Consciousness as interest

pp. 47-60

in: Patrick Stokes, Kierkegaard's mirrors, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Climacus' identification of consciousness with interesse introduces a new, qualitatively thick (indeed, positively "pregnant" with meaning according to Climacus) description into this otherwise dry and schematic account of consciousness. Characteristically, Climacus is not concerned with providing a clear definition of interesse, but he does flesh out its meaning by playing upon the Latin resonances of the word. Interest, he tells us, is a relation inter-esse, variously translated as "between being," "being between," even "between us." Just as "consciousness," in its extension as the actuality of reflection, is irreducibly existential, so too is interesse, with its connotations of immersion in being, understood as a descriptor of (or perhaps another name for) consciousness. In the Postscript, Climacus describes actuality (in the sense of the actuality of the existing individual) as "an inter-esse between abstraction's hypothetical unity of thinking and being" (CUP, 1:314/SKS 7, 286). In other words, interesse is the emplacement between elements that can only be mediated into a comfortable unity in the abstract. In existence, no such mediation occurs, and so we find ourselves being between these irreconcilable elements.