Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  In service of understanding the faith of Abraham, the book introduces some key ideas. One is the idea that “the ethical” can be a temptation away from “the religious.” Abraham’s religious stance results in his willingness to commit an offence against that which is universally considered to be ethical. It is always true that fathers should not kill their sons. Yet Abraham’s right position towards God entails willingness to do just this; hence, faith is something higher than ethics. Here de Silentio introduces the idea of the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Teleological means “purposeful,” and suspension implies a temporary pause. Thus faith entails an openness to the possibility that the demands of common morality may be temporally suspended for a higher purpose. De Silentio is quick to point out that faith does not always imply killing—it occurs whenever someone resigns that which is right and good while at the same time believing this will be restored to them. Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac while at the very same time believing that God’s promise to bless Abraham through Isaac would still be fulfilled. De Silentio likens this double posture of “resigning” and “receiving” to a dancer’s leap. (Although the phrase never appears in the original Danish, this is the source of the English idiom “Leap of Faith.”) De Silentio calls people who move through life resigning “the ethical” while retaining hope it will be restored “Knights of Faith.” The Knights do not call attention to themselves. Indeed, like Abraham, they must remain silent. To justify “faith” by making reference to what is common-sensically and universally considered “ethical” is to succumb to a temptation.

  The book contains some of the most striking ideas of Kierkegaard’s authorship; however, it is significant how few of them appear in any of his later works. The Knight of Faith and his silent, anonymous faith does not show up again, and de Silentio’s vision is subject to criticism by Kierkegaard’s later pseudonyms. Although he talks about “faith,” it is not actually Christianity with which de Silentio is concerned—he resolutely focuses on characters from pagan antiquity and pre-Hebrew history, and the figure of Jesus Christ is mentioned only once in passing and never named. At the same time, the theme of resigning and receiving is clearly related to the events of Kierkegaard’s own life and his tortured relationship with Regine—a connection that did not go unnoticed by her or anyone who knew of their situation.

  The thinly veiled personal nature of the book and the lyrical genius Kierkegaard employs to develop his ideas has made Fear andTrembling one of the most compelling and influential books, not only of Kierkegaard’s career, but in the history of Western thought. Kierkegaard himself was aware of this book’s potential to overshadow the rest (“O, once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the book” (JP 6491), yet the reasons above, and the pseudonymous nature of the piece, should make readers pause before treating Johannes de Silentio’s vision of faith as Søren Kierkegaard’s last and best word on the subject.

  Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy

  June 13, 1844

  Johannes Climacus

  “… can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?” (title page).

  Philosophical Fragments is attributed to Johannes Climacus, one of Kierkegaard’s favourite pseudonyms, and one to whom is entrusted some of the ideas nearest and dearest to Kierkegaard’s heart. Søren’s journals reveal his prevarication over whether to use a pseudonym at all for this book, and it was only at the last minute he scratched his name from the manuscript and submitted the text to the publishers as “Johannes Climacus” instead. Climacus had been used as a standin for Søren in an earlier book with a high autobiographical content (also called Johannes Climacus), which Søren had left unfinished. The name will appear a few years later as the author of the magnum opus Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which at the time Søren thought would conclude his authorship. Philosophical Fragments is a short book, written from the point of view of someone who claims to have faith but who is still uneasy calling himself a Christian. The subject matter revolves around the limits of human reason, methods of learning truth, and the relationship between faith, historical events, and paradox. The title is a satirical dig at Hegel and his followers who approached matters of faith, reason, and historical truth from a distinctly systematic angle, offering grand, holistic schemes that allowed for no loose fragments of thought.

  One of the major Kierkegaardian themes Fragments develops is the difference between “pagan” and “Christian” categories of conveying truth. Socrates, the greatest pagan of all time, embodies the “mauetic,” or “midwife,” method. His goal was to bring the truth out from within his learners, getting them to effectively recall what was already lodged within. Socrates was not the object of the learning—indeed, he must become less so that the learner can attain self-knowledge. Fragments contrasts this with an approach to truth in which the Teacher is the message. Here, no amount of midwifery will bring forth truth from within the learner, for the learner exists in a state of sin. Truth must be revealed, not recalled: the condition for receiving Truth is not to gain more knowledge, but to repent and be saved. With the introduction of a Teacher who is himself the Truth, and not merely a vehicle for relaying useful self-knowledge, Fragments is led to examine another grand Kierkegaardian theme: offence at—or belief in—the paradox of the incarnation. It is worth noting here that Fragments is not an explicitly “Christian” book. As a way of preventing the Christianised reader from making too easy assumptions, the book studiously avoids talking about “God” and instead refers throughout to “the god.” The name of Jesus Christ is not mentioned, and the incarnation is discussed wholly in terms of a paradox of mutually conflicting concepts, rather than a specific person with a narrative life. “I shall merely trace [the idea] in a few lines without reference to whether it was historical or not” (45). The Paradox is the presence of the Finite with the Infinite, of the Eternal with the Temporal. It is a thought that reason cannot think, and it is with this paradox that Climacus thinks the learner must reside without being offended if he is to be said to have faith. The time and place of the incarnation is less important to Climacus than is the claim that the incarnation had a time and a place at all. How can faith in any one point in history be the source of salvation? Fragments considers whether the first witnesses of the incarnation (the “first-hand disciples”) had any advantages over any second-hand disciples who came later. It suggests being a second-hand disciple is impossible only if faith is a matter of accumulating knowledge. Yet faith is not a matter of knowledge. It is a matter of not being offended when confronted with the Paradox. The Paradox of the Infinite residing with the Finite is not a problem that can be solved with more information; thus, the first-hand disciples faced the same challenge as did the second-hand disciples. The incarnation was as offensive to reason one second after it happened as it is thousands of years later.

  Concept of Anxiety

  June 17, 1844

  Vigilius Haufniensis

  Søren arranged to have this book published five days after Fragments and on the same day as Prefaces. Unlike these books, and true to its name, Anxiety is a serious, convoluted read. Søren’s own anxious inner life clearly informs the work; however, this is no simple autobiography. The book itself is laid out like a sort of textbook, prompting some interpreters to speculate it was intended to be a satire on the Hegelian method that had so gripped Kierkegaard’s contemporaries who treated personal subjects with a detached, objective air. The book takes as its subject matter such related topics as freedom, original sin, inherited guilt, and the overriding sense of angst, which Haufniensis thinks affects all humans everywhere.

  As an idea, angst can be as difficult to understand as it has been significant in the history of Western thought. Kierkegaard’s earliest English translators used the word “dread,” while later scholars opt
ed for “anxiety.” Secular existentialist philosophers have made much of Kierkegaardian angst as the fear of death and unavoidable annihilation that looms over all human decisions. Yet angst for Haufniensis was not solely negative. Nor was it fear of an inevitable reality. Instead, angst is about free possibility and is deeply ennobling. Only human beings can experience anxiety about the possibilities of the future because only human beings have the ability to freely choose their lives. “If a human being were a beast or an angel, he could not be in anxiety … the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man” (155). Angst is not fear of what is real. It is the ambiguous sense of unease people feel when considering the undefined possibilities of life. Specifically for Haufniensis, it is the unease humans face when prompted by the Eternal God to become an Authentic Person. This possibility is attractive and repulsive at the same time. Attractive, because it represents the true home for every new self. Repulsive, because such a relation to God also requires a death to the old self. Sin is what happens when the person, in fear, turns away from the possibility of relation to the Eternal. Some points that follow from this are worth noting. First, fear comes from angst, but it is not synonymous with it. Secondly, “sin” is seen as the propensity for fearful turning from God (and consequent self-betrayal), which all humans share. Original Sin is the act of the will that occurred first with Adam and occurs every time a self fearfully clutches to itself rather than turns to God. Thirdly, sin follows angst, but the presence of angst does not cause sin. Instead, angst indicates the presence of spiritual freedom. With his prayer “Not my will but yours be done,” Jesus Christ faced the possibilities of his future responsibly and authentically. The great angst of Gethsemane revealed a spiritually great Person.

  Prefaces: Light Reading for People in Various Estates According to Time and Opportunity

  June 17, 1844

  Nicholas Notabene

  “Writing a preface is like being aware that one is beginning to fall in love … every event an intimation of the transfiguration” (6).

  Spare a thought for poor old Nicholas Notabene. All the chap wants to do is write, but his wife has forbidden it. For her, living with a writer is like being married to man who is never home. “To be an author when one is a husband … is open infidelity”!

  Not wishing to face the wrath of this good woman, Nicholas alights on an ingenious solution. Rather than publish one book of his own, he will write the prefaces to a number of books that have not yet been written. In this way, Nicholas can communicate all he wants to say without succumbing to the temptation to be an author.

  Prefaces appeared on the same day as the Concept of Anxiety, and a week after Philosophical Fragments and Three Upbuilding Discourses. As the title and pseudonym imply, it is a lighter work than the others, filled with humorous observations and satirical swipes. While the format of Prefaces appears less rigorous than a philosophical or religious text, the content retains themes familiar to any reader of Kierkegaard. Much of the satire is aimed at key literary figures such as J. L. Heiberg and H. L. Martensen. Kierkegaard also has wider targets in mind: Notabene prefaces books that reflect a general cultural intoxication with Hegel’s philosophy, as well as Kierkegaard’s own reading public, who care more about the appearance of sophistication owning a difficult book provides, than they do about actually reading the book itself.

  A literary public intellectual, Heiberg had written reviews of two of Kierkegaard’s previous books, Either/Or and Repetition. The reviews were not good, but more so, Kierkegaard felt that in his misunderstanding of the books, Heiberg had misrepresented them too. Prefaces makes fun of Heiberg’s pretentious attempts to “go beyond” Hegel, and his pompous predilection to treat his writing as gifts to the reading public. Martensen—never far from Kierkegaard’s sights—is satirised for his presentation of the high point of Christian history as producing the sophisticated, cultured chattering class of Golden Age Denmark. Martensen, a Hegelian theologian, was also well-known in Denmark for adopting the phrase “doubt everything” (lifted from the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes). Notabene’s fawning Prefaces in fact satirise this approach, ironically showing up systematic philosophies that supposedly start with nothing but end up claiming to describe Absolute Truth. Notabene confesses he cannot doubt everything, but at least he can doubt whether the philosophers understand their own thought. The Hegelian philosophy that had so entranced Danish culture was one that proposed an endless development of thought based on opposites: from thesis to antithesis to synthesis.

  “I am so obtuse that philosophy cannot become understandable to me. The opposite of this is that philosophy is so sagacious that it cannot comprehend my obtuseness. These opposites are mediated into a high unity, that is, a common obtuseness” (58).

  Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions

  April 29, 1845

  Søren Kierkegaard

  These three non-pseudonymous discourses on the occasions of confession, marriage, and a funeral were written at the same time as the pseudonymous Stages on Life’s Way and came out a day before. Unsurprisingly the occasions correspond in interesting ways with the stages of life in the companion title. True to form, the pseudonymous stuff was more popular than the material in Kierkegaard’s own name, a fact not lost on the author.

  The first occasion of confession leads Kierkegaard to explore what it means to seek God. It is a reflection on the feelings that arise when one has a truly aesthetic appreciation for nature and the wonder that occurs as a result. The discourse surmises that when a self is alone with itself away from the distractions of human civilisation, it will be more amenable to a godly encounter. Like confession in a church, the appreciation for nature will bring one into contact with God. “When the forest frowns at eventide, then the night’s moon gets lost in the trees … then the pagan suddenly sees the marvel of a luminous effect that grips him, then he sees the unknown, and worship is the expression of wonder” (19). Discourses does not think nature worship is the same as Christianity; instead, Christianity is the completion and attainment of what the honest pagan dimly apprehends and desires. Nature sparks wonder, but it is not itself a fit object of worship. Man is not one with nature. Man in nature is lonely until he finds God. Yet for this he must own up to his guilt and in solitary confession admit his self is not yet a fit home for the Divine.

  The occasion of a wedding recalls the earnest ethical discourses of Judge William in Either/Or. Like the Judge, Kierkegaard has short shrift for romantic notions and flowery rhetoric. Love does not “conquer all” when it is infatuated happiness, but only when it is a duty of daily commitment. In keeping the marriage vows, a person enters into a relationship that must be renewed again and again in the moment. When men and women live ever-presently, they open themselves up to the Eternal. “So, then, a true conception of life and of oneself is required for the resolution of marriage; but this already implies the second great requirement, which is just like the first: a true conception of God … thus a language is required in which they talk to each other. This language is the resolution, the only language in which God will involve himself with a human being” (63).

  If Kierkegaard departed from clichéd sentimentality when discoursing on the responsibilities of marriage, the occasion at the graveside finds him departing from the usual sombre tone of a funeral. In the discourse, the reality of death is a route to authentic living. Death is the occasion that brings everyone, equally, before God. Likewise, the certain knowledge of our death is the occasion for hopeful, fruitful living now in the present. This is a form of living every single person can choose, regardless of their station in life, crowd, or culture. Kierkegaard refers to this awakened, aware life as “earnestness.” “Death is the schoolmaster of earnestness … precisely by its leaving to the single individual the task of searching himself … Death says, ‘I exist; if anyone wants to learn from me, then let him come to me’ ” (74–76). The certainty of death is a wake-up call for persons to live in the m
oment as Single Individuals. “If death is night then life is day … the terse but impelling cry of earnestness, like death’s terse cry, is: This very day!” (82–83).

  Stages on Life’s Way

  April 30, 1845

  Multiple pseudonymous authors compiled and edited by Hilarius Bookbinder

  It is evening in the forest. The sun has set, leaving only a cool darkness. Five young, worldly aesthetes gather for a banquet in a fairy-tale hall under the trees. Here we meet a “young man” ambivalent about the possibility of fatherhood, a cynical Ladies’ Tailor, Constantine from Repetition, and Victor Eremita and Johannes the Seducer from Either/Or. The five meet to talk about love, philosophy, and women. Their monologues grow increasingly disdainful of marriage and the female sex. Women are, at best, an inspiration for poems and song. At worst they are mad degenerates. The best thing to do to avoid the trap women represent is to avoid commitment and to treat love of them as an act of momentary enjoyment. By way of sealing their pact, the men throw their wine goblets out into the dark: a libation to the gods of the world.

  On their way home, they encounter Judge William and his wife. William has written a manuscript about marriage, which Victor steals away. The Judge’s missive becomes the second stage of Stages. In stark contrast to the misogyny of the aesthetes, the moral man urges a view of marriage as the highest of human endeavours. The young men want “love” but they will never have it because they lack resolution. Only a self, choosing daily to dedicate itself to another, will know love. Marriage is a sacred duty.