The Anarchē of Spirit^263macro-manages the worldly status quo of suffering and injustice,
or evil.
No, Socrates had a sounder understanding; he knew that the art
of power lies precisely in making another free [insofar as Socrates,
as a maieutic and incidental teacher, helps deliver the individual
of a truth which liberates them from heteronomous delusion and
into the light of their own autonomy]. But in the relationship be-
tween individuals this can never be done, even though it needs to
be emphasized again and again that this is the highest; only om-
nipotence can truly succeed in this. Therefore if a human being had
the slightest independent existence over against God (with regard
to materia) then God could not make him free. Creation out of
nothing is once again the Omnipotent One’s expression for being
able to make [a being] independent. He to whom I owe absolutely
everything, although he still absolutely controls everything, has in
fact made me independent. If in creating man God himself lost a
little of his power, then precisely what he could not do would be to
make a human being independent.^97In other words, whereas the powerful tend to crave greater and
greater power over others, only true divine omnipotence has the
power to make another free. Kierkegaard thus interprets divine
omnipotence as kenotic love and as a gift of freedom which creates
ex nihilo the space for a self to become itself as truly independent.
The self truly becomes itself, not in sole relation to the others, nor
to the State, none of whom can make it free. The self becomes it-
self before God in relation to whom it becomes conscious of itself
as “Spirit”—Spirit realised as individuated freedom.
At this moment, however, Kierkegaard and Proudhon assume
their stands even further apart. While Proudhon may regard the-
ism as a necessary dialectical agonist for anti-theism, Kierkegaard’s
theism validates the possibility of Proudhon’s negation of “God”
as an inexorable, yet ultimately grievous, expression of the free-
dom of offence. Under Kierkegaard’s theological dialectic, there-
fore, Proudhon’s anti-theism becomes an expression of despair:
specifically “In Despair to will to Be Oneself: Defiance”.^98 While
anti-theism is made possible by freedom, its expression ultimately
leads away from the realisation of freedom as Spirit and down
into the abyssal un-freedom of despair. In struggling against God,