Numerology and the Revolutionary Subject

If numerology were acceptable evidence in academic circles, today would be the day that proves my work right, because it was on May 5 that both Søren Kierkegaard (1813) and Karl Marx (1818) were born. Two of my most important intellectual forebears, I’ve long thought that they were really two sides of the same coin, and that together they provide a comprehensive account of freedom and selfhood. But if numerology isn’t convincing, I thought I’d share a short excerpt from my book, exploring the idea of revolutionary subjectivity.

God and Poverty

Kierkegaard began Fear and Trembling with an epigram meant to cast interpretive doubt upon his whole work, and then immediately introduced the theme of doubt more explicitly, by way of Socrates and Descartes. Bookending his work with this same theme, he ends it with a joke about Heraclitus. After praising Heraclitus, and recalling his famous pronouncement that you cannot step in the same river twice, he speaks of one of Heraclitus’s disciples, a disciple who went “further,” and pronounced that “one cannot do it even once.”65 In so arguing, this disciple amended Heraclitus’s thesis into one that “denies” motion rather than affirming it, whereas all he had wanted to do was to go “further.”66 Reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s critique of the bourgeois intellectual for whom everything had become easy, in building upon Heraclitus without truly understanding him, his disciple unwittingly transforms Heraclitus into his opposite.67 As for Heraclitus himself, in affirming the motion of being and, more specifically, in affirming temporal change, he offers a correlative to Socratic doubt, by way of an affirmation of the ephemerality of the apparent world.68 That is, in a world of ceaseless temporal flux, Socratic detachment helps remedy our anxious desire to dominate.

However, in this dual-sided claim, a metaphysical and a spiritual claim that seems anchored in ancient thought, Kierkegaard is actually demonstrating how much he himself is a modern—while also offering another point of contact between himself and Marx. Certainly, Heraclitus captures something enduringly revelatory in his pronouncement, yet its deep resonance with Kierkegaard also speaks to a historical fact that Marx captures well. Particularly evident in the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously describes the chaos of the modern world, given the fantastically creative and destructive powers of capitalism. Capitalism has created a world in which “steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production,” in which the “market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land”; it is a world in which the “bourgeoisie . . . has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations . . . [and] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ ” where it has also “stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe,” converting “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers”; and it does so because the “bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”69 All of this leads to a world in which “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify,” so that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”70

While evocatively described in the Communist Manifesto, this sense of instability and dislocation is also evident in On the Jewish Question. After all, while it is partially a story of how political emancipation reifies the idea of the bourgeois individual, this reified sense of stability is the mechanism by which the forces of civil society are unleashed. That is, by believing in equality, the inequalities endemic to capitalism are liberated, and it is this liberation that forms the underlying narrative of Marx’s larger historical project. While Heraclitus and Socrates might help capture this flux as an eternal metaphysical truth, the former doing so by way of a pronouncement about the nature of the world and the latter by affirming an attitude by which to experience that world, what Marx helps reveal is that as a result of capitalism (and its protection under the modern, democratic state), the material world has come to embody this flux in an ever more immediate way. The Socratic detachment of an authentically lived doubt, and the Heraclitean affirmation of a world that warrants it, might demonstrate an eternal truth; however, given the modern world, it is an eternal truth that has become particularly pronounced.

For this reason, Marshall Berman speaks of Marx as a paragon of modernity, as he sees in Marx a deep awareness of the nature of modern experience. For Berman, “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. . . . [Modernity] pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ ”71 Given this reality, it is easy to imagine the difficult fate of an isolated individual. For all the promise of capitalism, such as the endlessly changing world of experiences it provides, and the possibility for self-development that this holds, the cost of this world is that we are each reduced to instrumental laborers in a vast, unforgiving, and ever-churning machine. It is a world in which towers that dwarf Babel are erected in mere months, in which cities are conjured out of the ground seemingly overnight, and in which the greatest dreams of science fiction are tomorrow’s realities. However, it is simultaneously a world in which foreclosure, gentrification, and “eminent domain” ensure that no one’s home is free from the threat of dispossession, a world in which once thriving communities lie in ruins when their “sustaining” industry “dies,” and a world in which “downsizing,” “outsourcing,” “redundancy,” and “retrenchment” are just a few of the synonyms for the human beings who stubbornly outlive their use. And so, the experience that unites humanity is one that potentially destroys us too.

The challenge, therefore, is to find a sense of strength by which to “survive” this maelstrom, let alone to thrive within it. And given this evocation, it should be easy to imagine why a sense of personal integrity that draws upon an identification with the ephemeral objects of modern life sets the stage for overwhelming loss and loneliness—while simultaneously being bolstered by them. It also helps explain why the “individuality” of “political emancipation,” which serves as our contemporary version of “the ethical,” is one of the few identities capable of surviving for any extended period of time, given the creative destruction of capitalism. In its substantive vacuity and absence of any real communal solidarity, a belief in the abstract individual is particularly malleable to the sorcerer’s forces of capital, which itself depends on the willingness of individuals to be instrumentally exploited. That is, in believing ourselves individuals but only abstractly so, we reduce ourselves to a quantitative and therefore interchangeable “human” resource, that can then be allocated according to the needs of capital. “Individuals” are therefore allocated in much the way that units of lumber or steel might be. In a bitter irony, the affirmation of this vacuous equality—an affirmation whose substantive vacuity affords little position from which to critique—is tantamount to an affirmation of the equality of our own instrumental worthlessness. While seemingly affirming our worth, we are actually affirming that which allows us to be treated as expendable, so long as we are all equally so.

While private property originates as a historical and material phenomenon, we have seen that it is reproduced by way of this attitude of private property. However, for Kierkegaard, this attitude is reinforced by the feeling of control that constitutes the “temptation” of “the ethical.”72 That is, faced with the maelstrom of modern life, and without the security of love, identity can provide a tempting sense of stability, even if the identities we adopt are as substantively vacuous as the abstract individual. However, this sense of control is little more than a feeling of domination that we exert over ourselves and others, and that ultimately serves the owners of capital, because we willingly transform ourselves into objects that are easily instrumentalized in the interest of production. In other words, in a vicious cycle, our vulnerability leads to our desire to dominate, while our desire to dominate leads to our vulnerability. And this ultimately serves those few who stand to make a profit. More simply, it is from the vulnerability of poverty that we all flee, running into the waiting arms of private property, and its true masters.73 Therefore, as Socrates counseled, we need to learn to let go.

Yet, the modern world also opens many doors. If feudal social relationships existed with an immediacy that made it difficult to see past them, that is, if feudalism made true interpersonal disclosure a near impossibility, then capitalism’s maelstrom has made true community a greater possibility. For all of our attempts to hold onto our delusions, the instability of modern life is a constant challenge toward maintaining them. While Kierkegaard never understood despair as a sociological category, it is easy to see how it could be that too. Granted, it remains a phenomenon that pertains to individuals and their subjectivity, but insofar as his higher forms of despair speak to an inability to will conformity, we might expect capitalism to multiply their occurrence. This is Marx’s explicit insight; it is capitalism’s implicit dynamism that makes conforming to static social roles a near impossibility, even if these roles are as flexible as the abstract individual.74 What is needed, however, for both Marx and Kierkegaard, is a sense of personal integrity that is not subject to the vicissitudes of the ephemeral world of capitalism, a sense of integrity upon which true communities can be built, and a sense of integrity that offers an enduring position from which to critique the systematic dehumanization upon which capitalism depends. What is needed, therefore, is love.

Marx does not speak the language of love, but he is less far from this formula than might appear. If Kierkegaard’s love entails an appropriation and disclosure of the self as free and loving, while simultaneously helping others do so too, Marx achieves much the same through his idea of human emancipation. For Marx, the bourgeois sense of freedom “makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it.”75 Therefore, “the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself.”76 That is, in conceiving of ourselves as ego, and in conceiving of freedom as the satiation of our desires, we come to see others as obstacles to our freedom rather than expressions of it. Or, at best, they become means to our ends. Consequently, we find ourselves living in a humanly impoverished world, in which we exist with others merely as reified images of an egoistically conceived sense of freedom, rather than in a richly humanized world filled with subjects with whom we share a community based in freedom.

Marx therefore writes of human emancipation as the process of following through on the promises of political emancipation, a process of making the promise of freedom real. “Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognised and organised his ‘forces propres’ as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.”77 The revolutionary values of liberté, egalité, and fraternité, having been enshrined in the droits du citoyen, were themselves a legitimate expression of a freedom that was an advance on the oppression of feudal life; however, having been abstracted into the political realm, they need to be reclaimed by human beings in our real, social existence. Rather than living our duplicitous lives, caught between a world that affords us a vacuous equality and one that offers indignity, this vacuous equality needs to be made real by re-absorption into our actual lives. Which is to say, freedom needs to be lived, not only thought, and in overcoming our abstract projection of ourselves and the irresponsibility it entails, we set the stage for a self-appropriation in which the human world is rightly recognized as a product of our free subjectivity.

As a result, rather than being vulnerably subject to the world, we become subjects upon which it depends, because the creativity released by capitalism only appears a foreign force intent on our ruin so long as we have not yet appropriated those forces as our own. Ultimately, it is on this basis that true community can arise, as accepting responsibility for my freedom entails a recognition that this freedom is shared by all. In overcoming our desire to dominate and in appropriating a real, substantive freedom, “every man [might come to] see in other men . . . the realization of his own freedom . . . [not] the barrier to it.”78 After all, my compromise of this freedom becomes your experience of oppression and your compromise my oppression, insofar as we reciprocally impose on one another the restrictions we impose on ourselves. Which is to say that, truly, “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”79 Or, in Kierkegaard’s language, “Love is a revolution, the deepest of all.”80

Marx spent little time detailing the complex narrative of an individual subject on the road to freedom, nor did he explore the ways in which religious narratives might help describe it. Instead, Marx’s corollary emerged in the years following 1843, as he increasingly imagined the proletariat as the class of revolutionary change.81 In this, we find Marx extending Kierkegaard into the political world, just as Kierkegaard draws Marx deeper into individual subjectivity. For Marx, the proletariat is by definition the instrumental class, making it also the class of vulnerability; it is the class that most acutely suffers from the fact that “all that is solid melts into air.”82 However, if they are not destroyed by a world that treats them instrumentally—and many are destroyed—they might also be freed of the illusions by which their servitude is justified, in a collective expression of Kierkegaard’s Socratic doubt. More important, if this happens, they might find that they are not alone, but together, so that in the love from their fellow workers—in their solidarity with them—they might come to discover an empowering sense of self-worth.

For Marx, the forces of domination had matured to their peak because history had “simplified class antagonisms . . . [into] Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”83 In the pure instrumentality of labor, it is their freedom itself—their labor—that workers sell to capitalists. Whereas prior systems of exploitation were “veiled by religious and political illusions,” exploitation is now “naked, shameless, direct, [and] brutal.”84 Therefore, a future revolution might not be waged on behalf of a partial understanding of oppression, but could potentially grasp the true nature of freedom, because “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”85 Marx therefore believed that the eternal struggle for human dignity was synonymous with the historical struggle to overcome private property.86 The particular battle of the proletariat was therefore a universal battle; living in a society of pure dehumanization, a society in which workers embody the indignity of being an instrumental object rather than a free subject, their battle could potentially become one of pure humanization.

Had Marx sought to answer the question of where this human dignity originates (i.e., the origins of the free creativity of our species being), he might have been led to Kierkegaard’s conception of God. The origins of our freedom remain a mystery, as we do not will ourselves, but must accept ourselves and others as gifts. However, as far as we know, Marx never asked. Yet, understood in the way that Kierkegaard does, God provides an unassailable critical perspective on the world, insofar as God speaks to our eternal, historically transcendental nature, while simultaneously providing a loving foundation for a free community. Furthermore, for those living in a capitalist world, a world in which the proletarian class has seemed to become less distinct, and a world in which few identify with this instrumental class despite being situated in its midst, Kierkegaard’s radicalism helps reveal the essential nature that makes the proletariat revolutionary. That is, understanding freedom and domination in subjective terms is essential in a world of less starkly drawn—or less immediately apparent—class distinctions, as it allows us to clarify the qualitative distinctions that Marx saw in a class that is often misunderstood as being purely quantitative. The proletariat are the potentially revolutionary class because of the class position they hold, but what would make them actually revolutionary is that their shared experience of exploitation allows them to transform Kierkegaard’s subjective transformation into a political act. A solitary leap of faith entails an ethics; a collective one entails a politics.

Kierkegaard’s discourse therefore provides a critical corrective for political thought by helping reveal the deeply subjective nature of the revolutionary subject. Capitalism may be a system of economic production, but its problem, and the reason it requires critique, is the worthlessness it imposes on its members. This, rather than a particular, historically apparent feature, is what constitutes the problem. For the proletariat, oftentimes disabused of their self-deceptions and yet potentially disclosed to one another in their vulnerability, the possibility for a new type of community could emerge out of the nourishing love they felt for one another. The value enshrined in such communities entailed an innate and inalienable critique of the old, and it is this critique that Marx’s analysis helps articulate in its fullest social and political form.

The radical transformation of the proletariat therefore entails a twofold transformation: the first, a recognition of the dignity found in freedom, and the second, an understanding of the systematic forces of dehumanization.87 Just as those “religiously” converted start making sense of a world inconsistent with their faith—a world in which their freedom abrades against their bondage—they potentially come to understand that the forces working against them are not eternal or accidental; that is, the problem is not socialization as an eternal problem, even if socialization has always been used as a tool of oppression. Rather, these forces are deliberate and systematic, making use of socialization so that they can extort a profit from the instrumentalization of workers. For every Nora, there is her husband Torvald; for every Douglass, a slave owner; and for every worker, an owner of capital. Therefore, following from “religious conversion,” some individuals might come to have what James Marsh calls a “radical political conversion.”88 Told by society that they had no worth, yet told by one another that this was not so, the faith of those around them could prove to be the start of something truly and inexplicably new.

Aroosi, Jamie, The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject, (Part II: Emancipation, Chapter 5: Faith, pp. 95-102)