Kierkegaard
Page 20
In this short book, Andersen is held up against Kierkegaard’s philosophy of art and of the individual and is found wanting. An authentic individual is not simply a passive product of his experiences. His choices, his commitment, and his integrity are essential to his personhood. Andersen’s novel tells us its hero is a genius who has been reduced to wretchedness as a result of his circumstances. Nonsense, snorts Kierkegaard, “Genius is not a rush candle that goes out in a puff of air” (88). Andersen’s hero (and thus Andersen himself) is charged with being a coward, succumbing to self-pity and weakness all in the name of art and poetry. For Kierkegaard, Andersen is an incomplete person who has produced an unfinished work of art.
Unsurprisingly, the review rankled. Andersen, though young, was already a celebrated author at the time and expected more reverence from an upstart nobody like Søren. The two men moved in similar social and literary circles, and Kierkegaard had broken etiquette with his contentious and highly personal critique. Reared in a family that revelled in the cut-and-thrust of argument for argument’s sake, “the Fork” had struck again. By way of revenge, Andersen caricatured Søren as a repetitive, nonsensical parrot in The Shoes of Fortune, and wrote a play that quoted extensive passages from Søren’s review to comic effect. This was the first time Søren’s barbed wit brought literary revenge upon his head. It would not be the last.
Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates
September 16, 1841
Søren Kierkegaard
The Concept of Irony is the published version of Søren’s master’s dissertation, which is equivalent to today’s doctorate. Apart from its content, the dissertation itself was notable for the fact that Søren sought permission to write in Danish, rather than Latin as was usually required. Søren claimed that as his study included a discussion of European “Romanticism,” to write in a language that knew nothing of this cultural movement would be “as unreasonable as asking someone to use squares to describe a circle” (JP 2308).
In the book, Søren enlists Socrates in his critique of the Romantic literature and mind-set that had gripped the imagination of the people of his day. Romanticism is the name given to the cluster of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century artists, writers, thinkers, and politicians who, in a reaction against the soulless rationalism of the Enlightenment, emphasised natural emotion, intuition, and subjectivity. To be ironic is to pretend ignorance, or to adopt a stance opposite from what you know to be the truth for the sake of that truth.
The book is set in two, unequal, parts. The long first part deals with Socrates and argues his life and thought is primarily understood through the lens of irony. This argument is traced through the key Socratic dialogues and is also shown to be the key to explaining Socrates’ actions in his own decadent Greek culture. In the face of the Sophists who treated “truth” as a matter of rhetoric and mutual agreement, Socrates pretended to be foolish in order to show the “wise” they had no wisdom at all. In Irony, Socrates represents a position of “infinite negativity”: always demolishing but not able to build. In his longing for a universal Truth, Socrates rejected all the temporary “truths” of his society. This might be “negative,” but at least it does not topple one lesser god only to put another one up in its place.
The second part of Irony is much shorter. Here, the concept of “irony” is seen to have taken root in a corrupt form in the literature and mind-set of Romanticism. Søren likes the Romantic displeasure at smug bourgeois life, custom-bound and habitual. The Romantics, he says, breathe fresh air into this spiritless, monotonous existence. Yet the Romantics are portrayed as using their irony for petty, adolescent mockery. They have no conception of Socrates’ infinite, absolute negativity, which undermines all assumptions about human ability to produce something True. The Romantics rightly accuse modernity of trapping people in a slavery of social customs, materialism, and shallow religiosity. Yet the Romantics also condemn people to a slavish devotion to their own subjective passions and immature whims. Irony, argues Kierkegaard, is a necessary moment on the way to exposing a lie. But it fails when it becomes the new lie under which people live.
Intellectually, the book suggests a significant future development in Kierkegaard’s thought. Irony criticises Socrates for not having a vision of the role of the state—he sees only individuals and not commonality. Here, the young Kierkegaard sides with Hegel: a position he would later forthrightly reject: “What a Hegelian fool I was!” (JP 4281). Ironically (!) the focus on the individual, and the Socratic method for drawing individuals from their common crowds, would become the hallmark of Kierkegaard’s mature life and work. Personally, Kierkegaard had a vested interest in irony. The book was written during the period leading up to Søren’s break up with Regine, with all the elaborate schemes distancing Søren’s public actions from his real feelings that accompanied that period. The pseudonymous nature of most of Kierkegaard’s authorship is also deeply ironic, as are many of the stances Kierkegaard took under his own name. Significantly, at the end of his life Søren would employ Socratic irony by claiming not to be a Christian, thus exposing the Christianity of Christendom as no Christianity at all.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
February 20, 1843
Multiple pseudonymous authors compiled and edited by Victor Eremita
“It may at times have occurred to you, dear reader, to doubt somewhat the accuracy of that familiar philosophical thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer” (3).
Kierkegaard considered his authorship proper to have begun with Either/Or. It is the first work in a series of pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous books intended to introduce the reader to the various stages of life as expressed by different characters in Christendom.
The book opens with a shaggy-dog tale of how the editor, Victor Eremita (which means “triumphant hermit”), acquired an old writing desk only to find a series of loose papers stuffed into a secret compartment. Either/Or purports to be Victor’s publication of those papers. Most of the material is attributed to two further pseudonyms. “A,” a young man living a hedonistic life of pleasure, and “B,” an old man who turns out to be a judge called William. The Judge extols the ethical life to “A,” especially as it is found in marriage. The book is peppered with other essays and pieces, most notably the shocking “Seducer’s Diary,” which details the seduction and then abandonment of a young woman, and a concluding sermon reminding all the characters in the book “in relation to God we are always in the wrong” (350).
Like all of Kierkegaard’s books, this one is concerned with the state of our existence and with how to become an authentic person. He identifies three stages of existence—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Either/Or is mostly concerned with the first two, with hints of the religious breaking through. The aesthete lives for experience and lives by appearance. His life finds its highest meaning in drama, music, and sensuous love. Either/Or contains the stories of “A,” the Seducer, and various operatic figures such as Don Juan. Here, the aesthetic life comes across as appealing and articulate, but also one filled with boredom, selfishness, and callous treatment of others. The second half of the book is given over to the Judge, whose longwinded prose is intentionally supposed to remind the reader of a dull lecture, albeit one that contains much wisdom. The Judge is an “ethical” man, which means he has chosen a life of responsibility for others. The Judge is happier than “A” because his choices are more meaningful and thus more important to him. The ethical person is involved with other people, while the aesthete is confined mostly to his own imagination. Furthermore, the aesthete flits from one temporary experience to the next while the ethical man lives according to eternal principles. In this way, becoming an authentic person is seen to happen only when the individual chooses to live according to a duty external to himself rather than according to some whim of self-satisfaction or human invention.
Except Judge William too is still less than a person. The Either/Or of the title is
not the choice of either aesthetic existence or ethical existence. It is a choice between the aesthetic and the ethical on one side, and the religious on the other. “Before God we are always in the wrong” is a reminder that all stages of life rely on adherence to the systems and inventions of man. The ethical Judge might be using the language of “eternity,” but in reality he is conforming to the relative moral habits of his culture no less than the aesthete who lives only for sensation. The two stages are necessary for an authentic life, but they need to be brought under a third. Either/Or is also a comment on Hegel, who famously proposed that all opposition and contradiction is an illusion. For Hegel, one thesis creates its antithesis, which together in turn becomes a synthesis. That synthesis itself produces an antithesis, and so on and so on. The history of the world is the history of the Big Idea (God) unfolding in this way. Significantly, it is in mankind’s highest developed culture that Hegel thinks the Mind of God is best expressed. Instead of seeing either God or man, Hegel sees both/and. It is the idea that human nations and civilisations can generate eternal Truth that Kierkegaard begins to undermine in Either/Or.
Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses:
Two Upbuilding Discourses
May 16, 1843
Three Upbuilding Discourses
October 16, 1843
Four Upbuilding Discourses
December 6, 1843
Two Upbuilding Discourses
March 5, 1844
Three Upbuilding Discourses
June 8, 1844
Four Upbuilding Discourses
August 31, 1844
Søren Kierkegaard
When it comes to faith, what is needed is “a different kind of talk” (9).
Søren published these short, theological pieces under his own name. Eventually, he would reissue the eighteen disparate discourses under one title. However, the original publications were designed more or less to accompany the pseudonymous output, with some discourses arriving the same day as other texts. The sequence began four months after the publication of Either/Or. Compared to the rapturous reception of Victor Eremita and friends, the religious reflections were not a publishing success. “With my left hand I passed Either/Or out into the world, with my right hand Two Upbuilding Discourses; but they all or almost all took the left hand with their right” (POV 36).
While it is significant Søren used his own name for these texts, as a “different kind of talk” they are not conventionally straightforward Christian devotional texts. As with everything Kierkegaard wrote, he had “the Single Individual” in mind, intending the reader to follow the thought experiments and exercises as part of their spiritual formation into authentic Christianity and true personhood. “Upbuilding” refers to the building up of the self and is sometimes translated as “edifying.” “Discourses” alerts readers to the idea that these pieces are less (or perhaps more) than sermons. The Discourses are overtly Christian in a way the pseudonymous texts are not, though they studiously avoid claiming the authority of an apostle or the role of a clergyman ordained by God to preach his Word.
The themes vary widely, but most of the discourses adopt a scriptural verse or biblical character upon which to reflect. A sample of section headings serve as an indication of the whole: “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins” (1843); “The Lord Gave, and the Lord Took Away; Blessed Be the Name of the Lord” (1843); “Every Good Gift and Every Perfect Gift Is From Above” (1843); “Think about Your Creator in the Days of Your Youth” (1844); “He Must Increase; I Must Decrease” (1844); “The Thorn in the Flesh” (1844).
Many of the essays contain a similar inscription: “To the late Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, formerly a clothing merchant here in the city, my father, these discourses are dedicated.” Other personal elements are present in these writings. Regine’s presence can often be detected, for example in the Second Discourse, entitled “Every Good and Perfect Gift Is from Above.” Søren suggests the person who attempts to find their ultimate meaning in a universe that runs along the strict principles of Reward and Punishment will be doomed to frustration. All of God’s gifts are perfect, even (perhaps especially) the ones that appear to thwart our desires. Even tragedy needs to be received with thanksgiving for the reason that God can use evil for good. Kierkegaard’s description of personal tragedy being redeemed by God is especially poignant in light of the fact that at this time he too was living in the pain of broken love. The Discourses are an attempt to articulate how it is a truly religious person can bless the name of the Lord when he gives and when he takes away.
Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology
October 16, 1843
Constantine Constantius
“Hope is a lovely maiden who slips away between one’s fingers; recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies” (132).
If God exists, then God is the source of all existence. What is more, if God exists then God is Eternal, not temporary. Thus, if human selves are to realise their authentic existence, they must relate rightly to God, which is to say, to the Eternal. It is the self’s identity becoming authentic through a right relationship to Eternity that occupies this book. The idea of “repetition” is crucial for personhood. Without repeated events, there can be no persistent reality, no continuity of a self. Without repetition, life would be one fleeting and unconnected experience after another. Repetition happens when a self commits, and recommits, its new self with the ideals and choices of the past self. By repeatedly choosing oneself, a person unites their past and future selves in the present. Without repetition there can be no meaning—“all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise” (149). The continuity of existence through time is what makes “repetition” more a matter of eternity than of temporality. Like the Eternal, repetition is ever-present and ever-future. The self that chooses itself again in the moment is an ever-renewing self: every choice that entails the choices of the past also opens up new avenues in the future. Like Eternity, repetition is pregnant with possibility. However, without a right relationship to the Eternal, repetition becomes bare endurance, much like the pointless task of Sisyphus doomed to roll the same rock up the same hill. Only choices made “before God” give repetition its value and meaning.
Working with the theme that repetition is necessary for meaningful identity, Repetition contrasts different ways people attempt to seek this out. Pagans such as Socrates and pre-Christians like the writer of Ecclesiastes adopt the attitude “what is new becomes old.” The meaning of existence has to be found by looking (or remembering) the past, for “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The aesthete of Christendom is such a person. The first half of Repetition tells the whimsical tale of a young man who, realising he enjoys his memories of his beloved more than he enjoys her, takes a return trip to Berlin to relive his most formative experiences and to rediscover himself. The experiment is a disaster and the young man learns that by attempting to relive the past he has robbed his experiences of the novelty and meaning they held for him. If there is to be true repetition, it cannot be had by replicating external experiences. This leads to the shorter, second section of the book, which explores the ethical approach to repetition. The ethicist realises that meaningful repetition has to do with responsible self-choice. Yet this too is doomed to disaster for the simple reason that no amount of discipline and constancy of character can restore a broken, sinful self to wholeness. Here, the religious possibility of repetition arises. For the one who says, “I am making everything new” (Revelation 21:5), what is old becomes new. The repetition of Eternity does not just repeat a life. It redeems it.
Readers should be forgiven if they read strong autobiographical connections into this book. The subject of a young man aesthetically, ethically, and religiously rethinking his purpose in life after a failed romance hits rather close to (Søren’s) home. A few months previous to its publication, Søren had also fled to Berli
n when he realised Regine did not hate him. The book is full of allusions to the possibility of restoration of lost love. Yet before the book was sent to the printers, Søren learned the news that Regine had become engaged to Fritz Schlegel. The manuscript editions show evidence of revision and addition in light of this news, expanding the “religious” aspect of spiritual restoration in the face of despair and adding a number of ambiguous comments about the constancy of womanly love. Yet readers would be mistaken to read Repetition as straightforward autobiography. As Søren liked to constantly remind his readers, he was a poet who takes the stuff of life (including his own) and spins it into new things. Constantine Constantius is not writing nonfiction, he is writing an experimental essay on what it is to be a self and how one goes about becoming one.
Fear and Trembling
October 16, 1843
Johannes de Silentio
“The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is” (30).
Kierkegaard arranged to have this book published on the same day as Repetition. It is attributed to the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, who repeatedly tells his readers he is not a man who has faith. Nonetheless, Johannes de Silentio sets out to explore what he thinks faith might be. He does this primarily through a series of extended reflections on the person of Abraham and the attempted sacrifice of Isaac. Fear and Trembling treats the Genesis story seriously, but this is not a work of biblical exposition. Instead, Johannes attempts to get inside the head of this “father of faith,” retelling the story from multiple perspectives and comparing Abraham’s predicament to other tragic stories drawn from classical myth. It is significant Johannes often admits defeat, thus living up to his name John “the Silent One.” “Every time [he considered the story] he sank down wearily, folded his hands and said, ‘No one was as great as Abraham. Who is able to understand him?’ ”(14).