticipates that his philosophical system will maintain itself
(forever) in its “unalterability.” He writes that it is not “self-conceit that
justifies my trust in this” but the fact that the result is the same whether we
proceed from the smallest part to the whole or from the whole to the smallest
part “(for this whole too is given in itself through the final intention of pure
reason in the practical); while the attempt to alter even the smallest part
directly introduces contradictions not merely into the system, but into univer-
sal reason” (Bxxxviii). Kant’s simple but profound point, in sharp contrast
with Schopenhauer’s concept of “epiphilosophy,” is that philosophy, insofar
as it is true, is complete (perfect), for truth is its own standard. Surely, we
believe that every work of art, insofar as it is truly a work of art, is complete
(perfect). Every human being, insofar as he or she is truly human, is complete
(perfect). Descartes tells us at the beginning of Part I of the Discourse on
Method that the mind of every human being is whole and entire. We do not
make a transition to the whole from the part (from partiality). In our striving
to be human, truthful, honest, loving . . . , we do not make a transition from
part to whole. For all true transition, as historical, is from whole to ever more
ample, infinitely perfect whole. We strive to be truthful, not because we are
not now truthful (i.e., because the truth is epi-philosophical). Rather, we
strive to be truthful because we are, now, truthful. I cannot arrive at the truth
by beginning from a position that is untruthful, that is outside of the truth. I
can become “more” truthful (or honest or caring or decent) as a person only
“infinitely” (unconditionally, absolutely). While truth (like all human values)
is relational—it involves persons in relation—it is not (finitely) relative.
Truth is not simply a matter of my opinion or of what Schopenhauer calls
incommunicable, non-rational intuition that serves as its own standard
(which is essentially what Hegel calls immediacy and the Bible idolatry). I
can undertake to be truthful in solely beginning, now, from and with the
truth. This is the best of all possible worlds, not as given eternally, and so
independently of me, in its immediately finite (perfect, finished) conditional-
ity, but as that which I rationally will to bring into existence—actually,
practically, absolutely, unconditionally now.
142 What Is Philosophy?

Consistent with his epiphilosophy as reflecting Socratic ignorance Scho-

penhauer frequently points out, as we have already seen, that the only knowl-
edge that we possess of the will in itself—of the will’s will to be nothing in
itself—is negative (following the Neoplatonic tradition of negative theolo-
gy). Thus, he writes that “we cannot possibly know positively, but only
negatively . . . that which does not will life” (II.433). Furthermore, he makes
the issue of what it means to grasp the negativity of nothing (the nothing of
negativity) central to the final section 71 of Volume I (before the Appendix).
He begins by stating that he will not conceal an objection to his conception of
ethics—that the aim of the will is to annihilate the will: that the end (i.e., the
beginning) of life is death, together with the fact “that it is quite impossible to
remedy it” (I.408). The irremediable problem to which Schopenhauer here
refers is that the liberation from the world as suffering the will-to-live “now
appears to us as a transition into empty nothingness.” Indeed, he goes on to
point out, with an appeal to Kant, that the concept of nothing, because it
presupposes affirmation, is essentially relative, not absolute. He adds, fur-
ther, that the concept of “an absolute nothing . . . is not even conceivable . . .”
(I.409). What Schopenhauer, however, does not point out is what Kant shows
us in demonstrating the dependence of negation on affirmation—that the will
to deny or to negate the will depends on the will-to-live or on what in the
Transcendental Dialectic he calls transcendental affirmation. (I would addi-
tionally call attention to what Kant does not tell us, which is that transcen-
dental affirmation is but a version of the ontological argument: to negate
existence presupposes the affirmation of existence. This is why the act of
negating, e.g., of taking the life of another human being, is so unspeakably an
evil and the act of taking one’s own life is so unspeakably a negation—for
those who remain and bear the heavy obligation of affirming life.)
It appears, then, that Schopenhauer, with his invocation of the Kantian
demonstration that negative knowledge rests on affirmative or positive
knowledge, is prepared to acknowledge that the objection to his conception
of ethics, as based on the will not to will, cannot be remedied, i.e., that it
must be accepted. Indeed, he proceeds to state that if, “however, it should be
absolutely insisted on that somehow a positive knowledge is to be acquired
of what philosophy can express only negatively as denial of the will, . . . such
a state cannot really be called knowledge,” since, in eliminating the distinc-
tion between subject and object, “it is accessible only to one’s own experi-
ence that cannot be further communicated.” What this means, then, he con-
tinues, is that we “must be satisfied here with negative knowledge, content to
have reached the final landmark of the positive” (I.410). Schopenhauer fur-
ther states that, with the annihilation of the will, all phenomena as the will’s
representation, i.e., as the very world itself, are annihilated. “No will: no
representation, no world.” With only “nothing” left, we see, he writes, that
the reason that “we abhor nothingness so much is simply another way of
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 143

saying that we will life so much and that we are nothing but the will and
know nothing but it alone.” Consequently, in finding ourselves trapped be-
tween the misery of affirming the world as nothing and the empty nothing
that results from the will’s negation of the world, the sole consolation that
remains for us is the lives of saints and ascetics. For it is they, in having
overcome the world as nothing, together with works of art, who show life to
be nothing but death and so reveal death to be the absolute nothing of life.
They bespeak the “peace that is higher than all reason” and the “ocean-like
calmness of the spirit . . .” (I.411). We must not even evade this final noth-
ingness, Schopenhauer writes in the concluding sentences of Volume I, by
means of

myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahman or the Nirva-

na of the Buddhists. On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what re-
mains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the
will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has
turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours, with all its suns and
galaxies, is—nothing. (I.411–12) 22

Schopenhauer is nothing if not brilliant in bringing The World as Will and

Representation (Volume I, Fourth Book) to a close. His response to the
irremediable objection to, as the refutation of, his philosophy that to claim
that the aim of the will, as the essence of life, is to will not to will, i.e., to will
nothing at all, is thoroughly contradictory is that he is in full agreement with
it. Nothing will come from nothing the self-deceived Lear informs his truth-
telling daughter Cordelia, who says “nothing” in response to the demand of
her royal father that she show her love to be nothing but his. Schopenhauer
has nothing to say to the objection that he has nothing to say—except to
acknowledge that he agrees with it completely. Indeed, to accuse him of
saying nothing that is not contradictory is, he observes, simply to confirm his
argument that most people remain blindly attached to the will-to-live, which
he has shown to be (worth) nothing at all. To contradict Schopenhauer, to
contradict him, is to contradict yourself, to turn the objection to his philoso-
phy against yourself. To accuse him of saying nothing, which is not contra-
dictory, is to show that there is nothing that you say that is not contradictory.
Is there, then, no way out of this contradiction? Of course. Consider
Shakespeare—whose figures like Edgar and Cordelia have to become noth-
ing (Edgar as an exile within the kingdom and Cordelia as an exile without
the kingdom) in order to show, in contradiction of a wickedly conniving half
brother, self-deceiving fathers, and evil royal sisters, together with one of
their monstrous consorts, that something, rather, everything loving does
come from nothing, from nothing that is not creative of human community.
Edgar and Cordelia reflect back upon others, not their own self-image but the
truth of themselves. This is what all great art does.
144 What Is Philosophy?

Before drawing to a close my engagement with Schopenhauer, it is im-

portant, first, to take into careful consideration the passage in the Appendix
to Volume I in which he sharply condemns Kant for claiming to identify
human morality with the golden rule. What is at stake here, as always, is how
we comprehend the self—the ego—and so constitute the basis on which we
are able to distinguish between the self as egoistic (relative) and the self as
altruistic (relational), between, in Hegel’s terms, the self as immediate and
the self as mediated. Kierkegaard calls the second the absolute relation to the
absolute, as we saw in the previous chapter. Indeed, the fact that Schopen-
hauer opposes the individual, as phenomenally egoist, to the universal, as the
essentially selfless thing-in-itself, indicates that he has no concept of the
biblical self (human and divine) as at once individual and universal, both self
and other. Indeed, he simply replicates, as we saw earlier, the opposition
between the aesthetic (selfish) individual and the ethical (reduction of the self
to the) universal, which Kierkegaard presents in Fear and Trembling and
which he then proceeds to overcome (appropriate) with his concept of the
single individual as the knight of faith who is absolutely related to the abso-
lute. However, the book on which I shall call here to give sharper relief to
Schopenhauer’s failure to provide a true concept of the self, including the
basis on which to distinguish between egoism (self-interest) and morality
(altruism), is the Leviathan, in which Hobbes explicitly identifies both the
laws of nature and morality with the golden rule as “the law of the Gospel”
and “the word of God.” While Spinoza and also Rousseau, as fellow social
contract theorists, would be no less appropriate to invoke here, Hobbes is
particularly salient because of the terse lucidity in which he formulates the
critical issues. 23 Although Schopenhauer, in reducing the individual to a life
of egoistic self-interest and so of self-contradiction, does comment from time
to time on Hobbes, as on Spinoza, he altogether ignores the fundamentally
decisive distinction that they make between the state of nature and the social
state, between contradictory (so-called possessive) individualism and (what
we may call) complementary individualism (in which the self is completed,
i.e., perfected as whole, in and through the other as whole, in and through the
one who is wholly other).
The principal point that Schopenhauer makes in his criticism of Kant is
that, because his predecessor identifies the principle of morality with the
happiness of the individual, all that his ethics amounts to is that “each [indi-
vidual] makes the egoism of others the limit of his own.” In other words, the
consequence of holding that each individual simply satisfies his own ego is
that “egoism remains the source of the ethical principle.” Indeed, Schopen-
hauer observes, “this principle of ethics . . . is nothing but an indirect and
disguised expression of the old simple principle, Quod tibi fieri non vis,
alteri ne feceris (What you do not want done to you do not do to an-
other) . . .” (I.525). Since, however, he continues, this principle is primarily
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 145

concerned with what is passive (suffering) and only indirectly with action, it
could serve as the foundation solely of the state, whose role is to prevent
wrongs, but not of ethics, which is concerned with action. Furthermore,
Schopenhauer declares, such a principle of egoism is not true to Christianity,
which, as true virtue, is concerned, not with deeds but solely with the willing-
ness to do them, with love. For what Christianity teaches us, he writes, is
“that what makes [us] blessed and redeems [us] is not works done (opera
operata) but faith, the genuine disposition that is granted by the Holy Ghost
alone [and is] not produced by the free and deliberate will that has in view
only the law” (I. 526-27). He observes yet further that, since faith depends
upon election by grace, “virtue, like genius [as the basis of all genuine works
of arts], is to a certain extent innate” and, consequently, not based on external
law (rules and regulations). It is evident, then, he writes, that we can no more
“transform an ignoble character into one that is virtuous and noble” than we
can convert “lead into gold. The search for an ethical system and a first
principle which would, therefore, have practical influence and would actually
transform and improve the human race is just like the search for the philoso-
pher’s stone.” The conclusion, consequently, at which Schopenhauer arrives
is that Kant’s concept of happiness as “a satisfied willing” and his own true
concept of virtue as “a complete renunciation in which all willing comes to
an end . . . are fundamentally irreconcilable” (I.527).
While Schopenhauer is right that Kant’s concept of ethics as the “satisfac-
tion” of the will of the individual in not doing unto another what he does not
want done unto himself is fundamentally opposed to and irreconcilable with
his own concept of ethics as the satisfaction of the will of the individual in
willing to terminate all willing, his summary of Kantian ethics, as of Chris-
tian ethics, is a perverse caricature of both. The principle of Kantian ethics,
as is well known, is not happiness but duty: the categorical (lawful) obliga-
tion of each person to view all human beings, without exception, as ends in
themselves, as persons, not as instrumental means (as things of use). The
dualistic (irreconcilable) opposition that Schopenhauer draws between faith
(grace) and works (law)—such that he views grace (like genius) as “to a
certain extent innate”!—is true to the spirit neither of the Gospels (the teach-
ing of Jesus) nor of the magisterial letters of Paul (Romans), 1 John, and
James: “Go and do likewise” (See, in particular, the parable of the Good
Samaritan in Luke 10.25-37). The extreme opposition that Schopenhauer
posits between faith and works is also mirrored in the unbreachable wall that
he erects between ethics (the individual as internal to himself) and politics
(the state with its external laws). Surely, however, what Schopenhauer thus
reveals to us is that the individual who claims to annihilate his own will
never escapes the extreme egoism of the contradictory state of nature in
which his opposition to himself shows him to be essentially at war, not at
peace, with himself. So thus we have what is patently the most irresponsible
146 What Is Philosophy?

element on the part of Schopenhauer in his critique of Kant’s ethics: the

complete absence (1) of any acknowledgment that “the old simple principle”
that “we not do unto another what we do not want another to do unto us” is
identical with the (affirmatively phrased) golden rule—love your neighbor as
yourself (“Go and do likewise”); and (2) of any acknowledgment, let alone
discussion, of the principle of love as neighbor as central to biblical ethics
(and politics), both Jewish and Christian. (Also absent is any acknowledg-
ment on Schopenhauer’s part of Kant’s recognition that the moral law is a
resumé of the golden rule.)
In stark contrast to Schopenhauer is Hobbes. In distinguishing in the
Leviathan between the state of nature and the civil state (I use these terms for
the sake of convenience), between the states of war and peace, Hobbes expli-
citly invokes the golden rule no less than four times as representing what he
calls the law of nature governing civil society. It is not surprising that Scho-
penhauer invokes the description that Hobbes gives of the state of nature as
“the war of all against all” to represent, in his own view, the phenomenal
egoism of the will-to-live 24 and that Hobbes famously describes in the Levia-
than as “a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; . . . and
which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life
of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” 25 (143). But Schopenhauer
remains silent about the fact that in the next chapter of the Leviathan Hobbes
writes that, when human beings abide by the law of nature, they live at peace
with each other. “This is that law of the Gospel: whatsoever you require that
others should do to you, that do ye to them. And that law of all men, quod tibi
fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris” (147). In the following chapter Hobbes ob-
serves that there is no excuse for men of even “the meanest capacity” not to
grasp the contraction of “the laws of nature, dictating peace, for a means of
the conservation of men in multitudes . . . into one easy sum, . . . and that is,
Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself . . .”
(166). He repeats in yet a later chapter: “The laws of nature therefore need
not any publishing, nor proclamation; as being contained in this one sen-
tence, approved by all the world, Do not that to another, which thou thinkest
unreasonable to be done by another to thyself . . .” (249). In still a fourth
passage he notes that, in order for men to get “themselves out from that
miserable condition of war, which is necessarily consequent . . . to the natural
passions of men,” the laws of nature are required: “justice, equity, modesty,
mercy, and, in sum, doing to others, as we would be done to, [which] of
themselves . . . are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality,
pride, revenge, and the like” 26 (173). In summarizing his general conception
of the laws of nature, Hobbes writes that they

are immutable and eternal; for injustice, ingratitude, arrogance, pride, iniquity,
acception [i.e., favoritism] of persons, and the rest, can never be made lawful.
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 147

For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it. . . . And
the science of them, is the true and only moral philosophy. For moral philoso-
phy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil, in the conversa-
tion, and society of mankind. . . . [A]ll men agree on this, that peace is good,
and therefore also the way, or means of peace, which . . . are justice, gratitude,
modesty, equity, mercy, and the rest of the laws of nature, are good; that is to
say; moral virtues; and their contrary vices, evil. Now the science of virtue and
vice, is moral philosophy; and therefore the true doctrine of the laws of nature,
is the true moral philosophy. . . . [However,] law, properly, is the word of him,
that by right hath command over others. But yet if we consider the same
theorems, as delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all
things; then are they properly called laws 27 (167–68)

In complete refutation of the philosophy of Schopenhauer Hobbes equates

the word of God, the laws of nature as constituting civil society, moral
philosophy, civil law, and the Gospel, while citing the two versions of the
golden rule, negative and positive, as equivalents. Particularly striking is his
statement that it is the science (i.e., knowledge) of good and evil that consti-
tutes moral philosophy “in the conversation and society of mankind.” He
supports this claim with the declaration that, since the laws of nature are
immutable and eternal and so need neither “publishing, nor proclamation,”
they are known to all human beings, even the most lowly, as the command
not to do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you. What
Hobbes thus shows us is that the covenant (the social contract), in binding
one human being to another in the knowledge of good and evil, is at one and
the same time ethical and political, both individual and social. Of particular
significance, then, is the fact that Hobbes makes knowledge, not ignorance,
of good and evil the very basis of moral philosophy, of both ethics and
politics. It follows, then, surely, that it is Adam and Eve, not Socrates togeth-
er with his fellow Greek philosophers, who are the original, the first, philoso-
phers and so the very creators of modern philosophy. Put historically, it is
arresting to see that Hobbes makes no attempt to locate the origin of the
social contract (i.e., democracy) in Greek philosophy or culture. Instead, he
plainly shows us that the origin of our modern concepts of ethics and politics,
the origin of our modern values, is biblical.
Hobbes allows us, consequently, to sharpen our focus in discerning the
critical flaw, the fundamental error that saps the philosophy of Schopenhauer
of its coherence and viability. What Hobbes, together with the other social
contract theorists, shows us is that, from the beginning, and so always al-
ready historically, we have made the transition from nature to society, from
the state of war of all against all to the state of covenantal peace in which
each human being contracts to abide by the natural law of loving his neigh-
bor as himself. This is precisely equivalent to the doctrine of creatio ex
nihilo: in the beginning human beings are created from nothing, from nothing
148 What Is Philosophy?

that is natural. It is no less perfectly congruent with the story of Adam and
Eve who begin their lives, not in the paradisiacally natural garden of Eden,
ignorant of good and evil, but, in being like God, in knowing good and evil,
having fallen from the nothing of paradisiacal nature into the covenantal
relations that are at one and same time ethical and social (political). I am
truly an individual, I am truly my individual self only insofar as I recognize
my fellow individual as the standard of truth—as the word of God—to which
we are each equally subject.
The irremediable error that Schopenhauer makes is that he locates the
transition that constitutes the lives of human beings, not at, and so as, the
beginning of their lives but at, and so as, the end of their lives. Their original
transformation, their rebirth (or second birth), comes solely in and through
death with the extinction of their will-to-live. But thus we see that the para-
dox of the biblical conception of life confirms Kant’s demonstration that we
do not know, because we can and shall never know, the thing-in-itself (ex-
cept as an object of nature). What existence is, in itself, what we are as
human beings is not given to us naturally but is, rather, the creative gift of
life in which all that we are we owe in love of, in obligation to, the neighbor.
The contradiction central to the conception of life held by Schopenhauer is,
in contrast, that human life, as determined by the ego of individuals, can be
stilled, turned around, transformed, and so annihilated only as (at) the end of
life. Yet, he himself is compelled to acknowledge, as we have seen, that the
knowledge that we possess in willing to annihilate what we know of our
existence as the will-to-live is purely negative: it is nothing. In other words,
knowledge is for Schopenhauer simply the tautological nothing of self-
contradiction.
What it is, then, that engagement with the contradictory philosophy of
Schopenhauer, together with that of Feuerbach, reveals to us is the paradoxi-
cal truth that the essence of Christianity is philosophical or, in other words,
that philosophy is essentially Christian. The critique of pure reason is the
critique of pure faith. But the reader will have kept clearly in mind, I trust,
that, in following Kierkegaard, I understand the concept of Christianity, as
critically distinguished from Christendom, to be the hermeneutical principle
that allows us, at once ontologically and historically, to overcome the contra-
dictory opposition between philosophy and religion, between reason and
faith. When we ask, then, what Athens has to do with Jerusalem, our answer
is a double one. Just as Athens, let’s say the philosophy of Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle, has nothing to do with Jerusalem—understood, hermeneutical-
ly, as the Bible, i.e., religion—so Athens also has nothing to do with Jerusa-
lem—understood, hermeneutically, as the Bible, i.e., as philosophy. In other
words, in order for us moderns to answer the question—What is philoso-
phy . . . for us?—we have, at one and the same time, in distinguishing
Christianity from Christendom, to deny that Athens is philosophy (or reli-
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 149

gion) and to affirm that Jerusalem is religion and philosophy, both faith and
reason. But this entails two additionally critical principles. First, just as Ath-
ens is not Christianity so it is at the same time not Christendom. Paganism, as
I have shown in my book, is to be carefully distinguished from idolatry.
Second, Christianity—whatever are its differences from Judaism and howev-
er we undertake to distinguish the New Testament from the Old Testament—
is first and last, both ontologically and historically, i.e., hermeneutically, the
Bible as based on the stories, the myths, the ideas, the principles, the con-
cepts of creation, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the covenant as love of
neighbor. (It is my judgment that, insofar as we endeavor to comprehend
Christianity as Jewish and Judaism as Christian—consonant with Spinoza in
the Theologico-Political Treatise, i.e., hermeneutically—we are enabled to
overcome critically inadequate conceptions of both. But this the reader
knows is not the central focus of my present study.)
We have found that Schopenhauer and Feuerbach, in providing contradic-
tory answers to the question—What does Athens have to do with Jerusa-
lem?—contradict not only themselves but also each other. Neither under-
stands that Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem when it is understood
that reason, as Kant shows us, is the practice of willing, of bringing into
existence, the kingdom of ends as the covenantal polity in which we are to
treat all human beings as persons of infinite dignity and not as finite things.
They equally do not see that the essence of Christianity, in constituting what
is essentially Jerusalem, is biblical and so at once Jewish and Christian.
While both thinkers repudiate the doctrine of creation, Feuerbach’s reduction
of the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve to the idolatrous (Gnostic) dualism
of flesh and spirit, so prevalent in Christendom, is the very account of the
Fall that Schopenhauer welcomes in support of his view that the fall into life,
into existence, is the primal sin from which Christ, following the teaching of
Eastern paganism, liberates human beings. In sum, then, what we learn from
the philosophy of Feuerbach and of Schopenhauer, in their contradictory
opposition to each other, is that it is only if we, with Kant, Hegel, and
Kierkegaard, abandon the old metaphysics of identifying philosophy with
Athens and embrace the new metaphysics of practical reason as the covenan-
tal love of the Bible that we can overcome the contradictions of Christendom
as representing, hermeneutically, the idolatry of not only faith but also rea-
son.

NOTES

1. Spinoza famously writes in the Ethics that truth is its own index, the standard both of
itself and of the false.
2. It is little recognized, by either philosophers or theologians, that Kant, consistent with
his commentary on the Genesis story of the Fall as the story of the beginning (principle) of man
as a free, rational being, analyzes, in The Critique of Practical Reason, the doctrine of creation
150 What Is Philosophy?

ex nihilo with an exacting insight that, in my judgment, is found nowhere else. He distinguishes
between, on the one hand, “existence in time . . . [as] only a sensible way of representing things
which belong to thinking beings in the world” and, on the other hand, their existence “as things
in themselves, since the concept of a creation does not belong to the sensible way of represent-
ing existence or causality but can only be referred to noumena.” He states further that it is no
less a contradiction to say that “God is a creator of appearances” than it is to say “that as creator
he is the cause of actions in the sensible world and thus of actions as appearances, even though
he is the cause of the existence of the acting beings (as noumena).” Thus, Kant observes, we
can “affirm freedom without compromising the natural mechanism of actions as appearances”
(since existence in time applies to appearances and not to things in themselves). Consequently,
“it cannot make the slightest difference that the acting beings are creatures, since creation has
to do with their intelligible [i.e., practical] but not their sensible [i.e., theoretical] existence and
therefore cannot be regarded as the determining ground of appearances . . .” (221-22). What
Kant here makes clear to us is that we can view human beings as creatures (as created from
nothing that belongs to the mechanical world of natural causation) solely insofar as we under-
stand them to be things in themselves, i.e., to be thinking, acting subjects in the noumenal
world of freedom (self-determination), and not sensible objects in the phenomenal world of
time (and space) as determined by mechanical (natural) causes. The story of creation is, we see,
the story of freedom, not the story of nature. Yet the paradox, which Kant makes the very
ground of his entire philosophy, is that it is only on the basis of the concept of creation that we
are free to have a mechanical science of nature that does not compromise human freedom.
Phenomenal objects depend on the noumenal mind of free, rational subjects precisely because
the mind of human beings is creative and so free while the things of nature are determined by
the mechanisms of natural causation. Human subjects account creatively for the mechanical
objects of nature. It is not the objects of nature that account mechanically for human subjects.
3. Stevens, 331.
4. Regarding the first of the seven dogmas (principles) of faith that Spinoza outlines (af-
firms) in chapter 14 of the Theologico-Political Treatise, he writes that “God, that is, the
supreme being who is most highly just and merciful (misericordem), exists as the exemplar of
true life . . . .”
5. The second edition appeared in 1848. The translation of Marian Evans (George Eliot)
appeared in 1854, followed by a second edition in 1881. The work is divided into two major
sections (following the Introduction dealing with the “essence” of the nature of man and of
religion): I. “The True or Anthropological Essence of Religion” and II. “The False or Theologi-
cal Essence of Religion.” The work concludes with a lengthy Appendix containing “Explana-
tions—Remarks—Illustrative Citations.”
6. I use “dogma” in the sense of the seven dogmas (principles) of faith that Spinoza
formulates in chapter 14 of the Theologico-Political Treatise (see note 4) and in accord with the
distinction that Kant makes between dogmas (principles) and dogmatism in the Preface to the
second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. (We may note here that, without dogmas, there
would be no dogmatism. But dogmas do not justify dogmatism; and dogmatism cannot be
justified by dogmas.)
7. It is also worth observing that in Outside the Subject Emmanuel Levinas writes as
follows about the significance of Martin Buber for twentieth-century philosophy: “Any reflec-
tion on the alterity of the other in his or her irreducibility to the objectivity of objects and [to]
the being of beings must recognize the new perspective that Buber opened—and find encour-
agement in it” (31). He also observes that the “justice and charity whose message the Bible
bears were difficult, until Buber’s time [I and Thou was published in 1923], to integrate with
philosophical reason, [which had been] constructed for a cosmology situating God in relation to
the world and positing God, in a way, as a superlative of being” (9).
8. I do not address here the massive resistance that “Christian” thinkers have traditionally
shown to dealing equitably and honestly with the relationship of Christianity to Judaism or of
the New Testament to the Hebrew Bible. But it is also sobering to recall that, while it is only
the Jew Spinoza, among the great (pre-twentieth-century) philosophers, who unequivocally
argues that the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament shares a common interpretive structure,
i.e., a common set of values whose core is caritas, he was expelled from the Jewish community
 What Is Philosophy? Feuerbach and Schopenhauer on the Essence of Christianity 151

in Amsterdam (for unspecified reasons) in 1656, an action almost without precedent in the
history of Judaism.
9. See his Being Singular Plural and Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity.
10. While Hobbes claims that his principle of sovereignty serves monarchical rule, what he
actually demonstrates (in spite of himself) is that his concept of the sovereign one undercuts
monarchy and is consistent solely with the democratic one of the people. See my discussion of
Hobbes later in this chapter. See also my essay “Hobbes and the Sovereignty of the Golden
Rule.”
11. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 629-30.
12. See note 4.
13. Montaigne, 491.
14. A character in Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” recalls the saying of a
Gnostic: “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind”
(68).
15. The most important part of The World as Will and Representation is the fourth and last
Book of Volume I (sections 53-71), together with the supplementary chapters to the sections of
the Fourth Book (Chapters 40-50), in Volume II. (In the interest of clarity, I have changed the
numbering of the supplementary chapters, which is given in Roman numerals, to Arabic nu-
merals.) But also important are the concluding sections of the Third Book (in Volume I) on art;
the Appendix to Volume I: “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy”; and the following supple-
mentary chapters (in Volume II) to sections in the first three Books: Chap. 17: “On Man’s Need
for Metaphysics”; Chap. 34: “On the Inner Nature of Art”; Chaps. 36-37: on the aesthetics of
the plastic and the pictorial arts and of poetry; Chap. 38: “On History”; and Chap. 39: “On the
Metaphysics of Music.” Also of particular note are the titles of two of the supplementary
chapters to the Fourth Book: Chap. 41: “On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of
Our Inner Nature” and Chap. 44: “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” (with an Appendix on
pederasty). I cite the translation of E.F.J. Payne (originally published in 1958 and reprinted,
with corrections, in 1966). I occasionally modify punctuation and spelling in the interest of
both clarity and contemporary usage. I also change “thou art” to “you are.”
16. Schopenhauer discusses suicide in section 69 of the Fourth Book of Volume I.
17. Conor is a standard Latin verb for effort (“will”). Conatus is the past participle used
substantively.
18. Alter’s translation (The Five Books of Moses). Schopenhauer cites three words in
Greek: “all exceedingly good.”
19. Cited in Greek and taken (without attribution) from the Phaedo.
20. Bernini’s sculpture is in the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and Caravaggio’s painting
is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York).
21. “With the attainment of Self-Knowledge, Affirmation, and Denial of the Will-to-Live”
(I.269).
22. Schopenhauer adds a final footnote in which he writes that “nothing” is the “beyond all
knowledge” (beyond the subject-object distinction) as found in the Buddhist texts of the Per-
fection of Wisdom.
23. In contrast with Spinoza and Rousseau, who explicitly view the social contract as essen-
tially democratic (non-hierarchical), consistent with the Kantian idea that all human beings are
free, rational ends in themselves, Hobbes claims to write in support of absolute monarchy. But
the fundamental distinction that he makes between the natural and the civil (social) states
ultimately supports, consistent with his great successors, democracy. Indeed, contemporary
royalists denounced Hobbes as a political revolutionary! See note 10.
24. See I.333 (where Schopenhauer refers to Hobbes’ De cive).
25. I cite unchanged Hobbes’ cranky yet always effective (affecting) syntax and punctua-
tion.
26. I omit here Hobbes’ central point that “the terror of some power, to cause them [the laws
of nature] to be observed” is required. For “covenants, without the swords, are but words, and
of no strength to secure a man at all” (173). See note 10.
27. It is evident that Hobbes, in identifying the law with the word of the monarch, who by
right has command over others, does not identify the word of the monarch with the word of
152 What Is Philosophy?

God. (He did not support the principle of the divine right of kings, as did royalist supporters.)
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s! See note 26.
 Chapter Five

Conclusion

The salutary feature of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, together with Feuer-

bach’s, for this study is that it confronts us, starkly, with the Kierkegaardian
either-or (which is but a version of Kant’s): either believe, or be offended.
Either believe—in the Bible as the original text of individual human-exis-
tence relationships. Or be offended—that it is solely on the basis of the
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, of the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, and of
the golden rule of covenantal responsibility that we can account for our
knowledge of good and evil, of our knowledge of the values that constitute
modern life as what Hobbes calls the conversation and society of mankind. It
is only on the basis of affirming existence—and behold: it is good!—that we
can establish a critical grip on our life as the way of subjectivity. There is no
escape from our subjective existence, from our existence as subjects, into the
universality of nature, of the species, as both Schopenhauer and Feuerbach
assert. We are irremediably created subjects whose sinful ways can be com-
prehended solely from within the subjective practice of covenantal love.
Subjectivity is the gift of life that is, it is true, so very easily twisted into the
curse of life. Still, subjectivity is not to be feared—as it is in and through that
most intense of despair that Kierkegaard calls the despair of willing to be
yourself as a human subject. But it is also not to be taken for granted, as a
given, as if it were not the gift of life for which we are without surcease and
so with the burden of fear and trembling forever responsible.
We may say, then, that it is no less salutary for us that Schopenhauer and
Feuerbach are complementarily contradictory in their failure to comprehend
Christianity (the Bible) as the truth of modernity. Feuerbach’s critique of
Christian theology, insofar as its God is conceived as supernatural and so as
external to man, is sound. This is the God of Christendom who, as Kierke-
gaard tells us, has never existed because he has always existed eternally. But

153
154 Chapter 5

where Feuerbach falls into abject contradiction is in his contention that, in

contrast to a supernatural God, man is natural—whence his failure to deal
adequately with the story of the Fall or with the principle of love as the
mutuality of covenantal relationship. Feuerbach, moreover, provides us with
no indication that he is aware of the fundamental contradiction to which he
succumbs.
In contrast to Feuerbach is Schopenhauer who, I emphasize, is that weird-
ly consistent thinker who makes contradiction, i.e., contradictory self-knowl-
edge, the epitome of modern philosophy as epiphilosophy. Surely, however,
it is now evident that the acknowledgment on his part that his own philoso-
phy is nothing but contradiction is itself nothing but the reflection of the
ultimate offense: the sin of refusing to account for contradiction on grounds
that are not contradictory. Schopenhauer’s flight into negative knowledge, as
associated, in yet another manifestation of self-contradiction, with the ignor-
ance of Socrates, who never pretended, in his ignorance of existence as the
domain of divine and human will, to undertake to negate existence, is the
ultimate expression of offense (despair). Not only, then, do we learn from
Schopenhauer, as from Feuerbach, the absolute importance of possessing an
ontologically and historically true understanding of Christianity, including its
relationship to Judaism, together with its relation to paganism (Greco-Roman
and ancient Indian). But, equally, we see the absolute importance of develop-
ing a properly critical philosophy of history. The temporality that accompa-
nies the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, the Fall, and the covenant is history
understood as the infinite self-consciousness of our responsibility to account
for our subjectivity. Whereas the time of objective nature is at once linear
and circular (contingent and eternal), the time of subjects is that which they
bring into existence as the history of their infinitely diverse and varied rela-
tions.
We come, then, to realize that we are in the presence of a double irony in
undertaking to think through the contradiction that is to be found, above all,
in Schopenhauer’s philosophy in light of what I call biblical paradox, an
irony having to do doubly with “nothing.” The irony, in the first instance, is
that, because human existence is created from nothing—from nothing that is
knowable in itself—knowledge of good and evil, as the very constitution of
the human covenant, has no other foundation than subjectivity. Good and
evil are not given naturally in themselves. They are neither external nor
internal to us. Rather, human subjects freely bring good and evil into exis-
tence through their practice of building (of working through) an infinite
variety and plurality of relationships with each other. It is evident, conse-
quently, that subjectivity is both the blessing and the curse of our lives. For it
is so very easy for us human beings to justify our subjectivity at the expense
of (and not in loving relationship with) others. It is we human beings who are
solely responsible for having taken on the sin of eating of the singular fruit of
 Conclusion 155

the knowledge of good and evil from that extraordinary tree. It is this very act
by which our eyes are opened to the fact that this knowledge is not given in
itself, either naturally or supernaturally. However, since our good is nothing
natural—but solely the will of us as subjects—so evil is also nothing natu-
ral—but solely the will of us as subjects. Indeed, we personify the concept of
evil in Satan, as the satanic, and in the Devil, as the diabolical—in taking
revenge against existence by means of the claim that in itself it is nothing at
all. The initial irony, then, is that, because it is “nothing” but subjectivity that
constitutes modern life, the nothing that is subjectively inescapable consti-
tutes the issue of what it means to exist that no human being as a modern,
thinking subject, including the modern philosopher Schopenhauer, can
evade. For it makes all the difference in the world whether we begin creative-
ly from nothing or whether we view nothing as the termination of our exis-
tence, whether, in the second case, we view the termination of our existence
as nothing. Indeed, knowledge of good and evil is nothing but the willing
determination on the part of subjects to distinguish between beginning from
nothing (that is not creative) and ending with nothing (that is creative).
The irony is doubled, then, with Schopenhauer’s contention that philoso-
phy begins with nothing but ignorance (and not with the knowledge of good
and evil). However, Socratic ignorance—which, as we saw in chapter 1, is
identical with Aristotle’s idea of god as thought thinking itself—has abso-
lutely nothing to do with nothing, for nothing can come from nothing. Yet,
Schopenhauer, having, like Feuerbach, taken over pagan metaphysics, has no
explanation at all of how the will as blind and ignorant, in its will-to-live, can
be turned around and transformed into the negative knowledge, into the
negation of knowledge, that is absolutely nothing. The idea that life is the
transition that takes place solely at the end of our lives, that life is reversed,
transformed, and reborn only in and through death, is, ironically, the very
rationalization of Christianity in the terms of paganism that Kierkegaard calls
Christendom. Kierkegaard, moreover, has high praise for Socrates. At least
the gadfly of Athens never pretended to be a Christian, he tells us. Socrates
never pretended to interpret Christianity—unlike so many of those who,
having been born Christians in the progressive nineteenth century, have no
idea, consequently, of how hard it is for those who are born Christians (in
Christendom) to become Christians, i.e., to engage truly “in the conversation
and society of mankind” whereby they learn as subjects to know good and
evil as the absolute difference between transition as the original affirmation,
in the beginning, of creation from nothing (that is not creative) and transition
as the original negation, in the end, of creation as nothing (that is creative).
In his appeal to Socratic ignorance—Socrates knows that he is ignorant of
contradiction, but he does not know what the contradiction is of which he is
ignorant—Schopenhauer claims to justify his own concept of philosophy as
contradictory ignorance in and through justifying all philosophy as the ignor-
156 Chapter 5

ance of contradiction. But thus we have a signal example of his failure to see
that, as you conceive of the history of philosophy, so also you conceive of the
philosophy of history. He has no grasp of Hegel’s insight that to comprehend
philosophy historically is to comprehend it ontologically and that to compre-
hend philosophy ontologically is to comprehend it historically. Indeed, we
may recall that Kierkegaard views Socrates as the philosophically tragic hero
who is infinitely resigned to the “purely” human position that to desire the
good is to lack the good. Socrates has no concept of the essential good as, to
recall Spinoza, the essence of desire: that what we will, that what we desire is
the non-contradictory good—insofar as we abide by the golden rule that, to
recall Hobbes, the good that we desire for ourselves we desire for all human
beings in the peaceable kingdom of ends. Yes, it is precisely human desire,
human willfulness that creates conflicts, often tragic—think of the plays of
Shakespeare! Yet it is no less human desire, human will, that is the source of
all truth and reconciliation in the divine comedy of art, as of life.
As an example of how critically important it is to comprehend the philos-
ophy of history as the history of philosophy, I want to mention here one
particular point. Schopenhauer is right in claiming, as we saw, that there is no
concept of immortality in the Hebrew Bible. But, as always, he thus commits
a double error. First, while the ancient Jews reject as pagan any notion of the
immortality of the soul as eternally natural or naturally eternal and so as
inconsistent with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, they are absolutely com-
mitted to belief in the eternity of existence as the gift of the covenantal
relationship to God and neighbor. Adam and Eve relinquish eternal life as
given naturally in paradise on behalf of the gift of covenantal life for which
they and we their heirs bear the responsibility, eternally, of bringing histori-
cally, creatively, into existence. Second, there is also no notion of immortal-
ity, as supernatural (afterlife), in the New Testament (in Christianity), as
Schopenhauer claims. The kingdom of heaven that Jesus invokes in his par-
ables (above all, in the Gospel of Matthew) is covenantal existence for which
all his listeners are responsible, now, for bringing into existence in their
lives: Go and do likewise. Schopenhauer, I also want to point out, ignores
altogether the concepts of incarnation and resurrection (as consistent with the
Judaic ideas of covenant and Messiah). The notion of immortality that Scho-
penhauer holds is a perfect example, consequently, of the idolatry of Chris-
tendom: the rationalization of Christian belief in pagan terms.
Regarding Kant and Hegel, we see that the unhappy lack of attention that
Feuerbach gives to Kant’s philosophy is reflected in his truly lamentable
failure to comprehend the philosophy of Hegel. The fundamental errors that
Schopenhauer commits in his presentation of Kant underlie the miserable
contempt that he shows for Hegel in the ignorance of his philosophy. For
where else but in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion of Hegel do we
find so profoundly articulated the concepts of God and man as historical and
 Conclusion 157

relational, consistent with Kant his great predecessor and with Kierkegaard
his great successor?
What we gain, then, from close study and critical scrutiny of the key
works of Feuerbach and, above all, Schopenhauer is the contradictory “nega-
tive knowledge” that affirms, for us, the essence of Christianity as the will of
subjects whose subjective representations constitute existence as the histori-
cal covenant of their human relations. The negative knowledge of Feuerbach
and Schopenhauer thus affirms the truth of the philosophy of Kant, Hegel,
and Kierkegaard that our values are modern insofar as they are biblical and
biblical insofar as they are modern. To proclaim that we can go beyond
Abraham by returning to the ancient Greeks (with Feuerbach) or to the an-
cient Indians (with Schopenhauer) is the error of errors. Still, that is no
excuse for standing still. For not to go so far as Abraham is even worse. Our
responsibility, always, is yet again and ever to bring into historical existence
the text of individual human relationships as the loving conversation and
society of mankind. Feuerbach is right (this was actually Hegel’s original
insight, as we saw): the concept that we have of God is the concept that we
have of our human self. The relationship that we human beings have to
history is the relationship that we have to God. The relationships that we
have to each other are the relationships that we have to history. The God of
history is the history of God. God without history is empty. History without
God is blind. Human beings without history are blind. History without hu-
man beings is empty.
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 Index

Abraham, 13, 18, 41, 50–51, 84, 112–113;
Infinite Spirit of, 71; like-for-like
relating to, 67, 68, 70, 72; three
religions of, 54
Absolute Idea, 66–67
Absolute Paradox, 62, 66–67, 68, 71, 75,
79, 83
Adam and Eve: covenant of, 23–24; divine
command for, 31; story of, 2, 3, 10, 16,
26, 29, 73, 96–97, 109, 111, 112, 139,
148. See also Fall, of Adam and Eve
affirmation: of existence, 153;
transcendental, 142
Agamemnon, 67, 68–70, 72, 73, 74
alienated divinity, 16
anthropology, 100–101, 102, 108
Apology (Socrates), 6, 13
Apostles, 107, 135
Aristotle, 40; Plato and, 2, 3; works of, 6,
30
art: from nature, 22, 52n4; as work of love,
84, 88
atheist, 16, 99–100
balance wheel, 130
Baptism, 114
"being-in-itself", 139
belief, 80–81
believe or be offended, 8, 53, 54, 60
Bhagavad-Gita, 40
Bible, 30, 88, 100; contradictions of,
107–108, 110; Feuerbach on, 107;
Hebrew, 2, 24, 45, 47; language of,
104–105, 107–108; truth of, 111
biblical, modernity as, 30, 49, 51
biblical doctrine, of creation, 127–128
biblical man, 69
biblical metaphysics, 5–6, 7
biblical origin, of philosophy, 1
Brahmanism, 125, 126–128, 132
bread, as sacred, 95
Buber, Martin, 11
Buddhism, 93, 95, 125, 126–127, 128, 135,
136
Caesar, Julius, 24
caritas, 94, 100
choice, 8, 33
Christ, 25, 43, 45, 47, 105; as God-man,
113. See also Jesus
Christendom, 25, 27, 31, 47, 50–51, 140;
Christianity and, 13–14, 15, 35, 69,
148–149; God in, 71; Jews' oppression
within, 41–42; Kierkegaard on, 53–54,
58, 59–60, 101, 129
Christianity, 41, 43, 45, 60, 62–65, 90,
145; Christendom and, 13–14, 15, 35,
69, 148–149; doctrines of, 21; essence
of, 60, 99–115, 148–149; Feuerbach on,
93–95, 100–101, 111, 113–114, 116;
God of, 55; Heathenism and, 106–107;

167
168
heterogenous elements of, 135–136;
Kierkegaard on, 53–59, 71, 102; love
and, 105–106; modernity and, 24;
principle of, 104–105; theology of, 102;
true and false, 102; truth of, 117. See
also Schopenhauer, on Christianity
Christians, 10, 135; anthropology of, 102;
Hegel as, 11; modern, 113
Christian Spirit, 43
Christian supernaturalism, 115–116
Christian Trinity, 41, 43
chronos, 2
Clement of Alexandria, 126
commandments, 25, 27–28
communication, 14; direct, 55, 56; indirect,
55, 56, 84
conatus, 122, 151n17
conception: covenantal life of, 10, 31, 49;
of God, 27, 101; of philosophy,
99–100; of sin, 26
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
(Kierkegaard), 109
"Conjectural Beginning of Human
History" (Kant), 32–37, 73
conscience, miracle of, 64
consciousness, 6, 38, 45; of evil, 44; of
God, 105; of moral law, 103; of species,
105. See also self-consciousness
contradictions, 23, 25, 29, 31, 36–40,
155–156; Absolute Idea and, 67; of
Bible, 107–108, 110; Descartes and,
96–97; of Feuerbach, 93–94, 116–117;
finite, 47; of Hegel, 42–44; law of, 3, 7,
11, 30, 110; of metaphysics, 96; of
paganism, 44; risk of, 26–27; of
Schopenhauer, 93–94, 116–117, 118,
119, 122, 124, 126, 127, 133–137, 141,
143–145, 148–149; sin of, 48; as state
of mind, 98
covenant, 26, 59, 82, 97, 98–99, 140, 147;
in and through, 2, 3, 9, 38, 43, 83, 85,
87; Adam and Eve in, 23–24; creation
and, 15; between God and man, 29, 31,
64, 71; Infinite Spirit in, 22, 49; of love,
71, 88–89, 103, 107, 149
covenantal existence, 68, 79, 156
covenantal history, 22
covenantal ideals, of humanity, 66
covenantal life of conception, 10, 31, 49
Index
covenantal love, 25, 47, 56–57, 153
covenantal partner, 11
covenantal relationship, 43, 44, 78,
102–103, 108, 109–110, 113
creatio ex nihilo, 125; act of, 96, 149n2;
doctrine of, 11, 141, 147–148, 153, 154,
156; Feuerbach on, 101–102, 113;
Judaism relating to, 94, 117;
Schopenhauer on, 99, 120, 121, 126,
128
creation: biblical doctrine of, 127–128;
covenant and, 15; Descartes on, 97–98;
Feuerbach on, 95; Jewish doctrine of,
106; Schopenhauer on, 95, 128; Spirit
of, 22
The Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 7, 31,
141
culture, 104–105, 107, 108
death: of God, 15–16, 50; of human beings,
25, 47, 50, 71, 123, 132, 133, 136; of
Jesus, 128; life and, 3–5, 31, 47, 56–57,
98; as love of universality, 137;
preparation for, 126; Schopenhauer on
life and, 117, 122, 127
democracy, 17
Descartes, René, 111, 130; contradictions
and, 96–97; on creation, 97–98; works
of, 7, 141
desire, 5, 9, 156
despair, 3, 18n2
dialectic, of history and faith, 109
direct communication, 55, 56
Discourse on Method (Descartes), 141
divine, 27, 29
divine command, 31
divine knowledge, 30
divine love, 60
divine revelation, 110
divinity: alienated, 16; concepts of, 16, 61
doctrine: of Christianity, 21; of creatio ex
nihilo, 11, 141, 147–148, 153, 154, 156;
of creation, biblical, 127–128; of
creation, Jewish, 106; of generation of
paganism, 127–128
dogma, 99, 150n6
duty, 145
ego, 134–135
 Index
egoism, 144–145
either-or, 153
Encyclopaedia Logic (Hegel), 22, 45, 47
enlightenment, 48, 54
"epiphilosophy", 139–142, 154
essence: of Christianity, 60, 99–115,
148–149; of reason, 103
Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach), 99,
102, 106, 110, 114, 115, 117, 150n5
eternal mythus, 45, 47, 49, 52, 56–57
Eternal Spirit, 49
ethics, 145–146
Ethics (Spinoza), 3–4, 5, 7, 131
Eucharist, 114
Euripides, 129
Evangelists, 107
evil: of consciousness, 44; Feuerbach on,
109; good and, 2, 9, 35–37, 44–45,
48–52, 69, 102, 132, 140, 147, 155;
Kant and, 5–6, 50; knowledge of, 119;
sin relating to, 44–45
existence, 4–5, 6; affirmation of, 153;
coming into, 54, 59–60, 63, 66–67,
70–71, 74–76, 79–83, 98; covenantal,
68, 79, 156; of God, 10–11, 12, 71,
78–79, 81; historical, 67, 71, 72, 78–79,
81–83, 88–90; of individual, 132–133;
Kierkegaard on, 55, 57; of neighbor,
11; Other of, 22; paradox of, 130;
phenomenal, 118; possibility of, 131;
question of, 130; Schopenhauer on,
121, 123, 130–133; social, 132; stages
of, 67–69, 71–72, 77; wretchedness of,
128, 130
expectation, of future, 33
faith, 57, 63–64, 66, 77, 78, 80–81, 83;
dialectic of history and, 109;
Kierkegaard on, 71, 102; knight of, 67,
68, 69–70, 72, 73–74, 75, 82, 144;
reason and, 54, 99–100, 150n8
Fall, of Adam and Eve, 23, 149, 153;
concept of, 31; Feuerbach's concept of,
16–17, 115–116; Gnostic interpretation
of, 117, 126; Schopenhauer's concept
of, 16–17, 119, 121, 125; story of, 2, 9.
See also myth of Fall
Fall, of man, 128
fate, 123; of others, 134
169
Fate, subjectivity of, 28
Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 10, 12,
41, 55, 57, 63, 67–69, 74–75, 82,
112–113, 125, 144
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1; as atheist, 16; on
Bible, 107; on Christianity, 93–95,
100–101, 111, 113–114, 116; on
contradictions, 93–94, 100–101; creatio
ex nihilo, 101–102, 113; on creation,
95; on culture, 104–105, 107, 108;
errors committed by, 101–102; Fall
concept of, 16–17, 115–116; God
concept of, 15, 101–103; on good and
evil, 109; humanity and divinity
concepts of, 16; on Kant, 1, 14–18; on
modernity, 112; on natural man
alienated as supernatural God, 99–117;
philosophy of, 14–18, 94, 95–96,
149n1, 153–154, 157; subjectivity of,
94, 116; on superstition and sophistry,
110; on truth, 108–110; on water, 114;
works of, 99, 101, 102, 106, 110, 114,
115, 117, 150n5
finite, human beings as, 60, 120
finite contradictions, 47
finite Spirit, 42–43, 46, 51, 65
”A First and Last Explanation”
(Kierkegaard), 109
free choice, 33
freedom, 80; explanation of, 140–141; of
human beings, 8, 46–47, 140;
metaphysics relating to, 21; nature to,
21, 35; of subjectivity, 103
fruits, of Spirit, 87
future expectation, 33
generation doctrine, of paganism, 127–128
Genesis, 2, 3, 9–10, 29, 35, 44
Gnostic interpretation, of Fall, 117, 126
God, 7, 8–9, 14, 21; in Christendom, 71; of
Christianity, 55; conception of, 27, 101;
consciousness of, 105; covenant man
and, 29, 31, 64, 71; death of, 15–16, 50;
divine knowledge and, 30; existence of,
10–11, 12, 71, 78–79, 81; Feuerbach
on, 15, 101–103; image of, 10–11, 16,
22, 26, 27–28, 44, 56; as infinite, 60;
knowledge of, 36, 49–50, 57; love of,
24, 38, 50, 61, 88–89, 105–106; man
170
and, 25, 26, 58, 62–63, 100–101; of
nature, 106; Spirit of, 50, 85–86; as
supernatural, 17, 99–117; as universal,
103; Word of, 88, 108, 110–111,
147–148
God-man, 54, 60, 62, 67, 76, 113
The Gods of Greece (Schiller), 28
golden rule, 21, 123, 135, 144, 146
good: evil and, 2, 9, 35–37, 44–45, 48–52,
69, 102, 132, 140, 147, 155; Feuerbach
on, 109; Kant and, 5–6, 50; knowledge
of, 119; sin relating to, 44–45; speech
and, 13–14
Gospels, 2, 87–88, 144, 145–146, 147
Greek gods, 27, 28
Greek metaphysics, 5–6
Greek Spirit, 42
The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals (Kant), 5, 8–9, 33
Hamlet, 129–130
happiness, 123, 145
heart, as truth of man, 106
Heathenism, 106–107
Hebrew Bible, 2, 24, 45, 47
Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 9, 18n3; as Christian,
11; contradictory claims of, 42–44; on
Kant, 1, 2, 9–14; on mind, 22; on myth
of Fall, 21–30, 31, 37–39, 50, 52n7;
philosophy of, 9–14; subjectivity and,
9; works of, 7, 12, 22–23, 27, 38, 43,
45, 47, 66–67, 109
Hegelian Spirit, 10, 21–23, 52n5–52n6
Heidegger, Martin, 139–140
heroes, 67, 68–70, 72–73, 75
heterogenous elements, of Christianity,
135–136
Hindus, 93, 95, 132, 135
historical, man as, 108
historical existence, 67, 71, 72, 78–79,
81–83, 88–90
history, 57–58; covenantal, 22; dialectic of,
109; human beings and, 157; ontology
and, 9, 11, 17–18, 49; of philosophy,
124–125; Schopenhauer on, 121, 124;
of Spirit, 49
Hobbes, Thomas, 102, 144, 146–148,
151n10, 151n23–151n27
Holy Ghost, 145
Index
holy law, 25
holy nature, 114–116
Homer, 3
Homo homini Deus est, 104
human alienation, 15
human beings: death and, 25, 47, 71, 123,
132, 133, 136; difference between, 104;
as finite, 60, 120; freedom of, 8, 46–47,
140; history and, 157; image of, 27;
knowing of, 120; nature of, 48–49, 102;
obligations of, 74–75; redemption of,
15, 17; responsibility of, 45–46, 50–51,
68; Spinoza on, 131
humanity: covenantal ideals of, 66; and
divinity concepts, 16, 61; love of, 137;
nature as standard of, 115
human love, 60, 105
human relationships, 73–83
human time, 124
idolatry, 27, 56, 65, 69, 111
idols, 26, 59
Iliad, 40
image: concept of, 84; of God, 10–11, 16,
22, 26, 27–28, 44, 56; of human beings,
27
immortal blessedness, 4
immortality, 8, 21, 47, 156; concept of,
98–99; of paradise, 109; soul of, 3, 102
Incarnation, 99, 113, 150n4, 156
indirect communication, 55, 56, 84
individual: ego of, 134–135; existence of,
132–133; subjectivity to, 104; will of,
145
individual human existence-relationships,
109–110, 111, 112
infinite, God as, 60
infinite reconciliation, 45, 47
infinite resignation, knight of, 125
Infinite Spirit, 28, 42–43, 44, 45–46,
47–48, 51; of Abraham, 71; in
covenant, 22, 49; of Kierkegaard,
65–67, 68, 71, 73, 75, 77, 78, 83, 86,
89; miracle of, 67; paradox of, 70–71
inner being, 122
intellect, 122
“I think, therefore I am”, 112
I-thou, 94, 103, 106–107
itself, 22–25, 30–31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38–40
 Index
I-you relationship, 106
Jeremiah, 110–111
Jerusalem, 149
Jesus, 14, 111–112, 156; in Jewish
tradition, 24; life and death of, 128;
Moses and, 2; as sinless, 24, 112. See
also Christ
Jewish doctrine, of creation, 106
Jewish Spirit, 42–43
Jewish tradition, Jesus in, 24
Jewish Trinity, 43, 52n8
Jews, Christian oppression of, 41–42
Judaism, 41, 43, 95, 119, 125–126, 154;
creatio ex nihilo relating to, 94, 117
judgment, 80, 91n6
Kant, Immanuel, 1, 2, 5, 14; choice and, 8;
concept of, 9–10, 16; desire and, 5; evil
and, 5–6, 50; good and, 5–6, 50; on
modernity, 8, 9, 27; on myth of Fall,
29–30, 31–37, 49–50, 51–52; points
demonstrated by, 7–9; reason and, 5;
thing and, 5; thinking and, 6;
transcendental logic of, 6; will and, 5,
123; works of, 5, 7, 8–9, 31, 32–37, 73,
109, 141
Kantian revolution in metaphysics, 1, 2–4,
22, 66, 123; Feuerbach, 1, 14–18;
Hegel, 1, 2, 9–14; Kant, 1, 2, 5–9, 14;
Kierkegaard, 1, 9–14; Schopenhauer, 1,
4, 9, 14–18, 119
Kierkegaard, Søren, 5, 8–9, 18n3, 51–52;
on Christendom, 53–54, 58, 59–60,
101, 129; on Christian faith, 71, 102;
Christianity critiqued by, 53–59, 71,
102; Concluding Unscientific
Postscript by, 109; on existence, 55, 57;
Fear and Trembling by, 10, 12, 41, 55,
57, 63, 67–69, 74–75, 82, 112–113,
125, 144; ”A First and Last
Explanation” by, 109; on heroes, 67,
68–70, 72–73, 75; on human
relationships, 73–83; indirect
communication of, 55, 56, 84; Infinite
Spirit of, 65–67, 68, 71, 73, 75, 77, 78,
83, 86, 89; on judgment, 80, 91n6; on
love, 58–59; on modernity, 88; on myth
of Fall, 56–57; Philosophical
171
Fragments by, 11–12, 59, 62, 66, 67,
68–69, 71, 75, 79, 90n2; philosophy of,
1, 9–14; Practice in Christianity by, 59,
62, 74; pseudonymous works of, 55;
Sickness unto Death by, 69; Socrates
and, 67, 68–69, 73, 75–77; subjectivity
and, 9; Works of Love by, 10, 43, 55,
59–61, 63–64, 73, 76, 79, 84–85, 87
knight: of faith, 67, 68, 69–70, 72, 73–74,
75, 82, 144; of infinite resignation, 125
knowing, willing and, 120–121
knowledge, 133, 138, 148; divine, 30; of
God, 36, 49–50, 57; of good and evil,
119; negative, 141, 142–143, 154;
object of, 103; positive, 142–143; will
and, 138
"know thyself", 139
Krishna, 40–41
language, 84, 85, 86–87, 89; of Bible,
104–105, 107–108. See also speech
laws: of contradiction, 3, 7, 11, 30, 110; of
Gospel, 144; as holy, 25; moral, 21,
103; of nature, 146; as sin, 25
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
(Hegel), 12, 38, 43, 156
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 120
Leviathan (Hobbes), 144, 146
life, 137; death and, 3–5, 31, 47, 56–57,
98; gift of, 153; of Jesus, 128; miracle
of, 4; objective value of, 133;
Schopenhauer on death and, 117, 122,
127
like-for-like, 58–83, 84, 88, 96, 101
logos, of man, 108
Lombard, Peter, 110
love, 11; art as work of, 84, 88;
Christianity and, 105–106; covenantal,
25, 47, 56–57, 153; covenant of, 71,
88–89, 103, 107, 149; death and, 137;
divine, 60; of God, 24, 38, 50, 61,
88–89, 105–106; human, 60, 105; of
humanity, 137; Kierkegaard on, 58–59;
of neighbor, 17, 25, 59–61, 73–74,
88–89, 96, 105, 135–136; species and,
106
"Love is a Matter of Conscience", 64
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 72, 91n3
172
man: biblical, 69; covenant between God
and, 29, 31, 64, 71; death of, 50; Fall of,
128; God and, 25, 26, 58, 62–63,
100–101; heart as truth of, 106; logos
of, 108; nature of, 101–102; from
nothing, 101–102; original, 36; pagan,
69; as species, 105, 106–107; Spirit of,
50
“Man is the God of Christianity,
Anthropology the mystery of Christian
Theology” (Feuerbach), 101
Matthew, 45, 52n9
Meditations on First Philosophy (St.
Anselm), 7, 96, 97–98
Metamorphoses (Ovid), 112
metaphor, as spirit, 58, 59, 84–90
metaphysics, 155; biblical, 5–6, 7;
contradictions of, 96; freedom relating
to, 21; Greek, 5–6; of modernity,
119–120; modern revolution in, 5; new,
9. See also Kantian revolution in
metaphysics
Metaphysics (Aristotle), 6, 30
miracle: of conscience, 64; of Infinite
Spirit, 67; of life, 4
misery, 43–44
modern Christians, 113
modernity: as biblical, 30, 49, 51;
Christianity and, 24; dark side of, 4;
Feuerbach on, 112; Kant on, 8, 9, 27;
Kierkegaard on, 88; metaphysics of,
119–120; myth of, 2; philosophers on,
1, 18, 99–100, 150n7; Schopenhauer
on, 90, 119, 125; truth of, 54, 59, 94,
108, 112, 153–154; values of, 53,
93–94, 117, 119, 137
modern philosophy, 47, 58, 93–94
modern revolution, in metaphysics, 5
modern values, 93, 119
Montaigne, Michel de, 113
moral feeling, 114
morality, 106, 116, 144–145
moral law, 21, 103
moral virtues, 136
mortality, 98–99
Moses, 2
myth, of modernity, 2
myth of Fall, 13, 15, 40–49, 51, 80;
concepts of, 31; Hegel on, 21–30, 31,
Index
37–39, 50, 52n7; incompatibility of
concepts of, 31; Kant on, 29–30, 31–37,
49–50, 51–52; Kierkegaard on, 56–57;
as test, 29
myth of universal being. See
Schopenhauer, on myth of universal
being
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 100
"nation of priests", 64
natural man alienated as supernatural God,
99–117
natural time, human time and, 124
nature: art from, 22, 52n4; to freedom, 21,
35; God of, 106; as holy, 114–116; of
human beings, 48–49, 102; laws of,
146; of man, 101–102; morality and,
106; phenomenal, 137; as sacred, 114;
sensate-psychical, 86; as standard of
humanity, 115; as standard of reason,
106, 115; as standard of truth, 115–116;
state of, 48, 131; true end of, 33, 115;
universality of, 17, 94; will and,
137–138
Nature to Spirit, 114–115
negative knowledge, 141, 142–143, 154
neighbor, 28, 156; existence of, 11; love of,
17, 25, 59–61, 73–74, 88–89, 96, 105,
135–136
new metaphysics, 9
New Testament, 2, 15, 17, 64, 127, 149,
156
Nicomachean Ethics, 40
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 7, 41, 83
Nihilism, 4
Nirvana, 128, 136
non-existence, 129–132, 133
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
(Stevens), 97
nothing, 101–102, 117, 127–130, 137–139,
140–141, 143, 154; negativity of, 142;
world as, 143, 151n22
objective value, of life, 133
objects: of knowledge, 103; subjects and,
102–104, 119–120, 139; of theory, 104,
106
Odyssey (Homer), 3
“Of Presumption” (Montaigne), 113
 Index
Old Testament, 126, 127, 149
oneness, 44
On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 4
ontology, history and, 9, 11, 17–18, 49
original man, 36
original sin, 34, 36, 47, 115, 116, 118, 126
other, self and, 11, 23
Other of existence, 22
others, individuality and fate of, 134
Ovid, 112
paganism, 3, 4, 29, 126, 149, 155;
contradiction of, 44; generation
doctrine of, 127–128; idolatry and, 13,
27; Spirit of, 42
pagan man, 69
Paradise, 23
Paradise Lost, 73
paradox: of existence, 130; of Infinite
Spirit, 70–71; Moment of, 57. See also
Absolute Paradox
paradoxical union, of temporal and eternal,
57–59
Pascal, Blaise, 45–46, 47, 49, 128
Paul, 2–3, 18n1, 24–25, 51, 84, 110–111
perfection, 136
Phaedo (Socrates), 12
phenomenal existence, 118
phenomenal nature, 137
The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 7
philomythos, 30, 36
philosophers, on modernity, 1, 18, 99–100,
150n7
Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard),
11–12, 59, 62, 66, 67, 68–69, 71, 75,
79, 90n2
philosophy: from biblical origin, 1;
conception of, 99–100; of Feuerbach,
14–18, 94, 95–96, 149n1, 153–154,
157; of Hegel, 9–14; history of,
124–125; of Kierkegaard, 9–14;
modern, 47, 58, 93–94; of
Schopenhauer, 14–18, 94, 95–96, 118,
124–126, 149n1, 153–157; theology
and, 1–2, 47–48, 54, 99–100; true
conception of, 99–100; of truth, 35
Philosophy of History (Hegel), 27
Philosophy of Mind (Hegel), 22–23
Philosophy of Religion (Hegel), 27, 109
173
Plato, 2, 3, 6, 124–125
Platonic Idea, 94, 125
positive knowledge, 142–143
practical reason, 53, 57
Practice in Christianity (Kierkegaard), 59,
62, 74
prejudices, 45
principium individuationis, 118, 134–135,
137
Prophets, 44
prototypes, 74
Psalms, 44
pure reason, 55, 83
reason, 9, 21–22, 33–34, 35, 131; critique
of, 53; essence of, 103; faith and, 54,
99–100, 150n8; Kant and, 5; nature
and, 106, 115; practical, 53, 57; pure,
55, 83
redemption, 15, 17, 95
refusal, 33
relationships: covenantal, 43, 44, 78,
102–103, 108, 109–110, 113; human,
73–83; individual human existence-
relationships, 109–110, 111, 112; I-you,
106; of seeing, 84–85. See also self-
relationship
Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason
(Kant), 109
responsibility, of human beings, 45–46,
50–51, 68
restoration, 132
resurrection, 156
revelation, 110
Roman Empire, 43–44
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 17
sacred: bread as, 95; nature as, 114; water
as, 114; wine as, 114
saecula saeculorum, 2
salvation, 26, 123, 128
Samsara, 128, 136
Schopenhauer, Arthur: as atheist, 16;
contradictions and, 93–94, 116–117,
118, 119, 122, 124, 126, 127, 133–137,
141, 143–145, 148–149; creatio ex
nihilo, 99, 120, 121, 126, 128; critique
of, 15; Fall concept of, 16–17, 119, 121,
125; humanity and divinity concept of,
174 Index
16; on Kant, 1, 4, 9, 14–18, 119;
philosophy of, 14–18, 94, 95–96, 118,
124–126, 149n1, 153–157; on religious
differences, 126; Spinoza and,
122–123, 131; subjectivity of, 94;
works of, 117, 118, 124, 151n15
Schopenhauer, on Christianity, 15, 94–95,
123–124; on creation, 95, 128; Hindu
and Buddhists texts relating to, 93, 95;
on modernity, 90, 119, 125; modern
values with, 93, 119
Schopenhauer, on myth of universal being,
117; contradiction of life and death,
117, 122, 127; on existence, 121, 123,
130–133; on history, 121, 124; on
principium individuationis, 118, 120,
122, 124; problems with, 120–121; on
sin, 121; on will, 118–123; on world,
118
Science of Logic (Hegel), 66–67
scriptura, 109, 111
The Search for Truth (Descartes), 7
self, other and, 11, 23
self-consciousness, 12, 22, 25, 38, 52n3, 95
self-contradiction, 66, 81–82, 100, 148,
154
self-deception, 111
self-determination, 95
self-relationship, 94
sensate-psychical nature, 86
sexuality, 35, 99, 100–101, 115, 116, 122
Shakespeare, William, 1, 50, 114,
129–130, 138, 143, 156
Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard), 69
silence, 63, 69
sin, 10, 24, 26; conception of, 26; of
contradiction, 48; good and evil relating
to, 44–45; of idolatry, 27; law as, 25;
original, 34, 36, 47, 115, 116, 118, 126;
against Spirit, 56, 111–112
sin-ignorance, 69
social contract, 147
social existence, 132
Socrates, 6, 12, 13, 18, 126; Kierkegaard
and, 67, 68–69, 73, 75–77
sophistry, 110
Sophocles, 107, 129
soul, immortality of, 3, 102
species: consciousness of, 105; love and,
106; man as, 105, 106–107
speech, 13–14, 85–86, 89. See also
language
Spinoza, Baruch, 2, 8, 17, 51, 78–79; on
human beings, 131; Schopenhauer and,
122–123, 131; works of, 3–4, 5, 7,
99–100, 109, 111, 131
spirit: metaphor as, 58, 59, 84–90; of
revolution, 65
Spirit, 9, 16, 45; Christian, 43; concept of,
47–48; of creation, 22; development of,
38; Eternal, 49; finite, 42–43, 46, 51;
fruits of, 87; of God, 50, 85–86; Greek,
42; Hegelian, 10, 21–23, 52n5–52n6; of
history, 49; Jewish, 42–43; Judaism
and, 41; of man, 50; Nature to,
114–115; of paganism, 42; sin against,
56, 111–112; to Spirit, 58, 95; stages in,
37–40, 41–42. See also Infinite Spirit
state of mind, contradictions as, 98
Stevens, Wallace, 97
"Stoic equanimity", 128
subjectivity, 98, 153, 154; of Fate, 28; of
Feuerbach, 94, 116; freedom of, 103; of
Hegel, 9; to individual, 104; of
Kierkegaard, 9; of Schopenhauer, 94; of
truth, 9, 66, 110
subjects: objects and, 102–104, 119–120,
139; truth and, 8–9
suicide, 122, 151n15
supernatural, God as, 17, 99–117
supernatural beings, 112
supernaturalism, Christian, 115–116
superstition, 110
Tertullian, 1–2
Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza),
99–100, 109, 111
theology: anthropology and, 100–101, 102;
of Christianity, 102; concept of, 100;
philosophy and, 1–2, 47–48, 54,
99–100
theory, of objects, 104, 106
thing, 5, 22
things-in-themselves, 8, 119–120, 121,
132, 136, 137–138, 140, 148
thinking, 6, 30–31
time concept, 71, 98, 125
 Index
to be or not to be, 7–9, 31, 91n4, 129–130
Torah, 26
tragedy, 128–130
transcendental affirmation, 142
Transcendental Dialectic, 142
transcendental illusion, 14, 140
transcendental logic, of Kant, 6
Trinity: Christian, 41, 43; Jewish, 43, 52n8
truth, 27, 59–60, 62, 69, 75–76, 141; of
Bible, 111; of Christianity, 117;
Feuerbach on, 108–110; heart and, 106;
of modernity, 54, 59, 94, 108, 112,
153–154; nature as standard of,
115–116; of philosophy, 35; principle
of, 105; subjectivity of, 9, 66, 110;
subjects and, 8–9
understanding, 103
universal: God as, 103. See also
Schopenhauer, on myth of universal
being
universality: death as love of, 137; of
nature, 17, 94
175
values, of modernity, 53, 93–94, 117, 119,
137
virtue, asceticism and, 135
water, as sacred, 114
What is Metaphysics? (Heidegger), 139
will: aim of, 142; of individual, 145; Kant
and, 5, 123; knowledge and, 138;
liberation of, 140; nature and, 137–138;
Schopenhauer on, 118–123
will-to-live, 118, 120, 121–122, 128–130,
133, 135–139, 142, 143, 148
wine, as sacred, 114
Word, of God, 88, 108, 110–111, 147–148
work of love, as work of art, 84, 88
Works of Love (Kierkegaard), 10, 43, 55,
59–61, 63–64, 73, 76, 79, 84–85, 87
world concept, 131
The World as Will and Representation
(Schopenhauer), 117, 118, 124, 139,
143, 151n15
 About the Author

Brayton Polka is professor emeritus of Humanities and of Social and Politi-

cal Thought at York University in Toronto. He is the author of several books
and numerous smaller studies in which he focuses on the issue of interpreta-
tion. He shows that the hermeneutical relationship between text and reader is
based on the golden rule of interpretation: that text and reader each bear the
responsibility of interpreting the other as they want to be interpreted by the
other. Interpretation is, consequently, the covenantal relationship par excel-
lence. Professor Polka argues, then, that the values that underlie, that “up-
build” or edify, all hermeneutical effort—e.g., love, freedom, justice, and the
dignity of every human being—are at once biblical and modern. He argues,
additionally, that it is only on the basis of understanding that our modern
values are biblical from the beginning and that biblical values are modern
unto the end that we can deconstruct and so overcome the opposition so
prevalent today between theology and philosophy, between faith and reason,
and between the religious and the secular. He has written both general stud-
ies, in which he applies his hermeneutical theory to thinking through the
relationship between religion and philosophy, and more specialized, interpre-
tive studies of, in particular, Freud, Spinoza (in two volumes), and Shake-
speare.

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