Kierkegaardian Essays: A Festschrift in Honour of George Pattison 9783110742480, 9783110741995

Citation preview

Kierkegaardian Essays

Kierkegaard Studies

Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart and Karl Verstrynge in cooperation with Peter Šajda

Monograph Series 31 Edited by Karl Verstrynge

Kierkegaardian Essays A Festschrift in Honour of George Pattison Edited by Clare Carlisle and Steven Shakespeare

ISBN 978-3-11-074199-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-074248-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-074262-6 ISSN 1434-2952 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952019 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; Detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface The authors of these fourteen essays have been asked: What does it mean to be Kierkegaardian? In his extraordinary authorship, Søren Kierkegaard famously distinguished between the “what” and the “how” of Christianity. “What…” and “How…” open two kinds of question, and Kierkegaard suggested that the most essential truths of existence should be sought by asking, “How…?” How should we relate to ourselves, to one another, and to God? How should we live and how should we die? How should we be in the world? How can we become human? The adjective “Kierkegaardian” directs our attention to this questioning “how.” It names many possibilities: perhaps a certain way of philosophizing, existing, choosing, loving, looking, listening, reading, writing, teaching, making art, praying, going to church—or not going to church. “How…” gestures to subjectivity, one of Kierkegaard’s most fundamental philosophical categories, while “What…” often signals an objectifying line of thought. As Ingolf Dalferth puts it in his conclusion to the first essay in this book, “The crucial question is not what we are and ought to do, but how we can and should live our lives in order to remain true to the radical finitude and deep passivity of our existence.” This Kierkegaardian “how” is often acknowledged by scholars: sometimes it is mentioned as an aside, or invoked in a conclusion, or considered as a key ingredient of his philosophy. But what happens when it becomes the main ingredient? What happens when we examine it closely and directly? The Kierkegaardian “how” is of course difficult to pin down: it is more like an adverbial clause than the subject or the object of a proposition. Attending to it requires a shift in perspective, and it sometimes elicits new kinds of argument, new kinds of reflection, in order to bring it to light. These Kierkegaardian Essays begin with the broadest—and deepest—Kierkegaardian question: how to be a human being? The first two essays address this question: for Dalferth, its answer lies in the theological insight that “we have not made ourselves, but have been made to make ourselves,” and thus human being is both created and creative. “Kierkegaardian thinkers see everything in a different light because they start from here,” argues Dalferth. Clare Carlisle investigates this simultaneously theological and creative task of human making through a biographical analysis of Kierkegaard’s relation to his authorship that draws on Étienne Souriau’s concept of the “work to be made.” Her essay identifies a distinctively Kierkegaardian problem at the heart of the authorship: how to find the courage to truly, authentically care about what matters to us. As Carlisle suggests, in responding to this problem Kierkegaard insisted on both levhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-001

VI

Preface

ity and seriousness. This is just one example of the contrarian logic of conjunction that Joakim Garff discerns in Kierkegaard’s work: not either/or but both/and, because “ambivalence and duplicity” form the deep structure of his thought. The Kierkegaardian conjunction of levity and seriousness is pursued by Daniel Whistler and Stephen Mulhall, whose essays seek—in very different ways—to uncover a specifically Kierkegaardian philosophical style. Both Whistler and Mulhall draw attention to the ludic, absurd or ridiculous strands running through Kierkegaard’s work. Whistler follows the metaphysical turn in contemporary continental philosophy to argue that the key to Kierkegaardian speculation lies in “the relation between ludic textuality and metaphysical ambition” that he discerns in Kierkegaard’s corpus. Questioning the idea that Kierkegaardian indirect communication is opposed to, or at least in tension with, constructive metaphysical thinking, Whistler asks how indirect communication might become speculative: “How might a Kierkegaardian thinker speculate precisely by way of indirection?” And he concludes that a Kierkegaardian speculation embraces the deep “ambiguity” of discussing transcendent reality. This means “recognising the promise of talking about such things, the obligation to talk about such things—as well as the near-certain shipwreck that awaits anyone who does so talk about these things.” For Mulhall, too, philosophy’s seriousness and “ludicrousness” are intertwined. Doubting that “philosophy’s essence is untouched by the ridiculous,” he sets off on the trail of a distinctively “Kierkegaardian satire.” His essay “The Riddle of Irony” focuses on Johannes Climacus, whom Mulhall regards as Kierkegaard’s most philosophical and most satirical pseudonym; it concludes with the quintessentially Kierkegaardian insight that not only Climacus—or Kierkegaard—but “each of us is a riddle we can neither solve nor set aside, an inexhaustible object of seduction and fascination” (italics added). Many of the contributors to this book would agree that reading Kierkegaard can change one’s life, and the essays by Hugh Pyper and Iben Damgaard begin by affirming this. Recalling his own childhood encounter with Kierkegaard’s writing, Pyper explores the phenomenon of “childhood reading” and identifies a distinctively Kierkegaardian reading experience: “a continued shock of remembrance that beneath the surface of our lives, whether calm or stormy, dark shapes circle in the abyss—and yet we are afloat.” For Pyper, Tove Jansson, the Scandinavian author of the Moomin stories, exemplifies a Kierkegaardian approach to storytelling. Jansson’s Moomin series ends by providing “no answers… and the questions point beyond the story”: this Socratic open-endedness, Pyper suggests, offers young readers a glimpse of “that Kierkegaardian sense of the terror and joy in the awareness of our fragility.” Damgaard focuses on a very different work of art, Carl Dreyer’s 1855 film Ordet (“The Word”), which features two Kier-

Preface

VII

kegaardian figures, Johannes and Inger, who embody contrasting forms of religious faith. While Johannes—a melancholy young theology student who loses his mind in endless thoughts and doubts when he reads Kierkegaard—is a recognisably Kierkegaardian character, Damgaard argues that Inger embodies a saner, quieter Kierkegaardian earnestness “that reveals itself in the smiling lightness of everyday gestures of love.” Joel Rasmussen’s essay “The Generous Eye” is similarly interested in the Kierkegaardian “how” of love. Rasmussen discerns a Kierkegaardian phenomenology in a certain way of looking, of reading, and of writing, characterised by “the search for apt expressions to enable familiar things to appear in a new light.” Finding this phenomenological method at work in Kierkegaard’s 1843 discourse “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” Rasmussen concludes that this text “affirms that what one sees depends on how one sees.” Continuing this reflection on the ethical “how” of loving, Matthew Kirkpatrick asks how neighbourly love can be carried out. His essay shows how Kierkegaard draws on Augustine and Schleiermacher to conceive “a reciprocal, Socratic relationality” which depends on both unity and difference: “human relationships retain their richness when individuals are both united and separated by a shared idea.” For Kirkpatrick, this Kierkegaardian relationality is achieved through a combination of love and forgetting. In her essay “Vocation and the Voice of Conscience,” Claudia Welz explores the Kierkegaardian question of “how God can call us and how we can receive his call.” Arguing that a Kierkegaardian “voice” of conscience is marked by both listening and silence, Welz asks, “What if conscience ‘speaks’ only silently, saying nothing specific, not providing any propositions, but only uncanny feelings such as anxiety, guilt and shame, in order to provoke questioning and self-scrutiny?” In dialogue with George Pattison, she suggests that a Socratic form of contemplative prayer is essential to Kierkegaardian faith; this kind of prayer “destines us to listen to God and confide in him.” Kierkegaard wanted his readers to judge for themselves, and this means, Welz concludes, that “if one wants to be Kierkegaardian, one has to preserve one’s independence from Kierkegaard.” Like Welz, Steven Shakespeare celebrates the anti-dogmatic character of Kierkegaardian thinking and probes a certain experience of silence, in which nothingness— not knowing, not speaking—emerges as a peculiarly Kierkegaardian method of “agnostic” theological enquiry. For Shakespeare, this method involves refusing “to be the conduit of an unchanging content… Rather, it is a work of serious attention, commitment and love.” Kierkegaard’s writings were, of course, attuned not only to the call of God and the deep silence of the self, but also to the noisy clamour of what he called “the present age.” Christopher Barnett’s essay mines Kierkegaard’s analyses of

VIII

Preface

both melancholy and modernity in order to articulate a philosophical response to the rise of depression in the era of modern technology. Barnett argues that “to be a Kierkegaardian is never to be comfortable or satisfied. On the other hand, this sense of melancholic dissatisfaction is not an end in itself.” A Kierkegaardian perspective, he concludes, must recognise that “the cure begins with seeing the problem for what it is. One cannot simply ignore the challenges of the present age but, instead, must pass through the crucible of depression before leaving it behind.” For Noreen Khawaja, to be Kierkegaardian is—among other things—“to avoid metacommentary about what one has said.” This maxim applies to Joakim Garff’s concluding “Diapsalmata” as much as to Khawaja’s own essay. As Garff observes, in reflecting on Kierkegaard’s lyricism, “the majority of his texts have something in common with poetry: they can never be paraphrased without significant loss of meaning. They can only be quoted.” This resistance to paraphrase and explication—which are, of course, two familiar features of scholarly work—reflects the fact that for Kierkegaard, as for his hero Socrates, philosophical communication was often more like performance art than scientific, systematic exposition. This performative element in Kierkegaardian thought is explored through two short essays that offer “interludes” in the series of scholarly engagements. Combining the characteristic Kierkegaardian features of lightness and earnestness, Khawaja’s essay “Wayward Intimacies” raises questions about literary and philosophical genre in tracing how Kierkegaard’s autofictions map out characters and situations, gestures and postures, moods and fragments of moods, which hover between life and art. In pursuit of this Kierkegaardian ephemera, her piece follows the figure of the seducer from the pages of Either/Or to a series of scenes set in the liminal, shadowy space between fact and fiction—a space echoing with multiple Kierkegaardian voices. To be a Kierkegaardian writer, Khawaja suggests, is “to sift through shapes yet unclassified in search of a genre suited to the drama of mind.” Like Khawaja, Gordon Marino takes his cue from Kierkegaard’s autofictional dramas: his Kierkegaardian figure is the philosopher who wears his heart on his sleeve (even if that sleeve is part of a theatrical costume). Kierkegaard’s willingness to bring his personal life into his work drew sharp criticism from some of his contemporaries, particularly the journalist Peder Ludvig Møller whose irritation with Kierkegaard’s tendency to “expose his whole inner development to the public eye” precipitated the catastrophic “Corsair affair.”¹ Marino’s response is more positive: for him, Kierkegaard “nudges us to think in the first person,” and “this

 See Peder Ludvig Møller, Fædrelandet, nr. 2079, December 29, 1845 (translated in COR, 96 – 104).

Preface

IX

inside-out, as opposed to objective perspective, is the hallmark of Kierkegaardian thinking.” As Marino’s opening reference to the Edifying Discourses may remind us, Kierkegaard borrowed from the Pietist thinker A. H. Francke three metaphors for edifying reading: looking in a mirror, receiving a love letter, and following a royal command.² Marino’s own “interlude” combines all three of these elements, with its frank self-examination, its reflection on human intimacy, and its insistence on an urgent ethical earnestness that chooses this very day to overcome strife with love. As these preliminary remarks show, the contributors to this collection both explore and enact, in a variety of ways, their understanding of what it means to be Kierkegaardian. The essay form allows more scope for creativity than is often permitted by a chapter or article in a scholarly volume, and the collection as a whole is, from a literary point of view, more than the sum of its parts. It echoes Kierkegaard’s first major work, Either/Or (1843)—his bestselling book during his own lifetime, and still one of his most influential works—which is itself presented as an “edited collection” by multiple authors. This groundbreaking polyvocal text deploys many literary genres, and the authors of Kierkegaardian Essays draw on some of these: diapsalmata (Garff), experimental fiction (Khawaja), autobiography (Marino), and the upbuilding discourse (Shakespeare). Set in this recognizably Kierkegaardian literary context, the other essays—like the philosophical and aesthetic essays within Either/Or—jostle with texts that call into question the norms of academic discourse. We will not pretend to have found these essays in a secret drawer of an antique writing desk, as Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Victor Eremita discovered the papers that comprise Either/Or. ³ The essays were, however, kept secret from one person. Just as some of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses were written with a real or imagined occasion in mind, so this collection of essays has a special occasion: the 70th birthday of Professor George Pattison, whose distinguished career as a scholar, teacher and writer has been devoted, above all, to Kierkegaard. Joakim Garff’s closing essay honours this occasion by offering 70 Kierkegaardian “theses, declarations, and expressions of thanks.” After studying at the universities of Edinburgh and Durham, Professor Pattison began his academic career at King’s College, Cambridge in 1991; ten years later he moved to the University of Aarhus, before returning to Britain to take up the Lady Margaret Chair of Divinity at Oxford in 2004. In 2013 he moved to  See SKS 13, 53 – 62 / FSE, 25 – 35; on the link between Francke and Kierkegaard, see Lee C. Barrett, “Kierkegaard and Biblical Studies” in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Jon Stewart, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2015, pp. 150 – 151.  See SKS 2, 13 / EO1, 6.

X

Preface

the University of Glasgow, where he was the 1640 Chair of Divinity until his retirement in 2020. His astonishingly productive career has issued in more than twenty books—many of them about Kierkegaard, and all of them shaped by his profound encounter with Kierkegaard’s authorship. Beginning with Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious (1992), Pattison forged a pioneering path through Kierkegaard’s theological, philosophical and literary oeuvre, often returning to the themes of Art, Modernity and Faith—to quote the title of his very first book—that animated Kierkegaard’s own intellectual life. His books “Poor Paris!” Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Spectacular City (1999), Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, Theology (2002), Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century (2012) and Kierkegaard: The Quest for the Unambiguous Life (2013), among others, are landmarks of modern Kierkegaard scholarship. His most recent books bring Kierkegaardian insights to bear on the deepest metaphysical and existential matters: God, time, eternity, the devout life, and the question of being itself. George Pattison is also a fine translator of Kierkegaard. His anthology of Spiritual Writings (2000) is the perfect starting-point for readers embarking on their Kierkegaardian journey. He was one of the original editors of the twelve-volume English translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks recently published by Princeton University Press (2007– 2020). The essays in this collection seek to reflect, at least to some extent, the remarkable openness of Pattison’s engagement with Kierkegaard. Despite his eminence as a scholar, that engagement is not confined within the usual perimeters of academic work. Pattison has channeled his Kierkegaardian insights into his pastoral activity as a priest and preacher. While the effects of this activity are diffuse and impossible to measure, it is given a literary form in Kierkegaard’s Pastoral Dialogues (2012), a creative adaptation of a selection of Kierkegaard’s spiritual writings co-authored with Helle Møller Jensen. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Kierkegaard’s birth, Pattison produced another innovative adaptation: his splendid dramatization of Repetition, directed by Tara Isabella Brunton and performed in Oxford and in London’s Danish Church in May 2013. Pattison is now writing a new work of philosophical fiction titled Conversations With Dostoevsky, alongside his unfailingly thoughtful and eclectic blog Confessions of a Devout European, which he began on New Year’s Day, 2018 following the United Kingdom’s heartbreaking Brexit vote. The range of essays included here gestures towards the expansive and, at times, experimental range of Pattison’s own work by pushing beyond the normal expectations for a scholarly edited volume—and we are grateful to the KSMS editors for allowing this book to be an exception to the standard format of the series.

Preface

XI

Anyone fortunate enough to be taught by Professor Pattison—whether in Cambridge, Aarhus, Oxford or Glasgow—knows the breadth of his intellectual interests and his linguistic expertise. Somehow, amidst his magnificent contributions to Kierkegaard scholarship and his conscientious mentoring of numerous younger scholars, he managed to produce compelling studies of Martin Heidegger, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Paul Tillich. The many possibilities harboured in our use of the word “Kierkegaardian” reflects a motif of Professor Pattison’s work and pedagogy: his concern has always been to incite us to think for ourselves. We were both taught by George Pattison as undergraduates at Cambridge in the 1990s. Inspired by his teaching and emboldened by his kindness, we both stayed on to write PhD dissertations on Kierkegaard under his supervision. We cherish memories of unhurried conversations about philosophy, art, books, films, and even God in Professor Pattison’s study in King’s College. Like every author of these Kierkegaardian Essays—and like many other students and colleagues—we have been privileged to witness his remarkable generosity as a thinker, a scholar, a teacher, and—most important of all, as any Kierkegaardian knows—a human being. His work has touched all of us individually in incalculable ways, as well as fostering a community of intellectual enquiry that extends from Cambridge and Oxford to Scandinavia, Germany, North America, and Scotland. Along with the other authors, we offer these Kierkegaardian Essays in thanks and friendship to George Pattison, and in celebration of Søren Kierkegaard himself. Clare Carlisle and Steven Shakespeare

Table of Contents Ingolf Dalferth What Does It Mean to Be Human?

1

Clare Carlisle Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

15

Daniel Whistler Speculate Like a Kierkegaardian!

31

Stephen Mulhall The Riddle of Irony

43

Noreen Khawaja Interlude I: Wayward Intimacies Hugh S. Pyper A Smile From Every Child

61

67

Iben Damgaard “Was It—Love?” “No, No, It Was Søren Kierkegaard”

81

Joel D. S. Rasmussen 93 The Generous Eye Matthew D. Kirkpatrick On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

105

Gordon Marino Interlude II: Summon the Earnest Thought of Death Claudia Welz Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

125

131

Steven Shakespeare From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

147

XIV

Table of Contents

Christopher B. Barnett Melancholy and Modernity

165

Joakim Garff Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks 183 About the Authors Index

215

213

Ingolf Dalferth

What Does It Mean to Be Human? We live in a time of fundamental changes. Until recently, whoever was born of a woman was considered human, but now we have started to produce embryos that do not belong to our kind. Moreover, artificial general intelligence, digital networking and robotics help us to create environments that are increasingly indistinguishable from us. The rapid evolution of human-looking robots confirms the blurring of the line between man and machine. By making our very selves the subjects of a comprehensive biological design experiment whose parameters we have not really mastered and whose outcome is wholly uncertain, we have embarked on a process that is about to change the definition of what it means to be human. We have lost a clear sense of who and what we are, if we ever had one. But without it we cannot decide what is good for us, as humans, and hence whether the process on which we have embarked really will help people to be “better than well,” as transhumanists promise.¹ So what does it mean to be human, for us, today?

I Who and what we are have always been controversial questions. Plato was applauded for his definition of human beings as featherless bipeds—but only until Diogenes the Cynic threw a plucked rooster over the wall of Plato’s school. People have not only disagreed about the facts of human life (what is true of humans?), but also about the values, goals and ends that humans should actualize in living their lives (how ought we to live as humans?). Answers to questions about our humanity have been sought along five routes: by contrasting the human with the non-human (other animals), the more than human (the divine), the inhuman (negative human behaviors), the superhuman (what humans will become), or the transhuman (thinking machines). In each case the question at stake and the point of comparison is a different one; and in all these respects the idea of humanity has been defined differently. But note that it is we who ask these questions and make these comparisons. Our human point of view is inscribed into the very process of comparing our-

 Natasha Vita-More, “What is the Mission of Humanity+?” (https://humanityplus.org/about/ mission/) (3/24/2021). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-002

2

Ingolf Dalferth

selves with the non-human, the more than human, the inhuman, the superhuman, the transhuman. We are the point of reference for the contrasts we explore, and in important respects the distinction is not a difference between us and others, but a difference that runs right through ourselves. The difficulty of stating who and what we are is precisely due to the fact that we are so over-determined or multi-coded that we cannot give a simple and clear answer to these questions. The classical tradition defined the human being as rational animal (animal rationale or animal rationabile). This was understood in two different ways, depending on how one construed the genus (genus proximum) and the specific difference (differentia specifica) in this definition. The Aristotelian tradition took animal to be the genus and rational the specific difference: humans share a nutritive life with plants, and an instinctual life with other animals, but they are distinguished from other animals by their reason, mind or intellect.² Philosophers with a more Neoplatonist bent of mind construed it the other way around: by understanding human beings to be “mortal rational animals,” Porphyry took rationality (rational nature) to be the genus, and animality (mortal bodies) the specific difference. The first view places humans at the top of the animal world because of their intellect or reason, while the second view looks at them as a low or even degenerate kind of rational being because of their materiality and corporeality. Both Jewish and Christian thinkers read this ambivalent philosophical heritage through the lens of their imago Dei (image of God) tradition by comparing humans with the divine. On the one hand they understood that which distinguishes us from other animals (our intellect or reason) to be at the same time that which relates us in an analogical way to the divine. On the other hand they saw the materiality of the body and the sensuality of the animal nature as the reason why humans are excluded from the true intellectual life of reason and rationality. Modernity inherited both views and both problems. Where it began to understand humanity from an evolutionary perspective, it still looked for biological distinctions that make humans stand out from the animal world. And where it continued the imago Dei tradition, it re-evaluated body, materiality and sensuality positively and conceived the divine differently (not only as “spiritual”, but in a dipolar way also as—somehow—“material”). The first view has been increasingly questioned in recent years: reason, rationality and intellect have been shown in many respects to mark at best a distinction by degree and not an absolute difference between humans and other animals. The second view has created problems because the dipolar account of the divine significantly blurs the

 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.13.

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

3

distinction between creator and creation that lies at the heart of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheisms.

II A Kierkegaardian approach avoids these difficulties. It takes seriously that it is we who ask questions about ourselves, about others and about our world. It does not start with the question of what we are (essence), but from the fact that we are (existence), and it cannot do so without taking into account how we are (mode of existence). To be human means to exist in a certain way—a way that can be deepened from existing in space and time (sensual Dasein) through living in a moral way (moral Sosein) to living in a way that is true to the nature of our existence (existential Wahrsein). What does this mean? Kierkegaard had understood Kant: existence is not a predicate of determination. It does not help us to say what something is, but that it is—not somewhere in a fantasy world, but in the actual world in which we live. To define humans as rational beings means to propose a concept of human being from a perspective that reflects the interests of those who define humans in this way. Such definitions may seek to mark our distinction from other beings; to show our openness towards the divine; or to celebrate rationality as the decisive feature of humanity. Concepts of humanity are always controversial and shaped by the interests of those who propose them. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, started not from an attempt to define a concept of what we are, but from the undeniable fact that we are. We couldn’t begin to define a concept of what we are if we didn’t exist. Therefore, if we want to start from an uncontroversial starting point, we must start from here. Kant argued that we do not further specify the concept of humans as rational beings if we add and they exist. Rather, we claim that humans thus defined really exist in our actual world. This is Kierkegaard’s starting-point. He does not start with conceptual possibility, but with actuality; and not with just any actuality, but with our own; and not by asking what we are, but how we exist. Not only can the existence of a thing never be included in the concept of this thing, but we can never include our own existence in the concepts through which we attempt to state who and what we are. We can only thematize our existence if we pay attention to how we exist. Existential statements differ from both definitions and factual statements. Definitions define the meaning of a term, while factual statements assert facts that can be true in a possible world, even if they are wrong in our actual world (“x is F”). Existential statements state facts that are, or are not, the case

4

Ingolf Dalferth

in the world in which we live (“There is at least one x that has the property F”). In an important sense, existential statements are always also about us because they cannot be true unless they are true in the world in which we exist (“There is at least one x that has the property F” can only be true if it is true in the world in which we exist). And while we can make many existential statements and describe ourselves in many ways, we can only do so because we exist; and while we exist, we can only describe our own existence by unfolding how we exist. We can state analytical truths that are true in all possible worlds only in the actual world where we exist, and we cannot state truths that are not analytical without using indexicals such as “here,” “there,” “today,” “yesterday,” “I,” “you,” “we,” “you.” The question “Is it raining?” can only be answered if it is taken to mean “Is it raining now or here or today?” Truth is concrete. It cannot be grasped through combining concepts into propositions and propositions into systems of propositions, no matter how detailed. All this remains a pure possibility, but does not reach actual reality. Actuality is more than the totality of the possible, and truth is to be found not in detached objectivity, but in concerned “subjectivity,” that is to say, in the actual world in which we exist.³ Therefore, to be is not the value of a bound variable (as Quine argued). The existential quantifier locates something in a given universe of discourse, but unless that to which it refers is ultimately grounded in the world in which we exist, it is not actual. We are the criterion of actual existence, for what is not true in our actual world, is not actually true but only (if at all) a possible truth. Whereas non-contradictory statements describe something possible, existential statements assert something real. But they are only true if they are true in the world in which we exist. Both factual and existential statements presuppose the existence of those to whom they are communicated. But whereas factual statements communicate possibilities that we can ignore, existential statements communicate something whose truth or falsity touches our life and changes our world. Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel was therefore entirely in line with Kant, but he concluded from Kant’s insight into the locating or positing function of the “predicate” of existence that existential statements are not only about the instantiation of a concept in the world of experience, but about us. Existential statements point beyond the world of possibilities to the world of actual life and suffering to which all belong who actually exist, have existed or will exist. For just as the experience of suffering differs from its description, so existing differs from talking about existence.

 SKS 7, 173 – 174 / CUP1, 189 – 190.

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

5

And since we cannot exist without existing in a certain way, we cannot talk about our own existence without expressing how we exist. Kierkegaard insisted on the difference between factual statements and existence statements in all his writings and under all his pseudonyms. “Being a Christian is defined not by the ‘what’ of Christianity but by the ‘how’ of the Christian.”⁴ Christianity is not a “doctrine” that can be unfolded as a system in a plethora of paragraphs, but “an existence-communication which paradoxically accentuates existing.”⁵ Christianity concerns human existence, not the unfolding of Christian doctrine in a system of thought, and it explains the finitude of human existence not by marking it off from other finite things, but by proving it to be the place that shows how the finite is rooted in and distinguished from the infinite. By addressing this explicitly, Christian communications seek to change people’s lives and help them to understand their existence in a new way. This is why throughout his authorship Kierkegaard tries to retranslate theological concepts into existential insights that have been lost in the systems of thought of theology and philosophy. He does not propose an ethical ideal of a good life, but illuminates the concrete structure of human existence. His concern is the humanity of humans, which has its core in the way we relate to the structure of our existence. This is importantly different from trying to define our humanity by distinguishing us from other animals, intelligent machines, or the divine. Biological and neurophysiological research increasingly level out and dissolve clear-cut distinctions between humans and other animals and living species. Reason, rationality, deliberation, decision-making, free choice, intentional action, etc. all come by degrees and can be found in some way in other animals as well. While we have always tried to compensate for the limits of our biological nature by technical means, transhumanists see human biology as an obstacle to progress that can and should be overcome by technology. However, if research into biological computing and nanotechnology keeps progressing at the present rate, then the difference between humans and machines will soon be negligible and there will be no space to define humanity. Moreover, if we compare humans not to other animals or machines but to other humans, then the regularities of a common biology and evolutionary past are by far outdone by the cultural differences and plurality in which humans adapt to different situations and circumstances. There is no unity of humanity that has not emerged from a multitude of diversities—at the biological level and at the cultural level. Humanity is a normative project, not merely a biological fact, and there is an endemic normative

 SKS 7, 554 / CUP1, 610.  SKS 7, 550 / CUP1, 606.

6

Ingolf Dalferth

conflict about how this project should be implemented in human culture and history. This is why any attempt to outline a vision of our humanity by asking who and what we are, could be or should be, can only come to a controversial conclusion. We could always be different. And often we are, and want to be. So we should not attempt to define our “essence,” but start from the recognition of the facts about our existence. Finitude and passivity are two particularly important facts: we exist, even though we might not have existed; and we exist not through what we do ourselves but through what is done to us. Moreover, we live in a vast universe, in which we are marginal and completely insignificant; and we live in a finite universe that is not made forever. It is not much consolation to be told that we live in a fine-tuned universe that seems to be made precisely for us to observe it, and for us to be made precisely to observe it. We know that this will not last forever—not for us, not for our kind, not for our galaxy, not for our universe. The long-term future of the universe leaves little to hope for. For all we know the universe will end as a cold and inhospitable place composed of dead stars and black holes. The only consolation is that we shall not live to see the end. Because we cannot deny these facts about our existence, we cannot exist in a human way without striving for a positive appreciation of our finitude and passivity.

III We are finite beings, and we are part of the process of biological evolution. However, what really counts for our self-understanding is not what distinguishes us from other members of the animal world or from the machines we make, but rather what helps us to live as human beings among human beings in a humane way. We need a conception of our humanity that helps us to live a truly human life in a world that is not of our making and that we are about to ruin by selfishly exploiting its resources and transforming it into our habitat irrespective of what this means for others. Such a conception of humanity—whatever else we may want to say—must be based on a positive account of human finitude: we are finite beings in a finite world, and we cannot be true to ourselves if we are not true to our finitude. What does this mean? “Finitude” is a contrast term. Everything we call “finite” is marked off both from the infinite and from other finite things, and the two distinctions cannot be collapsed into one (the infinite is neither an item in the series of finite items nor the totality of that series). While the distinction from other finite things implies limitations, the distinction from the infinite does not: the infinite does not limit

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

7

the finite, but rather enables or constitutes it as a reality. We can try to overcome our limitations and enlarge the sphere and quality of our activities. But this will not alter our status as finite being. We cannot undo the distinction between the finite and the infinite, because that is assumed and presupposed in everything we do. Humans are distinguished from other finite beings in that we can become aware of our finitude in this twofold sense. A weak sense of finitude is to be aware of one’s differences from and commonalities with other finite beings, whereas a strong sense of finitude is to recognize one’s difference from and embedding in the infinite. We acquire a weak sense of finitude in everyday situations by experiencing our limitations and imperfections in our interactions with others. But in order to develop a strong sense of finitude, we must distance ourselves from these situations and distinguish them all together from the infinite in which they are embedded and without which they would not be finite. A strong sense of finitude reflects our contrast not merely to other finite beings but above all to the infinite. We miss the force of that contrast if we construe the infinite merely in negative terms as that which is not finite (negative infinity), and not in positive terms as that which posits the finite by distinguishing itself from the finite as infinite (positive infinity). Negative infinity is the product of our attempt to overcome our finite limitations, while positive infinity is that without which there would be no finite existence. As humans we continually strive to overstep our limitations and overcome our imperfections. However, to be finite is not an imperfection to be overcome, but that which makes us real—i. e. actual and not merely possible—by giving us time and space to live a human life in this world. The point of finitude is not that we have the deficiency that we are not infinite, but that we have the good fortune to be here at all; it is not necessary that we are, and we might not have been. If we want to have a human future in a technological world, we must cultivate a strong sense of infinity, and understand infinity in a positive sense. A weak sense of finitude can create feelings of inequality among people and promote dominance behavior to make the most of one’s own limited possibilities at the expense of others. A strong sense of finitude, on the other hand, implies the universal equality of everything finite as distinct from the infinite, and this lays the foundation for respect for the equality of all human beings, and reverence for life. Towards the infinite we are all in the same boat. We receive life as a gift and cannot obtain it through our own doing. Humans can become aware of their difference not merely from other finite beings but also from the infinite. But we cannot do so without noting that we were not aware of it before. We have ignored our actual situation and disregarded our finitude. This is what Paul Tillich has called “estrangement,” and Kierke-

8

Ingolf Dalferth

gaard “sin:” living a human life oblivious of one’s actual situation before the infinite love of God. It is one thing to be in time (or to exist: Dasein); it is another to live as a human being (to exist in a particular way: Sosein); and it is a third to live as a human being in a truly human way (to exist in the right way: Wahrsein). The first marks the existential difference between being and not being: we are even though we might not have been, or, in other words, our existence is contingent. Our Sosein marks the biological difference between human beings and other animals: we are humans and hence responsible for how we live. Our Wahrsein marks the anthropological difference between human and inhuman ways of living a human life: as humans we can live in a way that is true to the contingency and finitude of our Dasein, or fail to do so. These three basic insights about human finitude remain true also in the contemporary age of technology. First, we owe our Dasein not to ourselves but to a creative reality beyond ourselves: we are a finite reality not of our own making. Second, we owe our Sosein to our own making by living in a human or an inhuman way: we are a finite reality that is made to make itself, i. e. that can will to live in a truly human way, or not will it. Third, we live in a truly human way, i. e. achieve our Wahrsein, by acknowledging that our Dasein is not of our own making, and that this is what we share with all other beings: we have not made ourselves to make ourselves. We are neither the principle nor the origin of ourselves. We acknowledge this, if we treat both ourselves and others as recipients of a gift that we can only receive, but never give, and for which we can only be grateful because none of us deserves it. Whereas our existence is not a result of our own decision, the way we exist is: we always could have existed otherwise, and therefore we are responsible for the way in which we actually exist. However, even human life as it ought to be will still be a finite life—or, as Kierkegaard put it in Sickness Unto Death, “a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”⁶ This synthesis is not a given but a goal, not a fact but a paradoxical task and a permanent duty: the duty to live our human lives in a human way in the face of the permanent threat of the abyss of inhumanity. So the key distinction that orients a positive account of human finitude is not the biological difference between human beings and other animals in the process of evolution, but the anthropological difference between human and inhuman ways of living a human life. The criterion for this difference is whether we pay attention to the existential difference between being and nonbeing in the way

 SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

9

we live our lives. This existential difference is not of our own making, but prior to everything we do or can do. We are, but we might not have been; hence the possibility of our being is grounded not in us but in some prior actuality different from us. This is why the analysis of human finitude requires us to talk of our passivity.

IV The Western focus on activity in the understanding of human beings has given passivity a bad name in our culture.⁷ As a whole industry keeps reminding us, in order to enhance our lives we must overcome passivity, step up our activities, take matters into our own hands, do everything to make the world a better place. In our culture, to be active is good, and to be passive is a deficiency to be overcome. Christian theology has always resisted a one-sided focus on activity. The creative center of human life is not activity but passivity—the fact that we are subject to much for which we cannot be held accountable. Most of what we are we do not owe to ourselves. Our Dasein is not of our own making; our Sosein is only in small part the result of what we do; and our Wahrsein does not result from what we do, but rather results from something that befalls us (if it does). We are made true, if we are, but we cannot make ourselves true, for at least two reasons. On the one hand we cannot step outside of ourselves and redo what has gone wrong. We cannot simply press the reset button. On the other hand, we cannot be reduced to a mere function of our past, as “predictive analysis” or “speculative design” approaches seem to assume. These practices seek to anticipate our future behavior by building models based on pattern analyses of data about our past behaviors that allow them to predict (and influence) our future behavior with increasing probability. But we are not merely a set of data, and what we shall be and do is not merely the probabilistic prolongation of our past into the future. We are a place where new and unpredictable things happen all the time. We cannot undo our past, but our past also does not determine the possibilities we can encounter. We can refuse to follow the pattern. We can say no. And we can do so because we are marked by a fundamental passivity that keeps the door open for new possibilities that we cannot predict on the basis of our past.

 Cf. J. Schiffers, Passivität denken: Aristoteles—Leibniz—Heidegger, Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber 2014.

10

Ingolf Dalferth

In short, from beginning to end, and with respect to our Dasein, Sosein, and Wahrsein, our lives are molded by passivity—a passivity that is the condition of the possibility of a truly open future for us. There is so much that happens to us and so little that we make happen. Before I can act as a self, I must become a self, and while I cannot be a self without acting, I cannot become a self by acting. A primal passivity precedes all our activity. We are never only the result of what we have done, but always also of what has happened to us, and what happens to us goes beyond anything we have done or can do. Of course, we must not play off passivity against activity. We cannot live without being both active and passive, being impacted by others and impacting others. Both are constitutive features of human life. But they occur in an order that must be respected and in ways that need to be distinguished. The most important distinction to be drawn here is between contrastive and deep passivity. Actual life as enacted in time and space is neither pure activity nor pure passivity; it is always a mixture of both, or, in Schleiermacher’s words, a continual “interpenetration and succession of activity and passivity.”⁸ It has a passive side to be impacted by others (receptivity), and an active side to impact others (spontaneity), and the two are polar opposites that allow for different degrees of mixture. This is different in the case of deep passivity. This more basic passivity is not merely other than human activity; it is that without which there would be neither active nor passive processes in human life. It is a complete passivity of the life of human persons, not just a partial passivity within their lives. The distinction between deep and contrastive passivity is frequently overlooked in theological accounts that claim there are no “dealings of God with us without us.”⁹ They construe the divine-human relationship as an interaction between a divine and a human agent; they construe that interaction as a conjunction of divine and human activities; and they understand the mode of that interaction, at least at the human pole, in terms of contrastive passivity and activity where the one cannot occur without the other. Not only is there no divine activity to which there is no corresponding human activity, but there is also no human passivity that is not tinged with human activity. In both respects the human person is seen as an agent who in principle is capable of acting in one way or another. There is no place in this picture for deep passivity.

 Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. by H. R. MackIntosh and J. S. Stewart, London: T&T Clark 1999, p. 41.  Karl-Heinz Menke, “Rechtfertigung: Gottes Handeln an uns ohne uns? Jüdisch perspektivierte Anfragen an einen binnenchristlichen Konsens,” Catholica, vol. 63, 2009, pp. 58 – 72.

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

11

However, even in ordinary life there are phenomena that do not fit such a view. Deep passivity characterizes the beginning of our lives, but also manifests itself in many ways in our lives. Aristotle importantly distinguished between qualitative change and substantial becoming. It is one thing if a particular substance or entity (e. g. water) changes from one state (being hot) to another state (being cold), and quite another if some new entity springs up or comes into being. For a new entity to come into existence, there is no ὑποκείμενον (hypokeimenon: underlying entity) to be postulated that has the capacity to change from a potential to an actual state. All that is needed is a possibility that is actualized. To become actual is not a qualitative change but a modal change, and the modal change does not change the entity in question, but changes the actual world in which it comes to exist. The new entity is purely passively involved in the change from possibility to actuality, and it does not make sense to ascribe to it a potentiality or capacity for its becoming. This is particularly so with respect to God. To be created by God entails a purely passive becoming for the human (or any other) creature. No doubt, there is no living creature that isn’t active. But the activity of the creature is not what creates it; it is what follows from creation. Only those who are created can and will act as creatures (or fail to do so). They can only act because they exist, but their existence is characterized by a deep passivity that empowers them to their free activity. It’s a creative passivity, because it makes it possible for them to be creative in their finite ways. An indication of this deep passivity can be found in many occurrences in human life. You may become the heir to your uncle’s fortune, but there is nothing you do to become this. And while it is true that you cannot be an heir without being alive and able to act in some way or other, you do not become an heir by what you do but by what is done to you. To become an heir is to become one in a merely passive way. Only then are you able to act as an heir and accept or reject your inheritance. A one-sided passivity precedes all your activity as an heir and makes it possible in the first place. Something similar is true of many other occurrences in human life as well, and this does not contradict the fact that we cannot live without being both active and passive, being impacted by others and impacting others. All this does not distinguish us in principle from robots or technological human-machine hybrids. They too can only be active on the basis of a passive becoming. And the deep passivity of their existence can neither in their case nor in ours be construed in terms of a contrastive passivity and activity. Even if it were true that for every activity we perform we must possess a capacity to perform it, we can possess capacities only if we exist, and we cannot construe our existence as an activity that results from practicing a capacity that makes

12

Ingolf Dalferth

our existence possible. I may not be able to hear you without the capacity of hearing, but I do not need a capacity of existing in order to be able to come into existence. The modal distinction between possibility (“it is possible to do x”) and capacity or potentiality (“it is possible for me to do x”) does not translate to the deep passivity of coming into existence. If I exist, it is possible that I exist, but I do not have a capacity or potential to exist before I actually do. The same is true of theological accounts of the imago Dei. To call human beings the image of God is to say that it is possible that they become the locus where God’s presence is recognized and acknowledged (faith) or ignored and rejected (non-faith), so that humans can live their lives as creatures of God or fail to do so. But if they are God’s creatures, they remain so regardless of whether they recognize this or not, and also regardless of whether they are humans in our contemporary sense or human-machine hybrids in one of our possible futures. In neither case do they need a capacity to elicit God’s presence or to be aware of their proximity to God. It is a modal mistake to turn possibility into capacity and to infer from the possibility of becoming aware of the presence of God a human capacity to do so. And it is a theological mistake to turn God’s grace into a God-given capacity that humans possess qua human beings and that distinguishes them from all other creatures. Where God’s presence is recognized, it is not recognized because God is present and we have a capacity to recognize it. Rather, God is present in such a way that God creates the human condition of the possibility of recognizing God’s presence in the very act of our recognizing or ignoring God’s presence without the need of a pre-given or an a priori human capacity to do so. We do not owe it to ourselves that we exist, or know about God’s presence (if we do), or come to acknowledge rather than ignore or deny it. In all these respects we depend on the prior activity of God, and hence on a deep passivity that precedes and undergirds all our activities. This is true for us today, and it is also true for our possibly trans-human existence in the future. We are God’s creatures even though we are born from human parents, and we do not cease to be God’s creatures if we turn ourselves into cyborgs. Our status as creatures does not depend on what we are or do, on our evolutionary past or the possibilities of our technological future, but on how God relates to us.¹⁰ The emphasis is on the prior activity of God and the deep passivity of the creature and not on the interpenetration of divine giving and human receiving in a joint activity of Creator and creature.

 Cf. SKS 4, 222– 226 / PF, 14– 19.

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

13

V So what does it mean to be human in the age of technology? From a theological point of view, nothing different from what it meant in earlier ages. Humans are creatures who, by the way they live, show whether or not they live up to their deep passivity and radical finitude, and who therefore can or cannot orient their lives to God’s presence. God’s creative activity corresponds to a deep passivity on the human side that must not be construed in terms of the contrastive activity and passivity in human life. This completely one-sided activity is reflected in our deep passivity and radical finitude. It is the reason why we have every right to understand our passivity and finitude positively. We exist, even though we did not need to exist. And it is good that we exist, not because we provide a good reason for it, but because God loves us into existence. Whereas God’s activity does not depend on us, we can neither be nor act without God, and nothing we can do can replace our utter dependence on the prior activity of God. To be a creature in no sense results from anything we do or can do. God is the sole center of activity, and we partake in it in utter passivity—a passivity that is creative because it empowers us to become aware of and live in accordance with our existential passivity, or not to do so and ignore it. Since the activity is all God’s and not also ours, there is no need for a specific human capacity for being God’s creature, neither for us today nor for possible human-machine hybrids in the future.¹¹ There is no reason to fear that technological progress may undermine our status as creatures—whatever may happen to our humanity as we know it. If humans are the place where God relates to us by making his presence known, then God can also make humans who have turned themselves into cyborgs become such a place. Scientific and technological progress is not necessarily in conflict with our status as God’s creatures, who through their finite lives take part in God’s infinite life. So even if we become better than well in our present age of technology, we always remain God’s creation. We live in a human way if we take our deep passivity seriously and orient ourselves to the prior creative activity without which neither we nor anything else that exists would be or could live. If this is true of us today, then it will also be true of us tomorrow, whatever we may become in our technological future. What can go wrong—and regularly

 For this reason, there is no need for a special Cyborg theology—or only in so far as it is necessary to correct the mistakes made in the tradition by elevating humans above other creatures instead of seeing them as the exemplars of what is true of all creatures. Cf. Scott A. Midson, Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology and God, London/New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. 2018.

14

Ingolf Dalferth

does go wrong—is our awareness of our deep passivity and our neglect of the moral duties and obligations that come with our status as creatures among creatures. We may become aware of our finitude and deep passivity, but we are unable to develop a positive sense of them because we are blind to the true character of our existence and reality as creatures in God’s creation. This does not annul God’s relationship to us, but results in a life that neglects its foundation and misses its existential truth because it overemphasizes our activity and fails to appreciate the deep passivity and radical finitude of all creation. Life is a gift that deserves our gratitude not only while it lasts, but also when it comes to an end. We shall have existed. That is infinitely more than one can say of innumerable possibilities. Kierkegaardian thinkers are aware of this. They know how to make distinctions. They do not follow the short-sighted dogmatism of modernity, that you have to fade out God in order to understand yourself or our world as it really is. They know not only a factual Dasein and a moral Sosein, but also a human Wahrsein, because they distinguish between a human life that is blind to the presence of God and a life that is open to God and oriented to God’s presence. The crucial question is not what we are and ought to do, but how we can and should live our lives in order to remain true to the radical finitude and deep passivity of our existence. We have not made ourselves, but have been made to make ourselves. We owe our existence and our possibilities to the one who, as the creative actuality of the possible, also makes our life possible and real. Kierkegaardian thinkers see everything in a different light because they start from here. They live as creatures in God’s creation and thus in a richer, more complex and multidimensional world than the ensemble of spatio-temporal chains of events that can be abstracted from it. And they know that this is a gain and not a loss, an advantage and not a disadvantage. There is more in life than we experience, because we could not live and experience anything if it were not so.

Clare Carlisle

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross Between blue rocks But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away Let the other yew be shaken and reply. Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden, Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still Even among these rocks, Our peace in His will And even among these rocks Sister, mother And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea, Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.¹

Throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard pursued the question of “what it is to be a human being and what, from a godly standpoint, is the requirement for being a human being,” and he argued that being human was something that needed to be learned.² In The Concept of Anxiety he showed that learning to be human meant “learning to be anxious,” and in The Sickness Unto Death he showed that it meant learning to be in despair.³ His 1849 discourses on the lily of the field and the bird of the air express his wish to learn “silence, obedience, joy.”⁴ But another Kierkegaardian lesson, less determinate and more diffuse, lies in many of his works and throughout his journals: learning to care about things.

 From T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” in Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, London: Faber and Faber 1963, pp. 104– 105.  SKS 11, 10 / Søren Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses, trans. by Bruce Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016 (henceforth LFBA), p. 5. See also SKS 26, 363, NB35:3 / KJN 10, 317.  SKS 4, 454 / CA, 155; SKS 11 / SUD, passim.  SKS 11, 10 / LFBA, 5. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-003

16

Clare Carlisle

Human beings do care about things: as Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, “being-in-the-world is essentially care [Sorge].”⁵ It is as impossible to avoid caring as it is impossible to avoid anxiety and despair. For Kierkegaard, these impossibilities belong to a human being’s spiritual nature, and they are both a blessing and a curse.⁶ It is difficult to care about things, just as it is difficult to be anxious and in despair. Letting things matter, letting them be important, exposes the sensitive human soul to the bracing winds of fortune and to the harsh judgements of other people—and for Kierkegaard it is “other people” who make the task of learning to be human especially difficult.⁷ Without the meaningfulness of things human beings are lost and empty; but otherwise they are painfully swollen with meaning, tender and sore with how much things matter, aching and heavy with the weight of earnestness. The question of what to care about is not very complicated. Kierkegaard was a fairly typical person in this respect: he cared about his family and his friends; he cared about what other people thought and said about him; and like anyone who is fortunate enough to follow their vocation, he cared about his work. But the existential problem of how to care about these things—how to allow them to matter—informs the deep structure of his thinking. It is this distinctively Kierkegaardian problem that I set out to explore in this essay. I will begin by offering a few examples of how the problem appears in his published writings, before turning to more biographical considerations about Kierkegaard’s relationship to his own work. Here, I will draw on the concept of the “work to-be-made [l’oeuvre à faire]” set out by the French philosopher Étienne Souriau, which, I suggest, illuminates Kierkegaard’s sense of his “work as an author.”

I The Kierkegaardian Problem of Care The concept of irony, with which Kierkegaard began his philosophical career, relates directly to the existential question of how to care about one’s life. Irony is a form of thought that calls the significance of things into question. The Romantic irony that Kierkegaard encountered in the writings of Friedrich Schlegel could “survey everything” and expose the contingency of all meaning with a detach-

 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, Albany, New York: SUNY Press 1996, p. 192.  See SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.  SKS 11, 10 / LFBA, 5.

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

17

ment that provides a certain experience of freedom.⁸ Yet truly human irony, as Socrates showed with the example of his life, means calling things into question because one cares about them. Jonathan Lear has argued that Socratic irony “is a manifestation of utter seriousness and commitment, not its opposite,” and similarly Kierkegaardian irony is “a way of achieving…a more earnest commitment” to one’s existential task.⁹ When Socrates found gaps and aporia in the concepts of justice and courage that shaped the lives of his neighbours and the life of his city, he was pursuing these virtues passionately, religiously: he was honouring his God. Kierkegaard’s threefold distinction between aesthetic, ethical and religious spheres of existence can, likewise, be understood as a response to the problem of how to care about things. In Either/Or the aesthete, a clever young man, decides to be detached and indifferent, allowing nothing to matter to him: “marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way…hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way.”¹⁰ The transition from the aesthetic sphere to the ethical sphere involves a fundamental shift in the way things matter. Kierkegaard’s ethical sphere is constituted by a consensus of caring: my husband matters to me just as your wife matters to you; my child matters to me just as your child matters to you. Moreover, we can perceive that every person matters, that every life has a weight. On the basis of this consensus, ethical agents can be disclosed to one another, and understand one another. One of the key arguments of Fear and Trembling rests upon a distinction between two forms of religious life: the way of “resignation,” or renunciation, and the way of “faith.” For the knight of resignation only God matters. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de silentio identifies with this view: “I do not trouble God with my little troubles, details do not concern me; I gaze only at my love [for God] and keep its virgin flame pure and clear.”¹¹ The knight of faith, by contrast, “is convinced that God is concerned about the smallest things.”¹² This very brief glance at the beginning of Kierkegaard’s authorship—from his 1840 dissertation On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates to his bestselling 1843 works—shows his deep engagement with the question of how to care about things, how to let them matter. His suggestion in Fear and

 Schlegel’s Lucinde and Other Fragments, trans. by Peter Firchow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1971, p. 148. On Kierkegaard’s critique of Romantic irony, see Joel Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, London: T&T Clark 2005.  Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony, Harvard University Press 2014, p. 19 and p. 38.  SKS 2, 47– 48 / EO1, 38 – 39.  SKS 4, 129 / FT, 34.  Ibid.

18

Clare Carlisle

Trembling that faith is distinguished precisely by the belief that, in the eyes of God, every little detail is important reveals this to be a theological issue as well as an existential one. When we turn to Kierkegaard’s late discourse on “The Changelessness of God,” preached in Copenhagen’s Citadel Church in 1851 and published in 1855 amidst his final attack on the Danish Church, we see that right at the end of his authorship he remained preoccupied with the same question. In the prayer that opens this discourse, Kierkegaard contrasts a human resistance to caring with God’s concern for the smallest things (to echo Johannes de silentio’s words): If [a human being] is to maintain a mere measure of changelessness, he must not have too much that can move him and must not let himself be moved too much. But everything moves you, and in infinite love. Even what we human beings call a trifle and unmoved pass by, the sparrow’s need, that moves you; what we so often scarcely pay attention to, a human sigh, that moves you, Infinite Love.¹³

In the middle portion of the discourse, Kierkegaard brings the question of “significance,” or what matters, to the centre of his theology. “Remember,” he tells his reader, “that for God nothing is significant and nothing is insignificant, that in one sense for him the significant is insignificant, and in another sense for him even the least insignificance is something infinitely significant.”¹⁴ Kierkegaard recommends a child-like faith: it might look like maturity, he suggests, to think “that God does not bother with the trivialities of your life,” but in fact it is “simply the reverse childishness of old age to think that something is insignificant for God.”¹⁵ God’s attentive, loving care is connected to the divine attribute of omniscience: God “knows down to the least detail what you have forgotten.”¹⁶ Kierkegaard draws these lessons from the idea that God’s relation to each person is like a loving father’s relation to his child, expressed in the New Testament text forming the basis of the discourse. According to this text, which was Kierkegaard’s very favourite biblical passage, God is a gift-giving “Father of lights” (James 1:17). Putting this together with Luke 12: 6 – 7—“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. And even the very hairs on your head are numbered”—yields a theology that accentuates the significance of the smallest things. God’s care for these things permits human beings to let them be important.

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

13, 13, 13, 13,

327 / M, 268. 334 / M, 275 – 276. 335 / M, 276. 335 – 336 / M, 277.

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

19

From these various works emerges a Kierkegaardian theology which conceives God as having a human capacity for caring, coupled with a divine capacity for knowing. Although the Letter of James describes God as a “Father,” this care for small things is perhaps more often regarded as a maternal quality. Kierkegaard’s God is as devoted and attentive as a mother who is interested in the colour of her daughter’s new sofa, and what kind of soup her son had for lunch; or a mother who makes a dress for her child’s teddy bear and hunts for the bear when it is lost. Kierkegaard seems to have been personally invested in this theology of care. When in “The Changelessness of God” he tells his listener or reader to remember that “even the least insignificance is something infinitely significant” for God, he adds that this is “something I say to myself.”¹⁷ When Kierkegaard himself came closest to being “convinced that God is concerned about the smallest things,” he could write that “I live each day in relation to God as a child to a father (mother).”¹⁸

II Philosophy and Biography In the previous section I outlined the Kierkegaardian question of care, and in the next section I shall explore it in a more biographical register by considering how Kierkegaard confronted, “in relation to God,” his sense of the importance of his own work and authorship. Before we take this biographical turn, let me offer a few preliminary remarks about the relationship between biography and philosophy. It is sometimes said by philosophers in general—and by Kierkegaard scholars in particular—that biographical questions must be separated from philosophical questions, and it is true that conflating these types of questions can cause confusion or lead to ad hominem arguments. However, a case for the philosophical relevance of biography can be made by appealing to Eleonore Stump’s important distinction between “propositional” knowledge and “knowledge of persons.” Stump, a Catholic philosopher, called these “Dominican” and “Franciscan” types of knowledge. She argues that the Dominican, propositional style of knowing most commonly employed in philosophical thinking can (and indeed should) be supplemented by the more immediate, intuitive, personal Franciscan form of knowing that arises both in second-person encounter and in narratives.¹⁹ The genre of biography is in fact a blend of the two forms of  SKS 13, 334 / M, 275.  SKS 21, 310 NB10: 105 / KJN 5, 321.  See Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012, pp. 40 – 63.

20

Clare Carlisle

“Franciscan” knowledge that Stump identifies: second-person encounter, and narrative. Biographical research involves both an extended encounter with the subject of the biography—whether this is a first-hand encounter with a living subject, or an encounter mediated by sources written by or about the subject, and ideally also by the places they inhabited and the objects that were part of their life—and the construction of a narrative about that person’s life. Reading a biography is, similarly, both an encounter with its subject and a narrative journey. According to Stump, “narratives are an aid to thinking through certain philosophical issues; they are not a rival to philosophy itself.”²⁰ However, there is reason to question a hard-and-fast distinction between narrative and “philosophy itself,” if this implies that a narrative—and, in particular in the present context, a biographical narrative—cannot be regarded as carrying out the work of philosophy. A little reflection on biography reveals this to be a philosophical genre, concerned with ontological, epistemological and ethical questions: what is a human being; what can one human being know about another human being; how can we measure the value of a human life? This is not, of course, to suggest that biographers always address these questions explicitly, but when either the subject or the author of a biography is a philosopher, we might expect such questions to arise. In a biography of Kierkegaard, a philosopher who quite explicitly brought his own life and experience into his work, these questions could even take centre-stage. If I may slip into an autobiographical voice for a moment, I will add as a matter of fact that as Kierkegaard’s biographer I found myself confronting precisely these questions—and they struck me not simply as philosophical questions but as distinctly Kierkegaardian questions, which he wrestled with throughout his authorship. And for Kierkegaard, questions about the shape, truth, meaning and value of a human life are theological as well as philosophical. He saw human beings as spiritual beings, constituted by their relation to God; he argued that the most essential truth about human beings belong to subjectivity, and can be fully known only by God; and he insisted that the value of a human life lies in its relation to God, and is measurable only by a divine judgement. The relation between philosophy and biography could, in fact, be the subject of an entire Kierkegaardian essay. In the present context, I hope these brief remarks are sufficient to show that Kierkegaard’s biography and his philosophy

 Eleonore Stump, “Faith and the Problem of Evil” in Seeking Understanding: The Stob Lectures, 1986 – 1998, Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans 2001, p. 511.

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

21

might at least illuminate one another, and explain my interest in the biographical aspects of the Kierkegaardian problem of care.

III Kierkegaard’s Mountain Although the things Kierkegaard cared about—his family, his friends, his image and reputation, his work—were not unusual, he had a legendary capacity for caring about them. In 1871 his close friend Hans Brøchner recalled that “With K. it frequently happened that when he reflected on some minor matter, he could make it into a little piece of world history. His sense of reality did not always keep pace with his expertise at reflection, and so he came to view facts oddly displaced or transformed to abnormal dimensions.”²¹ To put it more bluntly, Kierkegaard made mountains out of molehills. His largest mountain was his authorship. This was Kierkegaard’s Moriah: the site of his spiritual trial, and what he cared about most. In 1849 he wrote that “my work as an author [is] what I would absolutely most like to continue doing.”²² His relationship to God was inextricable from his authorship; his relationship to Christianity was worked out through it; and his relationship with Regine Olsen was folded into it. In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, written in 1848 and left unpublished, Kierkegaard gives an extraordinary description of himself as an author before God. He would sit down to write feeling restless, anxious and impatient, yet unable to begin. Then he would hear a voice telling him, like a teacher speaking to a boy, to write his assignment: Then I can do it, then I dare not do anything else, then I write each word, each line, almost unaware of the next word and the next line. Then, when I read it through later, I find an entirely different satisfaction in it. Even though some glowing expressions did perhaps elude me, what has been produced is something else—it is not the work of the poet passion or of the thinker passion, but of devotion to God, and for me a divine worship.²³

Kierkegaard wrote about the texts, the thinkers, and the philosophical, religious, ethical and aesthetic issues that were important to him, yet the process of writing itself—including the public reception of his works—was what mattered most. In 1843 he made a small mountain out of J. L. Heiberg’s lukewarm review of Either/ Or, going over and over it in his mind and drafting a series of sarcastic responses.  Hans Brøchner to H. P. Barfod, November 10th 1871, quoted in Bruce Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998, p. 61.  SKS 21, 248, NB9:78 / KJN 5, 259  SKS 16, 51– 53 / PV, 71– 73.

22

Clare Carlisle

He spent the summer of 1848 agonising over whether to publish an “aesthetic” piece about Heiberg’s wife, “The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” in the newspaper Fædrelandet, and after making the decision fretted for weeks in his journal about this “little article.”²⁴ Writing was also the medium—and often the content—of Kierkegaard’s relationship to himself. He searched for himself, found himself, and contended with himself as an author: “I came to understand myself through writing,” he wrote in The Point of View for My Work as an Author. ²⁵ His enemy Peder Ludvig Møller picked up on Kierkegaard’s intense relationship to writing when he wrote the cruel review of Stages on Life’s Way that triggered Kierkegaard’s battle with the Corsair: Writing and producing seem to have become a physical need for him, or he uses it as medicine… Just as a healthy person rests by sleeping, he seems to rest by letting his pen run; instead of eating and sleeping he satiates himself by writing… Despite all his intelligence, reflection for him has become a severe sickness; his religiousness, which renounces the whole world in order to be occupied with itself, appears to me to be a pusillanimity at which the Lord and his angels must laugh.²⁶

Here Møller argues that Kierkegaard’s willingness to let his own existence have great importance is both unmanly and unethical: the sign of a weak, petty, cowardly self-involvement. This analysis is not entirely inaccurate; indeed, the grains of truth in Møller’s attack may explain why it affected Kierkegaard so deeply. However, Kierkegaard’s capacity to care about himself might be considered a sign not of cowardice and pusillanimity—literally, smallness of soul—but, on the contrary, of his courage and greatness of soul. Perhaps it is not necessarily brave to care about one’s life—but it is brave to let oneself be seen to care about it. If the Kierkegaardian task of learning to be human involves learning to care about things in the right way, then Kierkegaard may have had this in mind when he wrote, at the beginning of his Godly Discourses on the lily and the bird, that learning “what it is to be human being and what, from a godly standpoint, is the requirement for being a human being” is especially difficult “in the company of other people.”²⁷ In publishing his work, he had to summon courage to offer to the world what

 See SKS 21, 7– 69 / KJN 5, 11– 75; Joakim Garff, Kierkegaard: A Biography, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007, pp. 548 – 549; Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, London: Allen Lane 2019, pp. 112– 113.  Pap. IX A 213 / PV, 162.  See COR, 96 – 104.  SKS 11, 10 / LFBA, 5.

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

23

was most important to him, because this meant exposing himself to the risk of rejection, ridicule, embarrassment, humiliation, disappointment, failure. Often he resisted this exposure, and sought to defend himself. Human beings employ a variety of defence mechanisms against the significance and seriousness of their lives, including certain kinds of humour and irony, but Kierkegaard’s chief weapons were defiance and disdain. He imperiously dismissed Møller’s disparaging review of Stages on Life’s Way, claiming that Møller’s opinion had no effect on him: “Such persons are not part of my environment, and no matter how obtrusive and rude they are, it makes no difference; this does not disturb my joy over the little world that constitutes my surroundings.”²⁸ Many years later, in 1854, he responded in a similar way to his arch-rival, the eminent theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. Kierkegaard had taken what he felt to be a momentous step in writing an article that criticised both Martensen and the late Bishop Mynster, which Martensen countered with a supercilious rejoinder in Berling’s Times, mocking the “higher religious requirement” that guided Kierkegaard’s conduct. In response, Kierkegaard published a piece in Fædrelandet which declared that Professor Martensen was “too subaltern a personality to be able to be impressive” and claimed that Martensen’s criticisms “make no impression on me at all.”²⁹ In the privacy of his garret room, however, he tore Martensen’s article into tiny pieces and threw them on the floor—a gesture of anger, frustration, disappointment that sums up the pathos of his life.³⁰ Kierkegaard’s disdain—his posture of not caring what others thought of him—was, he admitted, “the passion of his soul,” and he was repeatedly called to renounce it.³¹ In 1855 he launched his polemical journal The Moment, the last act of his authorship. In his first editorial preface he confessed that he had to renounce the “beloved distance” from which he “disdained” the world in order to rise to the urgent task of dispelling the “enormous illusion” of official Christianity.³² In other words, he felt compelled—that “religious requirement” again—to sacrifice his pride and expose his vulnerability. This renunciation was the price he had to pay, again and again, for being a writer. His toil on the mountain of his authorship was for him an “enormous productivity, so intense that it seems to me as if it must move stones”—yet in the public eye it was reduced to something trivial, “regarded as a kind of

    

SKS 14, 84 / COR, 46. SKS 14, 129 / M, 9 – 10. See Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard, pp. 116 – 117. See SKS 13, 130 / M, 92. SKS 13, 129 – 130 / M, 91– 92; see SKS 13, 147 / M, 105.

24

Clare Carlisle

hobby in the manner of fishing and such.”³³ Bitter and lonely at the end of 1848, Kierkegaard recalled how his brother, Peter Christian Kierkegaard, had responded when he said, jokingly, “I think I will entirely give up being an author and go in for horse-riding or things of that sort”—to which Peter “replied (in all seriousness), ʻThat would be the best thing.ʼ That is how pointless my endeavours look to him.”³⁴ Joakim Garff has observed that when Kierkegaard wrote his journals he was acutely conscious of future readers peering over his shoulder.³⁵ This could be construed rather negatively, as a sign of Kierkegaard’s calculated manipulation of his image, and perhaps as a symptom of insincerity or inauthenticity. But it might also give us reason to admire his courage and audacity. Every time he allowed readers to watch him rehearse his agonies about publishing each work, and his indignation and bruised pride when reviewers quibbled or ignored him, he renounced his defensive disdain. By showing us what it is to allow oneself to care—not just a lot, but infinitely, eternally—he teaches us how to be human beings. His earnestness is always, of course, shot through with jest and irony: before God, a human being is infinitely small as well as infinitely important. Far from being pusillanimous, Kierkegaard possessed an enormous elasticity of soul.

IV The Work To-Be-Made I have compared Kierkegaard’s authorship to a mountain, a metaphor that conveys the grandeur of his literary task, his “immense labour,” an exertion that he compared to moving stones. This metaphor also, of course, evokes the biblical story of Abraham that is the focus of Fear and Trembling: there the mountain is the site of an individual’s relationship to God, and of spiritual trial. However, this metaphor fails to capture one essential feature of Kierkegaard’s authorship. While a mountain is solid, fixed, and fully-formed, a work of art first exists as a process of making that is insubstantial, amorphous, and incomplete. Kierkegaard’s authorship, I will suggest, retained this character throughout his life— and even if we see his literary work of art as finally completed at his death, we might also regard it as continuing its work on generations of readers, and thus as essentially open-ended.

 SKS 21, 92 / KJN 5, 95.  SKS 21, 190 / KJN 5, 198.  See Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart, p. 260.

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

25

This character of the work of art demands to be approached as a Kierkegaardian “how” rather than as a substantial, objectifying “what.” To say that Kierkegaard cared about his writing is to say that the central relationship of his life was to something in the process of coming into existence, something with the existential character of “not yet.” The mode of existence belonging to an asyet-unfinished work of art is different—though it may not be entirely different —both from the existence of another human being, and from the existence of God. Perhaps the closest analogue to an artist’s relation to her artwork is a mother’s relation to her unborn child, a being who requires her labour in order to exist, though this analogy is, of course, limited in all sorts of ways. Kierkegaard does not directly address this question of the ontological status of artworks-in-progress. However, the French philosopher Étienne Souriau offers a strikingly Kierkegaardian analysis of the creative work of art (which encompasses the work of philosophy as well as the making of material and literary artworks) in his remarkable lecture “The mode of existence of the work to be made [l’oeuvre à faire],” delivered to the Société française de la philosophie in Paris in 1956. Souriau’s account of the “work to-be-made,” as we shall see shortly, illuminates Kierkegaard’s relation to his authorship. Souriau situates this account within a metaphysics of liminal existence. Any thing that exists palpably, visibly, experientially, he argues, is only ever “partway through an oscillation between the minimum and the maximum of its existence.”³⁶ This is as true of human beings as of other things: “Nothing, not even our own selves, is given to us other than in a sort of half-light…where there is neither total accomplishment, nor full existence.”³⁷ For Souriau, the work to-be-made testifies to “the existential incompleteness of every thing.”³⁸ Although the work to-be-made does not exist as a realised, physical object, it possesses a fullness of being that eludes those material things. It is not, however, an eternal Platonic form; on the contrary, it is to-be-made, and entirely dependent on a temporal process of making. The work-to-be-made is a “virtual” being, a “spiritual form” possessing a mode of existence that is “enigmatic and remote, but intense.”³⁹ This virtual or spiritual being asks to be created or “instaured.” It is the activity of making, as this is practiced and felt inwardly by the maker or creator, which provides “the only intimate, immediate, and direct experience we have at our disposal” for enquiring into the mode of exis Étienne Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence, trans. by Erik Beranek and Tim Howles, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing / University of Minnesota Press 2015, p. 220.  Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence p. 220.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 226 and p. 230.

26

Clare Carlisle

tence of the work to be made.⁴⁰ For this activity is a response to its call. As Souriau points out, a finished work never coincides completely with the virtual work to-be-made, “for in every realisation, whatever it may be, there is always a measure of failure.” A work is accomplished when the maker achieves “a sort of proximity” between the thing he has produced and its spiritual form, which all along has been beckoning him, demanding of him, and guiding him in his making. Souriau discusses examples of artistic creation including Dante writing his Commedia, Beethoven composing his Fifth Symphony, and Rembrandt painting the Supper at Emmaus–a work he began many times. In the case of Kierkegaard, it is not sufficient to point to one book, be it Fear and Trembling or Practice in Christianity or The Lilies of the Field and the Bird of the Air, or any other title. This insufficiency is nothing to do with these works themselves. Kierkegaard was acutely aware that each finished, published work, bound in paper in Reitzel’s bookshop, left his authorship still incomplete. His entire authorship was his work-to-be-made—and the same is true of his own existence, precisely because his writing and his existence, his art and his life, were one single task, one spiritual form, one vocation, continually in passage from “an objective and a hope” to its accomplishment.⁴¹ Insofar as we feel this accomplishment unfolding, maieutically, within ourselves as we read and re-read Kierkegaard’s works, we must say that it is still in progress, still to-be-made. It is important to note that although the work-to-be-made demands and even necessitates its making, it does not determine its making. Instead, it demands the maker’s inventions and improvisations, without which it would never be accomplished. For all that the work to-be-made depends on us—and this dependency is its demand—we are passive as well as active in relation to it. The work to-bemade is imperious: “we are implicated by it,” and as we endure its demand we feel in ourselves “a power responding to a sort of obligation.”⁴² This necessity is not, of course, a logical or a physical necessity, but “a necessity that we feel, that we undergo.”⁴³ If the work to-be-made could speak, its tone of voice would be earnestness, and it would say: “This very day.”⁴⁴ As Souriau puts it, “the as yet unmade work imposes itself as an existential urgency.”⁴⁵ Since this is a Kierkegaardian essay, it is tempting to speak here of a work of love. And indeed, Souriau remarks,

     

Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., p. 221 and p. 223. Ibid., p. 221 and pp. 223 – 224. See SKS 5, 453 – 454 / TD, 83 – 85. Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence, p. 223.

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

27

if the poet did not already love the poem a little bit before having written it, there would doubtless be no creation…There would be a sort of prostitution—especially in artistic creation—in the fact of making his own humanity into a means for the work if there was not something in the work that seemed to deserve the gift of a soul and at times of a life—in any case, of tremendous labours.⁴⁶

A maker is used by the work he makes, pressed into its service. When the work implicates us, we must “throw everything we find in ourselves that is capable of responding to its demand and its call into its crucible.” Souriau gives as an example Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose hero is in love with Lotte, a beautiful young woman who takes shape from Goethe’s thoughts of the women he loved, Friederike Brion and Charlotte Buff. It is, suggests Souriau, the novel itself—Goethe’s work-to-be-made—“that rummages through his soul, that takes hold of it in order to nourish itself with the memories and experiences it is able to use.” In the same way, Kierkegaard’s novella Repetition, modelled on The Sorrows of Young Werther in both its plot and its form, tore through Kierkegaard’s soul and picked over the carcass of his broken engagement to Regine Olsen. The same is also true, though less obviously, of its sister work Fear and Trembling. Souriau conceives the artist’s response to the work to-be-made as both a gift and a sacrifice, and as both free and necessary. For better or worse, the work tobe-made does not present itself as a revelation, but “establishes and maintains a questioning situation”: The work-to-be-made never says to us: “Here is what I am, here is what I should be, a model you only have to copy.” Rather, it is a mute dialogue in which the work seems enigmatically, almost ironically to say: “And what are you going to do now? With what actions are you going to promote or deteriorate me?” What are you going to do? I imagine that to some degree this is God’s name for human beings, for that person to whom God has given the freedom to do as he will, yet who is neither damned nor saved before the deed is done. Likewise, in a somewhat divine manner, the work orders us to choose, to respond. What are you going to do? Like the deus absconditus, it leaves us to work it out…The work, that ironic sphinx, does not help us. It never spares us an act of invention.⁴⁷

Kierkegaard learned that meeting this unsparing demand of the work to-bemade fuses the exhilarating power of creation with abject trials of subjugation.

 Ibid., p. 230.  Ibid., pp. 232– 233.

28

Clare Carlisle

While he was in Berlin writing Repetition and Fear and Trembling he described his experience of submitting to the writing process: I am put down in a dark pit where I crawl about in agony and pain, see nothing, no way out. Then suddenly a thought stirs in my mind, a thought so vivid, as though I had never had it before even though it is not unfamiliar to me…When it has taken hold in me I am pampered a bit, I am taken by the arms, and then I, who had been shrivelled up like a grasshopper, grow up again, sound, thriving, happy, warm, and lively as a new born child. Then it’s as though I must give my word that I shall follow this thought to the uttermost; I pledge my life and now I am buckled in the harness. I cannot stop and my powers hold out. Then I finish, and it starts all over again.⁴⁸

Souriau touches on this Kierkegaardian experience when he describes the “abnegation” and “renunciation” of the artist: “we accept many sorrows and pains on account of that right to existence that the work claims with respect to us in its call…all the great works grasp the man in his entirety, and the man is no longer anything but the servant of the work.”⁴⁹ As we have seen, Souriau’s analysis of the work to-be-made has a quasi-theological character: he describes the work as “like the deus absconditus,” which, in a “somewhat divine manner,” “orders us to choose, to respond,” and alludes to its “real presence.”⁵⁰ Kierkegaard did not quite personify and deify his authorship in this way, but he saw his literary vocation as inseparable from his religious vocation. In The Point of View on My Work as an Author he described how his writing was subject to divine “governance.” His authorship, he explains there, “is not the work of the poet passion or of the thinker passion, but of devotion to God, and for me a divine worship.”⁵¹

V Conclusion Souriau’s paradigmatic works to-be-made are great symphonies, paintings, and literary works, and Kierkegaard’s monumental authorship certainly fits into this paradigm. But works to-be-made need not be so elevated. This category might also encompass more obscure works-in-progress, which have the same ontological character, and the same distinctive relation to their makers. Works to-bemade might be, as George Eliot puts it at the end of Middlemarch, “unhistoric

   

SKS 18, 171, JJ:99 / KJN 2, 158 – 159. Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence, pp. 231– 232 and pp. 234– 235. Ibid., pp. 232– 233 and p. 238. SKS 16, 50 – 53 / PV, 71– 73.

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

29

acts” with “incalculably diffusive” effects, whose makers eventually disappear into “unvisited tombs.”⁵² When we look at it this way, we can say that many (if not all) ordinary human beings have their works-to-be-made. The self-relation that, according to Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus, constitutes the spiritual element of human being, encompasses our relation to works to-be-made —a relation of creativity and care that is exemplified, and perhaps magnified, in Kierkegaard’s relation to his authorship.⁵³ Souriau himself suggests that his analysis of the work to-be-made is not confined to great artists and their works. At the beginning of his lecture, he explained that his topic was “very dear” to him because it implicates “all of us,” as human beings and as philosophers. He returned to this point at the end of the lecture: “what is important to me is that which is not at all personal in this, it is that which, on the contrary, if what I have sketched before you is correct, must be shared and felt by all of you.”⁵⁴ Souriau’s analysis also suggests that the Kierkegaardian experience of devotion and submission to the demands of his literary vocation need not necessarily rest on the theological foundation that Kierkegaard himself espouses. For Kierkegaard, following his vocation was a response to divine governance. Souriau, however, insists that the work to-be-made itself has the character of a divine call and command—which illuminates the “existential incompleteness” of its maker—and leaves open the question of its ultimate source. “When we create, we are not alone,” he writes: “In the dialogue in which the work questions us and calls us, it guides and leads us in the sense that with it and for it, we explore the paths that lead to its final, concrete presence. Yes, in conversation with the work, we are not alone.”⁵⁵ Any work to-be-made demands our devotion and elicits our creativity. Precisely because of its commanding urgency and importance, it sets before us the Kierkegaardian problem of how—and how much—to care about it. Kierkegaard can teach us, by his example, to care more deeply about our own vocations; he shows why this is difficult and requires courage; and he inspires with his astonishing capacity for devotion to what mattered most to him. He can also teach us how not to care, by highlighting the difference between a defensive, defiant posture that does not allow things to be too important, and the kind of levity that becomes possible only after one learns to let oneself care in-

 George Eliot, Middlemarch, vol. 3, Cabinet Edition, London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons 1878, p. 456 (“Finale”).  See SKS 11, 129 – 130 / SUD, 13 – 14.  Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence, p. 240.  Ibid., p. 238.

30

Clare Carlisle

finitely. This is the key to Kierkegaardian irony: knowing how to hold this heavy burden—being a human being—lightly.⁵⁶

 See SKS 8, 339 / UD, 239.

Daniel Whistler

Speculate Like a Kierkegaardian! When I first read George Pattison’s 1999 book Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism, I was stunned by how thoroughly it defamiliarized existential philosophies. Anxious Angels is a jarring read—and deliberately so. It refuses to tell a hackneyed story full of trite stereotypes of angst and absurdity. Nor does it identify the beginning of its tale in Cartesian dualism or the death of God.¹ Pattison takes seriously the suggestion made by Paul Tillich, late in life, that the eruption of existentialist thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed more to Jakob Böhme than to Immanuel Kant, more to F.W.J. Schelling than to Edmund Husserl—to philosophies “reluctant to surrender the cosmological context within which the drama of human existence is played out.”² In Anxious Angels, familiar faces become unfamiliar, and the effect of this thoroughgoing process of alienation is particularly striking in the case of Kierkegaard. Far more explicitly than in Pattison’s celebrated Kierkegaard-scholarship, Anxious Angels embeds the Danish writer in a story about “the cosmic dimensions” of being, about ambitious speculative philosophising.³ Of course, Pattison does not envisage Kierkegaard as whole-heartedly embracing this tradition—far from it! Nevertheless, he contextualises Kierkegaardian thought in terms of cosmic drama. In 1999 Pattison was almost a lone voice in situating Kierkegaard among metaphysical thinkers. The Kierkegaard of the 90s was notoriously a critic of ontotheology, metaphysical hubris and all conceptual constructions, whether that was specifically due to his Kantianism, fideism or proto-poststructuralism, or, more generally, owing to his insistence on religious transcendence, his nonconceptual faith in an incomprehensible deity or his performance of a decentred self. Things have now changed: a new generation of scholars has begun to read Kierkegaard speculatively—to chart his metaphysical ambitions, his materialist affinities and his conceptual edifices.⁴ These readers are willing to see Kierke-

 As Pattison states in opening, “I shall be arguing that religious existentialism is a phenomenon sui generis and not a mere derivative of secular existentialism” (Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism, London: St Martin’s Press 1999, p. 2).  Ibid., p. 20.  Ibid., p. 162.  This speculative turn in Kierkegaard studies is associated with the names of Alison Assiter, Michael O’Neill Burns, Saitya Das, David Kangas and Steven Shakespeare, among others. And it strikes me that Pattison’s Anxious Angels stands as a precursor to this trend, preparing the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-004

32

Daniel Whistler

gaard constructing a full-blown transcendental and materialist ontology, structured around an endlessly fracturing, but still productive dialectic;⁵ or developing a “dynamic, differential, and temporally open” metaphysics of “transcendental immanence”.⁶ These new readings collectively affirm “the speculative greatness of Kierkegaard’s thought,” as Maria Binetti phrased it a decade ago.⁷ Kierkegaard’s work is no longer seen as a reaction to German Idealism or as a polemic against it, but rather as one more fringe, heterodox repetition of the German Idealist project—that is, in line with philosophers like Schelling, this is a Kierkegaard who, in Slavoj Žižek’s phrase, “rejected the limitation to finitude”—not just existentially, but epistemologically as well.⁸ And yet, while Pattison’s Anxious Angels indirectly prepared the way for this contemporary blossoming of speculative Kierkegaards, the book describes a Kierkegaardian thinking resolutely indifferent to these kinds of systematic metaphysics. And one of the major reasons for this indifference, according to Pattison, is to be found in practices of indirect communication. For Pattison’s Kierkegaard, the world “can never be expressed in a simple or direct way,” and so “experimentation with new modes of communication” takes precedence over any straightforward description of metaphysical structures.⁹ Pattison continues that Kierkegaard’s embrace of ludic textuality, writerly indirection, jokes, contradictions and pseudonyms form moments of resistance to speculative philosophy. His Kierkegaard still adheres to the binary of metaphysical construction or textual games. My aim is to begin interrogating this opposition, to scrutinise the idea that practices of indirect communication are necessarily obstacles to metaphysical construction. How does indirect communication become speculative? How might a Kierkegaardian thinker speculate precisely by way of indirection? What if Kierkegaard’s philosophical ambition is revealed, rather than betrayed, by the cunning of his texts?

way for it genealogically in much the same way as Jon Stewart’s Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered did historiographically and as Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View did conceptually.  Michael O’Neill Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic, London: Rowman and Littlefield 2015, p. 61.  Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2015, p. 12.  Maria J. Binetti, “Kierkegaard’s Ethical Stage in Hegel’s Logical Categories,” Cosmos and History, vol. 3, nr. 2, 2007, p. 183.  Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006, p. 110.  Pattison, Anxious Angels, pp. 5 – 6.

Speculate Like a Kierkegaardian!

33

In thinking through these questions, I take (predictably enough) a circuitous route: I consider the relation between indirection and speculation by way of three images. These images form a triptych that portrays a speculating Kierkegaard. First, in The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus portrays a Kierkegaard who speculates despite himself, who cannot in the end resist the lure of the “great outdoors”—the truth beyond subjectivity, beyond experience, beyond writing— notwithstanding all his textual games and subtleties. For Camus, the speculative and the indirect are two tendencies that pull in opposite, conflicting directions in Kierkegaard’s works. Second, at the end of his dramatic trilogy To Damascus August Strindberg conjures a Kierkegaard for whom speculative release—understood in a mystic register—is made possible by the pursuit of complexity to the point of hypocrisy. Strindberg places pseudonymous indirection in the service of speculative transcendence. Third, one of Kierkegaard’s own images of speculation is the “demonstration of the god” in Chapter Three of Philosophical Fragments. Here Climacus calls for more indirection in speculative pursuits, performing simultaneously the culmination of the speculative impulse and its downfall. These three images teach us (at the very least) that there is more to be said about the relation between ludic textuality and metaphysical ambition in Kierkegaard’s corpus than flat-out opposition. They begin to instruct us about the various tensions, potentialities and peculiarities involved in speculating pseudonymously.

I Image 1 The Myth of Sisyphus contains Camus’s confession of his doomed love for Kierkegaard.¹⁰ Despite all his absurdist virtues, his lucidity, his affirmation of immanence, even Kierkegaard ends up committing philosophical suicide out of longing for “the great outdoors.” Camus’s Kierkegaard goes almost as far as Camus himself in formulating “a philosophy of the non-significance of the world.”¹¹ He tarries with “that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish or impotency reigns”¹² and hence, far more than any other figure in the existentialist tradition, he proclaims that “nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity  For the context to Camus’s reading of Kierkegaard at this juncture in his “cycles,” see Daniel Berthold, “Kierkegaard and Camus: either/or?,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 73, 2013, pp. 137– 150.  Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. by Justin O’Brien, London: Penguin 2000, p. 46.  Ibid., p. 22.

34

Daniel Whistler

and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.”¹³ Kierkegaard (for the most part) stays within these walls, despite the pain and suffering they bring: the majority of his philosophy revolves “around a privileged and bitter moment in which hope has no further place;” it articulates “the desperate joy of a man crucified.”¹⁴ Camus connects this Kierkegaardian dwelling in inconsistency and suffering with pseudonymous proliferation and indirection. As “perhaps the most engaging” of existentialist philosophers, Kierkegaard “does more than discover the absurd, he lives it.”¹⁵ And he does so through the affirmative embrace of the multiple and the complex: “Don Juan of the understanding, he multiplies pseudonyms and contradictions, writes his Discourses of Edification at the same time as that manual of cynical spiritualism, The Diary of the Seducer. He refuses consolations, ethics, reliable principles.”¹⁶ Don Juan represents for Camus the ideal of a plurality of absolutes lived without contradiction, of proliferation without dispersion. Every woman Don Juan loves is loved “with the same passion and each time with his whole self.”¹⁷ Moreover, his tendency to multiplicity is redeemed by his self-consciousness: Don Juan multiplies selves in the knowledge of the futility of unity. On a literary plane, this is Kierkegaard’s greatest virtue: his work “multiplies pseudonyms and contradictions” without nullifying, diminishing or otherwise negating lucid truth. Kierkegaardian writing performs the absurdity of immanent life by way of complicating communication. It is no surprise, then, that when Camus set out his own ideal for writerly practice at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, it resembles this Kierkegaardian model. Camus too attempts to write like the “Don Juan of the understanding.” He speaks of the need to create “a succession of works” which, rather than forming “a series of approximations of the same thought,” undertake instead the positive presentation of contradiction: “It is possible to conceive of another type of creator proceeding by juxtaposition. Their works may seem to be devoid of interrelations. To a certain degree, they are contradictory. But viewed all together, they resume their natural grouping.”¹⁸ Lucid truth is, in part, a product of the serialisation of texts into inconsistent writerly patterns—and here Kierkegaard provides the model.

     

Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., pp. 24 f. Ibid. Ibid. ibid., p. 67. Ibid., pp. 111 f.

Speculate Like a Kierkegaardian!

35

And yet Kierkegaard himself ultimately fails at this task. Camus thinks there is an inevitability to Kierkegaard’s philosophical suicide, to his escape from the unbearable tensions of immanent life. In the end, even Kierkegaard is susceptible to the hope of meaning beyond immanence. “Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay,” writes Camus, and all his precursors—Kierkegaard included—have ultimately got away. The lack of fit between the subjective and the objective realms is oppressive, and Kierkegaard flees—this is “the movement by which a thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its very negation.”¹⁹ Instead of clinging fast to the lucid affirmation of immanence, Kierkegaard ends up offering “redeeming negations.”²⁰ He commits “philosophical suicide,” the negation of this life in the name of a beyond free from tension and absurdity. The problem of suicide for Camus is one of intellectual ecstasis, and so to speculate is to enact “a logic to the point of death.”²¹ There is something of The Myth of Sisyphus in Ray Brassier’s contention in Nihil Unbound that there is a “speculative opportunity” in the realisation that thinking can occur only on condition of self-extinction. For Brassier too, speculation occurs under “a figure of death.”²² It is Kierkegaard’s “appetite for the absolute”²³ that finally drives him beyond the realm of the living in a “leap” out of immanence. And so, despite apparently opposed writings, beyond the pseudonyms, the tricks and the similes, can be felt throughout that work as it were the presentiment…of a truth which eventually bursts forth in the last works. Kierkegaard likewise takes the leap…[He] wants to be cured… The entire effort of his intelligence is to escape the antinomy of the human condition.²⁴

The point is that Kierkegaardian philosophy is almost lucid, it almost does what is most difficult and remains faithful to immanence—but not quite. It concludes in a speculative gesture, despite all the pseudonyms, despite all the contradictions, despite all the indirections.

 Ibid., p. 40.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 8.  Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2007, pp. 222 f.  Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, p. 16.  Ibid., p. 35 and p. 37.

36

Daniel Whistler

II Image 2 Strindberg and Camus may have very little else in common, but their readings of Kierkegaard have some similarities. Strindberg too describes a Kierkegaardian structure of release from the tensions of immanent life. Like Camus, Strindberg finds that Kierkegaard mimics the contradictions, inconsistencies and afflictions of worldly existence, but in the end takes a step beyond them. However, whereas for Camus this philosophical suicide stands opposed to practices of pseudonymous proliferation, for Strindberg both speculative transcendence and indirection work in the same direction. When salvation through simplification is no longer viable in a tortuously complex world, the only escape is through the hyperbolic affirmation of complex mediations. Strindberg’s To Damascus trilogy is structured christically around a narrative of tortures and agonies that form necessary “stations of the cross”²⁵ to be traversed by The Stranger for the purpose of mystic renewal—a final ascension that redeems the preceding litany of pains. In Strindberg’s own words, the characters “torment each other in order to finally arrive at reconciliation with God.”²⁶ This, he claims, was already theorised by Paul in the New Testament: “As Saint Paul says: [the] body is delivered to the tortures of Satan, so that the soul can be amended and merit its salvation.”²⁷ In this way, the plays follow The Stranger’s accelerated descent into affliction in order to “earn” grace: “I aspire to a torture that will re-establish my equilibrium…So, let us descend into the snake pit as quickly as possible.”²⁸ At the end of the trilogy grace is, indeed, achieved: The Stranger crosses the threshold from life into the beyond—or, more precisely, here he ascends to the redemptive White House in which all toil and turmoil fall away. The trilogy concludes with the words, “Rest in peace.” Release from the sufferings of the world has, at last, been accomplished. What is of interest to me here is Strindberg’s recourse to Kierkegaard precisely at the moment when The Stranger finally enters the White House. On arrival, he is given a tour of the Hall of Paintings by the monks who have created it. This picture-gallery is idiosyncratic insofar as, in one of the monks’ words,  On the of stations of the cross imagery, see August Strindberg, Le Chemin de Damas, in Théâtre complet vol. 3, trans. by Tage Aurell e.a., Paris: L’Arche 1983, p. 216 and p. 218. For a fuller version of the below reading of Strindberg’s trilogy, see Daniel Whistler, “‘Unutterable Utterances’ and ‘Mysterious Naming’: Nomination in Badiou and the Theatre of Mysticism,” International Journal of Badiou Studies, vol. 5, 2017, pp. 23 – 51.  Strindberg, Le Chemin, p. 186.  Ibid., p. 229.  Ibid., p. 217.

Speculate Like a Kierkegaardian!

37

“all our paintings have at least two heads.”²⁹ The Hall of Paintings contains portraits depicting the hypocrisies of all those who most succeeded at worldly pursuits—and such inconsistencies of character have been painted as a series of multiple heads. The monks painted Luther double-headed as “the young champion of tolerance, the old champion of intolerance,”³⁰ and similarly Voltaire is sketched as a hydra, because he was “the atheist who spent his life defending God.”³¹ This multi-headed visualisation of spiritual inconsistency contrasts the simplicity, devotion and sincerity of the monks who “have only one head”³² with all those still struggling back down in the world who “have at least two.” Strindberg implies that the spiritual complications brought on by worldly existence impede ascent to the White House: complexity ruins beatitude. And yet, there are two exceptions to this disavowal of complexity. They are the two figures who, according to Strindberg, have actively embraced contradiction and metamorphosis in a way that can in fact be celebrated: Napoleon and Kierkegaard. Napoleon! Created by the Revolution! Emperor of the people, Nero of liberty, tyrant of equality, “venerable brother” of fraternity. He is the most astute of all these two-headed people, for he could laugh at himself, raise himself above his inconsistencies, take on a new skin, change his soul and with each metamorphosis feel truly like a new incarnation with perfect conviction.

For Strindberg, There is only one man one could compare with this—the Dane Kierkegaard. He had, from the beginning, a consciousness of this parthenogenesis of the soul, the power of giving birth from this life without fertilisation, like a tree sprouting from a shoot. It is for this reason, and also because he would not allow himself to be duped by life, that he wrote under a series of pseudonyms, each representing “a stage on life’s way.”³³

While the monks take the inimitable path of absolute simplicity, Napoleon and Kierkegaard both pursued a kind of salvation through absolute complication—through a proliferation of heads and an affirmative embrace of contradiction. Strindberg invokes the pseudonyms as exemplars of Kierkegaard’s rejection of beatific simplicity: the very fact that he wrote under so many aliases, in so many styles and genres is a defining feature of his ability to “raise himself     

Ibid., p. 354. Ibid. Ibid., p. 356. Ibid. Ibid., p. 356 f.

38

Daniel Whistler

above his inconsistencies” and revel in metamorphosis as a positive principle. Kierkegaard’s parthenogenesis—his self-willed birthing of new heads, new personalities and new philosophical points of view—is lucid: he reproduces himself again and again in new forms without any concern for consistency or simplicity. In the topology of the plays, Stringberg’s invocation of Kierkegaard takes place very precisely in the beyond. The Napoleonic-Kierkegaardian path is— quite paradoxically—one of salvation through self-conscious exacerbation of worldly inconsistency and hypocrisy. A self-willed exaggeration of the contradictions of immanence accomplishes a form of ascesis. Kierkegaardian writing mimics the complications, mediations and inconsistences of blighted worldly existence in order to escape from it. Like Napoleon, this author “stands above” his metamorphoses, free from them and the logic of the world they perform. This is how Strindberg diagnoses the structure of Kierkegaardian thinking: the fictional performance of complexity (i. e. indirection) does not hinder salvific transcendence. It is, in fact, the only way at present to accomplish it.

III Image 3 Napoleon reappears in the final “image” of our triptych: Chapter Three of Philosophical Fragments—which includes one of Kierkegaard’s most celebrated references to Napoleon. If, as Brassier suggests, the task of any speculative philosophy is to think the death of thought, then Climacus’s “ultimate paradox of thought” must be read as a paradigmatic instance of the speculative impulse. For this “paradox” is glossed precisely as the desire “to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”³⁴ Moreover, the paradox is generated not merely out of reason’s encounter with blank otherness, but also by a negotiation with the “many terrifying devices and many subterfuges” that “disturb” thinking.³⁵ It is a matter of philosophy’s ability to chart, represent and recreate these indirections—to proliferate its own strategies, devices and subterfuges in response to any reflective confrontation with the outside. Chapter Three of Philosophical Fragments is structured around the dual demands of speculation (thinking the outside) and indirection (proliferating subterfuges), and for this reason it is a crucial reference point for any attempt to understand how these two demands combine in Kierkegaard’s corpus.

 SKS 4, 23 / PF, 37  SKS 4, 249 / PF, 44.

Speculate Like a Kierkegaardian!

39

The key to any good interpretation of Chapter Three of Philosophical Fragments is to recognise its debt to Schelling. Even more than references to cosmological angst in The Concept of Anxiety or to the dynamics of subjectivity in The Sickness unto Death, it is this chapter that contains Kierkegaard’s most detailed reflections on the philosophy he encountered when he attended Schelling’s lectures in Berlin in 1841. Climacus thinks through the argument for God’s existence in terms of “demonstrating Napoleon’s existence from Napoleon’s works,”³⁶ just as Schelling frames his proof of God’s existence in terms of coming to know a person “by means of their consequent words or deeds.”³⁷ Schelling told his audience in Berlin that “if that which necessarily exists is God, then this and that consequence—we want to say, then a, b, c, and so on—become possible; but if according to our experience a, b, c, and so on, really exist, then the necessary conclusion is that that which necessarily exists is really God.”³⁸ To paraphrase: Schelling attempted to prove the essence (divinity) of that which exists by means of the consequences of this existence made manifest in experience, i. e. revelation—“to transform precisely that which is incomprehensible a priori into what is a posteriori comprehensible.”³⁹ Positive philosophy, he explained, consists of a proof of what is known a priori (the existence of God) through what is known a posteriori (experiences of revelation), to “infer the existence of God…from experiential marks.”⁴⁰ This is no traditional form of induction. To return to the analogy of knowing a person from their actions: the actions of a person, as experienced, are not to be derived from their character in some kind of rationalist deduction; nor is one merely to infer the character of the freely-acting person behind these actions (as for traditional forms of inference). Schelling’s argument is, instead, an abductive proof—a proof “per posterius,” based on a doctrine of “a priori empiricism:” “The prius [or what is God] is grounded empirically”, such that philosophy “has in it both elements of rationalism and empiricism, but stands at the same time above both.”⁴¹ Like Schelling, Climacus too quickly writes off as “foolishness” direct, rationalist proofs of the existence of God that “want to demonstrate that this

 SKS 4, 245 / PF, 40.  Tyler Tritten, “What is Called Free Thinking? Revelation as the Object of Speculative Philosophy,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, vol. 92, nr. 1, 2016, p. 62.  F.W.J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. by Bruce Matthews, Albany, New York: SUNY 2007, p. 208.  Schelling, The Grounding, p. 205.  F.W.J. Schelling, Grundlegung der Positiven Philosophie: Münchner Vorlesung WS 1832/33 und SS 1833, Turin: d‘Erasmo 1972, p. 271.  Schelling, Grundlegung, p. 402.

40

Daniel Whistler

unknown (the god) exists.”⁴² He is far more interested, instead, in assessing a Schellingian “per posterius” variant, in which we “demonstrate that the unknown, which exists, is the god.”⁴³ He continues with an example drawn almost verbatim from Schelling’s lectures: “Whether I am moving in the world of sensate palpability or in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone.”⁴⁴ Climacus will differ from Schelling not so much in the structure of this argument itself, than in the haste by which Schelling rushes to its conclusion: “We shall take our time.”⁴⁵ Climacus is provisionally in agreement with Schelling that a per posterius argumentative structure is promising, that it seems to work successfully in the case of God. When it comes to Napoleon, “his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence”—that is, “there is no absolute relation between him and his works.”⁴⁶ However, when it comes to God, the Schellingian inference is, on first blush, plausible: “Between the god and his works there is an absolute relation…and perhaps because of this his essentia involvit existentiam.”⁴⁷ Climacus seems to approve of Schelling’s method for arguing for the existence of God. The late Schelling’s per posterius proof is an exemplary instance of speculation through indirection. Schelling passes from empirical traces of revelation to God’s existence in a thoroughly mediated manner. There is no direct path; rather, he plots a strategic assault on the transcendent, an art of indirection exemplified by his abductive argument, according to which a possible experience reveals to us what is otherwise inaccessible. Revelation tells us something about God, but in an indirect way. Schelling describes metaphysical structures “as if looking in a mirror,”⁴⁸ and it is precisely the mediated reflection of the mirror that makes possible access to “the great outdoors.” In Chapter Three of Philosophical Fragments, Climacus affirms this basic idea of an indirect assault on the transcendent. However, he finds that Schelling is not indirect enough. Climacus, unlike Schelling, insists that the experiential data is not directly accessible: all the philosopher can make use of to begin his proof are God’s “works regarded ideally—that is, as they do not appear directly and imme-

      

SKS 4, 245 / PF, 39. SKS 4, 245 / PF, 40. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 4, 246 / PF, 40. SKS 4, 246 / PF, 41. F.W.J. Schelling, Clara, trans. by Fiona Steinkamp, Albany: SUNY 2009, p. 31.

Speculate Like a Kierkegaardian!

41

diately.”⁴⁹ While for Schelling the empirical facts from which the abductive argument begins—traces of revelation, the fact of the world—are directly and immediately accessible to the philosopher, Climacus disputes this. Schelling fails to take indirection all the way, to discern that even the evidence on which his argument rests is only available in a mediated manner. In making these claims, Climacus implicitly urges philosophy to become even more indirect. This reveals something about the relation between speculation and indirection in Kierkegaardian thought: speculation should tend towards ever-greater mediation. Climacus demands a hyperbolic intensification of the art of indirection, an ever-more strategic approach to the divine. However, this is only one side of it. Climacus urges reason to become more cunning and indirect precisely in order to bring about its ruin. Chapter Three ultimately attempts to show that “the understanding cannot even think the absolutely different,” that its passion is itself “paradoxical” and experienced as “torment.”⁵⁰ Climacus considers this tendency to excessive indirection to be the very downfall of the speculative impulse itself: when he notes that the evidence of God’s revelation—or His works—is only indirectly available to the philosopher, he does so to problematise Schelling’s argument for the existence of God. Argumentation fails—or, to put it in the terms of this essay: in becoming more and more mediated, philosophical construction undoes itself. Climacus engages with the late Schelling’s reasoning in order to bring it to its knees: Schelling is not cunning enough, not Socratic enough. Chapter Three of Philosophical Fragments is both a speculative and an antispeculative text. And, more generally, being Kierkegaardian involves participating precisely in the adventure as well as the frustrations announced by such a tension. It is to acknowledge that the critique of speculation has been rendered indiscernible from speculation itself. Being Kierkegaardian is a matter of embracing the ambiguity of talking about “the great outdoors” (or transcendence or the existence of God), recognising the promise of talking about such things, the obligation to talk about such things—as well as the near-certain shipwreck that awaits anyone who does so talk about these things. In other words, many of Kierkegaard’s texts hover over that very instant of metamorphosis where speculative reason is about to turn into its other, when it is on the threshold of collapsing under its own weight. Here is a philosophy always on the brink, always taking that one last risk. To trace the becoming-speculative of indirect communication is to chart at the same time and in the same indiscernible space the

 SKS 4, 247 / PF, 42.  SKS 4, 249 / PF, 44 f.

42

Daniel Whistler

undoing of speculation by indirect communication. Something like this is also what Pattison’s Anxious Angels manages to show: the book generates a parallax wherein one and the same object—Kierkegaard—comes to be viewed both within and outside the speculative field. It is, I want to assert in conclusion, an exemplary instance of what it looks like to be Kierkegaardian.

Stephen Mulhall

The Riddle of Irony Is it possible to be a Kierkegaardian philosopher? What might it mean for someone to inherit an enterprise founded by Plato’s Socrates in a way that is informed by a thinker who repeatedly presented his philosophical contemporaries as essentially risible? Various options suggest themselves: one might try to make a career of painting comic portraits of one’s own contemporaries; one might simply bracket Kierkegaard’s satirical treatment of philosophy in order to extract from his writings a series of genuine philosophical insights into the nature of art, or love, or ethics or religion; or one might seek to distinguish the ludicrousness of the Hegelian philosophical project, with which Kierkegaard was preoccupied, from that of Socrates, and more pertinently from one’s own preferred contemporary way of philosophizing. The first two options seem unattractive: the first promises the kind of repetition that extinguishes originality, and the second threatens to underestimate the unity of Kierkegaard’s work—the extent to which its insights derive from the very same authorial point of view as its satire. The third way looks more promising, given the obvious differences between a Hegelian encyclopaedia and a Platonic dialogue, not to mention (say) a Wittgensteinian philosophical investigation; but further inspection might cause us to hesitate. It would, after all, be rather unphilosophical to assume that divergent appearances track real underlying differences; and it might seem rather too philosophical to claim that philosophy’s essence is untouched by the ridiculous, when so many of its supposedly accidental historical expressions have attracted ridicule (when Kierkegaardian satire can be seen as continuing a tradition founded by Aristophanes). Here, I think we can gain some clarity, and some purchase on my initial question, if we acknowledge that the proximate source of much of what I’ve been so far calling Kierkegaardian satire is in fact his persona or pseudonym Johannes Climacus, and the three texts which involve him: Johannes Climacus: or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, Philosophical Fragments, and its Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Johannes Climacus is Kierkegaard’s philosophical pseudonym, the one whose life and writings most directly engage with philosophy, and—to an extent yet to be agreed upon—give expression to it. As Jim Conant puts it: “[Climacus] is meant for the religiously confused reader whose strategies of evasion are supplied by neo-Hegelian philosophy. Climacus’s works…are designed to engage, exhibit and defeat the form of temptation to evade the demands of the religious life which Kierkegaard sees as characteristically exacerbated by an enthuhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-005

44

Stephen Mulhall

siasm for philosophy: the temptation to construe…an ‘existential’ difficulty as one which calls for a particularly subtle exercise of the intellect.”¹ My engagement as a philosopher with Kierkegaard has certainly been grounded on an engagement with Climacus’s two interlinked texts understood as pseudonymously authored, and as exercises which turn on opposing the claims of philosophy with the claims of Christianity. That engagement took place some thirty years ago, and although it initially motivated me to write about other Kierkegaardian pseudonyms, it’s been a while since I have given Kierkegaard the kind of detailed attention I did then. So the present invitation to mark George Pattison’s retirement—and so to acknowledge how my own work was inflected by the example of his willingness to take seriously Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity, and by his broader sensitivity to the relation between form and content in thoughtful reflection— has encouraged me to return to Climacus, with a renewed interest in his Socratic origins and his later inheritance by Wittgenstein, in the light of some work I have been doing recently on the relevance of riddles to religious discourse. What follows will be very much a reading: an interpretation of texts, which takes seriously Kierkegaard’s presentation of Climacus as the author of those texts. This might or might not place me closer than other contributors to the familiar Festschrift template; but since the idea that writing demands reading, and so further writing, is one of the most basic lessons I have drawn from Kierkegaard (and from Pattison), it could not be otherwise. Responding in this way has helped me to understand how far another Kierkegaardian pseudonym—Anti-Climacus, the author of Practice in Christianity—is illuminatingly integral to Climacus’s identity, at once his twin and his opposite, standing against him and coming before him. Johannes Climacus declares he is not a Christian, whilst Anti-Climacus is tempted to declare himself an extraordinary Christian. In a draft preface composed for what became Practice in Christianity in the name of its pseudonymous author, Kierkegaard captures their uncanny intimacy in this way: “Like one eagle plunging down from the top of a cliff and a predatory fish shooting from the ocean’s depth to the surface with the same speed, we too both seek the same point; there is a contact, and at the same instant we rush from each other, each to his extremity.”² According to this analogy, the interface between the philosophical medium from which Climacus rises and the religious one from which Anti-Climacus descends must be both two-dimensional (not so much a transitional zone as a pure surface between two  Jim Conant, “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for their Work as Authors,” in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. by Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr, London: St. Martin’s Press 1995, pp. 16 f.  PC, 282.

The Riddle of Irony

45

perfectly contiguous but differently constituted volumes) and porous: otherwise the eagle and the fish could not encounter one another, and so repel one another. But since it is their desire to encounter Christ that drives them towards each other, Christ must be their sought-after, singular point of repelling contact—and so must at once link and separate not only the two passionate hunters, but also the two media they inhabit. Is this a view philosophy can credit? Let me first introduce the Climacus I claimed to know on the basis of my initial acquaintance with him.³ The linch-pin of the Philosophical Fragments is its development of two contrasting hypotheses intended to answer the question of whether and how the truth can be learned: the Socratic hypothesis conceives of the teacher as a dispensable means of awakening knowledge always already possessed or possessable by the learner, whereas the non-Socratic hypothesis (blatantly plagiarized from Christianity) conceives of the teacher as indispensable, conveying to the learner both the truth and the condition for grasping it. The Cartesian meditations with which, according to De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, Climacus commenced his commerce with philosophy—in their rejection of tradition in favour of each self’s rigorous examination of itself and its intellectual resources—plainly inherit the Socratic conception of the learner’s essential self-sufficiency; and Climacus goes to some lengths to bring out the anti-Cartesian essence of the non-Socratic hypothesis. That essence finds logical, poetic and metaphysical expression in the first three chapters of the Fragments. First, the non-Socratic hypothesis violates the Cartesian conditions of the thinkable: it conceives of the learner as undergoing an existential transformation equivalent to the transition from non-being to being, and so makes it a condition for anyone not yet so transformed being able to grasp the hypothesis that they be capable of thinking of themselves as currently non-existent—which is the one thought that Descartes, in his first meditation, claims to be certainly unthinkable. Second, it requires that its necessarily divine teacher can only disclose what he has to teach in the context of a truthful, mutually loving and comprehending relationship with the learner, which means that the teacher must lower himself to the learner’s level, not merely taking on human guise but becoming fully human. But this means that the divine teacher not only takes on dependence or conditionedness, but is essentially dependent on his learner’s freely given love. Descartes famously tells us that the idea of God from which alone we can recover our conviction in human openness to reality is the idea of an essentially unconditioned or perfect being. Consequently, third,

 I first laid out this reading in Part Three of my Inheritance and Originality, Oxford: OUP 2001, pp. 321– 414.

46

Stephen Mulhall

any Cartesian proponent of the Socratic hypothesis has an unstable relation to its non-Socratic counterpart. On the one hand, he regards the non-Socratic hypothesis as a hypothesis—that is, as one graspable, humanly-constructed answer to a question. But on the other hand, he must regard it as essentially ungraspable, beyond the limits of the thinkable—beyond the realm of human hypothesisconstruction, and unusable, even as an element within the Socratic hypothetical grounding, for establishing and conveying certainty. On the face of it, then, the author of the Fragments aspires to demonstrate that Cartesian philosophy and Christianity are radically opposed stances or orientations to the world. Each appears to be the other’s absolute other; each internally consistent and intellectually self-sufficient, asking only for an initial investment of faith in order to pay it back tenfold. However, Climacus also appears to suggest that the non-Socratic hypothesis can account for the existence and nature of both hypotheses in a way that the Socratic hypothesis cannot. For from the perspective of the non-Socratic hypothesis, those who have not undergone (re)birth by means of a relationship with the divine teacher must necessarily understand things in an inherently Socratic way, and will necessarily find it impossible to grasp the non-Socratic alternative. Whereas those committed to the Socratic hypothesis can make no sense of the fact that the non-Socratic alternative cannot coherently be grasped as what it must be if the Socratic hypothesis is correct—namely a hypothesis, a humanly-constructed conception of the way things are, one element of which is in fact essential to the construction of the Socratic hypothesis. In other words, the Cartesian perspective cannot comprehend the incomprehensibility of its putative intellectual competitor, whereas Christianity not only comprehends (indeed, requires) its own incomprehensibility, but comprehends the incomprehension it induces in its intellectual competitors. As I also argued, however, Climacus’s presentation of Christianity as the seductively incomprehensible other of Cartesian philosophy is itself a thoroughly Cartesian construction. To begin with, if Climacus is right in criticising the Cartesian for assuming that it grasps what must be by its own lights essentially ungraspable, then the same criticism ought to be levelled at anyone who claims to grasp the non-Socratic hypothesis as essentially or absolutely paradoxical to the unaided human understanding. If the idea of something absolutely different to the human is humanly unthinkable, how can that idea—that the absolute difference is humanly unthinkable—be humanly thinkable? To try to finesse this difficulty by distinguishing between actually thinking the unthinkable and merely thinking that the unthinkable is unthinkable is revealingly to reiterate a characteristically Cartesian strategy (which Descartes himself couches in terms of embracing something in thought as opposed to touching it), and one that is no less bound to disintegrate. For what exactly is the content of one’s putative thought

The Riddle of Irony

47

that “the unthinkable is unthinkable”—what exactly is being denoted and so grasped as unthinkable? Moreover, to present the non-Socratic hypothesis as the negation of the Socratic hypothesis cedes priority to the Socratic, and ensures that the resulting conception of its supposed opposite is essentially indebted to its original. And of course, the original question to which both are presented as possible answers it itself a thoroughly Socratic one—in fact, a canonical Socratic paradox. In short, in just the way Jim Conant argued with respect to Climacus’s Postscript, the Fragments also presents Divine incarnation as an element in an intellectual solution to an intellectual problem: whether we are offended by this teacher or not, it is our understanding that is engaged by him, our understanding that suffers and is wounded by his existence—as if the only kind of challenge that the incarnate deity poses to the modern followers of Socrates is an intellectual one. We are thus invited to recognize that Climacus’s self-constructed crucifixion of the understanding on the cross of the absolute paradox is in fact a blasphemous, intellectualized parody of the real challenge that the god’s crucifixion sets us. Unlike Conant, however, I tend to think that it is Climacus rather than his editor, S. Kierkegaard, who issues this invitation. The pseudonymous author of this text deliberately orchestrates his own downfall, in order to exemplify the ease with which even those who have identified the crucial temptation can succumb to it themselves (particularly when denouncing others for so doing), and thereby to encourage his readers to recognize themselves in his drive to criticise the motes in others’ eyes without seeing the beam in his own. More can certainly be made of what one might call the Cartesian inflection of Climacus’s philosophical make-up.⁴ Here, however, I want to reconsider its more explicit Socratic inflection; in particular, I want to reflect further on the fact that the author of the Fragments does not explicitly reflect on his choice of startingpoint—his invocation of the Socratic paradox concerning whether virtue can be taught, or more generally whether truth can be learnt or insight gained. I want, in other words, to take guidance from the fact that although Climacus never returns to interrogate that starting-point in the body of his text, he prefaces its articulation with the following “propositio”: “the question is asked by one who in his ignorance does not even know what provided the occasion for his questioning in this way.” I’ve already identified one kind of suggestive ignorance exhibited in Climacus initiating his project by asking this question: the refusal to see

 I tried to do so in “Doubt as Faith, Ethics as Temptation: The Trials of Søren Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms” in Anfechtung, ed. by Pierre Buhler, Stefan Berg, Andreas Hunziker and Hartmut von Sass, Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck 2016.

48

Stephen Mulhall

that his attempt to construct an anti-Socratic position is tainted from the outset by its constitutive dependence on a canonically Socratic paradox, and so on a quintessentially philosophical kind of puzzlement. But that ignorance (at once repressed and flaunted) is also a way of not acknowledging the specific paradox at issue, and so a way of not acknowledging that it is Plato’s dialogue the Meno that provides the (historical, textual) occasion for his questioning. Why is it this particular Socratic paradox—the one that initiates this particular dialogue—that initiates Climacus’s dialogue with philosophy? One might begin by noting that it is Meno rather than Socrates who introduces and recurs to this paradox about the impossibility of learning (how can one seek something if one is ignorant of it? But if one isn’t ignorant of it one has no need to seek it), and Socrates himself is rather dismissive of it, referring to it as a debater’s or quibbler’s question, implying that there is something sophistic about it. However, his proffered basis for rejecting it seems strikingly out of character. Socrates simply cites as authorities those priests and priestesses who have taken the trouble to explain the basis of their religious practices, as well as poets such as Pindar, who have declared their conviction in the immortality of the soul, which survives a series of rebirths essentially intact (a conception utterly antithetical to Climacus’s non-Socratic hypothesis, according to which rebirth is essentially discontinuous). On this basis, Socrates argues that learning is essentially recollection—a matter of recalling what our souls have already picked up from previous lifetimes of experience; in short, he denies that there is any such thing as learning or teaching, in the usual meaning of those terms. But this amounts to accepting the paradox rather than dissolving it, since he agrees that there is no such thing as learning; and it is done on the basis of arguments from authority, and indeed from kinds of authority that both Plato and Socrates are generally held to regard as deeply dubious, anything but self-evident sources of knowledge. Is all this just Socratic (or at least Platonic) irony? On the other hand, Socrates does go on to offer his own ground for his claim: he demonstrates its truth by “teaching” one of Meno’s slaves a geometrical theorem (a way of constructing from any given square another square of precisely twice the area, by means of its diagonal). In so doing, Socrates takes the slave through three mental states or conditions: he begins with ungrounded confidence in his ability to solve the geometrical problem; then Socrates reveals its lack of ground, thereby reducing him to bewilderment; and then he elicits from him a genuinely effective way of solving the problem. According to Socrates, this is an exemplary instance of teaching as no more than the occasion for the learner’s recollecting what he already knew; more precisely, he says that having educed a correct but potentially hazy or unanchored opinion about the particular square drawn in the sand in front of them, simply guiding the slave

The Riddle of Irony

49

through a series of such cases would reconstitute his grasp of the technique to the point of genuine knowledge. Any attentive reader of this dialogue will see that the slave’s journey mirrors the journey on which Socrates takes Meno—a mirroring that is flagged up by the way the example of shape is carried across from his discussion with Meno to his exchanges with the slave. Meno too begins with a groundless confidence in his grasp of what virtue is, is quickly reduced to numb bewilderment, and then takes at least some steps towards genuine illumination by the dialogue’s end. I mentioned the hovering possibility of irony a little earlier, but here we see that the structure of the soul’s journey under Socratic tuition is analogous to what Jonathan Lear has recently called “ironic disruption.”⁵ Lear draws on Christine Korsgaard’s work to argue that we constitute ourselves as human by inhabiting practical identities—descriptions under which we value ourselves, find our actions to be worth undertaking and so our lives to be worth living: farmer, artist, teacher. These identities commit their inhabitants to ideals or standards of excellence that they must adhere to in the face of temptation, and that can themselves be the object of reflective inquiry, as when I ask myself not only what they demand of me in a given situation, but whether they might be revised so as to better fulfil the good achieved by living out the identity they help to constitute. But such reflective engagement is not enough to engender irony. This arises when we find ourselves confronting a more radical diremption between the myriad ways in which individuals inhabit this identity and the ideal it aspires to embody. Imagine a teacher, grading papers and reflecting on how well her department’s grading practices match up to their shared goal of developing their students’ capacity to learn. She is suddenly struck by a sense of vertigo or disorientation in relation to everything that makes up that social practice: the very idea of teaching remains compelling, but it also seems entirely unrelated to how she currently lives out that identity, however reflectively. Phrases like “helping my students to develop their capacity to learn” retain their pertinence, but they have become enigmatic, open-ended, oracular: who her students might be (the ones on the course, the ones who read her books, her colleagues?), what their development might amount to, how anything she can do might contribute to it—these questions have become utterly compelling, but she does not even know how to begin answering them. In such a condition, I can no longer make sense of myself in terms of my practical identity, and yet this is an expression not of my loss of faith in that

 Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press 2011.

50

Stephen Mulhall

identity but of my continued commitment to the ideals that constitute it. It is precisely because I care passionately about teaching that I have come to a halt as a teacher; nothing any longer makes sense to me as the next step I might take as a teacher. I retain a strong desire to be such a person, but the intensity of that desire is what disorients me; it is my continuing commitment to its ideals that compels me to aspire to transcend altogether the social practices (Lear rather misleadingly calls them “pretenses”) that currently embody it. My sense is that all previously received understandings of what it is to be a teacher (and to reflect critically on what it is to be a teacher) fall short of what teaching—in its true significance and goodness—really demands. It is this kind of directed uncanniness that finds expression in such questions as: “Among all teachers, is there a teacher?” “Among all wise people, is there a wise person?” “Among all Christians, is there a Christian?” Lear’s ironist (who here reveals his indebtedness to the irony of Socrates and of Kierkegaard) is thus preoccupied with judging the vitality of an evaluative or spiritual world as such. She is sensitive to the possibility that such worlds might cease to make sense to us, leaving us utterly disoriented and incapable of making ourselves intelligible either to others or ourselves. This possibility is prepared for by the general fact that virtue terms are candidate objects for what one might call growth in understanding—for a kind of comprehension that can intelligibly be characterized not just as the opposite of ignorance, but in terms of depth and shallowness, profundity or superficiality. It is a familiar aspect of our moral experience that the further we develop our possession and understanding of the virtues, the deeper and more sophisticated their nature comes to seem to us, the more difficult it becomes to communicate and live out that understanding, and to feel confident that we have or even could fully realize their potential. Just as Socrates’s wisdom is shown most clearly in his knowledge of how far away he currently is from really being wise, so everyday moral life repeatedly discloses broader and deeper ranges of significance in its structuring terms and dispositions. In this sense, one might say that Meno’s original question about whether virtue can be taught unknowingly registers something internal to the virtues that problematizes any simple picture of what is acquired in acquiring them—such as some system of fixed rules or principles, some set of truths. Nevertheless, the practice-transcending aspirations with which Lear is concerned, and which Socrates embodies in his ironic treatment of Meno’s question, take us beyond that familiar territory. For they ask us to take seriously the possibility that every aspect of our current realization of a practical identity and its ideals might entirely have lost contact with the telos around which those practices were constituted, so that their inhabitants are—as it were—using all the right words, but their practices of employing them now appear empty or hollow, a

The Riddle of Irony

51

mere simulacrum of the meaning their users sincerely believe that they have. Here it matters that Meno, whose question about virtue initiates the inquiry, is identified as the follower of a sophist: he would have been well-known to Plato’s readers as someone about to embark on a deeply unscrupulous military and political career, leading to an early death at the hands of a foreign king. To live ironically in Lear’s and Socrates’s sense entails finding a way of living with the ineliminable possibility of such ironic experience. It doesn’t mean trying (impossibly) to live as a teacher or a Christian entirely outside the current social practices of teaching or of Christianity (which both Climacus and Anti-Climacus would call “Christendom”), but rather inhabiting them in a way which acknowledges that keeping faith with their constitutive ideals may at any time mean undergoing something more radically self-critical than refining or supplementing its existing array of procedures. This could mean acknowledging the mood or moment of philosophy—the irruption of and recovery from its distinctive mode of uncanny bewilderment—as a standing possibility of any authentic inhabitation of the ordinary or the everyday. But in light of Socrates’s repeated allusions to the divine (the priestesses who provide his solution to the paradox, who preside over the Eleusinian Mysteries into which he wants Meno to be initiated, and who embody his concluding counter-picture of knowledge as a gift from God), it could also means acknowledging that philosophical irony has its religious counterpart. Christianity infinitizes what Socrates’s gadfly presence diurnalizes, “returning us to the everyday, the ordinary, every day.”⁶ As Clare Carlisle puts it, the religious life cannot be circumscribed by any concept or set of propositions, any text, any image, any institution, any religion. “Christendom” can never be more than the totality of human efforts to determine what is indeterminate, to objectify what is endlessly elusive, to finitize what is infinite. The gap between Christendom and the indeterminate, elusive, authentic Christian ideal…is at once immanent to Christendom, and irreducible to it…Christendom is populated by Christians who carry out the complex and diverse pretence of Christian life; and yet inside every one of these inhabitants is an inwardness, the spiritual dimension of existence in which the God-relation is lived, and which animates the pretence. The gap or space between pretence and aspiration, between being and becoming a Christian, is within each existing individual…at least potentially…But when inwardnesses are closed up, narrowed, down, squeezed out, obscured, then there is only pretence, with no inner life to animate it, and no possibility for irony…Kierkegaard…saw his own task as opening up, enlarging

 See Stanley Cavell, “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” in Inquiry, vol. 31, nr. 3, 2008, pp. 253 – 264.

52

Stephen Mulhall

and deepening the inwardness of each individual, to awaken within Christendom the possibility of irony, and with it the possibility of the God-relationship.⁷

It helped me to think of what Carlisle calls Christianity’s capacity to transcend even its own best self-circumscription as an expression of its nature as a revealed religion. A God of revelation is capable at any time of revealing the best current Christian forms of self-understanding (doctrinal, liturgical, artistic) to be utterly inadequate to, even judged and condemned by, their putative object. We will come back to this; but first, I need to note another—perhaps even a more immediate—implication of Plato’s alignment of the slave-boy’s experience with that of Meno himself. This is the suggestion that philosophical investigations are analogous to mathematical investigations, most obviously in that they are exercises in guided recollection (and perhaps also in that their subject-matter bears upon necessities rather than contingencies: call it the essential or the unconditional). For someone who came to Kierkegaard via Wittgenstein, the resonances with section 89 of the Philosophical Investigations are hard to miss. Here Wittgenstein quotes Augustine for the second and final time, asking “what is time?” and saying that “if no-one asks me, I know; but if I am asked to explain, I don’t know.” Wittgenstein comments: This could not be said about a question of natural science (“What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?”, for instance). Something that one knows when nobody asks one, but no longer knows when one is asked to explain it, is something that has to be called to mind [besinnen: Anscombe says “that we need to remind ourselves of”]. (And it is obviously something which, for some reason, it is difficult to call to mind.)⁸

This doesn’t implicate Wittgenstein in Socrates’s picture of all learning as recollection, since the invoked contrast with scientific knowledge rather implies that its application should be restricted to philosophical learning; and even there, Wittgenstein immediately emphasizes the difficulty intrinsic to eliciting such recollection—one might say the struggle to recover the clear and distinct perception one is supposedly recalling. This connects with an argument Stanley Cavell once made for a more specific connection between the Investigations’ methodological ideal of a perspicuous presentation of what one recollects and the business of constructing mathemat Clare Carlisle, “How to Be a Human Being in the World: Kierkegaard’s Question of Existence” in Kierkegaard’s Existential Approach, ed. by Arne Grøn, René Rosfort and K. Brian Soderquist, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2017 (Kierkegaard Monograph Series, vol. 35), pp. 122 – 123.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. and trans. by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, §89.

The Riddle of Irony

53

ical proofs, which on Wittgenstein’s notorious account of the matter must themselves be perspicuous.⁹ Having run through Euclid’s proof that the sum of the inner angles of a triangle must be 180 degrees, Cavell claims that the predicates appropriate to the experience of grasping that proof (the slave-boy’s experience) are pleasure, a kind of liberation or relief, and a sense of arrival or completeness: “a proof is a structure that tells me something is over, a bottom reached.”¹⁰ And he asks: is there an ordering of words that similarly is its own bottom line, that sees to its own ground—words that partake of completeness, pleasure and the sense of breaking something off, that epitomize, separate a thought, with finish and permanence, from the general range of experience? Cavell’s answer is: the aphoristic, a mode of language to which the Investigations repeatedly recurs, whose power exhibits the clarity achieved by grammatical reminders together with an acknowledgement of the (metaphysical) obscurity from which such clarity comes. And he claims further: [A]ppeals to the ordinary that fail this mode of reflection are not Wittgensteinian appeals, they do not take their bearing from the power to make philosophical problems completely disappear—hence appear. They do not, accordingly, express our interest in these problems, and so leave us subjected to them without understanding what kinds of creatures we are, what our life form as talkers is, that we are thus fascinatable, that philosophy is seductive.¹¹

These remarks might reasonably lead anyone to ask: what is Meno’s interest in the paradox that prompts his exchanges with Socrates? What does it tell us about him and us, that we find ourselves subjected to that kind of interest, seduced or fascinated by that paradox, and by paradoxes in general? This is a matter that fascinates Johannes Climacus; and I have already mentioned several motives that might be in play in Meno’s case. But Cavell’s remarks also prompt me to ask: what orderings of words other than the aphoristic might answer to the criteria Cavell displays so perspicuously? What other possibilities of our lives with language might be said to break off a thought with a clarity that recollects the obscurity from which it emerged—might see to their own ground, be their own bottom line? It will help here to take guidance from an important development in the Meno’s use of its central analogical model: geometry. For having taught the slave-boy a basic and well-established geometrical theorem, Socrates returns to his dialogue with Meno about virtue by advancing a hypothesis, and by com Cf. Stanley Cavell, “The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself” in The Cavell Reader, ed. by Stephen Mulhall, Oxford: Blackwell 1996.  Ibid., p. 384.  Ibid., p. 385.

54

Stephen Mulhall

paring this approach to that adopted by mathematicians when confronting a problem to which they do not yet have a solution, or a proof. In other words, Socrates implies that we should compare philosophical investigations not with the recitation of an established proof for a theorem, but with the attempt to construct a proof for a conjecture. And Wittgenstein is famous amongst philosophers of mathematics for comparing a mathematical conjecture that lacks a proof to a riddle for which we have not found a solution.¹² Suppose I ask (following Cora Diamond, following the Sphinx): “What has four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?”¹³ To solve this riddle, you need to know more than what that form of words describes; you need to know how it describes it—to see how a human being might be seen as fitting that description, how those words might be seen as a description of human existence. It may seem clear in advance that any solution will have to meet certain conditions—for example, that if something has four legs, it must have more than two legs; but that would (falsely) imply that the solution to our riddle cannot be a human being. In other words, we no more understand the further conditions we might impose on a solution to our riddle than we understand the riddle itself. Part of grasping its solution as a solution will be grasping how it can be said to meet these ancillary conditions, and so those conditions can’t be said to control what will count as a solution. Nevertheless, our imaginative engagement with the riddle is controlled by something—by existing patterns of use in our language, on the basis of which the riddle-phrase has been constructed. In this case, there are existing patterns of employing number words, of describing animal anatomy and its supplements, and of measuring time; and there are familiar ways of extending those patterns— for example, comparing different ways of measuring time, such as measuring the course of a life in terms of the progress of a day. Finding a solution to the Sphinx’s riddle is a matter of finding an appropriate way to project all those patterns onto it. We are not seeking something that fits a determinate description, but something that it will strike us as right to call by the riddle-phrase. The familiarity of the phrase’s construction, and of its grammatical connections with other phrases, orients our seeking, and gives the phrase whatever meaning it has at this pre-solution stage; but we cannot simply read off what we will be prepared to count as its solution, or indeed whether there is one.

 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939, ed. by Cora Diamond, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1989, p 84.  Cora Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” in The Realistic Spirit, Cambridge: MIT Press 1991.

The Riddle of Irony

55

Wittgenstein sees an analogy here with our relation to a mathematical conjecture. By fixing its place in the system of mathematical propositions, a proof gives the conjecture a determinate meaning it hitherto lacked; but the task of seeking a proof is given such orientation as it has, and so the conjecture has whatever meaning it has for us prior to the construction of that proof, by virtue of our familiarity with other mathematical concepts and procedures on analogy with which the conjecture has been constructed. And Diamond suggests that Anselm’s ontological argument can be regarded as a working out of just such promissory connections in the domain of theology, with respect to the riddlephrase “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” (hereafter “that than which…”). That phrase is constructed on the basis of a familiar model (great, greater, greatest, greatest conceivable); and Anselm draws upon existing linguistic connections between lacking something, being limited, being dependent, coming into existence and having a beginning in order to establish that if we were to call anything “that than which…”, then it would be something that had no beginning. We understand “something that has no beginning” as much and as little as we understand “that than which…”; the link is the outer shell of a necessary connection in a language we do not yet know how to speak. We are entertaining familiar words combined in a familiar pattern, holding open the possibility of a new language-game in which that word-shape has a place and in which we might find ourselves at home—but this outcome would amount to the discovery of a logical space, not a discovery within one. Anselm’s emphasis on the difference between existence in the understanding and existence in reality can then be seen as a way of distinguishing between ideas that we can, and those that we cannot, conceive of being the result of human inventive capacities. He wants to emphasize that our conception of what is possible might itself be shown up by reality—that reality might show us not only that something is the case that we imagined was not, but that something beyond what we had ever taken to be possible, something beyond anything we could imagine as possible, was actual. But if anything answered to that condition, it must also be such that we could not imagine it never having existed. For if we could, then we could separate the idea of it from its actuality, could make sense of the possibility of its being a mere possibility to which nothing actual happened to correspond; and then we could conceive of something greater than it—something whose actuality is a condition for the possibility of conceiving it, something without which it is inconceivable that we could possess a language of any kind for it. Anything we were willing to count as “that than which…” would have to be something whose non-existence could not be conceived, something that is conceivable only on condition of its actuality.

56

Stephen Mulhall

In the case of ordinary riddles, it is only when we discover a solution to the riddle, and how it counts as a solution, that we fully understand the question the riddle poses; before this, the relevant phrases have only promissory meaning. But in the case of “that than which…”, Anselm establishes that every statement we can make about it can only have a promissory meaning. The full transparency of that language to us is ruled out, because if we could fully grasp its meaning now, then we could conceive of something greater than whatever those words describe (namely, something whose nature exceeds the grasp of any concepts of which we can even conceive). And of course this form of words—“something whose nature exceeds the grasp of any concept of which we can even conceive”—is no more fully transparent to us than any other form of words to which it is “grammatically” linked, via the outer shell of a “necessary connection.” All are “allusions” to a “language” we cannot even conceive of speaking before actually finding ourselves in a position to speak it—a language given to us by the being to whom it applies, and whose self-revelation (recorded in the riddle-phrases of the Bible and of tradition) repeatedly effected the radical conversion of all our existing concepts of God, and may do so again. This is what Climacus refers to so abstractly in the thought-project of Fragments as the teacher who must bring both the truth and the condition for grasping it. It is the possibility inherent in Christianity’s infinitizing of irony to which I take Carlisle to have been referring. It thereby posits the field of religious uses of language as discontinuously continuous with a broader aspect of our life with words—its inherently constructive, imaginative or creative dimension, its openendedness, its openness to the unforeseen and the unforeseeable: call it our capacity to improvise. Riddles exemplify such controlled creativity; and solved riddles have as good a claim as aphorisms to partake of emancipatory completeness, pleasure and a sense of breaking something off—to epitomize, to separate a thought, with finish and permanence, from the general range of experience (think of the solution to the Sphinx’s riddle). They too exhibit a kind of clarity, whilst acknowledging the (metaphysical) obscurity from which that clarity has come. This indebtedness to the enigmatic explains why, as Adam Roberts has pointed out, cultures in which riddle-making was central—for example, pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon culture—exemplify a deeply ironic conception of (human) reality. It is only familiarity that stands between us and a vision of the world as a fascinating but baffling series of puzzles…If the doors of perception were cleansed…we should see the world as it truly is, a riddle.

The Riddle of Irony

57

[T]he world is not a simple or transparent business, but a mystery to be plumbed. Riddles… talk about ordinary objects or phenomena in an ironic way: sly, allusive, misleading… This speaks in the largest way to the way the Old Northmen lived their lives. Irony is a way of expressing a sense that there is a gap between oneself and one’s world…Their gods were capricious, puzzling creatures because life is often that way; and those same Norse gods were themselves doomed to die…because human life is so doomed. The question as to why that is poses one of the most profound riddles of all. Riddles embody in a small way a very large observation about human existence. Life riddles us.¹⁴

Against this background, one can see why a Socratically minded philosopher might wish to solve Meno’s paradox by depicting teaching and learning as purely recollective. This amounts to depicting truth or insight as always already familiar, and hence to a denial of genuine novelty, and of the creative defamiliarization that might disclose life as intrinsically enigmatic or mysterious. The Meno’s deployment of established geometrical proofs can participate in that repression; but its less salient but no less fundamental invitation to consider the creativity inherent in their original construction equally allows a Wittgensteinian model of philosophy as transformative recollection (call it re-membering or re-articulating the ordinary) to claim continuity with a genuinely Socratic inheritance. And the fact that Climacus’s project begins with a paradox that Socrates resolves by dismissing, and ends by positing a paradox that is undismissable and insoluble, might then be seen as his way of indicating that his discontinuity with Socrates is also a mode of continuity. In specifically religious discourse, by contrast, the ironic riddling of words is absolutized or infinitized: rendered nothing but oracular. By cleaving to linguistic constructions that result from extending existing patterns of use in ways that deprive the constituent words of their usual sense, and refusing to accept any alternative assignments of sense, religious believers make manifest their faith in God’s absolute transcendence, and their refusal to arrogate the authority to determine what does or could possibly count as God’s expressing or revealing himself. This is one expression of their vision of words as pointing beyond themselves in just the way that all created things do: the fullest realization of their nature amounts to its self-overcoming. For the Christian, then, word meaning is ultimately kenotic or self-emptying. In denying ourselves ultimate authority over that meaning, we at once acknowledge that fact and enact our own

 Adam Roberts, The Riddles of The Hobbit, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2013, pp. 12– 13, p. 20 and p. 2.

58

Stephen Mulhall

self-abnegating createdness. In short, signifying has a fundamentally Christological form. And here at last our ironic trajectory through the medium of Socratically-inspired philosophy—penetrating the pure surface of its strictly two-dimensional geometrical example of lines and areas—brings us into contact with Anti-Climacus. This writer’s passionate encounters with a range of enigmatic Biblical remarks about and by the God-man (Diamond might call it a process of constructing promissory connections between and from them) lead him to the equal and opposite declaration that Christ has a fundamentally signifying form. More specifically, the second part of Practice in Christianity presents Christ’s causing of offense as ultimately a function of his being a sign, specifically a sign of contradiction. This contradiction is not between Christ’s being God and his being human, as if he instantiated a Hegelian speculative unity of two kinds, divinity and humanity. Rather, it lies in the fact that this individual human being is God. And by choosing to become this individual human being, God ensures the most impenetrable unrecognizability that is possible, an incognito that is woven into his very existence. As a result, God is incapable of direct communication with other human beings, and so is at once bound to create offense in others (either with respect to the loftiness of this individual’s claim to be God, or to the lowliness of the one making that lofty claim), and to suffer the unknowability of his inwardness. And what does Anti-Climacus take to be the purpose of this signifying? Because he was to disclose the thought of hearts… And only the sign of contradiction can do this…A contradiction placed squarely in front of a person—if one can get him to look at it—is a mirror; as he is forming a judgement, what dwells within him must be disclosed. It is a riddle, but as he is guessing the riddle, what dwells within him is disclosed by the way he guesses. The contradiction confronts him with a choice, and as he is choosing, together with what he chooses, he himself is disclosed.¹⁵

Christ is a riddle; but if his incognito is absolutely impenetrable, then he must be an absolutely insoluble riddle—what Wittgenstein and Diamond would call a great riddle. Compare the riddle of the Sphinx. Oedipus shows that this riddle is soluble, and so implies that the riddle of human existence has an answer; but the answer he arrives at is ineradicably pagan in Anti-Climacus’s terms. It merely characterizes humanity in general, and its definitiveness or efficacy (the solution’s ability to give us peace) is cast into doubt by the fact that Oedipus’s ability

 SKS 12, 131 / PC, 126 – 127.

The Riddle of Irony

59

to identify it does not deliver genuine self-knowledge: as his later sufferings attest, there is an abyssal gap between knowing what it is to be human, and knowing what it is to be the individual human being that one is. By contrast, what we encounter in encountering Christ—the singular incarnation of religion’s infinitizing drive—is an insoluble riddle that must be answered by each individual without reliance upon historical context, shared norms or established patterns of speech or behaviour, religious or otherwise. This riddle leaves each individual absolutely exposed, required simultaneously to acknowledge her inability to resolve it and her obligation to maintain her relationship with it. After all, if, as St. Paul says, human existence is a riddle for which the solution was unknown until Christ’s self-revelation, and Christ is himself a riddle, then so is human existence in general, and so is any individual life lived in relation to it. Because our defining relationship as creatures—gifted with infinite inwardness, with the non-self-identity that makes our ironic existence possible—is to the Sign of Contradiction, Christ is a mirror revealing that we are all signs of contradiction. Each of us is a riddle we can neither solve nor set aside, an inexhaustible object of seduction and fascination.

Noreen Khawaja

Interlude I: Wayward Intimacies Splash I removed my shoes on entering. Instinctively, without being asked. The flat was clean and spacious, glowing subtly in the deep orange mood of an evening at the end of August. My host was making a drink and left me to wander the edges of the room. Books climbed the walls in stacks. Every so often an intricate tangle of leaves appeared from a shelf or sill. A green-tinted photograph hung off-center above a stack crowned by a dark, crisp volume. The Seducer’s Diary. A branch on the cover with bright red flowers. The slashed Scandinavian o appearing briefly as a smooth, white heart pierced by an arrow. One might reflect in such a moment on the ironies of history and capital, plucking certain words from their villages, sending them out on long, unpredictable missions. That the seducer should come to speak for himself, should be found still creeping, up a faded brick wall in Park Slope. One might marvel at the possibility of a hermetic nineteenth-century joke that still turns well-meaning readers into a punchline. One might wonder if in this bottomless, anachronic laughter, it might be possible to find something like what was lost in becoming a person in the first place. If the truth is in time, we must be swimming in it.

Fossil Record It’s happened before. Humanly speaking for a reader of Kierkegaard to come upon the Diary in the home of a new friend is to confront an enigma. If you were to find a copy of Sportsman’s Sketches in someone’s library you’d think, this person probably likes to read Turgenev. A volume of poems by Alice Oswald and you’d say they must enjoy poetry, or Alice Oswald, or the way the earth sounds when it speaks to itself. The presence of the Diary in a person’s home is not immediately a sign of love. It’s a question.¹

 Unless the Diary is framed by the company of a certain canon, e. g. Machiavelli’s Prince, Casanova’s History of My Life, Byron’s Don Juan, Crébillon’s Sopha, etc. Then one can reasonably infer a love of libertinage. I personally have only seen one such library and would be very happy to know less about the person who created it than I presently do. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-006

62

Noreen Khawaja

[First form:] What is the word for an orphan when it is not a child abandoned by parents, but a self untethered from the trials that gave it form? A figure (seducer), a name (Johannes), a shadowgraph of repetitions and projections of phenomenal desperation. Like Marcus Aurelius with his ad se ipsum, marking the words that follow as ways he was trying, ever at the point of collapse, simply to keep it together. [Second form:] Is this a book or a ruin? Is there a difference?

Creeps The bristlecone pine, native to the western United States, thrives in harsh, dry soil at high altitudes, just below the tree line. Bristlecones are among the longest-living biotic forms. A few have their own Wikipedia pages. Methuselah. Prometheus. Though in the Great Basin National Park, signs indicating the name and location of these particular trees have apparently been removed, a forced incognito to stem the rising tide of tourists. Each approaching five thousand years, they are the oldest known living individuals on earth. What individuality means at such a scale is hard to fathom. Bristlecones do not press baldly upward as a sequoia or cypress. They grow slowly, twisting over their own frozen forms, in networks of warped branches at once dead and alive, meager threads of life slinking through vast ruins of themselves.² Conditions are so severe in these regions that even death is thrown off its game. Decay requires moisture, and the air and soil of a bristlecone forest can be dry enough to prevent fallen wood from rotting. Instead, it erodes, at a rate so unhurried, slower even than that of the trees’ growth, that the dead appear to outlive the living. And maybe they do. Johannes steps forward, a shade of shades. A vein of speech creeping through the obsolescence. On the orange evening I do not open the book. With memory and feeling as guides I climb the staircase of names to its question: In what language do I love her In what language am I able to express love for her In what language is she able to receive these expressions

 It’s mostly about the dendrochronology the trees make possible and I didn’t understand what his point was about climate change, but this image comes from Alex Ross, “The Bristlecones Speak,” New Yorker, January 20, 2020, pp. 44– 53. I learned to think about this question from Joanna Radin, “Rot,” The Multispecies Salon, (http://www.multispecies-salon.org/rot/) (1/25/20).

Interlude I: Wayward Intimacies

63

In what language does she name the difference between what she receives and what she is offered

If human beings were sculptures we might describe seduction as a matter of negative space. What about negative language? The language implied by the gaps between languages. A zone of fantasy and deception, of microbiotic hide and seek, of resonant and syncopated spirituality where nameplates are made with exquisite care but never point just where you think they should (mine, yours, alien, proper, appropriation, repetition, seduction, coercion, attention, abstention). Peeled off from the symphonic space of Either/Or, the meaning of seduction is more unstable than ever. Without A’s listless metaphysics or B’s ethics of disambiguity to serve as foils, without being refracted through the innumerable masks of that work, Johannes really just seems like a megalomaniac. In his foreword to the Diary, John Updike tries to counter this impression. He warns that the overconfident tone of the Diary is not what it seems—really, it’s a wound, presenting itself as a boast.³ Fantasy runs through the seducer’s story of conquest, an elemental kind of autofiction. But why imagine failure as a realer cause? We know nothing about Johannes’s so-called wound. It is no secret that he’s lying, somehow, that the seamless control he projects is some kind of mask. Of what it hides, we know nothing simple. I remember the students discussing whether they believed Johannes had even met Cordelia in the first place, ever really spoken to her. So much of the story is in his own head. What if you were watching them from the other side of the room, or from outside the window. Had they ever touched? Interacted? What if in all that time she’d never really even noticed him? He’s like a phantom. A phantom. Whose? What do you mean whose? No one’s. A glimmer on the fold. The point is not where did he come from the point is that he is not from here.

This is where they start to feel empathy for Johannes. Not a lot, mind you. Even still, I worry how much of it is for narratological reasons. The farce of the will is no match for the romance of the margins. Blurred outlines of other heroes begin

 I didn’t really read his foreword at the time but I searched for it on the internet it afterward and this seems to be his main point.

64

Noreen Khawaja

to accrete in the atmosphere. Cyrano? Heathcliff? Jordan Catalano? It should matter to someone that Heathcliff and Johannes seek to possess different things.

Here Because in another way, as Updike would agree, every word does to reality what the diary does, materializing itself, obstacle to the flow of things, but also conduit, forcing them to change direction, showing only some of its effect. A command does this and so does a promise, making bonds that disrupt the sensitivity of the moment. Everything that is tears reality apart a little. And that includes the ghosts. In Grib’s Forest there is a place called the Nook of the Eight Paths; only the one who seeks worthily finds it, for no map indicates it. Indeed, the name itself seems to contain a contradiction, for how can the meeting of eight paths create a nook, how can the beaten and frequented be reconciled with the out-of-the-way and the hidden?…Out-of-the-way, hidden, and secret—one is very close to a forest area called the Unlucky Enclosure. Thus the contradiction in the name only makes the place more solitary, just as contradiction always makes for solitariness. The eight paths—heavy traffic is only a possibility, a possibility for thought, because no one travels this path except a tiny insect that hurries across lente festinans [hastening at leisure]. No one travels it except that fugitive traveler that is constantly looking around, not in order to find someone but in order to avoid everyone, that fugitive that even in its hiding place does not feel the traveler’s longing for a message from someone, that fugitive that only the fatal bullet overtakes, which indeed explains why the deer now became so still but does not explain why it was so restless. No one travels this road except the wind, about which it is not known whence it comes or whither it goes… Eight paths and not a traveler! Indeed, it is as if the world were dead and the one survivor were in the awkward situation that there was no one to bury him.⁴

Today, however, the fugitive is not alone. Stumbling on a surprise reunion of characters from My So-Called Life, a short-lived 1990s television series exploring the possibilities for tenderness in the American suburb, his flight takes new form. As they converse, light floods the forest wall in yellow-red streams. Angela: But if we’re at the root of our own authenticity, how can we ever be in bad faith? Jordan: We might have to consider that we are really bad at being ourselves Angela: Did Rayanne tell you that? What is this? Jordan: Mostly soda. Just taste it. I think it’s possible for there to be nothing between two people, and yet for them not to touch.

 SKS 6, 23 – 34/ SLW, 16 – 17. I translated the name of the forest.

Interlude I: Wayward Intimacies

65

Angela: Can’t tell if that’s odd or obvious. Jordan: Is it good? Angela: It’s good.

Postscript To be Kierkegaardian is to avoid metacommentary about what one has said; or it is to engage in metacommentary while allowing one’s voice to fork as paths do, to double, triple, octuple; or it is a matter of listening more than speaking, for the faint, honest pulse beneath the well-trodden words; or it is to sift and sift through shapes yet unclassified in search of a genre suited to the drama of mind; or it is a repetition of hospitality, a hand extended to figures without names, to suitors who fail, to the truth in the pleasure of all of it.

Hugh S. Pyper

A Smile From Every Child Let me begin with a question. Which famous philosopher wrote the following words: “These days I have taken on the project of eliciting a smile from every child I meet”?¹ In the present context, there are no prizes for guessing that the answer is “Kierkegaard,” but the sentiment may still be unexpected. In my experience, this is an interesting quotation to spring on those who are just beginning the serious study of Kierkegaard’s works and who are only aware of the stereotype of him as “the melancholy Dane,” the spokesman of despairing misanthropy and existential angst. The evidence we have from his nieces and nephews gives a very different picture of Kierkegaard as a loving and muchloved uncle, playful and self-deprecating, who took children seriously as conversation partners and companions.² Those who met him as children retained a rather different view of him than many of his adult contemporaries. Rather unusually, perhaps, I too first encountered Kierkegaard during my childhood. A cousin of my father came for a brief visit. He was put up in my bedroom and I was sent to share with my brother. After he had left, I found a thank-you gift on the bedside table: Robert Perkins’s Søren Kierkegaard, a book in the “Makers of Contemporary Theology” series from Lutterworth Press. Sadly, over the years the book and I parted company but it reinforced in me the sense that there was a radical difference between the bland moralising that characterised much of the religious teaching I encountered and the terror and wonder that even then I was aware of in the great narratives of the Bible. The upshot of that, after some detours, has been a career in the study of biblical interpretation where Kierkegaardian reading has played a significant and recurring role, and a long and enriching engagement with Quakerism. As a result, Perkins’s book falls, for me, into the category of “childhood books,” a term introduced by Alison Waller in a recent study.³ Not all the books that one reads in childhood can be described as “children’s literature,” if that is taken to mean literature written with the child reader in mind. Children may pick up all sorts of books and those that have the most long-lasting or mem-

 SKS 18, 185, JJ: 139 / KJN 2, 171.  See, for instance, passim in the accounts in Chapter Nine “Søren and the Family” in Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by his Contemporaries, ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, pp. 136 – 192, and in particular that of his niece Henriette Lund (pp. 150 – 175).  Alison Waller, Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics, London: Bloomsbury Academic 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-007

68

Hugh S. Pyper

orable effects may not be great classics, or written with children in mind. Even before we can read independently, each of us begins to accumulate what Waller, following Catharine Stimpson, calls a “paracanon:” a list of beloved or, perhaps more accurately, unforgotten texts.⁴ After all, it may be that a book read in childhood sticks in our memory because it disturbed or terrified us, rather than because we enjoyed it. It may indeed be the boredom it induced that stays with us. We also need to qualify the meaning of “unforgotten” in this context, because one of Waller’s key interests is the way in which the book we remember may turn out to be rather different from the book we once read. Returning as an adult to re-read a formerly treasured book, we may find that we have forgotten or exaggerated elements of the story. Perhaps we blithely accepted information or attitudes that now strike us as questionable or distasteful, or now see subtleties and implicit meanings that we were unaware of as children. As Waller points out, the problem may not lie in the book; we may well have romanticized the child we imagine we were. What we call our memories may be fabrications by our adult self which do not reflect who we actually were as children. That said, much discussion of children’s literature operates on a false distinction between the child and the adult as readers, glossing over the inescapable continuity between them. How and what we read as adults is shaped by what we read as children, or, again more accurately, what remains with us of what we read as children. Waller explores how the environment—physical, intellectual and emotional—of the reading experience can colour and shape our memories: the size, shape, texture and smell of the book; who, if anyone, read it to us or with us; what we were wearing; the room we were in; the sounds we could hear as we were reading. In this insistence on the importance of childhood reading, Waller takes issue with both Italo Calvino and Matei Călinescu, authors of significant reflections on the act of re-reading.⁵ They gloss over reading done as a child, suggesting that children’s reading experiences are limited by their still developing understanding, and that childhood books are for the most part of little intrinsic value. Although she does not cite him, Waller has a formidable ally in Graham Greene, who wrote the following: Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In childhood all books are divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who

 Catherine Stimpson, “Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo Marsh,” New Literary History, vol. 21, 1990, pp. 957– 976.  See Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?, trans. by M. McLaughlin, London: Jonathan Cape 1999 and Matei Călinescu, Rereading, New Haven: Yale University Press 1993.

A Smile From Every Child

69

sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?⁶

If Greene is correct, the paracanon of childhood books and the experience of childhood reading is seminal. He does not go on to explore how certain books from the paracanon become part of what Waller calls a life-long reading act, re-read and re-appropriated in different circumstances and times, or present as a shaping memory, however that memory itself may be affected by changing interests and circumstances. On this account, Perkins, and so Kierkegaard, make it into my paracanon, with far-reaching consequences. This essay is one product of a life-long reading act involving Kierkegaard. We can also take issue with the idea that the books we encounter as children are trivial. Quite apart from the intrinsic merits of many books which are labelled as “children’s literature,” children do take up texts written for adults, which thus become “childhood books.” In this sense the Bible has for generations been a “childhood book,” and still continues to be. That is not the same as saying that it is a “children’s book,” although the vast industry devoted to the production of “children’s Bibles” is evidence that this distinction is often blurred. The consequences of this for adult attitudes to the text—either in rejection of the text itself as in some sense “childish,” or in the retention into adulthood of childish modes of reading—remains an obvious but under-researched question. That, however, is matter for another time. The question that gives rise to the present essay is what Kierkegaard himself might have to tell us about the importance of childhood books and of our reading experience as children. It turns out that Kierkegaard’s journal for 1837 includes a fair-sized essay on what kind of stories should be told to children.⁷ The Hongs and Grete Kjær suggest that this journal entry is a response to an article written in 1836 or 37 by Poul M. Møller, titled “Om at fortæller Børn Eventyr” [On telling Fairy-tales to Children].⁸ In the face of the increasing number of

 Graham Greene, “The Lost Childhood,” in Collected Essays, London: Vintage 1999 [1969], p. 13.  SKS 17, 122 – 133, BB:37 / KJN 1, 116 – 125.  Poul M. Møller, “Om at fortælle Børn Eventyr,” in Efterladte Skrifter, vol. 5, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1856, pp. 14– 17. The article is undated but the probable years for its production are suggested in a footnote by the editor of his collected works. See the editors’ note on ʻChildhood, Childrenʼ at JP 1, 509 – 510 and Grethe Kjær, “The Role of Folk and Fairy Tales in Kierkegaard’s Authorship,” in Kierkegaard on Art and Communication, ed. by George Pattison, Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press 1992, p. 83. See also Grethe Kjær, Eventyrets verden i Kierkegaards Forfatterskab, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag 1991, p. 28.

70

Hugh S. Pyper

collections of fairy and folk tales from around the world becoming available in Danish at that time, which parents were using to amuse their children, Møller offers a warning: It is not our opinion that one should completely deny children the pleasure of hearing tales of fantasy, but rather that…one should not give them a taste too soon, that one should not lead them into the land of trolls when they can scarcely speak clearly and when their circle of experience is confined to a couple of rooms.⁹

Møller was contributing to a debate that was current in Danish society, and indeed in most of Europe at that time, over the place of the imagination in children’s education and therefore in children’s literature.¹⁰ Under the influence of Herder, there was a huge growth of interest in folk-tales. For their advocates, these stories contained the ancient wisdom characteristic of each race before it was sullied by modern rationalism. Often this was couched in terms that harked back to the childhood of mankind, and went hand in hand with a view of childhood as a state of innocence—and of adulthood as a fall into alienation under the dead hand of economic and social pressure. Such folktales were therefore ideal for children to read. On the other hand, there were those who strongly argued that the purpose of education was precisely to shape children to become rational adults who would grow out of the superstitious and frivolous world of the nursery. Childhood was simply a time of ignorance to be left behind so that adulthood could be achieved, and folktales could be positively dangerous if they hindered that process. Kierkegaard does not refer to this article in his own essay, but whether he was specifically responding to Møller or not, it is clear he was stimulated to write it by a lively current debate. It is also clear that he diverges sharply from Møller’s views on the priority of realism over imagination in the education of children. Kierkegaard begins by asserting that children have a huge appetite for stories which many storytellers presume to satisfy. However, there are few who have a real talent for this. He sets out two good ways to tell stories, suggesting that most people fall short of these. The first is the naïve storytelling of the nursemaid, someone who herself is basically still a child; the second is the mature and

 Møller, “Om at fortælle Børn Eventyr,” p. 16.  For a comprehensive account of how these debates played out specifically in Denmark, see Torben Weinreich, Historien om Børneliteratur: Dansk Børneliteratur gennem 400 År, Copenhagen: Branner og Korch 2006, especially the section dealing with the period 1820 – 1880 (pp. 138 – 308).

A Smile From Every Child

71

educational approach of someone who knows how to be a child. Both have their validity, but what must be avoided is the pretence to naivety or the pretence to understanding. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Kierkegaard argues that stories should be told in a Socratic manner that positively invites children to question and ponder. Much depends on the character of the teller, who is characteristically more often an uncle rather than a parent, and therefore at a remove from daily discipline. It is not a matter of telling stories at prescribed moments. It is rather about having an attitude that seeks, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, to “bring the poetic into touch with their lives in every way,” and to bring glimpses of enchantment at random and unexpected moments. In a footnote, Kierkegaard emphasizes the need to learn from the marvellous creativity of children, citing Luke’s reference to the twelve-year-old Christ in the temple, rather than applying what he calls “the prosaic birch.” The good storyteller will be aware of what the children are learning at school, but uses this as an opportunity to awaken them to how this learning is linked to their deepest concerns, all with the aim of attuning their attentiveness. Kierkegaard warns against telling children that they need to enjoy their childhood because adulthood will bring trials and sorrows. This can only lead to anxiety that robs the child of his present pleasure. In a patently Lutheran phrase, he argues that a child who lives only under the law rather than the gospel can never become free. There is a place for the rigour of the schoolroom, but in itself that is not enough. Indeed, he raises the suggestion that an obsession with discipline is the result of one generation taking revenge on its children for what it has suffered through such mishandling. What a child needs, he insists, is mythology and good stories. He recommends getting the child to retell the story in different ways and through different media. The adult can then guide by Socratic questioning without quashing the child’s creativity. Kierkegaard then turns to the question of the significance of childhood itself. Is it just a preliminary phase whose importance lies in its effects on later stages, or does it have value in itself? He deplores the effect of the former view, by which childhood is seen as something that needs to be got through as quickly as possible and children themselves are deprived of a sense of self-worth. There are false ways of taking up childhood, however. Kierkegaard scorns those who seek to ape the ways of children as a way to evade adulthood. Equally, he has no time for patronising approaches. Both of these seem to regard childhood itself as empty of its own content. He particularly censures the practice of ending a story with the phrase, “But you realize of course that it was only a fairy story.” The result is that children are either given paltry books that are simply

72

Hugh S. Pyper

designed to pass the time, or else they are given books of instruction which encourage the illusion that the mere accumulation of details adds up to understanding. Kierkegaard then reveals that what he thinks is necessary in all education and upbringing of children is “to allow the child to bring forth life in himself in all stillness.”¹¹ He alludes approvingly to a short story by Ludwig Tieck in support of the importance of exposing children to the darker and more disturbing elements of folk tales. Not doing so leaves them prey to anxieties that the stories could have moderated. Those who profess to be worried that exposure to such stories will excite children’s imaginations and provoke anxiety (here Møller may well be in his thoughts) have the wrong end of the stick. Children are imaginative and prone to anxiety in any case; the problem is teaching them how to live with this—and this is precisely what folk tales can do. Walter de la Mare, a great but now rather neglected writer for and about children, knew this well. In one of the inimitable annotations to be found in the section of his verse anthology Come Hither, titled “About and Round About,” he tells us: I once tried to comfort a little boy who was unhappy because there was a Bear under his bed. Candlestick in hand, I talked and talked and proved that there wasn’t a real bear for miles and miles around, except, of course, at the Zoological Gardens, and there—black, brown, sloth, spectacled, grizzly and polar alike—all of them, poor creatures, were cabined, cribbed and shut up in barred cages. He listened, tears still shining in his eyes, his small face sharp and clear. “Why certainly, certainly not,” I ended, “there can’t be a real bear for miles around!” He smiled as if pitying me. “Ah yes,” he answered with a die-away sob, “but, you see, you’s talking of real bears and mine isn’t real.”¹²

Tieck, Kierkegaard, Bettelheim and de la Mare all knew that rationality is no defence against the unreal—and that anxiety feeds on unreality. Fantastic fears call for fantastic reassurances. Kierkegaard showed great interest in folktales, particularly in his earlier writings. Grethe Kjær in her monograph on their role in his authorship reminds us that the auction catalogue for the sale of his library after his death lists over a hundred titles under the category of “Folk Literature.”¹³ Throughout Europe, there was a growing appreciation of such literature at that period, but she argues that there are specific reasons for Kierkegaard’s interest. Early in his career, he

 SKS 17, 132, BB:37 / KJN 1, 125.  Walter de la Mare, Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages, Constable & Co: London 1928, p. 503.  Kjær, Eventyrets verden i Kierkegaards Forfatterskab, p. 9.

A Smile From Every Child

73

became fascinated by the Middle Ages as part of his project to analyse the roots of Romanticism, and particularly the Romantic irony which was to issue in his dissertation. He found in folk literature a refreshing form of naïve irony which simply disregarded the constraints of the mundane. And for him personally, folktales provided a means of relaxation and renewal where private sorrows are forgotten in the infinite sorrow of the human condition. Importantly, these tales also gave evidence of the ways in which ordinary people had confronted the great questions of existence at a time when the language of theology and philosophy was inaccessible to most. As such, they also spoke to children. Inevitably, in the Danish context, the name of Hans Christian Andersen comes to mind at this point. Given Kierkegaard’s interest in folk tales, one might expect that Andersen’s contributions to the genre would intrigue him. He did have access to them. Andersen himself sent him the two volumes of his New Fairy Tales, 1845 – 1848 with an inscription: “Either you like my little works Or you do not. They are nonetheless sent without Fear and Trembling and that is something, at any rate.”¹⁴ However, Lone Koldtoft points out that the Journals refer explicitly only to three of Andersen’s tales, in passing and rather dismissively.¹⁵ Furthermore, Joakim Garff sees it as “more than obvious” that Andersen was the target of Kierkegaard’s mockery in a passage in the 1837 essay referring to those “gangling childish marionettes who jump about on the floor and ride on hobbyhorses with the sweet little ones.”¹⁶ What Kierkegaard found lacking in Andersen becomes apparent in the following conversation recollected by his amanuensis, Israel Levin: One evening in the Frederiksberg Gardens we spoke of Andersen: “Andersen has no idea what fairy tales are. It is enough that he be good-hearted, why should he also attempt poetry? This poor woman, how brutally she drinks, but, dear me, the children get their sweets, they had to have something. All very innocent—but fairy tales?” And then he conjured up six, seven tales that made me very uncomfortable. His imagination was so lively that it was as if he saw the images right before his eyes. It was as though he lived in a spirit world, and with a strange impropriety and eccentricity he could evoke the most frightful things with an explicitness that was terrifying.¹⁷

 Quoted in Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce Krimmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005, p. 145.  Lone Koldtoft, “Hans Christian Andersen: Andersen was just an excuse” in Kierkegaard and his Danish Contemporaries, Tome III, Literature, Drama and Aesthetics, ed. by Jon Stewart, Farnham: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 7), pp. 1– 32 and pp. 12– 13.  Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, p. 14.  Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard, pp. 207– 208.

74

Hugh S. Pyper

In this attitude, as Kjær remarks, Kierkegaard anticipates Bruno Bettelheim, who judges some of Andersen’s most celebrated tales to be unsuitable for children. The story of the ugly duckling, for instance, is not helpful to any child who identifies with the outcast and bullied hero: he does not need to be told that he is of a different species from those who despise him, or to be given the idea that his fate was fixed at birth.¹⁸ More importantly, however, Bettelheim argues that the destructive emotions—jealousy, fear, anger—that folktales present are something that all children experience, but do not know how to deal with. Such feelings are too often met simply with disapproval, and the child is taught to repress them without any explanation. This can leave the child feeling uniquely flawed, with no access to examples of other people undergoing these unacceptable feelings and no strategies for moderating or living by them. This is what such tales can offer to the child, especially if they are accompanied in this exploration by a sympathetic elder who does not flinch from what is disturbing, but demonstrates that it can be survived. Here I want to turn to one of the greatest practitioners of this form of storytelling who seems to me to be attuned to what Kierkegaard is advocating here: Tove Jansson. I have not found any direct evidence that she read Kierkegaard, but the Kierkegaardian resonances of her approach to children in her Moomin books has been noticed by others. In an affectionate retrospective in the Guardian on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Moomin series, Frank Cottrell Boyce recalls his boyhood reading of Moominland Midwinter and remarks, “I can’t think of a better evocation of loneliness, or of feeling an outsider. At the time it felt as if Kierkegaard had turned up for a playdate.”¹⁹ Jansson wrote a brief but compelling essay on the craft of children’s writing for the Finnish-Swedish literary journal Horisont under the title “Den lömska barnboksförfattaren” in English, “The Deceptive Author of Children’s Books.”²⁰ In it, she argues that the important thing in any children’s book is that it contains a moment of intense horror. There must be a point where the child, following

 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, London: Peregrine 1978, pp. 104– 105.  Frank Cottrell Boyce “The Dangerous Journey by Tove Jansson—a Review,” The Guardian, February 19, 2011.  Tove Jansson, “Den lömska barnboksförfattaren,” Horisont, vol. 2, 1961, pp. 8 – 10. The translation is my own. For a more extended discussion and translation of this article in relation to children’s Bibles, see Hugh S. Pyper “The Bible in Moominvalley: The Child as Reader and the Deceptive Biblical Author,” in Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play: Studies in Biblical Poetry and Prophecy in Honour of Francis Landy, ed. by Ehud Ben Zvi, Claudia V. Camp, David M. Gunn and Aaron W. Hughes, London, T&T Clark 2015, pp. 235 – 252.

A Smile From Every Child

75

the traditional paths of story, “suddenly gets a black glimpse from the depths of something strange and incomprehensible.” The author should not explain what moves in the depths or what danger it represents. Children are fascinated by disaster and catastrophe, but they also have an ability to deal with them. She uses a striking illustration to demonstrate this: “I think everyone can recall the ecstasy of their first thunderstorm. Inexorably, it rolled over a terrified world and the lightning could strike—one’s neighbours—at any time….” For the child, this is exciting: “Everything has a new appearance and the face of catastrophe looms beyond the horizon. Fear of the dark and ghost stories and the threat without a name which hung like a splendid background behind security and gave meaning and contrast.” Jansson goes on: “I suspect that a child is very clever at keeping the fine balance between the power of the commonplace and the security of the fantastic. A very elaborate form of self-defence.” One could find worse summaries of the key to Kierkegaard’s authorship in his warning of the dangers that lie in succumbing to the undoubted power of the commonplace because we seek there a false sort of security, whereas it can only be found in the fantastic—or in the paradox of faith. Certainly, Jansson’s discussions of the glimpse of the abyss, which in her works is almost always tied to the sea, chime with the Kierkegaardian image of being suspended over 70,000 fathoms and the seeming paradox that what actually keeps one afloat is the 70,000 fathoms of water beneath one. In Jansson’s view, the author’s adult anxieties about the loss of childhood resonate with the child’s sense of potential loss and threat. She is adamant that the child does not seek an explanation for this, and certainly not from the adult. A child wants to think—or, she adds, more accurately, feel—beyond what can be explained. With this in mind, we can see an interesting example of similar ideas being put into practice in the passage from Practice in Christianity where Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anticlimacus gives advice on how one might present the gospel to a child.²¹ He suggests beginning by showing the child a selection of cheap but arresting pictures of heroes: Napoleon, William Tell and so on. In each case he points out a striking feature in the picture that allows him to draw the child into the story of the hero and gives him the opportunity to explain further. Among the pictures, however, is one that is very different: it is a picture of a crucified man. The child will be puzzled by this and ask why he is hanging on a tree. The adult can then explain that this is the most painful and disgraceful penalty a criminal could suffer. The child will wonder why such an ugly picture was put

 SKS 12, 176 – 180 / PC, 174– 179.

76

Hugh S. Pyper

among the others, and natural curiosity will lead him to ask who this criminal is. The adult can then explain that the crucified man is the most loving person in the world and go on to recount, with all the vividness at his or her command, the story of his betrayal and execution and then continue with the story of his resurrection and ascension. Anticlimacus’s concern here is to induce the reader to consider the child’s reaction. First the child would forget all the other pictures, and then become amazed that God had allowed this to happen and that those who were guilty of such cruelty went unpunished. Indeed, further thought would lead him to resolve to be the instrument of revenge himself. But as he grew older, the child would realize not only that such vengeance would be impossible, but that in seeking revenge he himself was betraying Christ. Now his one concern would be to suffer with Christ. The point here is not whether this should be adopted as the model for Christian education, or even whether Anticlimacus’s account of the psychological development of the child is plausible. We must also remember that Anticlimacus is not Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, in the guise of editor of the book, makes this plain. “In this book, originating in the year 1848, the requirement for being a Christian is forced up by the pseudonymous author to a supreme ideality,” he warns.²² We may also wonder whether there is some autobiographical element in this story: is Kierkegaard remembering a childhood experience? From the hints we have of his relationship with his father, it is not implausible that some such scenario took place, with both the severity and the emphasis on imagination, just as the scene in Johannes Climacus where the father walks the child in imagination through the city is often taken as a reminiscence of an actual experience in Kierkegaard’s childhood.²³ In that passage, the combination in the father of undimmed imagination under the cloak of strictness and prosaicness is made explicit. That, too, described a dialogical process. On the imaginary walks, the child’s own flights of fancy were always received and woven into the whole by the father’s omnipotent imagination. Here the child is induced to raise his own questions and his responses are not dictated to him; indeed, Anticlimacus expects that these responses will change as the child matures. Whatever we think of this procedure, it maps onto Jansson’s idea of the moment of horror where we gaze into the

 SKS 12, 15 / PC, 7.  SKS 15, 18 – 19 / JC, 120.

A Smile From Every Child

77

depths. In the midst of the story of human heroism, we glimpse the darkness that seeks to put out the light just because it is light. What then of Kierkegaard’s writings themselves as part of a paracanon? Can or should children read Kierkegaard? One recent attempt to make that a reality is an intriguing picture book by Line Faden-Babin and Jakob Rackmanski, titled Kierkegaard et la sirène. First published in French in 2014 as a contribution to “Les petits Platons,” a series of books presenting various philosophers to children, it was translated into English as Kierkegaard and the Mermaid by Jordan Lee Schnee and published by Diaphenes in 2019. It tells the story of a young mermaid, the daughter of the sea king, whose one wish is to get married and have a lavish wedding. Her parents arrange a great party and invite all the eligible young mermen, among whom she finds one who meets all her fantasies. Next morning, however, she awakes in a deep depression, questioning whether any of this was actually her own decision or just something she had been caught up in. She confronts her parents but they simply tell her that it has to be. She flares up, exclaiming, “Whatever I do, marriage or no, I am going to regret it because it won’t be my decision!”²⁴ She breaks off the engagement and flees the palace, ending up in Copenhagen Harbour. She is filled with wonder at the buildings and the bustle of the crowd, but especially at the beauty of the women, who all walk on two legs. For the first time, she longs to be a complete woman and looks with shame on her naked body ending in a fish tail. She wraps herself in a piece of sailcloth, but realizes that disguise will never her make her like the women she envies. Then a young man turns up. They strike up a conversation and she reveals her sense of being incomplete. He replies that no-one is born complete. It is a matter of choice. He tells her his name is Søren Kierkegaard and then asks her whether the despair she is now feeling is really something new, or whether she is discovering something that was always present in her. She confesses that the encounter with the city had temporarily excited her, but she now realizes that changing her environment or her appearance can make no difference to her sense that the princess everyone sees does not exist—and in fact that she herself may not exist. To her astonishment, Kierkegaard beams on her, explaining that by acknowledging her sadness, she is nearer to becoming complete than most people. She needs to choose to be herself. She cannot choose to be anyone else, but she

 Line Faden-Babin and Jakob Rachmanski, Kierkegaard and the Mermaid, trans. by Jordan Lee Schnee, Zurich: Diaphenes 2019, p. 15.

78

Hugh S. Pyper

has a free choice as to how she leads her life. He leaves her and she throws away the sailcloth, resolving that she will never again hide her fish tail but choose to be herself. She returns home and takes up again with her suitor. Now she sees him not as an ideal realized but with all his flaws; she decides to love him as he is. They marry and for a time all is perfect. The princess is proud of the transformation which has resulted from her own choice. Then she falls pregnant and her despair suddenly returns. She realizes that this new state demands something which is beyond her. She flees back to Copenhagen and again meets Kierkegaard. She berates him, saying that he had lied in saying that her despair would be overcome. Now it has returned and in addition she is about to have a baby! Kierkegaard sighs and says that he too knows the despair she feels, because neither of them are truly ready to be themselves. What they need is the help of one who wants them as they really are, the one who created them. They need God as a measure of what they truly are. “You mean that you have to believe in God truly to become yourself?” she asks him. In response Kierkegaard lets out another long sigh, and admits: “If I dared!”²⁵ The mermaid is puzzled: if this is the solution, what is stopping him from accomplishing it? Kierkegaard responds that he cannot know that God exists, so trusting in him needs courage, like throwing himself into the harbour, knowing he will not be able to swim back to land. He stands on tiptoe on the edge of the canal, arms spread, but then sits down beside her. She leans her head on his shoulder and falls asleep. When she awakens, he is gone. She waits, but at last dives back into the sea where she finds herself washed clean of her despair and imagines Kierkegaard flying above the sea, abandoned between God’s hands. Returning to her husband, she feels a love that extends beyond the merman and his child to all the creatures she had previously not noticed. Meanwhile, life on the quays of Copenhagen carries on the same. This is an ingenious approach to the task of making Kierkegaard accessible to children, helped by the evocative illustrations. I am left wondering whether it would have made its way into my paracanon if I had met it in childhood—and, if so, what effect it would have had. Its clear allusions to Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” serve to point up the contrast between the two writers. Andersen’s mermaid gives up her voice and suffers constant pain in order to be able to walk on land, but fails to win the love of her prince which is the condition of her gaining a soul. On the night before his wedding to another, her sisters

 Faden-Babin and Rachmanski, Kierkegaard and the Mermaid, p. 54.

A Smile From Every Child

79

bring her a knife with which to kill him in order to save herself, but she opts to go back to the sea, knowing that she has lost the chance to gain her soul. Her sacrifice, however, gains her admission among the daughters of the air and the chance to win a soul after three hundred years of good deeds. The Kierkegaardian mermaid, however, attains happiness in her marriage and in motherhood through accepting herself while acknowledging that this can only be done through having the courage to place her faith in God. Andersen’s story does have its moments of horror: the scene where the witch cuts out the mermaid’s tongue is deeply disturbing, for instance. Yet its central message is that the mermaid’s fate is tied inescapably to who she is and that all her aspirations beyond that are in the hands of others she cannot control. She cannot make the prince love her and even at the end, her promised immortality turns out to depend on the conduct of children: each good child she encounters will take a day off her probation, but a bad child will add a day. This, I think, would have smacked to Kierkegaard of just the weakness that he criticized in his early review of Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler. Its message is that, in the end, one is powerless in the face of one’s environment. Even the ugly duckling, after all, did nothing to deserve the scorn of the barnyard and so could do nothing to resist it. The fact he grew up into a swan owed nothing to any action or decision of his own. Yet I am not sure that Kierkegaard would have been convinced by the ending of Faden-Babin and Rachmanski’s story either. For all the positive attitude to children he shows in his writing and his work, increasingly he saw marriage and procreation as a problem for the Christian, not a solution. In the story, Kierkegaard simply disappears. It is only in the mermaid’s imagination that he is soaring above the sea between God’s hands. As far as we can tell, she will live a fulfilled life in her submarine palace with no need for any further engagement with Kierkegaard—and life in Copenhagen goes on as ever. Some of us, however, have a life-long engagement with Kierkegaard, reading and re-reading him, finding in his works a continued shock of remembrance that beneath the surface of our lives, whether calm or stormy, dark shapes circle in the abyss—and yet we are afloat. That distinctively Kierkegaardian sense, I would submit, is something that Tove Jansson evokes in her writing for children. The final book of the series, Moominvalley in November—or, more evocatively in Swedish, Sent i november (“Late in November”)—is centred on absence.²⁶ The

 Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November, trans. by Kingsley Hart, London: Puffin Books 1974; first published as Sent i November, Helsingfors: Geber 1970.

80

Hugh S. Pyper

Moomin family have left the valley, and a motley crew of characters gather at their empty house, drawn by their yearning for what their imaginations have told them of the family, and in particular of Moominmamma. It is a book of mourning, of confusion and of waiting, but gradually they realize that in the Moomins’ absence they now can form their own kind of family and find the love that they were seeking. At the very end of the book, the little orphan character Toft is left alone on the mountain, having just spotted the light on the mast of the Moomins’ ship which shows that at last they are about to return. And it is at that point, with the Moomins forever offshore, that Tove herself takes leave of Moominvalley and begins the series of adult novels and short stories that explore themes beyond the world of childhood. No answers: the child reader is left with Toft to run down to the jetty and secure the boat—or not, as it seems good. The reading goes beyond the book, and the questions point beyond the story. It is to Tove Jansson that I would send a child in the hopes of provoking a glimpse of that Kierkegaardian sense of the terror and joy in the awareness of our fragility. And, as he would approve, reading her might also bring a smile to the face of that child.

Iben Damgaard

“Was It—Love?” “No, No, It Was Søren Kierkegaard” Reading a book may change your life. Once the words have sneaked into your mind, moods and emotions, your whole way of seeing and being in the world may have altered completely. That some books can do this to you is the thrilling adventure—and risk—every time you lay your eyes upon the opening page of a book and begin to read. Kierkegaard is a writer who continually reflects upon this transformative process in which the possible world of the text transfigures the world of its reader; and throughout his writings, he challenges his readers to respond existentially to the words of his text by the way we live. In the art of literature, drama and film, we find quite a few depictions of how reading Kierkegaard may change one’s life. This essay will take a close look at one of the most legendary portrayals of a life changed by reading Kierkegaard, which appears in the Danish filmmaker Carl Th. Dreyer’s film Ordet [The Word] from 1955. The screenplay is Dreyer’s rewriting of a play by the Danish playwright and pastor Kaj Munk, first staged in 1932 at the theatre of Betty Nansen in Copenhagen, where Dreyer attended the première.¹ Dreyer’s Ordet features a Kierkegaardian figure, Johannes, the second of three adult sons of an old, wealthy, domineering farmer Morten Borgen, whose Grundtvigian Christianity is very social and worldly in its orientation. In contrast, the melancholic young Johannes withdraws from the world into an uncompromising faith, which has become madness, since he has come to believe himself to be God in the person of Jesus Christ. When the new pastor of the parish, a modern rationalist, comes to visit the family at their farm, Borgensgaard, he meets Johannes, who introduces himself as Jesus of Nazareth, come again into the world and the church that claims to believe in his miracles two thousand years ago, but now rejects him. The pastor tries to understand what has driven Johannes insane by asking the oldest son Mikkel: “Was it—love?” Mikkel responds: “No, no, it was Søren Kierkegaard”.² Dreyer’s explanation of Johannes’s insanity as a response to his reading Kierkegaard is an alteration of Kaj Munk’s play, which mentions also the Norwegian playwright Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. In Munk’s Ordet, Mikkel first answers the

 Ole Storm, “Introduction” in Carl Theodor Dreyer, Four Screenplays, London: Thames and Hudson 1964, p. 19.  Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 258 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-008

82

Iben Damgaard

pastor’s question, was it love? by replying: “No, it was Bjørnson,” and when the pastor is bewildered, Mikkel expands his reply: “Bjørnson and Kierkegaard. You see, Johannes was studying theology; he had uncommon ability…Reading those two—he wrestled so hard with them—they filled his mind with doubt, especially Bjørnson’s play called Beyond our power.”³ In Munk’s play, Mikkel furthermore tells the pastor that Johannes was about to marry, when his fiancée was killed in a road accident, trying to save him from being hit by a car, just after they had watched Bjørnson’s play in the theatre. According to Mikkel, Johannes became insane a couple of nights later, when he tried in vain to resurrect her. Thus in Munk’s play Johannes’s insanity is due to intense studies of not only Kierkegaard, but also Bjørnson, and is furthermore explained by the tragic loss of the woman he loved. Dreyer’s film makes Kierkegaard’s influence decisive. If Johannes were the only Kierkegaardian in the film, his story would convey a somewhat narrow interpetation of Kierkegaard’s legacy, focused on the understanding of faith in Kierkegaard’s final attack on the church shortly before his death in 1855.⁴ Yet Inger, wife of Mikkel and the mother of their two little daughters, who is expecting a third child, embodies another dimension of the Kierkegaardian legacy. The gentle, smiling kindness of her faith, hope and love calls to mind Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and his discourses on the lilies and the birds. While Ordet does not explicitly link Inger to Kierkegaard, Inger’s way of life seems to enact the faith and love that Works of Love is all about. Though Inger is not portrayed as a reader of Kierkegaard, her creator, Kaj Munk, was a passionate reader of Kierkegaard and profoundly influenced by his thought.⁵ I shall argue in this essay that Dreyer’s film Ordet can be seen as an exploration of two quite different Kierkegaardian ways of faith.⁶

 Kaj Munk, Five Plays by Kaj Munk, trans. by R. P. Keigwin, København: Nyt Nordisk Forlag 1964, pp. 103 f.  It has been the subject of much debate in Kierkegaard scholarship, to which extent Kierkegaard’s position changes in his final attack. This is, however, not an issue to be explored in this context.  As Per Stig Møller has established, Munk read Kierkegaard passionately already in high school and even more so in his university studies in theology. Munk studied Kierkegaard backwards. He worked intensely with the late Kierkegaard’s attack on the church before turning to earlier writings such as Works of Love and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (Cf. Per Stig Møller, Munk, København: Gyldendal 2000, pp. 82– 85).  Dreyer’s film has been interpreted from a Kierkegaardian perspective not only by Ziolkowski, whose Kierkegaardian reading focuses on the figure of Johannes (Eric Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 2011), but also by Daniel Watts, whose article: “The Fullness of Time: Kierkegaardian Themes in Dreyer’s Ordet” also brings

“Was It—Love?” “No, No, It Was Søren Kierkegaard”

83

We may begin with Johannes. We learn that he was an academically gifted and healthy young man, who left his family farm on the west coast of Jutland to study theology, encouraged by his father, who hoped he would become a reformer of Christianity. Yet, when Johannes began to read Kierkegaard, he lost his mind in endless thoughts and doubts. As Inger describes it in an earlier scene in the film: “It’s all that reading that’s made his head spin around and round.”⁷ Johannes does not seem to belong to this world. With the gloomy, melancholic voice and bizarre movements of an insane person, Johannes’s words are mostly direct quotations of the harshest utterances of the Gospels, proclaiming a critique of the world as a place of darkness that is unwilling to receive the light of the Word. He is absorbed in the words of the Gospel to the point of believing himself to be the incarnated Word. The central role of this Word is indicated already by the title of the film, which alludes to the opening line of the Gospel of the evangelist who was the namesake of Johannes: “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word became flesh” (John 1:1). This Word plays a pivotal role throughout the film, culminating in the final scene of resurrection, when Johannes invokes the divine Word. Johannes’s words set out to expose the hypocrisy, and doubleminded lack of faith among the acclaimed believers and conventional Christians surrounding him. Though mad, he has indeed a sharp eye for discovering hypocrisy, and he does so in ways that mirror Kierkegaard’s late attack on the lack of faith in the Christendom of his age. When focusing on Johannes as the Kierkegaardian figure in Ordet, the film may be described as, in Eric Ziolkowski’s words, “a cinematic transposition of Kierkegaard’s thinking about the conflict of authentic Christian faith with the mores of modern Christendom.”⁸ Dreyer’s portrayal of Johannes, driven mad by reading Kierkegaard, is particularly interesting in light of Kierkegaard’s own lifelong exploration of the relation between the word in the text and the world of its reader. Kierkegaard’s writings are full of readings. They explicitly develop readings of literature and drama, philosophy and theology, and perhaps most pervasively readings of biblical texts. Kier-

Inger into focus. Watts interprets the film as contributing to “a phenomenology of the religious experience…of a moment that disrupts the chronological flow of time and, that, in the lived experience of it, is charged with eternal significance” (Daniel Watts, “The Fullness of Time: Kierkegaardian Themes in Dreyer’s Ordet,” Religions, vol. 10, nr. 1, 2019, pp. 1– 13). Watts thus interprets Inger in the light of Ingeborg’s depiction of the Kierkegaardian category of the moment of vision [“Øieblikket”] in The Concept of Anxiety. My thanks to George Pattison for first drawing my attention to Watts’s article when we talked about Ordet over coffee in Copenhagen.  Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 242.  Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, p. 294.

84

Iben Damgaard

kegaard’s signed discourses are readings of a particular passage in a biblical text— most often from the New Testament—and biblical figures and passages also play a crucial though sometimes more hidden role in his pseudonymous writings. Kierkegaard even describes his own writings as mere readings, when he announces that the author only wanted “once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers.”⁹ He says this about his pseudonymous writings in his signed postscript to Johannes Climacus’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, and says it again about the entire authorship in his preface to Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, with which he had intended to finish his authorial activity.¹⁰ Kierkegaard presents his work as a reading of the familiar biblical text handed down from one generation to the next, and he presents his authorial role as an occasion for us, his readers, to discover our own life anew in light of these old familiar texts. He illustrates this authorial role with the image of a prompter, who Socratically whispers the old familiar words to us, the actors, as we are called to transform the words into existential action on the world’s stage.¹¹ Kierkegaard continually addresses his reader on the subject of the art of being a good reader, and tells stories of literary and imaginative readers who do not seem to master this art and in various ways get lost on the road from text to existential action. He explores the possibilities of communicating indirectly, which he envisions as a dialectical knot of jest and earnestness that the reader is to untie for himself.¹² Yet a reader might get himself ensnared in this dialectical knot. Dreyer’s Johannes has somehow lost his senses in reading Kierkegaard—and Ziolkowski is right to point out that Ordet stages readings of the Gospels through a Kierkegaardian lens, featuring a protagonist who “like Don Quixote, goes mad from his reading, ‘incarnates’ to the extreme what he read.”¹³ Johannes seems to be trapped inside the late Kierkegaard’s readings of New Testament Christianity, where imitatio Christi implies opposition to the world in a way that does indeed

 SKS 7, 573 / CUP1, 629 – 630.  See SKS 12, 281 / WA, 165 – 166.  For a more elaborate account of my interpretation of Kierkegaard’s description of his writings as readings and the relation between the Socratic and the biblical with regard to Kierkegaard’s authorial self-portrait as a prompter, I refer to my article “A Prompter’s Play? Kierkegaard’s Puzzling Portrait of Authorial Withdrawal in ʻAn Occasional Discourse,ʼ” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2019, pp. 267– 284.  See SKS 12, 137 / PC, 133.  Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, p. 309.

“Was It—Love?” “No, No, It Was Søren Kierkegaard”

85

bring to mind Cervantes’s Don Quixote, whose passionate readings of chivalric books make him believe himself to be a knight in an age, where chivalry had long been dead.¹⁴ Johannes appears as a quixotic reader, whose infinite passion is fixed upon the words of the Gospels that he repeats as if these words were his own, believing himself to be the risen Jesus Christ. He presents himself as called by God to be a prophet. Proclaiming the day of judgement to an imaginary crowd in the dunes of Jutland, Johannes addresses them with the words: “Woe unto you, ye hypocrites, thee…and thee…and thee…woe unto you, because ye believe not in me, the risen Christ, who has come unto you at the bidding of Him who made the heavens and the earth. Verily, I say unto you: the day of judgement is at hand. God has called me to be His prophet before His face”.¹⁵ It is beyond an author’s control how the reader appropriates his text. But is there perhaps something in Kierkegaard’s late writings that elucidates Mikkel’s claim that it was Kierkegaard who drove Johannes insane? Throughout his work, Kierkegaard describes his task as merely Socratic, accentuating that he, unlike a prophet, speaks without authority. He does so to the very last issue of The Moment, in which he announces that Socrates is the only analogy he has before him. Yet this claim is somewhat undermined by the way he writes in his final attack. In one of the most polemical late texts, the pamphlet “What Christ Judges of Official Christianity,” published in June 1855 between the second and third issues of The Moment, Kierkegaard stages himself almost as a biblical prophet with the word from God—the New Testament—in his hand, reading out its harshest words of judgement. According to Kierkegaard’s self-description in this pamphlet, he has hitherto communicated poetically in order to make his contemporaries feel safe. He proclaims that he now “changes his method and goes about the job directly.”¹⁶ This change of method entails that the “poet suddenly changed; he—if I may say it this way, threw away his guitar and—took out a book called The New Testa-

 Kierkegaard had a strong interest in the Quixotic knight, whom the early Kierkegaard sees as a fantasist. In Climacus’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Don Quixote’s infinite passion is described as “the prototype of the subjective lunacy in which the passion of inwardness grasps a particular fixed finite idea” (SKS 7, 179 / CUP1, 195). As Ziolkowski has pointed out, Kierkegaard’s view on Don Quixote changed radically. To the late Kierkegaard, Don Quixote appears as an analogue both to Christ and to the true Christian, who by existentially following Christ appears comical as a madman at whom everyone laughs. In a modern secular, scientific age, the true Christian will appear to tilt at windmills in the way he struggles with the world, and Kierkegaard acknowledged that he himself, in his own collision with the established church, was seen as a quixotic struggler (Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, pp. 172 f.).  Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 241.  SKS 13, 175 / M, 131.

86

Iben Damgaard

ment of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”¹⁷ Indirect communication through a dialectic of jest and earnestness is thus to be replaced by a direct attack. While Kierkegaard claims to have discarded his guitar, insisting that he is not a poet but a police detective employing a hermeneutics of suspicion towards the fraud of his contemporaries, he still relies on poetic and humorous means to do so, though now inclining to harsh satire and caricature. The pamphlet stages Jesus Christ reappearing in Copenhagen in 1855: Kierkegaard imagines how Jesus would attend a church service, and how he would judge, condemn and even expel all the so-called Christians from his church, as a direct repetition of the New Testament narrative of Christ’s cleansing of the temple. When Kierkegaard quotes Christ’s word of judgement as the final authoritative verdict against the professed Christians in his own age, he seems to use the biblical Word as a weapon on his side. Is he not thereby undermining his Socratic denial of authority? Does he not assume a certain authority, which may remind the reader of the authoritative, proclamatory word of a biblical prophet of judgement?¹⁸ It is this final, extreme Kierkegaard who seems to be taken to the next level in an insane reduplication, when Johannes believes himself to be the risen Christ, confronting his opponents in his sermon on the dunes. When Inger dies in childbirth, Johannes tries in vain to revive her in his own name, speaking as if he were Jesus. He then disappears, and returns on the day of the funeral. His father immediately notices that he has regained his sanity, and Johannes confirms this. He reproaches the crowd gathered round the coffin because none of them has thought of asking God to wake her up. When his father remarks that he mocks God, Johannes answers: “it is you who are mocking God with your half-heartedness.” This provokes Mikkel, who is in deep despair and rebukes him for shouting over his wife’s dead body. Johannes answers: “Mikkel, my brother—why, among all the believers, is there no one who believes?” He adds: “Inger, you must rot, because the times are rotten,”¹⁹ alluding to yet another melancholic Dane, to whom time appeared to be out of joint. It is worth noticing that Dreyer has shortened Johannes’s answer to Mikkel. In Munk’s play, Johannes praises Mikkel for being an honest man, because unlike all the professed believers, by whom he is surrounded, he has never faked a faith he didn’t have: “Mikkel, you honest, consistent man, who never insulted

 SKS 13, 174 / M, 130.  I have given a more elaborate account of this argument in my article “Through Hermeneutics of Suspicion to a Rediscovery of Faith: Kierkegaard’s Pamphlet ‘What Christ Judges of Official Christianity’ in relation to Ricoeur’s ‘Religion, Atheism and Faith,’” Studia Theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology, vol. 72, 2018, pp. 198 – 216.  Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 296

“Was It—Love?” “No, No, It Was Søren Kierkegaard”

87

God by pretending to believe in Him.”²⁰ Munk thereby highlights a Kierkegaardian aspect in Johannes’s relation to his atheistic brother, since Kierkegaard—especially the late Kierkegaard—praises the honesty of the atheistic freethinkers in contrast to the hypocrisy of the so-called Christians.²¹ The action in the scene around Inger’s coffin is taken forward by Maren, the daughter of Inger and Mikkel, who reminds her uncle Johannes that he has promised to bring back her mother. While Johannes could not restore life to Inger when he thought himself to be Jesus, Dreyer has the miracle of resurrection occur now, when, moved by Maren’s faith, Johannes calls on Inger not in his own name, but by invoking the divine Word: “give me the Word—the Word that can bring the dead alive.” Addressing himself directly to Inger, he says, “Inger, in the name of Jesus Christ, I say unto thee: arise.”²² Inger’s resurrection has been carefully prepared through the film’s many dialogues on miracles, and its references to biblical narratives of resurrection.²³ Before going further into what happens in this climax of the film, let us take a closer look at Inger and her edifying way of treating those around her. Inger speaks an everyday language and is remarkably sensitive to the needs, dreams and worries of the person she is speaking with. She understands how to meet each one in a way that builds up that individual’s courage to trust in the good, and her faith thus embraces and affirms life. She attends to the daily work of taking care of the people and animals on her farm in a competent and lightly smiling way. We see an example of this when she and her husband Mikkel talk in their bedroom at the beginning of the film. Mikkel is estranged from all the—as he puts it—“pious goings-on”: he does not even have “faith in faith,” and he is burdened by his father’s silent yet persistent reproach of his atheism. Inger, however, seeks to lighten this burden, gently reminding him that he has something more important, since he has “a heart—and goodness.” Inger’s way of seeing Mikkel as already possessing what is most important builds him up in a way that echoes Kierkegaard’s discourse in Works of Love on how love builds up by presupposing love in the other. When Mikkel insists that this is still not faith, she confidently

 Munk, Five Plays by Kaj Munk, p. 147.  See SKS 13, 173 / M, 129.  Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 297.  While making Ordet, Dreyer had already finished the screenplay for a projected film on Jesus on which he had been working for many years, and he saw the resurrection scene in Ordet as pointing forward to this film on Jesus of Nazareth, which unfortunately never materialized. (Cf. Caroline Vander Stichele, “Reframing Jesus: Dreyer’s lifelong passion” in The Bible in Motion II. A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception, ed. by Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, Berlin: De Gruyter 2016, pp. 587– 598, especially p. 595).

88

Iben Damgaard

replies that faith will come.²⁴ She describes faith to him with the words: “you see how warm you feel then—warm through and through—and how happy you are— and after all, it’s nice to be happy, isn’t it.”²⁵ The translation of the Danish word glad into “happy” here is a bit unfortunate; “joyful” would be better. Inger seeks to show him that faith has to do with the joy and warmth in being truly present in our life. Her faith seems to live out the connection between faith and joy that Kierkegaard writes about in many of his upbuilding discourses, particularly the third discourse in The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses, where Kierkegaard points out: “how true it is when the Gospel says: You shall learn joy from the lily and the bird.”²⁶ Kierkegaard thus reads New Testament Christianity as calling us to learn again what we may have forgotten among life’s worries and sorrows— namely, joy. He points out that Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew instructs us to take the lily and the bird as our teachers in learning unconditional joy. Bear in mind, Kierkegaard writes, “that you can see, that you can hear, that you can smell, that you can taste, that you can feel; that the sun shines for you and for your sake, that when it becomes weary the moon begins to shine and the stars are lit.”²⁷ This discourse takes us to the joy in our sensuous life and in nature with its changing seasons, which, however, also reveal the sorrow of creatures, since we live under “the dominion of perishability.” We are encouraged to learn from the lilies and the birds to cast all our sorrows on God and rediscover the joy of being alive today, since joy is “truly to be present to oneself [være sig selv nærværende]…truly to be today…Joy is the present time.”²⁸ The discourse contrasts the voice of the Gospel with the voice of the poet, who objects that this lesson of the lilies and the birds is possible only when we withdraw from the distractions of other human beings and society, and live apart in nature. Against the poet, Kierkegaard points out that we do not need to leave the world shared with others, for the lilies and the birds are “unconditionally just as joyful in solitude as in society.”²⁹ Living in the joy of faith is thus equally compatible

 This comes true in the last scene of the film, when Inger has woken up alive and asks Mikkel if the child she was giving birth to is alive, and he answers “Yes, Inger—it is alive—it lives with God”. When she has grasped the meaning of his words, she asks in surprise “with God?” and Mikkel answers her “Yes, I have found your faith” (Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 298).  Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 245.  SKS 11, 45 / WA, 41.  SKS 11, 43 / WA, 39.  Ibid.  SKS 11, 47 / WA, 44.

“Was It—Love?” “No, No, It Was Søren Kierkegaard”

89

with a solitary life and with a life lived in companionship with others.³⁰ Kierkegaard seems, however, to abandon this understanding of faith in his final attack, in which the task of becoming a Christian seems to exclude a life lived in daily commitments in close relations of love.³¹ Inger’s faith, however, is more attuned to the joy of birdsong, in which faith is not opposed to bodily, sensuous life. As Daniel Watts writes, Inger is able to “see the eternal in the finite, the spiritual in the bodily and the transcendent in the everyday.”³² Inger seeks to mediate in conflicts between the members of her family, and she tries to bring about reconciliation in the major conflict of the film. This conflict arises when Anders, the youngest son of Morten Borgen, falls in love with Anne, the daughter of the tailor Peter Petersen, who represents the stern, life-renouncing, other-worldly form of Christianity, which is opposed to the worldly orientation of Borgen’s Grundtvigianism. Each old patriarch stubbornly clings to his exclusive version of Christianity at the expense of the love of the young ones. Neither Anders nor Mikkel dares to confront their father on the issue of marriage, but Inger promises to do so. While Anders (in vain) asks Peter the tailor if he can marry Anne, Inger talks with her father-in-law, seeking to make him realize that the love of the younger generation is more important than the religious controversies of their fathers. Inger has prepared coffee and biscuits for their talk. She brings up the subject gently yet with bold determination, and when the old man refuses to speak about it, she asks how he can be such a proud farmer, when “the only thing that matters is that they love each other.” When he rejects the whole issue, insisting that love comes with the years, she replies, “I believe you understand about ev For an interesting interpretation of how Kierkegaard’s discourse develops a criticism of the Romantic poets’ approach to nature, I refer to George Pattison’s article, “The Joy of Birdsong or Dialectical Lyrics,” in Without Authority, ed. by Robert Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2006 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 18), pp. 111– 125.  The contrast comes to the fore in the articles in The Moment, where Kierkegaard repeatedly questions the possibility of being both married and a Christian according to the Christianity of the New Testament: “Even if it were not the case that Christianity recommends the single state, something the prototype expresses, although ‘the apostle,’ clearly against his will, sees himself compelled to give in a little to the eager-for-matrimony crowd and, like someone weary of hearing an everlasting fussing about the same thing, gives in a little, so that if worst comes to worst it is better to marry than to burn—even if this were not the case, it still could never occur to me to marry. The task of becoming a Christian is so enormous; why, then would it occur to me to become involved in this procrastination, however much people, especially at a certain age, describe it and regard it as the greatest bliss! I honestly do not comprehend how it has occurred to anyone to want to link being a Christian with being married” (SKS 13, 296 / M, 239).  Watts, “The Fullness of Time,” p. 4.

90

Iben Damgaard

erything in the world except about love.”³³ Borgen objects that he has been in love many times and was also married until his wife died, whereupon Inger goes a bit far, saying that the marriage was just “a farmer’s deal…” When he reproaches her, saying that his wife was a good wife to him, she duly apologizes. A little later, however, she smilingly adds: “if you’ll promise to let Anders and Anne marry, I’ll promise you something that will really make you happy.”³⁴ When asked what, she promises his favourite dish, fried eel, for Sunday dinner. He smiles a little when remarking, “Well, that’s an offer, of sorts,” and she then keeps up the jest: “I’ll promise you it shall be a boy this time. Are you happy now?” to which he responds “Ha, ha, you’re all right at making promises.”³⁵ He nevertheless rejects the whole thing, and angrily leaves the room on hearing that Anders has already left to talk with Peter Petersen. Inger runs after the old man and finds a way of talking with him, for she understands why it is so hard for him and shows compassion, and he is softened into a smile after all. Inger’s way of seeking reconciliation can be seen as an enactment of Kierkegaard’s discourse on love’s reconciliation in Works of Love, which explores how love’s existential seriousness is dexterous (behændig) in the art of lightly removing the asymmetry of the roles in a situation that is potentially humiliating for one or the other. Kierkegaard stresses that love knows the art of being “sufficiently earnest” to be able to work for reconciliation “as lightly as truth can still allow.” He continues: “Never believe that earnestness is moroseness; never believe that the contorted countenance it pains one to look at is earnestness—no one has ever been earnest who has not learned from earnestness that one can also appear too earnest.”³⁶ This description applies to Inger, who strives in earnest yet with smiling jest to bring about a reconciliation between Anders’s wish to marry Anne and his father’s stubborn refusal. Inger talks with old Borgen gently yet also firmly, boldly, straightforwardly. She seeks to avoid letting the situation become too serious and difficult for old Borgen to bear by attending to his comfort in the shape of a cup of coffee, biscuits and his pipe, and she makes up a jest game of crazy promises that calls forth a smile from the proud old man. Kierkegaard often returns to the issue of earnestness that in Matthew’s Gospel wears the smiling face of playful jest in appointing the lily and the bird as our teachers. In his preface to Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard claims that “the upbuilding address is fighting in many ways for the eternal to be victorious in a

   

Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 250. Ibid., p. 251. Ibid. SKS 9, 335 / WL, 340.

“Was It—Love?” “No, No, It Was Søren Kierkegaard”

91

person, but in the appropriate place and with the aid of the lily and the bird, it does not forget first and foremost to relax into a smile.”³⁷ The English translation does not really convey the full meaning of the Danish original: at formilde til smilet—“to soften into a smile” may be a bit better. Kierkegaard points out that the Gospel gives us courage by using the lily and the bird in this way. As he wrote in his very last discourse on the lilies and the birds: In order, however, that for us human beings the matter does not become all too earnest, deadly with anxiety, he [Christ] draws our attention away from himself and directs it toward something else, almost as if it were encouragement, a diversion: “Consider the lilies of the field; look at the birds of the air”. Consequently, he does not say: “No one can serve two masters…look at me”…then the earnestness would have become deadly.³⁸

Dreyer’s film ends in a way that accentuates an affirmation of life. As Caroline Vander Stichele has pointed out, the religious miracle of the resurrection of Inger points beyond itself: “it invokes the divine, but ends up affirming the human.”³⁹ The film’s ending puts a remarkable emphasis on life: Johannes has come to his senses and is capable of being present with his family, and Inger is resurrected to life and to Mikkel’s words of faith and love: “Now life is beginning for us,” Inger’s reply offers the film’s closing words: “Yes, life—life life.”⁴⁰ The powerful feeling of human life and the human embodiment of spirit and soul in the final scene of the film is not only expressed in words. It is also overwhelmingly shown in Inger’s very bodily presence in the look of love in her tearful eyes, and in the sensuousness in her kissing Mikkel. Ordet does not end with Inger’s death, nor does it end with the awe of the religious miracle of resurrection. The end is this new beginning in life, this intense awakening anew to the joy of truly being present in living together this very day, this very moment today. Earnestness can become too earnest in a way that is fatal, which is perhaps what had happened to Johannes when reading Kierkegaard’s final strident texts, which do seem to have somewhat forgotten about the gentle diversions of the lily and the bird. The figure of Inger, however, embodies what it may mean to be a Kierkegaardian in the upbuilding way of communicating in a religious-existential earnestness that reveals itself in the smiling lightness of everyday gestures of love.⁴¹

    

SKS 10, 24 / CD, 12. SKS 16, 227 / JFY, 179. Vander Stichele, “Reframing Jesus,” p. 595. Dreyer, Four Screenplays, p. 298. Thanks to David Seton for carefully checking my English.

Joel D. S. Rasmussen

The Generous Eye “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” (James 1:17)

The search for apt expressions to enable familiar things to appear in a new light, both for himself and to his readers, was clearly one of Søren Kierkegaard’s preoccupying concerns as a writer. This Kierkegaardian concern with appearances— phenomena—or how matters are viewed or might be viewed, has led a number of readers to regard Kierkegaard’s writings as “phenomenological.” While Kierkegaard was positioned as a pivotal interlocutor between the phenomenology of G.W.F. Hegel in the nineteenth century and that of Martin Heidegger in the twentieth, George Pattison rightly cautions us to remember that despite any “phenomenological tendency” we discern in Kierkegaard’s writings, his prioritization of “faith” raises a fundamental question in this connection. Pattison translates Kierkegaard’s religious language into philosophical language in order to put the question this way: If human being is determined in a fundamental respect by God, and if the being of God is not adequately conceivable by human beings, or is knowable only on the basis of the special kind of consciousness called “faith,” then can human being itself ever be adequately manifested in the forms of human consciousness? Isn’t the link between being, consciousness, and manifestation ruptured—or at the very least problematized—in a manner that renders the ambitions of phenomenology unfulfillable?¹

If we answer this question in the affirmative, then we will acknowledge with Pattison that there is a certain limit to moving directly from discerning any “phenomenological tendency” in Kierkegaard’s writing to identifying Kierkegaard himself as “a phenomenologist.” This probably would have suited Kierkegaard just fine, for I suspect he would have been about as eager to claim the label “phenomenologist” as he would have been concerned with claiming the description “existentialist”— which is to say, not very much at all. However, this is not to suggest he was disinterested in how phenomena appear to us, for how things appear or look was one of his principal concerns. We might still speak, in a highly qualified way,

 George Pattison, “Kierkegaard and the Limits of Phenomenology,” in Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment, ed. by Jeffrey Hanson, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 2010, p. 194. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-009

94

Joel D. S. Rasmussen

of Kierkegaard’s writing as a variety of “Christian existential phenomenology.”² What does this distinctively Kierkegaardian phenomenology look like? This essay will pursue this question by examining Kierkegaard’s 1843 Upbuilding Discourses. Metaphors of showing and seeing, of appearing and of looking, are prominent throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. Faith is the moment of vision (Øieblikket); the human being is originally created in God’s image (Billede); Jesus Christ is the visible pattern (Forbillede) for Christian existence—and that very pattern as the paradoxical God-man who goes incognito as the “sign of contradiction” (ModsigelsensTegn) can seem to be an “optical illusion” (Øienforblindelse). Clearly this language is metaphorical, but this is entirely in keeping with Kierkegaard’s own conception of how spiritual matters must be addressed and how, potentially, truth of the sort that matters existentially is disclosed. As he writes in Works of Love, “All human speech, even the divine speech of Holy Scripture, about the spiritual is essentially metaphorical [overført, carried over] speech.”³ I take Kierkegaard’s view here to be broadly in line with the claim of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson who maintain that “metaphors partially structure our everyday concepts and that this structure is [even] reflected in our literal language.”⁴ This is clearly the case with the metaphor “understanding is seeing,” which Lakoff and Johnson group with allied conceptual metaphors—“ideas are light-sources” and “discourse is a light-medium”—and illustrate with a list of conventional phrases: I see what you’re saying. It looks different from my point of view. What is your outlook on that? I view it differently. Now I’ve got the whole picture. Let me point something out to you. That’s an insightful idea. That was a brilliant remark. The argument is clear. It was a murky discussion. Could you elucidate your remarks? It’s a transparent argument. The discussion was opaque. ⁵

 George Pattison, A Phenomenology of the Devout Life: A Philosophy of Christian Life, Part 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018, p. 57, n. 34.  SKS 9, 212 / WL, 209.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1980, p. 46.  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 48. Pattison makes this point as well, and adds an important caveat: “[M]etaphors of vision appear to have a ‘natural affinity’ with questions of thinking, knowledge, and truth. ‘I see!’ we cry when we understand something. ‘Don’t you see what I’m trying to get at? Just look at the evidence before you,’ we shout at the uncomprehending interlocutor. Again, however, it must be acknowledged that such expressions are not exclusive. We might equally say ‘Ah! I get it!’ or ‘I hear what you’re saying’” (George Pattison, Thinking about God in an Age of Technology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, p. 153).

The Generous Eye

95

Consistent with a Heideggerian hermeneutics of “fore-having” (Vorhabe), “foresight” (Vorsicht), and “fore-grasping” (Vorgriff), Lakoff and Johnson further contend that “what we call ‘direct physical experience’ is never merely a matter of having a body of a certain sort; rather, every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions.”⁶ I think Kierkegaard recognized this too, and in this essay I am interested in exploring some ways in which Kierkegaard develops the “understanding is seeing” metaphor with respect to the theme of making love visible through the medium of his edifying literature and in the light of his specific religious presuppositions.

I “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” Kierkegaard published his massive two-volume work Either/Or in 1843 and liked to think of that as the beginning of his work as an author. It was nearly all but inevitable that this pseudonymous masterpiece of literary-philosophical reflection would overshadow the three slender volumes of religious writings entitled Two Upbuilding Discourses, Three Upbuilding Discourses, and Four Upbuilding Discourses, respectively, which he published under his own name in that same year. The first two discourses in Three Upbuilding Discourses bear the title “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” and in both Kierkegaard takes his theme from the First Letter of Peter 4:7– 11: The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaining. Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and power for ever and ever. Amen.⁷

In the first of the discourses reflecting on this passage and bearing the title “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” we read the words: It is not just a question of what one sees, but what one sees depends on how one sees. For looking at an object is not just a matter of receptivity or discovery but is also productive [a

 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 57.  Kierkegaard cites 1 Peter 4:7– 12, but Søren Bruun and Niels Jørgen Cappelørn note that this is surely a “mistake” and he actually intended 1 Peter 4:7– 11, concluding with “Amen” in verse 11. See SKS K5, 84.

96

Joel D. S. Rasmussen

bringing forth, is generative]⁸, and to the extent that is it productive [or generative], what is decisive is how those who are doing the looking are in themselves. When one person sees one thing and another sees another, even though they are both looking at the same situation, one discovers what the other hides. To the extent that the object under consideration belongs to the external world, the observer is perhaps less important; or more accurately, what is necessary for an observer is not something that affects one’s deeper being. But the more what is being examined belongs to the realm of the spirit, so much the more does it matter how the observer is in his innermost being.⁹

Since Kierkegaard offers this hermeneutical consideration in the context of interpreting Peter’s counsel to “maintain constant love for one another,” we know that in speaking of “what one sees” he refers here to seeing other human beings. And when speaking of “how one sees” he refers to the dispositions and thoughts one freely assumes vis-à-vis other human beings. “For the things of the spirit can be acquired only by means of freedom,” he says, “and what is acquired by means of freedom is also what we ourselves bring forth. In that case, it is not the external but the internal difference that counts, and it is from within that everything that makes us impure and the way we look at impure things proceeds.”¹⁰ Then, cascading several biblical references in succession, Kierkegaard writes, “What we see with the external eye is irrelevant, but ‘an evil eye issues from within a person’” (Mark 7:21– 22).¹¹ “An evil eye discovers much that love doesn’t see, because an evil eye sees the Lord acting unjustly, even though He is good” (Matthew 20:15).¹² “When wickedness dwells in a heart, the eye is readily offended, but when purity dwells in a heart, the eye sees the finger of God, for

 Kierkegaard writes “en Frembringen” here (SKS 5, 69), which might also be translated as “a bringing forth,” “an act of productivity,” or “a generative act.” Pattison has translated the Danish nouns “Betratning,” “Modtagen,” “Opdagen,” and “Frembringen” as verbs. The Danish is as follows: “Det beroer da ikke blot paa hvad man seer, men det hvad man seer beroer paa, hvorledes man seer; thi al Betragtning er ikke blot en Modtagen, en Opdagen, men tillige en Frembringen, og forsaavidt den er dette, da bliver det jo afgørende, hvorledes den Betragtende selv er.”  SKS 5, 69 / Søren Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” Spiritual Writings: Selections from the Upbuilding Discourses, trans. by George Pattison, New York: Harper Perennial 2010, pp. 232– 233. Pattison sources the text from SKS 5, 65 – 77. NB: SKS does not italicise “how” in the final line.  SKS 5, 69 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 233.  Ibid.  SKS 5, 69 – 70 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 233; The New Revised Standard Version has “are you envious because I am good,” but might be translated more literally as “is your eye evil because I am good?” The Danish translation stays closer to the Greek with “Eller er dit øje ondt, fordi jeg er god?” Kierkegaard first included the biblical citation in his fair copy, but then struck it out. See SKS K5, 93.

The Generous Eye

97

the pure see God always, ‘but those who do evil do not see God’” (3 John 1:11).¹³ And: “The eye is the light of the body, but when the light that is in a person is dark, how great the darkness then becomes!” (Matthew 6:22– 23).¹⁴ The editors of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter tell us that in the margin of his fair copy for this discourse Kierkegaard here wrote and then struck out “see Matthew 6:23.”¹⁵ He perhaps believed the biblical allusion would be obvious to his reader, but now, nearly two centuries later, one can no longer take this for granted. The likelihood of blinking past this particular biblical allusion might even be exacerbated in our day due to ambiguities of translation; the standard translation of the passage has been changed, both in Danish and in English. The contemporary English NRSV translates this saying of Jesus as “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy [Greek: ἁπλοῡς; haplous], your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Mt 6:22– 23).¹⁶ The authorized Danish translation of 2005 similarly reads, “Øjet er legemets lys” [The eye is the lamp of the body], but then instead of “if your eye is healthy” it translates the second half of the verse as “Er dit øjet klart,” where “klar” can mean “clear” but not “healthy” exactly, nor even “single,” as in the Authorized “King James” Version of 1611 which reads, “if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” Interestingly, the Danish translation of 1819 familiar to Kierkegaard did in fact translate this phrase as “if your eye is healthy” [dersom dit Øie er sundt]. And more interestingly still, Kierkegaard himself, although he quotes from both verses 22 and 23, doesn’t include this central phrase at all!

 SKS 5, 70 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 233; in this instance, Kierkegaard includes the biblical citation in the published edition.  Ibid.  See SKS 5, 93. The pericope in the Danish Authorized Version of 1819 reads: “Øiet er Legemets Lys; derfor, dersom dit Øie er sundt, bliver dit ganske Legeme lyst; men dersom dit Øie er ondt, bliver dit ganske Legeme mørkt. Dersom derfor det Lys, der er i dig, er Mørke, hvor stort bliver da Mørket!”  In his commentary on this passage Eugene Boring points out: “In contrast to the modern understanding, which regards the eye as a window that lets light into the body, the common understanding in the ancient world was the eye was like a lamp (Prov. 15:30; 2 Sam 12:11; Dan 10:6; Tob 10:15), an instrument that projects the inner light onto objects so they may be seen” (The New Interpreters Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, ed. by Leander E. Keck et al., vol. 8, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press 1995, p. 210; see also Dale C. Allison, Jr., “ʻThe Eye is the Lamp of the Bodyʼ (Matt 6:22– 23; cf. Luke 11:34– 36),” New Testament Studies, vol. 33, 1987, pp. 61– 83).

98

Joel D. S. Rasmussen

Here we encounter an aporia, both in the sense that translators have puzzled over how best to translate the ambiguous Greek term “haplous” [ἁπλοῡς], and in the etymological sense that Kierkegaard’s quotation of the verses here quite literally appears without the passage in question, which as I understand it is what the two morphemes a- [lacking] and poros [passage] mean: lacking passage. Perhaps it is for us as readers to decide how to see this. Perhaps the translation that best accords with Kierkegaard’s own metaphor of the productive or generative dimension of vision is one proposed by the late American theologian Richard R. Niebuhr, who once preached a sermon entitled “The Generous Eye” and who, following the distinguished New Testament scholar Henry J. Cadbury, rendered the passage, “if therefore thine eye be generous, thy whole body shall be full of light.”¹⁷ We may pause here to ask how Kierkegaard thinks the Gospel verses he cites, with their black and white talk of good and evil, purity and impurity, light and darkness, are meaningful in a world of grey. Surely the critical eye and keen psychological insight for which Kierkegaard is so justifiably wellknown hasn’t faltered? But if not, then why not commend the virtue of taking a fair, balanced, sober, and judicious view of others? Why not approve what might seem to be a more measured view that would recognize ourselves and others as the mixed bags of virtues and vices, strengths and weakness, fortes and foibles that we “really” are? Wouldn’t that be more judicious? Kierkegaard clearly anticipates such questions, and I think his response indicates in advance an even deeper psychological insight than the view assumed by the “judicious” view. “Perhaps we would seem smarter,” he observes: if we said that there is a great multitude of sins in the world, and it is exactly the same whether love discovers them or not. Should we then let the apostolic saying and the love that it describes be accounted no more than an elegant piece of phraseology that can’t stand up to scrutiny? But the kind of smartness that proceeds in that way—does it understand love as well as it understands the multitude of sins? Would it be willing to concede the opposite case: that the multitude of sins is just as great whether it is able to use the understanding to learn about them or not? Isn’t it actually rather gratified by its own cunning in being able to discover and track down our hidden sins?¹⁸

 Richard R. Niebuhr, “The Generous Eye: A Sermon,” in Streams of Grace: Studies of Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William James, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publisher, 2010 [1980], p. 115. See also Henry J. Cadbury, “The Single Eye,” Harvard Theological Review, vol. 47, no. 2, 1954, pp. 69 – 74.  SKS 5, 71 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” pp. 235 – 236.

The Generous Eye

99

Here I admit that in my own initial encounter with this passage I suspected Kierkegaard of committing a kind of performative contradiction. Is he not tracking down hidden sins by pointing out this cunning tendency to track down hidden sins? Do we not derive some shrewd sense of gratification from recognizing how people derive pleasure from spotting shortcomings? Is that what he calls hiding a multitude of sins? However, mindful of the dictum that “it is not just a question of what one sees, but what one sees depends on how one sees,” I re-read the passage. And on a more charitable reading I observed that Kierkegaard doesn’t expressly level the charge that I first believed he was levelling. My hermeneutics of suspicion had clouded my view. I don’t have to read him as saying that I do this, or that other readers do this, or that anyone in particular does it, but simply that there is a “kind of smartness that proceeds in this way.” He just puts it out there for reflection, distant and abstract from anyone in particular. We might imagine him saying, “Is it not so, dear reader?” Knowing that initially I had been in fact “rather gratified” by spotting what I thought was a performative contradiction means that I, at least, have to answer, “Yes, I suppose it is so.” So, clearly I had been too hasty in my initial judgement, and in being hasty I had implicated myself in the performative contradiction that I believed I spied in the discourse itself. It was my own fault. For only a page earlier the discourse had expressly warned me that “when hastiness dwells in a heart, a person is quick to discover a multitude of sins. Such a one understands very well what has been only half said, and, even if it is as if it were spoken at a great distance, such a one quickly seizes upon a word that has scarcely been uttered.”¹⁹ Again, “Is it not so, dear reader?” Yes, I suppose it is so. But hastiness is not the only route by which, as Kierkegaard and the Bible put it, “the eye is readily offended.”²⁰ Indeed, the discourse lists a veritable multitude of sins that tend toward the propensity to discover a multitude of sins: “When sinful lust dwells in a heart, the eye discovers a multitude of sins and makes them even more numerous.”²¹ So too with “anxiety,” “fear,” “miserliness,” “hate,” “strife,” “anger,” “quarrelling,” “duplicity,” “factions,” and “envy.” “When envy dwells in a heart, the eye has power to draw out something impure even from what is pure.”²² Transformative power. This is a dynamic that

   

SKS 5, 70 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 233. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 5, 71 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” pp. 233 – 234.

100

Joel D. S. Rasmussen

we might be more inclined to associate with Nietzsche than with Kierkegaard: it is very similar to what Nietzsche identifies as ressentiment. Only a few pages earlier Kierkegaard had reminded us of the “the world’s childhood teaching” that “revenge is sweet,” and wondered whether to warn readers “not to zealously call wrath down on others.”²³ Now he identifies the transvaluation of values in and through the power of the eye: “There is indeed a power in the world,” he says, “that talks in such a way as to translate ‘good’ by ‘evil.’”²⁴ Nietzsche couldn’t have agreed more. But Kierkegaard maintains that transvaluation can run the other way around as well, and I think it’s probably an understatement to say that Nietzsche would not have wished to follow Kierkegaard’s theological turn: “there is also a power that comes from above,” Kierkegaard attests, “and that translates what is evil into what is good—and that is the love that hides a multitude of sins.”²⁵

II The Look of Love So how does Kierkegaard envision love hiding a multitude of sins? On his telling, “when love dwells in a heart, then the eye has the power to love forth the good, even in what is impure. Such an eye does not see what is impure but only the purity that it loves and loves forth by loving it.”²⁶ To a suspicious eye this might look like a version of Pollyanna’s “glad game” dressed up in saintly clothing: see only the good in others, do not focus on their failings. But surely it would be a hasty and superficial reading that would accuse Kierkegaard (of all people) of a cloying optimism! True, the entire discourse turns on the question of what we choose to focus on, yet Kierkegaard’s encouragement to see only the good in each other is best read not in terms of simple optimism, I think, but rather in terms of the imitation of Christ. When in the discourse Kierkegaard turns from abstract characterizations of how love dwells in the heart as “joy, peace, patience, mildness, faithfulness goodness, gentleness, and abstinence” to the concrete exemplification of the fullest embodiment of love in an actual life, he does so with an expression so pious that it is sure to embarrass at least some of his readers. Love “looks always to the Lord,” he writes.²⁷ And in closing the discourse, he invites us once more     

SKS 5, 67 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 230. SKS 5, 71 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 235. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

The Generous Eye

101

“to dwell on this love by looking at the image in which it is made visible to the soul”: When the Scribes and Pharisees had taken a woman in flagrant sin, they took her to the Temple and brought her face to face with the Savior.²⁸ But Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground with His finger. He who knew all things also knew well what the Scribes and Pharisees knew before they told Him. The Scribes and Pharisees were quick to discover her guilt, which was easy to do, since her sin was flagrant. They also discovered another sin, the one they made themselves guilty of when they cunningly sought to snare the Lord. But Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground with His finger. Why did He bend down? Why did He write on the ground with His finger? Did he sit there like a judge, paying close attention to the prosecutor’s speech, attentively bending over to note down the point of the charge so as not to forget it and to be able to judge with due severity? Was this woman’s sin the only one that the Lord noted in his writing? Or didn’t He who wrote on the ground with His finger rather write so as to delete the charge and forget about it? There she stood, the sinful woman, surrounded by those who were perhaps more guilty than she was, yet who loudly accused her. But love bent down and didn’t hear the accusation that went right over its head, carried away on the wind. It wrote with its finger to delete what it itself knew—for sin discovers a multitude of sins, but love hides a multitude of sins. Yes! Love hides even the multitude of sins to be found in sin’s own eye, for by a single word the Lord silenced the Scribes and Pharisees, and no accuser was left, no one to condemn her. But Jesus said, “Nor do I condemn you. Go and sin no more—for punishment gives birth to new sins, but love covers a multitude of sins.”²⁹

I have quoted the final paragraph of Kierkegaard’s discourse in its entirety. The overall meaning is perhaps clear. But I want to draw attention to a detail that was not plain to me the first few times I read it, even though it was hidden in plain view. Some version of the phrase “Jesus bent down” appears four times here, but then a fifth time the discourse reads “love bent down.” Similarly, some version of what Jesus did when he bent down is repeated four times: he “wrote on the ground with his finger.” But then the fifth time the discourse reads, “love bent down” and “wrote with its finger.” Was it not enough just to state clearly and one time only what Jesus did? Why add the three-fold repetition, and then—as though this weren’t enough to draw it to an end—indulge in a further non-identical repetition? Sometimes such pleonasm is just annoying; we want to say, “Yes, I see—I get it already!” But sometimes pleonasm might be used rhetorically to slow a reader and prompt her or him to reflect on whether there is still more to see. What more can we see here?

 John 8:3 – 11.  SKS 5, 77 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” pp. 241– 242.

102

Joel D. S. Rasmussen

Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus tells us that Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses are not Christian sermons: “they use only ethical categories of immanence, not the doubly reflected religious categories in the paradox. If a confusion of language is to be averted, the sermon must be reserved for religious-Christian existence.”³⁰ Climacus suggests that perhaps what Kierkegaard had hoped to accomplish in the upbuilding discourses was to see “how far one can go, purely philosophically, in the upbuilding.”³¹ And yet, as George Pattison has observed, “the claim that the upbuilding discourses do not overlap with what is distinctively Christian doesn’t entirely stand up. While it is true that Kierkegaard consistently avoids speaking as if he had any kind of authority, even the early discourses draw attention to the authoritative nature of apostolic teaching and put in play such doctrinal concepts as the Fall.”³² Pattison also notes that Jesus himself even “makes an appearance in several [early discourses] and is shown as offering liberation from situations of sin and suffering.”³³ We have seen how in this discourse Kierkegaard does indeed begin and end with what he calls the “apostolic saying” that “love hides a multitude of sins.”³⁴ He even goes so far as to say that “it is not merely a piece of rhetoric to say that love hides a multitude of sins: it is true.”³⁵ Likewise, we have seen that Jesus himself makes his dramatic appearance in the final paragraph of the discourse. But the question of whether there is more to see in this discourse than Climacus says there is—more than meets the eye—really turns on whether the discourse remains (a) within the ethical category of immanence, or (b) is doubly reflected in the category of the incarnational paradox. Put another way, we might ask whether the discourse speaks of Jesus who is “purely philosophically” the ethical teacher, or of Jesus Christ who is God incarnate. A straightforward answer to this question is not obvious. And there would be no little irony if the standard reading of the upbuilding discourses following Climacus turns out to be not quite right. But here I come back to what might be a hint of an answer in the repetitions of the final paragraph. If we’re sympathetic

 SKS 7, 233 / CUP, 256.  Ibid.  Pattison, “Foreword” to Kierkegaard, Spiritual Writings, p. xv.  Ibid., p. xv. Pattison continues: “And yet—although this is something readers must test for themselves—the tone is, in a way that is hard to define, very different from that of a sermon. Even where apostolic authority or Christ’s saving love are mentioned, the reader is not so much instructed to accept this as to consider how and why it might be important for him or her to accept this authorty or believe in this love.”  SKS 5, 69 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 232.  SKS 5, 71– 2 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 236.

The Generous Eye

103

to the possibility that the non-identical recurrence of the phrase “Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground with His finger” is not simply an annoying rhetorical affectation, but rather an invitation to reflect upon some deeper significance, then we need to ask why Kierkegaard is so concerned to focus our attention on Jesus’s action? If he was only concerned to relate what happened, he would surely only need to say it once. But we have already read that it’s “not just a question of what one sees, but what one sees depends on how one sees.”³⁶ (This is very close to a claim Climacus famously makes in Postscript three years later when he asserts, “The how of the truth is precisely the truth,” and so perhaps there are still more reasons for taking his putatively definitive claim about the purely ethical character of the upbuilding discourses with a grain of salt.³⁷) So how are we going to read this? Kierkegaard transitions to his closing paragraph by relating that he has “spoken as if speaking to those who are perfect.”³⁸ And if some of us “don’t feel perfect,” he adds, well no matter: “the discourse makes no distinctions.”³⁹ He speaks to us as though we are already pure in heart, and he tells us—in the same paragraph concerning the importance of how one sees—that “when purity dwells in a heart, the eye sees the finger of God.”⁴⁰ Is this not a pointer to how we might read the conclusion of this discourse? The image of the “finger of God” is likely most familiar to us from the giving of the law to the people of Israel: “When God finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God” (Exodus 32:18). With that in mind, perhaps we can say that in this discourse Kierkegaard is poetically turning this familiar image in an unfamiliar way, coordinating Law and Gospel—covenant and reconciliation, requirement and forgiveness—and thereby evoking the incarnational witness that Jesus is “the image in which [Love] is made visible to the soul.”⁴¹ Indeed, this turning from familiar to unfamiliar is a distinctively Kierkegaardian movement. For if this is how we read it, then we can elucidate more fully Kierkegaard’s final repetition in which he affirms that “love bent down” and “wrote with its finger to delete what it itself knew.”⁴² If someone has been “waiting for the word that will give a point to what is said,”⁴³ then this might be it.

      

SKS 5, 69 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 232. See SKS 7, 294 / CUP 1, 323. SKS 5, 76 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 241. Ibid. SKS 5, 70 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 233. SKS 5, 76 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 241. SKS 5, 77 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 242.

104

Joel D. S. Rasmussen

Of course, if our concern is to discover “how far one can go, purely philosophically, in the upbuilding,” then we are always free to let Climacus’s more phenomenologically restrained interpretation guide how we read this discourse. Even without a more expressly Christian inflection, the discourse can still be read as an exhortation to “always take the generous view of others’ motivations and actions.”⁴⁴ Maybe the world of the text doesn’t bear the sort of reading I’ve just risked; but remember, the text itself affirms that what one sees depends on how one sees. And since I reckon that much of what it means to be a Kierkegaardian reader of Kierkegaard is to learn, to ponder, and to relearn—perhaps to relearn many times, and slowly—the surprising ways in which the how of the truth is the truth, I would wish to ask Climacus whether maybe he, like me, had been too hasty. Did he perhaps rush past the beginning in order to get to what he hoped would be the heart of the text? Remember that when Kierkegaard entitled his discourse “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” he also indicated that the source of this saying is the First Letter of Peter 4:7– 12 (or through to the end of verse 11, actually).⁴⁵ But as we’ve seen, the saying is in fact only one part of one verse, not the whole passage. I think it’s not too much to assume that Kierkegaard would have expected, or at least hoped, that a patient reader would first open a Bible and read the entirety of the passage before charging into the discourse. And in reading the words, “so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 4:11), Climacus would have glimpsed from the very beginning this Word of Love made fully visible only at the very end.

 SKS 5, 70 / Kierkegaard, “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins,” p. 234.  George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology, London: Routledge 2002, p. 210. Pattison himself advocates a philosophical, non-dogmatic reading of Kierkegaard’s discourse.  See note 7 above.

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting When I first became an academic, I attended an “away day” with the rest of my faculty. The purpose of the retreat was to connect with colleagues after the long summer, and to think about the year ahead. We were asked to consider the following question: as a teacher, what would you want to be written on your gravestone? Such a question follows a well-trodden path for retreatants, inviting them to consider their legacy and how they might want to be remembered. And many helpful, insightful, and inspiring answers were given. However, there’s often a danger in asking a Kierkegaardian a simple question—especially when it concerns the meaning of life, and any sense of mortality. Provoked inevitably by the feeling that I really should say something, as the last of my other colleagues finished up their responses, I answered that I wouldn’t want anything written on my gravestone as I hoped the students would remember the teaching (or at least what they took from it) rather than the teacher. After a moment of awkward silence, the conversation thankfully moved on. And such was my colleagues’ introduction to the new addition to the team. This story perhaps says more about my naiveté as a young academic than anything else. And yet, the role of the teacher and student highlighted in my answer is a concern I have continued to reflect on in both my professional and personal life. This concern is my starting point here. Taking Augustine, Schleiermacher, and Kierkegaard as my sources, this essay will highlight lines of interpenetration between each thinker in their shared views of reciprocal community and the role of the teacher. In doing so I will suggest how the perspectives of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard may aid in engaging with Augustine’s controversial presentation of a “using” love to define humankind’s interrelationships. However, by drawing on recent psychological insights, I will also suggest a further relational dynamic embraced by Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher that may develop Augustine’s formulation, and act as an aid to our reflections on the nature of Christian community—namely, forgetting.

I Augustine Augustine is one of the great theologians of love. However, in his distinction of love as both frui and uti, enjoyment and use, we not only find one of the great controversies in Augustinian thought, but also, as this essay argues, the foundation for his understanding of teaching and authentic relationality. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-010

106

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

In Book I of On Christian Doctrine Augustine states that “Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used. Those things which are to be enjoyed make us blessed. Those things which are to be used help and, as it were, sustain us as we move towards blessedness in order that we may gain and cling to those things which make us blessed.” To make sure this distinction is clear, Augustine explains that “To enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love, provided that it is worthy of love.”¹ The spiritual consequences of confusing or disrupting this natural order of love are, he warns, severe: “If we who enjoy and use things, being placed in the midst of things of both kinds, wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and something deflected, so that we are retarded in obtaining those things which are to be enjoyed, or even prevented altogether, shackled by an inferior love.”² For Augustine, only God is worthy of enjoyment. Other appropriate objects of our love, such as other people, are to be “used” towards this end. It is perhaps not surprising that this view has garnered significant concern or derision.³ Augustine appears to stand in direct opposition to Kant’s well-trodden maxim to “act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”⁴ And quite apart from philosophical critique, it seems unclear how it could be loving to simply use another individual for one’s own personal gain. However, this kind of response tends to treat Augustine’s position in abstraction from the argument of the wider work, and flattens both the relationships that are being described and the identity of the actors involved. When Book I is read within its context, a rather different picture emerges. At its heart, On Christian Doctrine is designed to teach people how to read Scripture, and Books II to IV offer a focused discussion on this theme. However, in Book I Augustine is addressing a prior and foundational concern. His Prologue discusses different groups who might disagree with his pedagogical project; by

 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Indianapolis, IN: The Liberal Arts of America Press, Inc. 1980, I.IV.4, p. 9.  Ibid., I.III.3, p. 9.  Cf. the helpful overviews of the literature in Oliver O’Donovan, “Usus and Fruitio in Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I,” Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 33, 1982, pp. 361– 397; Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, “Resisting Idolatry and Instrumentalisation in Loving the Neighbour: The Significance of the Pilgrimage Motif for Augustine’s Usus-Fruitio Distinction,” Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 27, nr. 2, 2014, pp. 202– 221.  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge: CUP 2012, p. 87.

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

107

far the most problematic are those who think they simply don’t need to be taught, but revel in a perceived direct inspiration. Such a mentality is, for Augustine, rooted in the “most proud and most dangerous temptations,” because it forgets not only that everything we receive is from God, and so to God alone is due glory, but also that God has ordained that his grace should be received from him through other people.⁵ By way of example, he notes that even Paul, who is encountered by Christ himself on the road to Damascus, is then sent to another person to receive his instruction. Indeed, for Augustine, in this way God roots human dignity in having made us his chosen means of disclosure. Augustine’s ire is further stoked by the hypocrisy that such individuals—despite refusing tuition and extolling a reliance on divine enlightenment—also masquerade as teachers. When we turn to Book I, then, the essential question is what it means to learn from others, and how to properly teach. As Augustine makes clear in the very first sentence of Book I, his focus is on “a way of discovering those things which are to be understood, and a way of teaching what we have learned.”⁶ The discussion of use and enjoyment in Book I cannot be read, therefore, outside the reciprocal relationality through which individuals both submit to one another, and act as channels of God’s revelation. Against an interpretation that takes Augustine to be instructing individuals on how selfishly to use others, we may see that he is rather attempting to describe what it means to live within the spiritual community of those who are “united in the brotherhood of the love of God.”⁷ Augustine is acutely aware of the dangerous mentality of inauthentic teachers. As he observes in his Confessions, the “wish to be feared or loved by people for no reason other than the joy derived from such power” is the main reason why he himself fails to love God properly.⁸ In Book I of On Christian Doctrine he describes the proud individual who “places his enjoyment in himself and rejoices that others place their hopes in him also.”⁹ This, for Augustine, is an entirely disordered form of love. As in his famous opening prayer in the Confessions —“You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”—so the essence of love as enjoyment is in finding ultimate fulfilment and rest.¹⁰ It is a love that is rooted in

 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Prologue 6, p. 5.  Ibid., I.I.1, p. 7.  Ibid., I.XXIX.30, p. 24.  Augustine, Confessions, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008, X.XXXVI 59, p. 213.  Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.XXXIII.36, p. 28.  Augustine, Confessions, I.I.1, p. 3; cf. On Christian Doctrine, I.XXXI.34, p. 27.

108

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

need.¹¹ For Augustine, only God can be the source of fulfilment. Human beings were never intended to fulfil each other, and are entirely incapable of doing so. In such a statement, Augustine is not seeking to denigrate human nature or its relationality, but simply to place it in its correct order. In his Confessions he maintains that those things which he enjoyed, and which kept him from God, were indeed “lovely.”¹² But their true loveliness was perverted when they were seen as an end in themselves, and not as a means to an end by virtue of their loveliness. It is only in this right ordering that human relationships may gain their true dignity as avenues for God’s revelation and fulfilment to us. In the context of addressing those who arrogantly refuse to receive instruction, to use another person means submitting to them in vulnerability, overcoming the pride that defines our sinful nature, and receiving from them as a teacher. Augustine sharpens this point by exploring what it means to be used, and the desire to be of use to others. The more we love God the more we will be compelled to draw others closer to God.¹³ As he petitions in his Confessions, “Stretch out your wings, and let us find refuge under them. Be our glory. Let it be for your sake that we are loved, and let it be your word in us which is feared.”¹⁴ Indeed, as Christ comes to be used himself, so in being-used do we find our vocation, blessing, and health.¹⁵ For Augustine, it is perhaps artificial to speak of giving and receiving as separate actions. Even when we use others, and so love them for the sake of God, we are at one and the same time teaching them about the fulfilling love of God within us.¹⁶ In seeing others fulfilled by God in their interactions with us, we are taught what fulfilment in God is, and are drawn towards it ourselves.¹⁷ Consequently, when such relationships are considered ideally in a “brotherhood of the love of God,” there should never be a time when we are not using and being used.¹⁸

 Note here that for Augustine, God cannot enjoy us as he does not need us (On Christian Doctrine, I.XXXI.34, p. 27).  Augustine, Confessions, X.XXVII.38, p. 201.  Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, X.XXIX.30, p. 24.  Augustine, Confessions, X.XXXVI.59, p. 214.  Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.XVI.15, p. 16; cf. I. I.1, p. 8.  Ibid.¸ I.XXII.21, pp. 18 – 19.  Ibid., I.XXXIII.37, pp. 28 – 29.  It should be noted that this is not always the case, and in different circumstances the giving and taking may fluctuate. As Augustine describes: “Among those who are able to enjoy God with us, we love some whom we help, some by whom we are helped, some whose help we need and whose wants we supply, and some on whom we bestow no benefits and from whom we await

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

109

For a number of commentators Augustine’s theology of love, as epitomised in his designations of enjoyment and use, undermines any concept of true community. What has been argued here is that, although Augustine could perhaps have done more to head off such an interpretation, it is precisely in these concepts that we find a union of love and teaching, and the foundations for a truly authentic sociality. And, as this essay will contend, in the thought of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard we find a more developed elaboration of this relational dynamic.

II Schleiermacher Augustine plays a relatively cursory role in Schleiermacher’s writing, limited largely to generally positive footnotes and references. And commentators on their work have spared few words on their relationship. However, when we turn to Schleiermacher’s On Religion, striking parallels may be found concerning relationality and the role of the teacher. On Religion is written to convince Schleiermacher’s “cultured” romantic readers that the rational, prudent, dogmatic, moral, political, and prescriptively universal faith that they so “despise” is not true religion at all. Furthermore, not only do these readers stand in coherence with true religion, but they are the only ones that may bring about its rebirth.¹⁹ To the romantic gaze, everything in creation is a part of the whole and unity of the universe. Through intuition and feeling, all people have the ability to perceive, interpret, and individually manifest this unity. This, for Schleiermacher, is the heart of religion. As he states, “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe’s own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity.”²⁰ When each person intuits the universe, they do so individually. Although intuition sees the unified whole, and each individual is united in an experience of humanity, each person will understand and present this according to their own distinctiveness and imagination.²¹ As Schleiermacher

none ourselves” (On Christian Doctrine, I.XXIX.30, p. 24). However, it is clear that our motivation should be a desire for both to be finally present.  Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011, p. 7, p. 9 and p. 66.  Schleiermacher, On Religion, p. 22.  Cf. Ibid., p. 53.

110

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

notes, “each has something unique. None is like the other.”²² It is not surprising, therefore, that he offers a sustained critique of a “mania for system” as any form of prescriptive, dogmatic, or systematic religion will by nature destroy the individuality of intuition.²³ Even the holy writings and documents of religion are, at best, simply for use by that “great ecclesiastical society”—that “institution for novices in religion”—and, at worst, a “mausoleum of religion,” as they circumvent the individual’s direct connection to the world-spirit.²⁴ Although intuition is entirely individual, it is also entirely passive. As beings who are fully entwined in the nature and unity of the universe, intuition is the way in which we receive the universe revealing itself to us. As Schleiermacher confirms, “All intuition proceeds from an influence of the intuited on the one who intuits, from an original and independent action of the former, which is then grasped, apprehended, and conceived by the latter according to one’s own nature.”²⁵ Our religious task, against all forms of prescriptive belief, is simply to become a person who can open themselves up to the unity of existence and receive such a revelation. Such conditions have a direct impact on how religion can therefore be taught. For Schleiermacher, religion isn’t something that should be communicated. Rather, individuals are compelled to do it by the strength of their passion. Schleiermacher opens his first speech by revealing that his words derive from the “inner, irresistible necessity of my nature; it is a divine calling; it is that which determines my place in the universe and makes me the being I am.”²⁶ But at the beginning of the fourth speech, he reveals that such a motivation is the essential element of anyone who has been touched by the divine spark and encountered the universe. They will by necessity not only seek to draw others towards religion, but desire to be drawn further towards it by others.²⁷ “Once there is religion, it must necessarily also be social. That not only lies in human nature but also is preeminently in the nature of religion.”²⁸ The fact that we intuit the universe imaginatively and individually does not undermine the impact of religious communication, but founds its effectiveness. If each person comes away with their own distinct perception, it is precisely in the distinctiveness of the other that they are developed to comprehend the whole. As Schleiermacher

      

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. 39. p. 28; cf. p. 26. pp. 9, 22, 50, 74; cf. p. 83. pp. 24– 25. p. 5. pp. 73 ff. p. 73.

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

111

explains, every expression of religion interests the true intuitor, “and seeking his complement he listens attentively to every tone that he recognises as religious. This is how mutual communication organises itself; thus speaking and hearing are equally indispensable for everyone.”²⁹ In these mutually communicative relationships, each individual is made more complete by being drawn closer to their essential unity with the universe or world spirit. And it is these relationships that reveal the nature of love. As Schleiermacher observes, “Each person embraces most ardently the one in whom the world is reflected most clearly and purely; each loves most tenderly the one in whom he believes he finds everything brought together that he himself lacks for the completion of humanity.”³⁰ Even though the universe may reveal itself through the whole spectrum of its creation, it is only through the depth of human relationships, and therefore in concrete love, that the ability to intuit the world in ever increasing diversity is made manifest.³¹ However, the essential nature of love is not just to unite but also to separate. In contrast to teachers who require their students to learn their message, and convince others to believe the same things as them, authentic communication must simply aid the development of others towards their own intuition. All communication must be in the service of the other’s freedom towards the universe. Schleiermacher describes human nature as caught between the two poles of love and resistance, oneness and individuality; as seeking to draw everything into oneself, and yet also to flee in isolation.³² Authentic existence is found at the point of equilibrium between the two. Consequently, true sociality only occurs within the “community of individuals” where a sense of conflict between union and individuation is maintained.³³ Against what Schleiermacher sees in inauthentic relationships as an “amalgamation of people,” those with a truly religious disposition “never stand too close to one another.”³⁴

     

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. 74. p. 38. pp. 37– 38. p. 37; cf. pp. 5 – 6. pp. 58 – 59. p. 78 and p. 79.

112

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

III Kierkegaard Schleiermacher’s work offers a clear development of the reciprocal relationality expressed by Augustine. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is in the figure of Kierkegaard that we may find its most concrete description.³⁵ The influence of Augustine and Schleiermacher on Kierkegaard is as tantalising as it is enigmatic, eliciting wildly divergent opinions from scholars on all sides.³⁶ Although Schleiermacher receives a positive treatment in The Concept of Irony and The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s early journals offer a far more critical edge. Similarly, commentators have rightly noted the importance for Kierkegaard of Augustine’s work on the right ordering of goods within the individual’s life as they journey towards their final telos and rest in God.³⁷ However, Kierkegaard is far more critical in his explicit references, denouncing Augustine as having entirely confused the concept of faith by intellectualising it and selling it out to philosophy.³⁸ And yet it is in the domain of relationality and the role  Matthew D. Kirkpatrick, “Sociological Categories and the Journey to Selfhood: From the Crowd to Community,” in Kierkegaard and Political Theology, ed. by Roberto Sirvent and Silas Morgan, Eugene, OR: Pickwick 2018, pp. 341– 357.  Both Lee Barrett and Robert Puchniak have offered extensive overviews of the available literature on Augustine’s influence that spreads across an all-to-nothing spectrum: see Lee Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans 2013, pp. 1– 15; Robert Puchniak, “Augustine: Kierkegaard’s Tempered Admiration of Augustine,” in Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Tradition ed. by Jon Stewart, Abingdon: Routledge 2016. With regard to Schleiermacher’s influence, this has largely been pioneered by Richard Crouter who, among other things, attributes Kierkegaard’s use of indirect communication to Schleiermacher’s influence. Cf. Richard Crouter, “Introduction,” in On Religion; Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, pp. 98 – 122.  Cf. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying; John A. Doody, “Kierkegaard,” in Augustine Through the Ages, ed. by Allan D. Fitzgerald, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans 1999; Christopher B. Barnett, “ʻRestʼ as Unio Mystica? Kierkegaard, Augustine, and the Spiritual Life,” Spiritus, vol. 16, nr. 1, 2016; Craig A. Hefner, “ʻIn God’s Changelessness There Is Restʼ: The Existential Doctrine of God’s Immutability in Augustine and Kierkegaard,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 20, nr. 1, 2018. It is striking that despite a focus on the theme of journeying that many commentators discuss, and the fact that On Christian Doctrine was the work Kierkegaard owned before, and in distinction to, his Augustine Collected Works series, this work is largely ignored from their analysis. This is perhaps especially surprising as the theme of pilgrimage is of central concern for Augustine scholars (cf. O’Donovan, “Usus and Fruitio,” and Stewart-Kroeker, “Resisting Idolatry”).  Cf. Pap, XI1 A 237 n.d., 1854 / JP 1,180; Pap, X5 A 134 n.d., 1853 / JP 4, 3864; Pap, XI2 A 380 n.d., 1854– 55 / JP 2 1154; Pap, XI1 A 371 n.d., 1854 / JP 4, 4299. Note also Kierkegaard’s critique of Augustine’s understanding of original sin at the heart of The Concept of Anxiety.

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

113

of the teacher that we find not only lines of profound similarity, but, as this essay will suggest, Kierkegaard standing as a fulfilment of Augustine and Schleiermacher’s relational thought. In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus describes a form of authentic teaching practiced by Socrates. In contrast to a pupil simply receiving the truth externally, instructed by the teacher in what they should understand the truth to be, Socratic tuition seeks to draw the truth out from within an individual through a process of recollection. Socrates is like a midwife who aids the individual in giving birth, but who makes no difference to what—or who—is born. The individual’s relationship to truth is therefore entirely personal, and Socrates is described as “merely an occasion” through which an individual may come to their knowledge.³⁹ For Johannes Climacus, the Socratic method stands in contrast to the way in which God reveals himself to individuals. When Christ is the teacher, he not only provides the content to be known, but also the condition by which a person may come to know it. But far from being discarded from the Christian schema, the Socratic method returns as the essential form of communication between believers.⁴⁰ Each individual may aid the other in their disposition before God. But if an individual is to come to know the truth, it must come from God alone. In the language of Postscript, the central concern of our responsibility is to develop the correct dispositional how of faith, not the what of its content. In this discussion the role of the human teacher is not limited to a formal pedagogical career, but defines a form of relationality. It is, in Johannes Climacus’s words, “the highest relation a human being can have to another”.⁴¹ Furthermore, it is entirely reciprocal: Socrates is “marked by autopathy just as much as by sympathy”—by a concern to teach but also to learn.⁴² Johannes Climacus’s description of authentic relationality remains somewhat tantalising—as it does in the majority of Kierkegaard’s authorship, with his firm emphasis on the individual. However, when we turn to the rather underappreciated Two Ages, we find a far more systematic focus. This work is an extensive literary review, published under Kierkegaard’s own name, of Two Ages—a novel by Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd. Here Kierkegaard offers some of his most penetrating analysis on aesthetics and the art of writing and communication. The review, written in March 1846 in the build up to the Danish Revolution in

   

Cf. SKS 4, 220 / PF, 11. SKS 4, 267 / PF, 65 – 66. SKS 4, 219 / PF, 10; cf. SKS 4, 231 / PF, 24. SKS 4, 231 / PF, 23.

114

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

1848, also provides insight into his analysis of society and politics. For Kierkegaard, the revolutionary zeal witnessed in Europe in past generations was wild, chaotic, and often destructive—yet it was defined by a passionate and decisive commitment.⁴³ People were willing to lose their lives for their cause; not only did their movement possess form and culture, but they each as individuals developed a form of authentic inwardness. In contrast, Kierkegaard argues, his present age is defined by a reflective, safe, and passionless sensibility, by security in numbers, and by a lack of anyone willing to stand up as an individual in decisive action. It is revolution by committee.⁴⁴ By lacking an inwardness and decisive conviction for themselves, he explains, his contemporaries lack true individuality, and so their relationships likewise lack a tension that allows them to develop as individuals through their relationships, and to aid in the development of others. Indeed, the lack of individuality becomes the essential quality of this form of relationality; anyone who might stand up, or consider themselves as different, will threaten the dynamics of the whole and must be immediately shut down. For Kierkegaard, this form of relationality goes by the name of the public, and its relationships are defined by envy and the process of levelling.⁴⁵ In stark contrast, the past revolutionary generation embodied a more authentic relationality because each individual was defined by their own commitment to the ideal for which they were fighting. The “idea” was the reason why they related to one another, and by mutually relating to this idea, they drew one another closer to it. In stepping back to consider these dynamics more generally, Kierkegaard offers a helpful summary: “When individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately related to an idea and are together essentially related to the same idea, the relation is optimal and normative. Individually the relation separates them (each one has himself to himself), and ideally unites them… Thus the individuals never come too close to each other in the herd sense, simply because they are united on the basis of an ideal distance.”⁴⁶ Within “the crowd” the very opposite is true: “Individuals do not in inwardness turn away from each other, do not turn outward in unanimity for an idea, but mutually turn to each other in a frustrating and suspicious, aggressive, levelling reciprocity. The avenue of the idea is blocked off; individuals mutually thwart and contravene each other; then selfish and mutual reflexive opposition is like a swamp—and now they are sitting in it. Instead of joy there is a kind of

   

Cf. SKS 8, 58 – 55 / TA, 60 – 68. SKS 8, 76 / TA, 79. Cf. SKS 8, 78 – 87 / TA, 81– 91. SKS 8, 61 / TA, 62– 63.

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

115

snivelling discontent, instead of sorrow a kind of sullen, dogged tenaciousness, instead of enthusiasm the garrulous common sense of experience.”⁴⁷ In contrast to such a bland and insipid existence, human relationships retain their richness when individuals are both united and separated by a shared idea. Here Kierkegaard makes three important clarifications. First, it does not necessarily matter what the idea is; the strength of the bond between individuals will be defined by the passion with which they hold to the idea. Second, people are united not simply because of a shared interest, but because through the union each individual develops the other’s relationship to that shared idea. And third, each person’s passionate relationship to the idea is not supposed to be the same. Rather, it is by virtue of their differences that they help one another to develop in relation to the idea. The levelling crowd seeks to destroy the law of contradiction; but it is precisely in this sense of a “qualitatively distinguishing passion” that mutual development takes place.⁴⁸ When earlier in the review Kierkegaard offers his evaluation of authentic communication—in contrast to a simple transference of ideas from one person to another—he insists that a writer “persuades” a reader in the development of their own life-view by the unity and yet difference of their perspectives.⁴⁹ Here Kierkegaard describes authentic relationships as like a spring that unites but also pushes away. As each individual gets closer to the other, so they are, by virtue of their closeness, pushed back from one another towards the idea. Although the idea might be anything—perhaps love, religious doctrine, political manifesto, family allegiance, or moral duty—for Kierkegaard, none of these ideas are strong enough to require our absolute passion and thus make our relationships stand the test of time. Just as political zeal fades once the revolution has succeeded, failed, or simply lost steam, so all these ideas will allow the spring to lose its resilience, threatening to drop each person into a “crowd” or “public.” For Kierkegaard, there is only one idea that, when rightly understood, requires our absolute passion, pathos, and commitment. That idea is God. When relationships have God as their centre and goal—where each individual develops the other towards God, not just as a feature of the relationship, but as its very essence, and this by virtue of the difference of their relationship to God as much as by its commonality—those relationships will retain their resilience. In such a dialectical dynamic, by coming closer and closer to one another, individuals are moved kenotically closer and closer to God. In this way, beyond

 SKS 8, 62 / TA, 63.  SKS 8, 75 / TA, 78; cf. SKS 8, 89 / TA, 94.  SKS 8, 18 – 24 / TA, 15 – 21.

116

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

all designations of friend, lover, family, or neighbour, each becomes a midwife to the other in their role as teacher, and as the learner ready to give birth. Kierkegaard’s description of this process in Two Ages remains somewhat abstract and ideal. However, a far more concrete presentation emerges in his 1849 book Practice in Christianity. Although this work presents some of his strongest critiques against the church, and even against religious community, Kierkegaard continues to insist on the importance of a reciprocal, Socratic relationality. He concludes the work with a meditation on all human tasks and engagements and, in particular, on our love: “We pray for those who have experienced what is the most beautiful earthly meaning of this earthly life, for those who in love have found each other; we pray for the lovers that they may not promise each other more than they are able to keep, and even if they are able to keep it, we pray that they may not promise each other too much in love, lest their love become an obstacle to your drawing them to yourself, that instead it might help them all the more to that end.”⁵⁰ In drawing Schleiermacher back into the discussion, it is clear that there are a number of clear differences between them. Kierkegaard considered the German theologian too much of a pantheist, who offered an entirely romantic vision of Christianity, and, by emphasizing our integral connection with the universe and ability to intuit it, failed to recognise the essentially ethical requirement of an anxiety-laden striving.⁵¹ Despite his own attack on Christendom, Kierkegaard would firmly oppose Schleiermacher’s rejection of the essential form of Lutheran Christianity. And Schleiermacher’s declaration of an apparent church triumphant would, presumably, have sent him reeling. However, Kierkegaard offers a tantalising look into his appreciation for Schleiermacher, and his own trajectory, where he comments that Schleiermacher reached “the first level of genuine orthodox dogmatics” for having “incorporated the concept of wonder in its inwardness,” and thus developing “a completely new Christian self-awareness.”⁵² Both thinkers are essentially concerned with this “first level” of engagement: how truthfully an individual relates to God, rather than necessarily the correct what of faith’s content. Despite their clear dif-

 SKS 12, 251– 252 / PC, 260 – 261.  Cf. Pap. II A 91 / JP 4, 3849; Pap, I A 170 / JP 2, 1563; Pap. X2 A 416 / JP 4, 3852. Note Crouter’s surprise at Kierkegaard’s critique that Schleiermacher lacks “a sense of striving, awakening, or becoming” and his defence of its presence (Richard Crouter, “Schleiermacher: Revisiting Kierkegaard’s Relationship to Him,” in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II: Theology, ed. by Jon Stewart, London: Routledge 2007 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 6), pp. 197– 232.  Pap. II A 199 / JP 4, 3850.

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

117

ferences, they find a striking connection on this most important matter. Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher both reject prescriptive, systematic thought in favour of thinking of the way in which the individual, as individual, stands before God. Human relationships, when properly understood, revolve around a mutual communication towards this end. Each one acts towards the other as both teacher and student, priest and laity. Loving relationships, therefore, must be characterised by both their unifying and separating qualities as each individual, by virtue of the growing intimacy of their loving relationship, is drawn away from the lover towards God. At the heart of each thinker is a clear understanding of the fact that we are made for each other, and yet our true fulfilment comes from God alone. Kierkegaard would offer little resistance when Schleiermacher declares, “To love the world spirit and joyfully observe its work is the goal of our religion, and in love there is no fear.”⁵³ In this way, both Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard strike at the heart of Augustine’s vision of relationality. All three work with the tension between God as the source of our fulfilment, and human relationships as the means by which this may be achieved. For Augustine, human relationships are a chosen means by which God draws people to himself. For Schleiermacher, they are crucial for our intuition of God. And Kierkegaard’s emphasis fluctuates somewhat depending on his mood.⁵⁴ All three are also responding to what they see as an essential problem of our human condition: we have made each other the source of our fulfilment, and a means by which our existential anxiety may be avoided. Schleiermacher’s position is more politically contextualised, while Kierkegaard and Augustine root this insight firmly within their hamartiology.⁵⁵ But each might affirm Augustine’s concern that “love for truth takes the form that they love something else and want this object to be the truth.”⁵⁶ Unfortunately, by making other people the source of truth, we have annihilated their ability to be an authentic channel of truth for us. By trying to come closer to each other, we have actually driven ourselves further apart. The solution we find in all three thinkers is rooted in our relationship to one another as teachers. The more we come closer together, the more we are directed beyond the

 Schleiermacher, On Religion, p. 34.  For a fuller reflection on the fluctuating nature of Kierkegaard’s understanding of human mediation see Kirkpatrick, “Sociological Categories,” pp. 352– 353.  Schleiermacher writes that due to the revolutionary climate, people exist with a “universal vertigo” such that “they must be happy to fix their eye on any one particular object firmly enough to hold onto it and to be able gradually to convince themselves that something may still be standing after all” (On Religion, p. 56).  Augustine, Confessions, X.XXII.34, pp. 199 – 200.

118

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

other towards God. In Augustinian terms, it is only by becoming the true object of use that we are released from each other. But conversely, it is only as objects of use that we can actually come close to each other.

IV On Love and Forgetting So far this essay has sought to redeem Augustine’s understanding of relationality, in part by demonstrating the way it is drawn into the relational thought of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard. However, quite apart from making Augustine’s formulation of use-love less controversial, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard suggest that we perhaps need to make it more so. In addition to the concept of use, therefore, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard add the concept of being forgotten. As Kierkegaard notes in Two Ages, when a communication is full of inwardness and passion, it is the message, and not the messenger, that is remembered. Through an authentic communication, the individual hearer is removed from the context of the speech and placed in a direct relationship with the meaning it has for them; “In the presence of deeply felt essential passion, the physical surroundings are forgotten.”⁵⁷ In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Kierkegaard uses the image of the theatre, where the prompter whispers to the actor to aid their performance before the audience. When this role is performed well, the actor benefits from the prompter without ever being distracted by his or her presence. In the same way, the voice of the teacher is but a whisper to focus the individual on their self-conscious standing before God.⁵⁸ In Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus compares the role of the human teacher to Christ as the teacher, and comments that it is only the divine teacher who cannot be forgotten.⁵⁹ Schleiermacher’s account of how the authentic human teacher is allowed to engage with the student is equally complicated, and equally Socratic in seeking the truth from within the individual. In completing his description of intuition and feeling, Schleiermacher states that “Your senses mediate the connection between the object and yourselves; the same influence of the object which reveals its existence to you, must stimulate them in various ways and produce a change in your inner consciousness. This feeling, of which you are frequently scarcely aware, can in other cases grow to such intensity that you forget both the object and yourselves because it.”⁶⁰ The idea that we should forget someone is perhaps    

SKS 8, 39 / TA, 39. SKS 8, 225 / UDVS, 124– 125. SKS 4, 226 / PF, 17. Schleiermacher, On Religion, p. 29.

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

119

as charged as the suggestion that we use them. But since they insist that the role of teacher rests at the heart of our mutual relationships, Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher require us to consider how forgetting must be present in all authentic relationality. Recent developments in the psychology of forgetting may help us to develop this idea further. Several scholars have observed that the concept of forgetting has long been considered negatively: it not only suggests loss and degradation, but also stands in opposition to a perception that memory anchors us in the ability to see reality—including our own—correctly. As Hans Markowitsch and Matthias Brand note, memory is perceived as “a cornerstone of an integrated personality.”⁶¹ And if we consider our ideological assumptions this becomes clear. Simon Nørby, for instance, suggests that our pedagogical theories revolve around the retention of information. And for Christa Davis Acampora, western philosophy as a whole may be characterised by an emphasis on investigating, grasping, preserving, and so remembering. Forgetting, therefore, stands as a decisive nemesis to any such endeavours.⁶² However, it has only relatively recently been shown that our ability to forget is not only foundational to our ability to function within the world, but also to our ability to remember.⁶³ As Sergio Della Salla reflects, “forgetting is the other coin of memory: without forgetting, remembering would be impossible, and humans would be like dull computers incapable of creativity.”⁶⁴ Jorges Luis Borges’s well-known short story, “Funes, His Memory”, tells the tale of a young man whose life is afflicted by his ability to remember everything. Yet Borges’s narrative pales in comparison to the real-life experience of those who suffer from Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory—also known as hyperthymestic syndrome—which allows individuals to remember a vast amount of details from their lives. Its consequence is to undermine their ability to distinguish between past and present, to discern meaningful details from the trivial, or even to stop the constant cascade of memories as each one acts as the cue for the next. Forgetting is the tool that protects us from the past, and allows us to focus on what is important for our present and future.

 Hans J. Markowitsch and Matthias Brand, “Forgetting: A Historical Perspective,” in Forgetting, ed. by Sergio Della Salla, New York: Pscyhology Press 2010, p. 23.  Christa Davis Acampora, “Forgetting the Subject,” in Reading Nietzsche at the Margins, ed. by Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press 2008, p. 34.  Psychologists are here clear in recognising that philosophy had come to this conclusion far earlier.  Sergio Della Salla, “Preface,” in Della Salla, Forgetting, p. xiii.

120

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

Forgetting also protects us from reality. While it was once thought that those with good mental health perceive reality correctly, and those with poor mental health have a loose or false grasp of it, so research now suggests that healthier minds have been protected from reality by the ability to better forget negative memories, and remember the more positive ones.⁶⁵ According to Shelley Taylor and Jonathan Brown, most normal people exist with “unrealistically positive self-evaluations,” “exaggerated perceptions of control,” and an “unrealistic optimism.”⁶⁶ This, they suggest, is how we cope with a seemingly meaningless life and keep living despite its difficulties. In contrast, the ability to retain each form of memory equally, and so have a more balanced and “true” view of reality, is widely considered a significant cause of depression.⁶⁷ Augustine proved himself entirely prescient of recent scientific literature when he reflects, “Great is the power of memory, an awe-inspiring mystery, my God, a power of profound and infinite multiplicity. And this is mind, this is I myself. What then am I, my God?”⁶⁸ Our minds undergo a process of “adaptive forgetting” in order to focus on what we perceive to be the most essential objects. Forgetting is not necessarily—and perhaps not even at all—a complete loss of information from the mind.⁶⁹ It also includes those memories that are not presently to hand or where we have simply “put things out of mind”, and await their appropriate cue to resurface.⁷⁰ Forgetting is therefore a matter of degrees rather than of absolute states. And forgetting is not always a passive event that simply happens to us, but a process in which we can be intimately involved. Motivated and intentional forgetting are mechanisms by which we sort and prioritise our memories in order to make sure that those which are optimal are closest to hand. Michael Anderson summarises the situation when he writes, “Much of the forgetting that we experience arises from the need to control the retrieval process in the face of competition. It is the process by which we combat interference—inhibition of competing traces—that precipitates forgetting, not the mere presence of other traces in memory… This functional view conceptualises for Michael C. Anderson, “Motivated Forgetting,” in Memory, ed. by Alan Baddeley e.a, New York: Psychology Press 2015, p. 266; Simon Nørby, “Why Forget? On Adaptive Value of Memory Loss,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 10, nr. 5, 2015, pp. 552– 553.  Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown, “Illusion and Wellbeing: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 103, nr. 2, 1988, p. 193.  Nørby, “Why Forget?,” p. 568.  Augustine, Confessions, X.XVII.26, p. 194.  Cf. Henry L. Roediger III, Yana Weinstein, and Pooja K. Agarwal, “Forgetting: Preliminary Considerations,” in Della Salla, Forgetting, p. 2; Michael C. Anderson, “Incidental Forgetting,” in Baddeley e.a., Memory, pp. 235 – 236 and p. 252; Simon Nørby, “Why Forget?”, pp. 552– 553.  Anderson, “Incidental Forgetting,” p. 268.

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

121

getting as a positive outcome, and highlights how a properly functioning memory system must be as good at forgetting as it is at remembering… Thus, rather than being victims of forces beyond our control, many cases of forgetting may be tied to the very mechanisms that enable the effective control of cognition.”⁷¹ In Nørby’s words, forgetting is a “mnemonic sorting device” that allows us to evaluate what gains priority in the mind, and to protect what is important when other elements compete with it for focus.⁷² This psychological perspective offers a tantalising parallel to Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher’s views of forgetting.⁷³ But while psychology evaluates essential goals in evolutionary, pragmatic, or simply personal terms, our philosopher-theologians introduce a single, divine telos. Adaptive forgetting is not, therefore, just a psychological but a spiritual discipline. As has been described, the most pervasive reason for our separation from this ultimate, divine goal is found in competition from other people and how we place our focus and value onto them; and it is through a process of adaptive forgetting that we might speak of the human other dropping back to allow our ultimate goal to be preserved as of greatest and central focus. Psychological investigations also tend to consider forgetting in relation to a more atomistic interpretation of encounter, when a moment is completed, stored as memory, and retained and recalled. Specific memories are traced and analysed historically according to their acquisition, storage, and retrieval.⁷⁴ However, such a perspective may fall under Kierkegaard’s critique of an abstract, “spatialised-time” that stands in contrast to a more existential temporal reckoning in which the infinitesimal present perpetually disappears from view as the already past.⁷⁵ Consequently, there isn’t a time when an encounter is not already a memory, or subject to forgetting.⁷⁶ Both Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher view

 Ibid., p. 258.  Nørby, “Adaptive Value,” p. 570.  Space does not permit an engagement with Nietzsche’s understanding of an “active forgetting”, which similarly aids in the creation of memory by sorting and prioritising the objects of consciousness to leave room for the essential. Bearing marked similarity with Augustine, Nietzsche notes that forgetting helps the individual learn to “distinguish between necessary and accidental phenomena, to think causally, to see the distant future as though it were the present and anticipate it, to establish with certainty what is the end, and what is the means to the end” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, London: Penguin 2013, p. 44).  Cf. Roediger et al., “Forgetting,” p. 2.  SKS 4, 389 / CA, 85.  Space does not permit an investigation of how a reciprocal relationality to the other as teacher might be the means through which the eternal may break into time, and so create the present moment. However, such an idea is strikingly suggestive from the material.

122

Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

forgetting in the context of an ongoing process that occurs in the “present” of a communication and encounter. The communicator is forgotten in the continuing event of the communication: the communicator drops out of mind as the listener is drawn inwards and upwards towards that higher goal. And, as has been made clear throughout, this ability to drop out is not by virtue of a superficial relationship, but rather by the virtue of their closeness in the moment of encounter, when each opens themselves up towards the other in a reciprocal communication and reception. Just as forgetting is not an “all or nothing” phenomenon, so in the process of forgetting the human other steps back in prioritising our focus elsewhere. Where for Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher another person might, potentially, provide a revelation by which they do become entirely forgotten when it is later remembered, so in most normal, day-to-day relationships, as witnessed by Kierkegaard’s concluding prayer in Practice in Christianity, highlighted earlier, it is more a matter of a lightness of remembering the other alongside our focus on God. But it should also be noted that whereas some forms of adaptive forgetting are designed to obscure our view of reality—as noted, by removing the negative to prioritise and value the more positive impressions that may protect our mental health—this form of forgetting works precisely to introduce us more fully to reality. While Schleiermacher has an almost entirely positive perspective on our intuition of the universe, and what this reveals to us, Kierkegaard and Augustine highlight the profound terror that an authentic encounter with reality might entail. However, even for them, once one has pushed through the “No” of fear and condemnation, reality in God also provides the “Yes” that answers our profoundest existential need. Kierkegaard’s essay on “Crop Rotation” in Either/Or offers a counterpoint for our discussion. Here Kierkegaard provides an extended discussion of forgetting, written in the guise of arguably his most aesthetic pseudonym, who describes forgetting as the essential technique by which one may overcome the boredom of existence. The aesthete attempts to remember as little as possible so that, in the inevitable repetition of life, events remain novel and exciting. To achieve this, he skips lightly over life, never touching it or becoming involved in it too much, in order that forgetting might occur. He forgets his encounters because they can provide such little essential meaning for him. In stark contrast, the forgetting which Kierkegaard describes in relation to authentic relationships is the very opposite dynamic: individuals forget one another precisely because of the essential meaning they provide, and by virtue of their closeness. If the aesthete were to dive into his relationships, he wouldn’t find a shallow pool but rather a bottomless ravine of endless potential meaning, as each encounter directs him closer to his divine end. It might be argued that Kierkegaard’s existential analy-

On Love, Teaching, and Forgetting

123

sis is structured according to the concept of forgetting, seen at either end of the spectrum of relationality as a way of escaping life, or as a way of finding true meaning within it. Augustine, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard all agree that individuals have been made for God, but also as a way to God for others. To use another person, or to forget another person, requires the individual to submit to them in hopefulness and vulnerability, stripped of their pride. This use-love and forgetting-love is, in essence, to encounter another human being with faith. To be used or forgotten by another is to be fulfilled in our human nature and vocation. In contrast to an anthropology that sees individuals atomistically, and according to a freedom bleached of meaning or telos, these theological thinkers understand humans as created to be ministers of God, teachers in every one of their relationships—and this radically alters the concept of use. To release someone to be themselves is to allow them to be used for the purpose for which they have been created. The dynamics of use and forgetting offer a challenge to each of our relationships. How should we desire to be on some level forgotten, and to release others in our act of forgetting? And perhaps especially in those relationships that we might describe as our “closest”? For relationships of equality, between lovers, the difficulty is perhaps never the mutuality that draws individuals together, but rather the forgetting that might separate them as the telos of their mutuality. In relationships of inequality the situation is perhaps different. In an educational setting, for instance, it may be easy for the teacher to embrace their role of imparting, and the pupil the disposition of receiving. But in what ways do teachers submit to their pupils, and become vulnerable towards them, and seek their instruction? Likewise, how does a student embrace a task and dignity that allows them to be a source of divine power to their teacher? And how do both teacher and student embrace a forgetting that jettisons their desires for honour and prestige, and for affirmation, confirmation, and praise? And what about for relationships where inequality is more implicit? What does it mean for our relationships with children, the elderly, the sick, those with disability, or people we simply consider to be other? Augustine, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard invite us to think of new ways by which we might be of use—and they also ask how to dignify and honour others as being worthy of their great use. As a Kierkegaardian reflecting on his personal and private relationships, the image of the blank gravestone with which this essay began continues to be provocative. It is tempting to allow it to play into the asocial individualism that is too often laid at Kierkegaard’s feet. However, when seen through the concept of use and forgetting it becomes a memorial to the substantial and efficacious relationship with the one who, after all, has come to visit the grave and yet continues to be inspired beyond it.

Gordon Marino

Interlude II: Summon the Earnest Thought of Death With his refulgent and groundbreaking book Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, George Pattison has done more than anyone to illuminate the importance of Kierkegaard’s often neglected “up-building” literature. As I understand Kierkegaard and his faithful interpreter Pattison, although one human being cannot play a decisive role in bringing another to faith, we can build each other up by removing illusions that are impediments to faith and becoming our true self. Being in my fifth act and having dedicated much of my life to trudging along with the writer who would have preferred I paid more attention to following the narrow path of Someone else, it seems an opportune time to take Professor Pattison’s cue and try to distil at least one of the edifying, existential lessons I have extracted from Kierkegaard’s non-pseudonymous literature. Unlike our composition teachers, the progenitor of existentialism nudges us to think in the first person: this inside-out, as opposed to objective perspective, is the hallmark of Kierkegaardian thinking; or as the author of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript puts it, the first-person perspective avoids the pitfall of “thinking whilst forgetting your existence.” It was this kind of forgetfulness—theorizing while failing to relate those theories to our concrete existence—that fixed the spearhead of Kierkegaard’s scathing critique of speculative and academic philosophy. Here, it might be useful to recall that while Kierkegaard has been appropriated by philosophy departments, he rarely referred to himself as a philosopher. For the most part, he self-identified as a kind of poet in the grand German Romantic tradition. Having banged the cymbals for the significance of the first-person perspective, let me confess: I came to Kierkegaard on the brink of my own self-destruction. Unhinged from a bloody divorce, I had been in and out of hospitals when I bumped into the humped-backed Dane in the late 1970s. A dreary winter’s day in New York City, I was hanging out in a used bookstore marking time before an appointment with a psychiatrist, when I randomly pulled a blue and grey covered paperback copy of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love from the shelf. The opening paragraph grabbed me by the lapels: If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. If we were to do so and do it out of fear lest we be deceived, would https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-011

126

Gordon Marino

we not then be deceived? We can, of course, be deceived in many ways. We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are deceived by not believing what is true.¹

A zombie at the time, it took a lot to ignite any degree of care for myself or others, but the opening page of this tome lit a match. Stealthily, I slipped the book inside my overcoat and sauntered out of the store without stopping at the register. Yes, my relationship with Kierkegaard commenced with a purloined letter of sorts, a letter which—I hope correctly—goes on to state, “love covers a multitude of sins.” As I began to study the Danish provocateur, it was refreshing for me to learn that Kierkegaard acknowledged the elephant in the room. He recognized that putting your trust in Jesus involves more than a fender-bender with the understanding. It was not just a matter of faith being beyond the understanding, but of its being an offence to reason. Maybe it is an offence to common sense, but Kierkegaard’s admission that from a worldly point of view holding on to Jesus might be a little bonkers, helped me try to hold on to Jesus, or at least, to say my prayers. For me, it was edifying to be tapped on the shoulder and reminded that whether or not we choose to try and trust that there is something sacred over and above the profane, that can make all the difference in the world. I say “try to trust” because as I will explain, I think that is how Kierkegaard glimpsed faith—as a duty to love and trust in a God both invisible and inscrutable. Feelings and even beliefs come and go, but the question of faith is how we relate ourselves to those feelings and beliefs. When the feeling isn’t there and believing in the Redeemer seems as silly as believing in Santa Claus, do you put your aspirations to faith to bed, or pray for faith to a God you can’t believe in? The collision between faith and reason aside, I would like to share one upbuilding message from Kierkegaard, a message slipped in between the lines of his 1845 discourse, “At a Graveside.” Thanks in part to George Pattison, all serious students of Kierkegaard have come to understand the axial importance for our friend of the term “earnestness” (alvorlighed). With his immortal “At a Graveside” Kierkegaard puts the skull on our desk, maintaining that being able to think ourselves dead is the master teacher of earnestness. Never mind the bucket list travel plans, earnestness comes with a bone deep understanding that there comes a time when there is no more time to address the wrongs we have committed, no more time to change our ways and become the individuals we once aspired to be.

 SKS 9, 13 / WL, 5.

Interlude II: Summon the Earnest Thought of Death

127

Time and again, Kierkegaard reflects on the nature and meaning of time, writing, All the forces of life are incapable of resisting time; it sweeps them along with itself…One who is living does not have it in his power to stop time, to find rest outside of time… Death, however, has this power…²

It is understood that when death comes it is “Up to here, not one step further.” By making myself co-present with the idea of my own demise, I create a time shortage and just as when the prices go up with a shortage of goods, so does the value of time become inflated with the understanding that our days on the blue planet are limited. This realization is a professor of earnestness and one capable of unleashing the “retroactive power of death,” a power that prompts us to “recollect God” and be more careful in our relationships. Ah, or as Kierkegaard would groan “Ak”, if only I had absorbed this up-building lesson years back! First-person perspective: my elder brother and I were spiritually joined at the hip, then one fateful afternoon we had a blood in the eye, heated argument about my ailing mother. In the end, even though we both were at the equator of our lives, we did not speak for nine wasted years. We must have imagined that we had a blank check of time and possibilities. We didn’t. In this short text, and unlike Ernst Becker in his Denial of Death, Kierkegaard does not fully appreciate the sheer terror many of us experience before the very thought of the end of our personal universe. And unlike, Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, Kierkegaard scarcely notes how much our being-towards-death is bound to our circles of love and connectedness. Still, “At a Graveside” deftly exposes the many ways in which we wrongly imagine that we are thinking our own death. As our author dubs them, these imaginings are gambits aimed at putting us outside of the idea of our own death, of what Heidegger, who thoroughly mined this discourse, tabs our “utmost possibility,” i. e., the end of our possibilities. For an instance of the legerdemain, take the marginalized and downtrodden worker, maybe a single mom earning her family’s daily bread cleaning rooms in a fancy hotel; such a person might take some solace in the notion that one day the peevish rich man who has just complained to her supervisor about dust on a lampshade will die, just like everyone else. To the maid with aching knees and raw hands, death might seem the ultimate justice, the great equalizer. And yet, Kierkegaard wags a finger—annihilation is a paltry form of equality! Adding, “Ah, how often, when death came to a person, the equality of annihilation  SKS 5, 448 – 449 / TD, 78.

128

Gordon Marino

taught him to wish the most oppressive dissimilarity back again…”³ The thinker nicknamed “The Fork” as a child, steadfastly maintains that the only unconditionally true equality is equality before God. Taking comfort in the idea that rich and poor will die is, at bottom, the projection of a depressive mood; “To long for death in this way is depression’s escape from life;”⁴ or as Pattison has limned it, “a kind of wounded powerlessness of the kind Nietzsche would call ‘ressentiment.’”⁵ A master of masks himself, Kierkegaard unmasks a closet full of our death dodges. And yet, it is not this unmasking that I wish to facet but a subtler up-building lesson delivered in what reads like a throw-away line. Midway in the discourse, Kierkegaard emphasizes that witnessing the death of another, even of your own child, is “only a mood…” not earnestness. For most of the authorship, Kierkegaard identifies earnestness as a mood, but in these few pages he underscores the distinction between the two. In this text, moods are feelings akin to internal weather. They come and go and are usually kindled by an external event. In contrast, earnestness is not a feeling but, as the philosophers might say, a “second order phenomenon” having more to do with the way we interpret and react to our feelings than to the feelings themselves. In the few lines I have under scrutiny, Kierkegaard is daubing a situation in which the earnest individual senses that he or she is on the brink of being consumed by the inexplicable sadness: …when death’s despondency would make your life a vanity, when that seducer, sadness, prowled around you, when the idea that all was over would anesthetize you into the sleep of depression, when you lost yourself in absentminded preoccupation with the symbols of death…you said to yourself, “My soul is in a mood, and if it continues this way, then there is in it a hostility toward me that can gain domination”⁶

When this despondent mood enshrouds us, Kierkegaard presses us to “summon the earnest thought of death”—to wake up to the fact that when the storm is in the offing, it is no time for games of melancholic self-indulgence. This counsel rings a bit like the dreaded, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” but it is not that simple. Kierkegaard is, instead, suggesting that while we may not have a choice over what we feel, we have sway over the direction in which we move our feelings. Consider this application of Kierkegaardian depth psychology. There are a select group of colleagues with whom I have had strife and, truth be told, at    

SKS 5, 458 / TD, 89. SKS 5, 451 / TD, 81. George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, Abingdon: Routledge 2002, p. 113. SKS 5, 454 / TD, 84.

Interlude II: Summon the Earnest Thought of Death

129

this point I rather enjoy being angry at them. When I cross paths with one of these academic devils, I look the other way. But let one of this irksome crew trip me up in some way and I can easily work myself into dudgeon. When the anger gets to a pitch, fantasies of revenge boil up to the point where I find my insomniac self pacing the floor late at night. As Kierkegaard tried to tell me, tried to build me up, if I don’t take care to steer my moods, I will end up experiencing myself as an innocent victim of those moods. And that is precisely what happens in this situation—I feel as if my agency has been taken away and as though I were suffering from impulses and feelings totally beyond my control. With a different set of categories up his sleeves, Kierkegaard anticipates the Freudian notion of psychological defences. The proto-psychoanalyst taught that a common bulwark against acedia is to play possum, to go numb rather than own the sadness and rage in the dark heart of depression. To reiterate, Magister Kierkegaard prescribes recollecting that our days are numbered with the promise that deeply appropriating that recognition will inspire us to battle through sadness, anger, and hopelessness and return to the world of caring. Listen, it worked once for me. Not long ago, my wife and I had a spat before bed. Seriously peeved, I shut the lights out and lay there fuming, staring at the ceiling. Soon, she rolled away and I rolled into the resolve to remain in my glacial state. Then the thought bubbled up, “at this stage of life there is no time to be careless with one another.” WOKE, I pushed my pride under the bed, flung my arm around my wife and nestling close whispered, “Let’s never go to bed mad. I love you with all my heart.” She responded tenderly and the strife, the content of which I can’t even remember now, seeped away. What does this personal anecdote have to do with Kierkegaard—or, more precisely, with the question of what it means to be Kierkegaardian? In fact, even though I am director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library and have been walking with Kierkegaard for more almost four decades, I still take a little umbrage when I am labelled a “Kierkegaardian.” Yet I follow him in thinking that in order to be good loving people we need to recognize and reach through moods and emotions that other famous pates have ignored and which threaten our ability to care. Though he had an intense need for affirmation, Kierkegaard anticipated and was wary of attracting an army of followers. The main aim of his authorship was to cultivate inwardness and in a virtual warning to himself Kierkegaard cautioned against becoming the paradoxical figure of a town crier of inwardness. Becoming human, for Kierkegaard, requires developing your own life perspective (anskuelse) and for him, it would not do to copy Kierkegaard’s life perspective; that is, to become a “Kierkegaardian.” Nevertheless, Kierkegaard has shaped my relationship to the world and myself. There is in his writings a persistent demand

130

Gordon Marino

to be honest and avoid self-deception. In his reflection on the personal meaning of death in life, he wisely reminds us to remind ourselves of the painful fact that there comes a time when all is over, when you cannot add a word to your story. He wags a finger as if to say, “keep a third eye open;” “don’t be sloppy with your relationship to others and yes, to God.” Clare Carlisle aptly refers to Kierkegaard as “philosopher of the heart” and Kierkegaardian or not, I am heart to heart with Kierkegaard on these points.

Claudia Welz

Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

In A Rhetorics of the Word (2019), the second part of a trilogy with the overall title A Philosophy of Christian Life, George Pattison investigates the aspiration to live a life in accordance with God’s will, as a response to a call from God. This call or vocation is understood as an event in language insofar as God “speaks” to the human being: “even if, in the first instance, that attraction cannot find appropriate verbal expression, its transformation into a firm and definite commitment will require words,” argues Pattison.¹ He refers to the testimony of the Bible where patriarchs, prophets, and apostles typically became who they were by their responsiveness to the divine call. Here a question imposes itself: Do words come into play only later, as a follow-up on a pre-linguistic feeling, or does the divine call speak precisely with the help of words? This question is important if we want to clarify how God can call us and how we can receive his call. A more general question is connected to it: What does it mean to listen to God, and how can we understand what he tells us about our vocation? That this is far from obvious comes to the fore already in the first chapter of Pattison’s book, which is titled “A Crisis of Vocation.” Here Pattison calls attention to Søren Kierkegaard’s life and work.

I Kierkegaard’s Crisis of Vocation In Kierkegaard’s Indøvelse i Christendom (1850), which has been translated as Practice or Training in Christianity, Pattison finds “something like Luther’s idea of the vocatio universalis, that is, the call to faith and to hope for the Kingdom of God issued to all human beings without restriction—albeit with distinctively Kierkegaardian emphases, such as the possibility of offence and the demand to receive Christ as the suffering Saviour.”² This general vocation applies to everyone. All of us are welcome to accept Christ’s invitation: “Come unto me, all you who travail and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). We are summoned to entrust ourselves to Christ with everything that preys on our minds. We are called to come to

 George Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word: A Philosophy of Christian Life, Part 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019, p. 2.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 32. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-012

132

Claudia Welz

Christ, to commit ourselves to his care and leave our burden there. Kierkegaard underlines not only Christ’s gentleness and meekness, but also the earnestness that lies in the demand he places upon us: to take up our cross and follow him. In his Upbuilding Discourses, Kierkegaard leads his readers to the direct encounter with God. “To be silent…to hear, and to obey the voice of God…is the motor of Christian existence.”³ Thus far reaches the broad consensus among Christians of all shades. Yet, as Pattison points out, it is Kierkegaard’s problem that his distinctive “task” is not prescribed for him.⁴ God’s call may well come to us every time we come to a fork in the road and find ourselves facing a new life decision, but Kierkegaard struggles with the question of “how an individualized modern person who is to choose his way in life through a combination of disposition and free action can also live that life as called by God—or, to put it the other way round, if Christian life is premised on being called by God, how can that call be made concrete in the individualized complexity of modern life?”⁵ In other words, the awareness of the vocation of all humankind does not dispense the single one from figuring out his or her specific vocation, place, and “mission” in life. Pattison explains that being called by God and being true to oneself seem to blend into one, and that this knot of issues cannot be resolved by a direct religious experience or tangible divine intervention. Even if God’s voice became audible in some supernatural way, “it would still require interpretation and application.”⁶ The epiphany of the risen Christ that Saul heard and saw on the Damascus Road (cf. Acts 9:7; 22:9) entailed his conversion from a persecutor of Christians to a follower of Christ. As a consequence, Pharisee Saul became Apostle Paul. The Pauline letters can be read as an attempt to spell out the sudden insight by which he was struck. Paul tried to give a rational and comprehensible account of his experience by contextualizing it; yet, in drawing on the Scriptures, Paul realized that Christ transcends tradition and brings something entirely new. How, then, can we distinguish between a genuine revelation and religious “fake news”? In his posthumously published book on Adolph Peter Adler, a pastor on the island of Bornholm, Kierkegaard mocks Adler’s mistaken recourse to a revelation he claimed to have received. In the beginning, Adler was an enthusiastic Hegelian, but then he turned against Hegelianism because, in a vision, Christ    

Ibid., p. 34. Cf. ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 39.

Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

133

had commanded him to burn his Hegelian books. Adler was deposed by the Bishop. Later on, Adler declared that the alleged revelation was rather a work of genius. Kierkegaard met with him and came to the conclusion that Adler confused the categories of the genius, who belongs to the sphere of immanence in being whatever he is by reason of himself, and of the apostle, who is what he is by divine authority. Adler retracted his own writings, but in Kierkegaard’s eyes he nonetheless became a victim of self-deception.⁷ How, if at all, can such self-deception be avoided? Kierkegaard addresses himself to God, who alone can see the human heart and cleanse it. According to the 1847 Upbuilding Discourse “On the Occasion of a Confession,” purity of heart is not acquired by reading many scholarly books, but by kneeling down and praying to God.⁸ In a private prayer Kierkegaard jotted down in a journal entry from the year 1850, he asks the Holy Spirit for help: You, Spirit of Holiness, dwell with uncleanness and infection; you, Spirit of Wisdom, with foolishness; you, Spirit of Truth, with self-deception! Oh, continue to dwell [here]; and you, who do not conveniently search for the desirable dwelling that you would surely seek in vain; you, who yourself, in creating and giving rebirth, make your own dwelling place―o, continue to dwell [here], that one day you might be pleased with the dwelling place you yourself have prepared for yourself in my infected and foolish and deceitful heart.⁹

This prayer sounds modest, but it asks for nothing less than a transformation, which amounts to a re-creation. The heart that does not yet deserve the gift of God’s presence needs to be created anew. Kierkegaard is here completely in line with Lutheran theology: there is no inherent human capacity to prepare divine indwelling, and God himself must prepare his dwelling place. In the “crisis of vocation,” the content of God’s call has, in Pattison’s words, “become strangely and deeply elusive.”¹⁰ I guess this is because the “call” and the situational context of personal “calling” are sufficiently ambiguous to require an exegesis from the one who is “called.” James G. Hart writes that “we speak metaphorically of a calling where it is assumed that there is no…actual second-personal address, a call, i. e., an emitted sound of a voice beckoning someone to come towards the one calling. Yet it is uncontroversial to speak of oneself drawn, moved, urged, etc., to follow a general direction in one’s

 See Kierkegaard, SKS 15, 258 – 259 / BA, 102 f., and Claudia Welz, “Conscience, Self-Deception, and the Question of Authenticity in Kierkegaard” in The Kierkegaardian Mind, ed. by Adam Buben, Eleanor Helms, and Patrick Stokes, London/New York: Routledge 2019, pp. 281– 292.  See SKS 8, 140 / UDVS, 26.  SKS 23, 17– 18 / KJN 7, 29.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 39.

134

Claudia Welz

life.”¹¹ We can feel drawn in different directions, sometimes even in opposed ones. Why do we end up taking a certain path rather than another? If this happens not only by chance, but also due to our decisions and our ideas of what kind of person we want to become, the question is still how God’s call can be “heard” and understood correctly by us, so that each of us makes the right choices that match our unique calling.

II The Divine Call and its Visual and Acoustic Elements In Chapter 3 on “Prophetic Calling,” Pattison elaborates on the ways in which the divine call “speaks” to us. He focuses not only on its acoustic, but also on its visual elements, which confirms Hart’s intuition that “calling” is a metaphor. God’s call seems to comprise more than words—or do the words themselves provoke a “vision” of what they convey? When discussing calling narratives from the Hebrew Bible (e. g. 1 Samuel 3:4), Pattison emphasizes the centrality of the divine word to the life and mission of each of the classical prophets: “the calling narratives give a high profile to what we might call the exchange of words between God and the prophet, an exchange that typically opens with the word that God addresses to the prophet.”¹² Pattison writes that, in such cases, “the prophet is literally God’s mouthpiece. His are the lips on which God’s word is morphologically articulated and phonetically voiced so as to become intelligible to other human beings.”¹³ Although the word is a basic category of biblical prophecy, Pattison admits that God not only speaks words, but also gives visions. This was the case in the call of Isaiah. Remarkably, Isaiah’s vision of the seraphim includes listening to their voices (Isaiah 6:1– 4). Furthermore, Pattison draws attention to the fact that divine communication as testified to in the Bible is not limited to human language. In Psalm 29:5, for example, God speaks through the sound of thunder. Pattison submits that, regardless of how the calling takes place, it requires an active response from those called: “Nevertheless, it might be objected that if the ground of

 James G. Hart, Who One Is. Book 2: Existenz and Transcendental Phenomenology, Dordrecht: Springer 2009, p. 259. Cf. Claudia Welz, “Transcendental-Existential Phenomenology: A Review Article on James G. Hart’s Who One Is,” Philosophy Today, vol. 54, nr. 3, 2010, pp. 299 – 308.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 75.  Ibid.

Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

135

our being comes to us as a call from outside ourselves, then our freedom is necessarily compromised from the ground up.”¹⁴ In order to square this circle, Pattison takes up Emmanuel Levinas’s suggestion regarding the prophetic reception of the word: God’s call does not precede the human answer, but is found in this answer. As the answer coincides with the perception of the call, “I make myself the author of what I hear,” explains Anna Yampolskaya.¹⁵ This way, the call from outside is internalized, yet without losing its external character. I would like to add that the call can preserve its external character only if the distinction between divine and human speech is preserved as well, even though it is the human being who “translates” and transmits the word of God. However, if God calls a human being by inspiring him or her, the divine word lies nowhere else than in the human word. Levinas’s description of inspiration in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (194) runs accordingly: “revelation is made by him that receives it, by the inspired subject….”¹⁶ The recipient of the revelation does not merely accept what he receives, but is also involved in shaping what he receives, and thereby, heteronomy is reverted into autonomy.¹⁷ For Levinas, every person is potentially a prophet. Pattison concludes that to be a prophet means to exist on the basis of a call that “constitutes us as responsible interpreters of the word, above all with regard to its implications for our relationships with others.”¹⁸ The exteriority of the divine word must become effective in the interiority of the human being. Levinas uses the French word conscience in order to determine the interiority in which God’s call is received; and conscience has the double meaning of “consciousness” and “conscience.” Particularly in cases where the “call” is an ethically significant command or order, it seems adequate to localize the internalization—and appropriation—of the external call in the “inner space” of conscience. This brings us to the next point: the connection between vocation and conscience. According to Hart, there is “a sense of self-identifying” with one’s path, “even if it has placed heavy demands on the one who has been ‘called’”; and he

 Ibid., p. 98.  See ibid., with reference to Anna Yampolskaya, “Prophetic Subjectivity in Later Levinas: Sobering up from One’s Own Identity,” Religions, vol. 11, nr. 50, 2019, p. 3.  Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing 1981, p. 156.  See Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 148, and my discussion of similar passages in Levinas’s work in Claudia Welz, “Freedom, Responsibility, and Religion in Public Life: From Luther to Levinas and Arendt,” Open Theology, vol. 4, nr. 1, 2018 (special issue: Rethinking Reformation), pp. 428 – 449.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 98.

136

Claudia Welz

infers that here, “the call has symmetry with conscience and the Ought.”¹⁹ Throughout the history of philosophy, the normativity implied in the Ought has been tied to discussions of how one can take upon oneself and live up to the ethical demand. This is just one of the topics that can be fruitfully discussed by comparing Kierkegaard’s and Levinas’s respective approaches.²⁰

III The Call of Conscience—Verbal or Nonverbal? Pattison deals with “The Call of Conscience” in the sixth chapter of A Rhetorics of the Word. His approach is theological, tying together the divine call and the call of conscience through the motif of the imago Dei, the human being created in or as God’s image (cf. Genesis 1:26 f).²¹ That we are made in the image of God, “it is said, endows us with an innate aptitude for hearing the divine word and understanding it.”²² In what follows, Pattison defends this (Catholic) claim against the (Protestant) “minority view in the Christian tradition, represented in the twentieth century by Karl Barth,” which has supposed that “we are not at all capable of hearing the Word since the original divine image has been completely obliterated through ‘man’s first disobedience.’ In this case, it is the Word of God itself that not only communicates itself to us but, at the same time, communicates to us the condition for receiving it.”²³ Pattison concludes that, “in this perspective, any investigation of the hearer of the Word is, quite simply, a waste of time and the only proper object of theological investigation is that Word itself in its self-revelation.”²⁴ The assumption that God must reveal himself and open our minds for the right reception of his word can also be found in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. This assumption is shared by all theologians following the Lutheran and Calvinist tradition. This is the mainstream. However, it does not imply that human beings are totally incapable of hearing the word of God. How could we

 Hart, Who One Is. Book 2, p. 261.  See, for instance, Arne Grøn, “The Ethical Demand: Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas” in What Is Ethically Demanded? K.E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life, ed. by Hans Fink and Robert Stern, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2017, pp. 130 – 147.  For a book-long elaboration on this theme in Judaism and Christianity, see my monograph Humanity in God’s Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press 2016; and the Syndicate symposium with Melissa Raphael, Jeffrey Bloechl, Jennifer Geddes, Andrew Benjamin, and Shelly Rambo on (https://syndicate.network/symposia/theol ogy/humanity-in-gods-image/) (6/21/2021).  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 187.  Ibid.  Ibid.

Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

137

investigate God’s self-revelation if we had no access whatsoever to God’s divine word? Recent scholarly work shows that, for Barth, hearing is precisely the medium in which God’s self-revelation presents itself to us, thereby making accessible the invisible.²⁵ Barth’s Einführung in die evangelische Theologie (1962) can be read as a theological phenomenology of listening, where theology is programmatically defined as menschliche Antwort. However, it is not the human response that constitutes theology, but rather the word that it hears and to which it responds: “das Wort, das sie hört und auf das sie antwortet.”²⁶ Thus, the logic of theo-logy is grounded in our listening to God’s Logos. Listening is, as it were, the hinge between the divine verbum externum, the word coming to us from outside, and our human response to this word, which comes from inside. Just like Kierkegaard, Barth also underlines the importance of the practice of prayer through which we can encounter God and ask him to open our blind eyes and deaf ears, so that his work and word may be disclosed to us.²⁷ It follows that it is by no means a waste of time to focus on “the hearer of the Word.”²⁸ In this context, Kierkegaard’s writings are indispensable. I agree with Noreen Khawaja who claims that “Kierkegaard is the first to reformulate Christian theology in fully ʻexistentialʼ terms,” and goes on to argue that “the idea of authentic selfhood at the center of existential philosophy…serves the missionary project of bringing the citizen of Christendom closer to ‘true’ Christianity by

 Ulrich Lincoln has dedicated a whole chapter to Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik in his book Die Theologie und das Hören, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2014, pp. 163 – 185. He demonstrates that hearing is, for Barth, a Sichtbarmachung (i. e. visibilization) of God’s revelation (ibid., p. 166) and a Medium absoluter Transparenz (ibid., p. 164) in that signs become transparent for the signified: God’s co-presence with us.  Karl Barth, Einführung in die evangelische Theologie, Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich 1985, p. 25. For a more detailed analysis, see Claudia Welz, “Gottesgewissheit, Zweifel und Anfechtung—im Gespräch mit Barths Einführung in die evangelische Theologie,” in Gotteserschütterung–Gottesvergewisserung: Die Gegenwartsrelevanz der Gotteslehre Karl Barths, ed. by Gregor Etzelmüller and Georg Plasger, Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich (forthcoming).  See Barth, Einführung in die evangelische Theologie, p. 185: “Um das Wunderbare wird es in dieser Bitte gehen: dass des Menschen blinde Augen und taube Ohren von Gott selbst für sein Werk und Wort geöffnet werden möchten—und zugleich um das noch Wunderbarere, dass Gottes Werk und Wort sich den Ohren und Augen dieses Menschen nicht entziehen, sondern erschliessen möchten.” As for prayer in Barth, I want to recommend Christine Svinth-Værge Põder’s excellent study Doxologische Entzogenheit: Die fundamentaltheologische Bedeutung des Gebets bei Karl Barth, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter 2009.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 187.

138

Claudia Welz

means of a pietistic intensification of one’s commitment, or faith.”²⁹ Provided that authenticity is not obtained easily, but emerges only through continuous efforts and confirmed choices, conscientious self-scrutiny becomes crucial for this project. Pattison’s primary aim is “to show how the call of conscience can help understand the phenomenon of the divine call and, in particular, what it could mean for a human being to be the hearer of such a call.”³⁰ An influential current in the Christian tradition has identified the call of conscience with God’s call. For reasons I will unfold later, this is problematic. Pattison identifies an additional problem: “As in the case of the translation of logos into ratio, we find ourselves confronted by the fact that many of the most influential accounts of conscience obscure its character as call or word-event.”³¹ In the light of this, Pattison sharpens his question “so as to see what is involved specifically in understanding conscience as a call rather than as a kind of intuition or feeling.”³² Since the underlying assumption is that God’s call is composed of words, it is clear that the call of conscience must be conceptualized accordingly if it is supposed to make audible God’s call. However, the divine call cannot be reduced to words. Therefore, the question is whether the call of conscience is to be defined as a verbal call with a concrete message. What if conscience “speaks” only silently, saying nothing specific, not providing any propositions, but only uncanny feelings such as anxiety, guilt and shame, in order to provoke questioning and self-scrutiny? In this case, the call of conscience is mediated emotionally. Then it is meaningful without words and, in this case, it seems inappropriate to oppose “call” to “intuition” or “feeling.” Pattison offers a brilliant criticism of the accounts of conscience by the English Puritans and moralists William Ames, Benjamin Whichcote, and Ralph Cudworth, portraying also the line of reception via Anthony Ashley Cooper (alias Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume, up to the Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler, who considered conscience to be both a perception of the heart and a moral sense. Pattison comments that Butler properly regarded conscience as a moral faculty within us, the judge of actions; but he criticizes that “the basic model is not that of dialogue (or even internal dialogue) but of perception, whether that is by means of an intellectual intuition or some kind of instinct

 Noreen Khawaja, The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2016, pp. 18 – 19.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 188.  Ibid.  Ibid.

Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

139

or sense.”³³ Pattison is right in linking language to human reasoning about matters of conscience, which confront us with the question as to how we are to understand an actual and unique situation and what we are to do about it. Such matters need “to be articulated in language” because “matters of conscience are matters we have to think about, in words.”³⁴ Yet, I wonder whether words come first—or rather feeling and perception. Pattison compares Levinas with the Danish philosopher K. E. Løgstrup, as both of them apply insights from phenomenology to questions of ethics under the guidance of some religious presuppositions (in Levinas’s case Judaism; in Løgstrup’s Lutheranism). He accentuates the difference between “construing ‘the ethical demand’ as silent (thus Løgstrup) and as calling (Levinas).”³⁵ Levinas’s position is explained as follows: “I know the face of the other as a human face and not an animal face because it speaks to me, revealing that what I see in the face is the expression of another autonomous being who is not me but is able, by speaking, to make a claim on me. Language, then, is crucial.”³⁶ Yet, according to Levinas, the face of the other person also speaks nonverbally in expressing, for instance, vulnerability, which commands me not to kill this person. Apart from exceptional situations, this command remains implicit. And that is why Levinas makes such an effort to explain why he in his discussion of language privileges le dire, the non-verbal gesture of “saying” (for instance a greeting signaled by a nod) as distinguished from le dit, the propositional content of “the said.” In Levinas, the notion of “language” includes not only the spoken language and its declarations, predications, and judgments, but also a language without words that signifies in the interhuman face-to-face encounter. The community of dialogue partners constituted by “saying” precedes any information that might be contained in “the said.” Turning to Løgstrup, Pattison emphasizes the silence of the demand, which he opposes to the sonority of language in Levinas.³⁷ “Words may be spoken, but the demand as such is tacit. The person asking directions does not say ‘You have an obligation to help me’—they just assume it.”³⁸ Exactly the same could be said about the ethical demand as described by Levinas.³⁹ When the widow, the or-

      

Ibid. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid. Ibid., p. 204. See ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 211. Cf. Grøn, “The Ethical Demand: Kierkegaard, Løgstrup, and Levinas,” passim.

140

Claudia Welz

phan, and the stranger—the figures chosen by the biblical prophets to exemplify those for whom we have a special responsibility—cry to us in the immediacy of their need, they do not necessarily tell us what they need. It is we who have to learn to hear and see them. Pattison writes that we recognize our obligation in their call for help, and that “the first movement of responsibility is simply ‘obeying this order before it is formulated’”; notabene, this is written not with reference to Løgstrup but, of course, to Levinas.⁴⁰ I think this comparison between Løgstrup and Levinas misses out on the non-verbal dimensions of language. While the comparison between Løgstrup and Levinas concerns the language between human beings, the communication with God invisible is another issue. In this context, perceptions of gestures in the visible world around us do not help when we want to get in touch with the One who not only has created this world and enters it in certain ways, but also remains beyond it. Interestingly, Pattison follows Paul Ricoeur’s recommendation to read the essay “Conscience Considered from a Theological Point of View” by the postwar Lutheran theologian Gerhard Ebeling. According to Ebeling, the call of conscience concerns our life as a whole, since conscience is the point of meeting of human beings, their world, and God.⁴¹ Ebeling reminds us that Reformation theology identifies Wortgeschehen and Heilsgeschehen, since salvation is imparted with God’s word, and locates this redeeming event of the word in conscience. This is, however, not the same as being “saved through attending to the voice of conscience”⁴² because the voice of conscience is deeply ambiguous. For Luther, it is dependent on the quality of the word from outside, which is echoed within the human being.⁴³ While the Law convicts and inculpates the sinner and induces guilt feelings,⁴⁴ the Gospel proclaims the forgiveness of sins and

 Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 215. For the quotations, see Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. by Gary D. Mole, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1994.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 201, referring to Gerhard Ebeling, “Theologische Erwägungen über das Gewissen” in Ebeling, Wort und Glaube, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1962, pp. 429 – 446, here p. 433.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 201.  See Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vols. 1– 32, Weimar: Böhlau et al., 1883 – 1999 (henceforth Luthers Werke, cited with number of volume, page, and line), here 5, 259, 18 – 20: “Quale enim est verbum, talis populus, talis deus, talis cultus, talis fides, talis conscientia, talia opera et omnia…” See Claudia Welz, “Das Gewissen als Instanz der Selbsterschließung: Luther, Kierkegaard und Heidegger,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologi, vol. 53, nr. 3, October 2011, pp. 265 – 284.  See Luthers Werke 18, 773, 3 – 5: “cum lex sit virtus peccati, ostendens tantum, non autem tollens peccatum, facit conscientiam ream coram Deo….” See Luthers Werke 2, 486, 33.

Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

141

gives the certitude of being saved in Christ, which relieves the conscience.⁴⁵ In Ebeling’s view, the Gospel’s character as a divine promise explains why we encounter God exclusively in the word: this is precisely due to the Verheißungscharakter seines Begegnens. ⁴⁶ Something important is still outstanding and eludes our present experience: God’s future coming and returning. In conscience, the divine call and human listening can coincide. Yet, this is not always the case. In and through conscience, human beings experience themselves as people who are not identical with themselves, but rather confronted with a question of identity. For this reason, Ebeling suggests speaking of a distance (Distanz) rather than an instance or entity (Instanz) in the human being when thematizing conscience. Pattison, too, notes that conscience cannot be an innate or natural endowment or an independently functioning organ of moral judgment.⁴⁷ However, in the beginning of his chapter on conscience, Pattison has called conscience “the eminent organ of moral or ethical life”⁴⁸ and our “receptor organ for hearing and understanding the Word of God” and even claimed that this “seems to be testified in the New Testament itself.”⁴⁹ He refers to 2 Corinthians 4:2 and Romans 2:15, but there is no mention of an “organ”; rather, a process of evaluation, of witnessing, and of conflicting thoughts accusing or excusing the self is mentioned. In fact, the Bible does not identify the call of conscience with the voice of God, and I am hesitant to impose this reading on the biblical text. I want to keep open the possibility that other voices “speak” in conscience as well. Kierkegaard was well aware of the fact that the origin of the voice of conscience cannot be determined in an unequivocal, straightforward fashion. He reckons with different possibilities—among them the possibility that conscience contains self-reflections. They may be caused by a question asked by no-one identifiable, by a nameless questioner, as Kierkegaard suggests in his Christian Discourses (1848).⁵⁰ Heidegger has taken up this thought, albeit without credit-

 See Luthers Werke 2, 466, 3 – 6.  See Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 201, referring to Ebeling, “Theologische Erwägungen über das Gewissen,” p. 435.  Ibid., pp. 201– 202, referring to Ebeling, “Theologische Erwägungen über das Gewissen,” p. 443.  Ibid., p. 189.  Ibid., p. 188.  See SKS 10, 243: “Men hvo er det dog der spørger? Ingen, Ingen! Dog Dette veed Du jo nok, at det er det forfærdeligste, det alvorligste Spørgsmaal, det hvorom der maa siges: der er Ingen, som spørger, og dog er der et Spørgsmaal—og et Spørgsmaal til ‘Dig’ personligt. Thi naar saa er, saa er det Samvittigheden der spørger.” For a systematic presentation and interpretation of Kierkegaard’s scattered texts on conscience, see my essay “Keeping the Secret of Subjectivity: Kierke-

142

Claudia Welz

ing Kierkegaard for it. While Heidegger rejects both an ethical and a theological interpretation of conscience, Kierkegaard allows for both of them. Certainly, Kierkegaard knew Immanuel Kant’s account of conscience, and Pattison offers fascinating considerations in this context. Although Kant’s account falls short of Pattison’s ideal of envisaging conscientiousness as a dialogical feature of life, he appreciates Kant’s image of conscience as an inner court of justice before which a person’s thoughts accuse or acquit one another. Here the conceptualization of conscience as a moral feeling does not dominate. Rather, we are faced with “a multi-voiced scenario, namely, that of …the interplay of voices between prosecutor, defence, and judge.”⁵¹ Pattison highlights that we are somehow obliged to represent the judge as also other than ourselves; otherwise we would in all likelihood end up by acquitting ourselves: If the judge is to do his job properly, he must be someone who both knows the inner workings of the heart and is himself the authoritative source of all our duties, which we experience as his commands. At the same time, we must also envisage him as having “all power in heaven and on earth” (as Kant puts it), in order for us to recognize his authority as inescapable. Such a judge, it seems, is none other than God…Conscientiousness is thus itself religion in the sense of understanding ourselves to be “responsible to a holy being (reason as moral legislator) whom we represent as distinct from us yet present in our inmost being and to whose will, the rules of justice, we are to submit.”⁵²

Pattison continues to argue that, in making the experience of conscience metaphorically multi-voiced, Kant appears to represent the autonomous moral self as more than a simple numerical unity. If it is still “one,” it is a kind of “resonating” one that is also connected to another whose voice resonates in it.⁵³ Pattison then undertakes a thought experiment: “what if the call of conscience, that is, the call of our intelligible nature to our sensuous nature…were not the call of an internal principle of reason (a logos qua ratio) but, indeed, the call, more or less indirect, of another?”⁵⁴ Now, in the moment that “my” conscience no longer without doubt belongs to “me” in accusing or excusing my deeds, its “voice” no longer concerns me unconditionally. I might remember what another person has said to me, perhaps gaard and Levinas on Conscience, Love, and the Limits of Self-Understanding” in Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and its Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas, ed. by Claudia Welz and Karl Verstrynge, London: Turnshare 2008, pp. 153 – 225.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 196.  Ibid., pp. 195 f, quoting Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy, trans. by Mary J. McGregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 561.  See Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 196.  Ibid.

Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

143

reproachingly; but this memory must not be confused with the call of conscience. A conscientious evaluation of my relationship to a fellow human being might reach the same conclusion as already voiced by that person; nonetheless, the call of my conscience cannot just consist in another person’s voice. Otherwise there was no need for every single person to “have” a conscience and to “be” conscientious. In commenting on Emre Kazim’s interpretation of Kant, Pattison disagrees with Kazim equating the experience of the voice of conscience with moral feeling, since this seems to occlude a multi-voiced scenario.⁵⁵ Yet, let us imagine the possibility of emotional ambivalence. Here, different feelings may represent different “voices.” Pattison, however, argues that an affective dimension is not sufficient to constitute a “call” of conscience, although an affective dimension of conscience might allow for receptivity regarding the voice of another: “A vocalized receptivity of this kind would then enable us to say that conscience does in some sense ‘call’ and that our judgements regarding right and wrong are therefore inseparable from our relations to others.”⁵⁶ In this statement, two phenomena seem to be mixed up: (1) a vocalized call and (2) an affective receptivity to this call. While it would be oversimplifying to describe conscience only in terms of feelings, Pattison’s multi-vocal scenario seems to be overcomplex in not only having the ambition of rendering God’s voice, but also of internalizing foreign voices with the result that one’s own conscience, which contains all these other voices, issues and receives polyphonic calls. Surely, the divine judge must be able to address us in words. With the help of our ears, we can hear other people calling us, and we can sense the ethical demand implied in their calls. However, does this mean that each person’s conscience also responds in a verbalized manner? If so, how do these verbal messages relate to emotions like remorse in the case of a “bad conscience” or, alternatively, peace of mind in the case of a “good conscience”?

IV Conclusion In order to do justice to the full-fledged experience of conscience, we have to allow that it can call us even in situations in which we have not expected its call. Therefore, the call of conscience cannot be determined as an intentional

 Ibid., p. 196, n. 37, referring to Emre Kazim, Kant on Conscience: A Unified Approach to Moral Self-Consciousness, Leiden: Brill 2017, especially pp. 36 – 50.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 196.

144

Claudia Welz

act. Conscience or con-scientia (derived from the Latin composite cum-scire, an accompanying knowing⁵⁷) can surprise us as a knowing-with ourselves that witnesses also what we would prefer not to know about ourselves. This witnessing process happens without our willing. We can try to ignore it, or respond in evasive ways. Conscientiousness, however, involves routines of self-recollection despite the unpleasant feelings it calls forth. Initially, conscience may “speak” through feelings; yet, in relating to these feelings, reflections come into play: thoughts accusing or excusing oneself. Thus, the call of conscience seems to unfold as a process that begins on an affective, pre-reflective level and ends with a voluntary response that can be formulated in words. It articulates a conflicted self: “I myself at a distance from me myself.”⁵⁸ As for the ethical aspects of conscience, the question of whether words come into play only later, as a follow-up on a pre-linguistic feeling, can be answered clearly in the affirmative: yes, since conscience, in the first instance, signals non-verbally through sentiments of approbation or condemnation. This might happen in response to a verbally uttered address or a non-verbal demand expressed by another person. While the witnessing consciousness is a continuous form of self-awareness, the “voice” or “call” of conscience makes its appearance only occasionally, most often in connection with “bad conscience” bothering us. As Hart writes, “When conscience is positive, I am at one with myself”; in this case, “conscience need not speak but may remain silent because I am I myself and at peace, and even joyful, in being so.”⁵⁹ As for the theological aspects of conscience, matters are more complicated. If salvation is indeed imparted through the words of the Gospel, these words resonate within us. However, other words and voices resonate there, too. In my view, conscience is neither a mere “echo chamber” that mechanically repeats sounds without changing their content, nor a “synthesizer” that productively merges all words and voices that appeal to us or impose themselves upon us. Conceptualizing conscience as a multi-voiced scenario in which even receptivity is vocalized means modelling conscience on perception. And, what is more, there is no room for silent listening anymore. Nolens volens, we might lose out of sight the human being as a hearer of God’s word.

 See Hart, Who One Is. Book 2, p. 115.  See ibid., p. 130.  Ibid., p. 125.

Vocation and the Voice of Conscience

145

This can be avoided if we follow Ebeling, who has characterized conscience as an act of innermost audition: “Akt innersten Gehörs.”⁶⁰ Ebeling explains that conscience is dependent on an external word because conscience can only “speak” to the extent that it is addressed—responding either in consent or dissent.⁶¹ There is no competition between the divine word and the human experience of conscience if we primarily perform the task of listening to a verbum externum. For Ebeling, it is not conscience itself that is a word-event, but rather the promulgation of the Gospel whose effects are experienced in conscience. In his discourse on the purity of heart, Kierkegaard establishes that, seen sub specie aeternitatis, conscience is the “place” that one either turns into a lonely prison or a blessed room of eternal happiness for oneself.⁶² This is so because in eternity one is forced to face oneself through conscience. Like Kant, who in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) considers conscience to be the consciousness of an inner court,⁶³ Kierkegaard assumes that conscience is a power of judgment. The voice of the judge must be “outsourced” to God insofar as no human being can pass an ultimate judgment on him- or herself, whereas the penultimate judgments of the accuser and defender may well be our own. If we dispossessed ourselves completely of conscience, we were also expropriated of the possibility to respond to the divine judgment. Ultimately, we are responsible before God for all actions and omissions.⁶⁴ Still, Kierkegaard does not take for granted that it is God speaking through conscience. In order to find out whether this is the case, we need to listen. While the call of conscience is out of our control and undergone passively, listening to its call and paying heed to it is an activity through which we can “cultivate” conscientiousness. Kierkegaard leads us into the practice of prayer, which destines us to listen to God and confide in him, the searcher of hearts (Psalm 139:23). This practice dovetails nicely with Pattison’s conclusion that conjoins two aspects of vocation: “being called by God and calling upon God.”⁶⁵ I am in complete agree-

 Gerhard Ebeling, “Das Gewissen in Luthers Verständnis” in Idem, Lutherstudien, vol. III: Begriffsuntersuchungen—Textinterpretationen—Wirkungsgeschichtliches, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1985, pp. 108 – 125, here p. 112, thesis 16.  Ebeling, “Das Gewissen in Luthers Verständnis,” p. 111, thesis 14.  See SKS 8, 233 / UDVS, 134.  See Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, “Tugendlehre” §13, A 99 (quoted according to standard divisions).  See SKS 8, 229 / UDVS, 129.  Pattison, A Rhetorics of the Word, p. 259.

146

Claudia Welz

ment with Pattison that this dialogical practice is much better than “a pure moment of vision in which divine and human meld beyond words.”⁶⁶ What does it mean to be Kierkegaardian? This is the guiding question of the present collection of essays. Obviously, Kierkegaard himself did not want “disciples” but rather dedicated his lifework to clarifying what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Kierkegaard pointed away from himself—to the only One who, in his eyes, was truly human and divine. Yet, Kierkegaard did not impose his Christian commitment unto others. On the contrary, he spoke through a plurality of pseudonyms in order to portray both the “ideal Christian” and a variety of other characters. He did so because he wanted his readers to judge by themselves and live according to their personal convictions. What mattered most for Kierkegaard was to listen to God’s call and to “translate” it into action. In fact, if one wants to be Kierkegaardian, one has to preserve one’s independence from Kierkegaard—listening to God alone when trying to figure out one’s specific vocation (cor)responding to God’s word. This is, Kierkegaard reminds us, the undelegable task of each individual.⁶⁷

 Ibid.  A warm thank-you to the team at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in Bad Homburg, where I found the peace to write this essay!

Steven Shakespeare

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing Kierkegaard was deeply preoccupied with the relationship between form and content in the Christian message. The “how” of Christian communication and living could not be seen as essentially separate from the “what” or the content of Christian doctrine. This concern is not merely a theme in his work. It is also structuring principle of his own writings. In other words, the “meaning” of his texts cannot be simply divorced from his formal experiments. The extent to which this is true, the significance of his formal innovations, and the relationship between the “direct” and “indirect” aspects of his texts is a much-ploughed furrow in Kierkegaardian scholarship, to which George Pattison has made important and groundbreaking contributions.¹ This essay does not attempt to meet that debate head-on. Rather, by way of appreciation of both Kierkegaard, and the ways in which Pattison has opened up a “dialogical” reading of his texts, it attempts something different: to work in a Kierkegaardian way, to adopt the Kierkegaardian idiom of the edifying discourse. It aims, peformatively, to open a new engagement with both Kierkegaard and Pattison’s central concern with the limits of thinking.²

 For some vary varied but significant approaches selected from the large literature on this topic, see Mark A. Tietjen, Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue: Authorship as Edification, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2013; Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence, State College: Pennsylvania State University Press 2005; Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press 1993; Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975; Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971. For some of Pattison’s contributions, see George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, London: Routledge, 2013; “‘Who’” is the Discourse? A Study in Kierkegaard’s Religious Literature,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 16, 1993, pp. 28 – 45; Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, London: Macmillan 1992.  Some might detect a hint of plagiarism here, in that others have also tried their hand at adopting a Kierkegaardian form: see, notably, George Pattison, “Remaining True to the Ethical?” in Kierkegaard and the Quest for the Unambiguous Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 171– 193. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-013

148

Steven Shakespeare

Prayer God, from whom comes every good and perfect gift, you choose what is low and hated in the world, things that are not, so that what is may be reduced to nothing. You appoint the lily and bird, in their nothingness, in what they do not do, to teach us how to be. In Christ, you became nothing, so that a new creation might be possible. Divine paradox: you call us to know nothing but you, to count ourselves as nothing before you—who became nothing for us! “Deep calls to deep…” I wonder: can you hear a prayer—that comes from no one? Should I pray to you—or to nothing? I do not know whether I have prayed or—not. So be it.

I Preamble “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come” (Mark 13:33). “The moment we begin to speak or to write, aren’t we thereby imposing an order, a structure, a meaning on what is itself, simply, nothing?”³

We are told that we must make something of ourselves, to fulfil our potential. Otherwise, our life is a missed opportunity. But what should we make? To begin a project without knowing the end goal is to begin badly. Designers and makers must have goals to reach, purposes to fulfil. Even if the end product has not yet taken shape, they must know what they are trying to do and refine that knowledge as they progress. The same, it seems, is true of the project of our life. The teacher asks us to know what needs to be known, in order to gain qualifications and get on in life. The celebrity asks us to know ourselves as reflections of their borrowed glory, in order to gain prestige and the currency of social recognition. The clergyperson asks us to know Christ as our Saviour, in order to gain salvation and God’s favour. The philosopher asks us to know what is, in order to gain truth and a standard to judge error. How shocking then, what Christ tells us: that, when it comes to the most important thing, to the most important moment, the moment of judgement, we do not know. He is not keeping this knowledge hidden from us; he is not keeping us  George Pattison, Agnosis. Theology in the Void, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1996, p. 3.

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

149

in suspense, like the poker player about to reveal their winning hand, eyeing us with a knowing smile. No, Christ is the Revealer: so there is revelation, there is a truth that will surprise us. However, what Christ reveals to us is precisely this: that, when it comes to the crucial moment, the fulfilment of time and the inbreaking of eternity—we do not know. He takes us to the inner sanctum, to the Holy of Holies; he tears down the curtain and we see: nothing. Keep awake, therefore, he says. And yet, we may ask: how is this wakefulness supposed to benefit us? For this is not simply a matter of not knowing when a future event will take place. It is more profound than that: we do not even know what we are to expect, or the manner of its arrival. The problem is profound, for, if this concerns the Father only, and not even the Son, then it is not just a matter of timing—as if counting days, hours and minutes were the business of the Eternal! If we stand awake, we do so on the brink of an abyss. We are like a man who finds himself on a ledge of rock, his back against the cliff, fathomless depths before his feet. How will we stand there? How will we live with the vertigo? What will we become, we who stand unmoving? A child grows up in play and innocence. Even when they know trauma and neglect, they live in the present. Every moment is filled by the present. The young person is driven by hopes, fears and desire. They take their ideals into the future. The uncertainty of that future may haunt and threaten their footsteps; and yet, it is the future they approach. They know each moment as a moment of possibility, but one that is indistinct, like a never-visited destination obscured by fog: one we do not know whether to long for or to dread. The adult knows the weight of care, of responsibility, of mistakes made and choices hardened into a path that no longer seems to yield. Perhaps they live in comfortable numbness or toiling struggle. Their moments are like links in a chain. But when we are old, then we realise that the true moment eluded us. The moment was not what filled the moment, not something on the far side of the moment, not what the moment leads on to. No: it was the moment itself, the nothingness of it, beyond presence, beyond transcendence, beyond necessity, beyond reason or purpose. That moment always dwelt in and among the others. And when we are old— or perhaps, when we grow older than the present—we find ourselves face to face with that moment. Not knowing where it comes from or where it goes. Keep awake, then, for you do not know. Your Father knows, and only he. You must unlearn what you think you know. So let us learn: agnosis.

150

Steven Shakespeare

Learning is a scholarly activity. Of course, we learn all the time—so we would like to believe! However, there is a particular discipline of learning which we call academic. This learning, we are told, is rigorous. It is well researched, heeding all the relevant evidence and arguments. It analyses, sifts and weighs. It is critical: it makes distinctions, evaluating what is essential, what is well supported—and what is not. Learning is an anxious business these days. We wonder what its purpose is, whether we will succeed at it—and what we will gain from it. Those who offer academic learning must justify themselves as they sell their wares in the market place. The academic must convince people that this effort is worth the time and the cost. Of course, it is an ancient tradition for wisdom to cry out in the public places and draw people to herself. But in our age, it seems that the message has got a little, shall we say, nuanced? Now we hear: Get wisdom (and get a job!) and whatever else you get, get insight (and improve your earning potential!)—Seek it like silver (just like silver!) and search for it as for hidden treasures (not too hard: we will give it to you on a plate!)—How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? Ah, no: delete this one from the prospectus! Where shall we look for learning? Christ directs us to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. They teach us not to be anxious: a word which, in the Greek, means not to be divided into parts. They teach us to will one thing, to be one thing. Yes, says the age, but Christ lived a long time ago, and we are much more advanced. We can smile at his bucolic imagery, but surely things have moved on? Surely things are more—complex? And so the age walks on by, looking down at its phone. And meanwhile, it has destroyed all the habitats in which the birds and lilies were able to live. The age has a point: we know through making distinctions, through telling natures apart. Academics love complexity. How odd, then, that all this complexity seems to serve a monochrome world, a world without mystery! This is how we judiciously come to know the what: the content, the outcome, the result. It is all there, laid out on the surface. I can only admire the sophistication of such learning. It is too sophisticated for me, however, and something of a distraction when we are treading a very different path, asking a very different question. When we are seeking to look at something that eludes our gaze. This is my wager: that there is another knowing, one which can only be reached by unlearning what we think knowing is, and by practising a different how of knowing (and looking). But here we meet the problem that all the ancient mystics and speculators knew: how can we speak of this? How can we claim to

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

151

know the nature of unknowing? How can we look at what does not give itself to be seen? How can we walk the line from knowledge to agnosis without falling into the abyss which crosses the way? It seems we need a guide: someone who is part of the academic world, who knows the business of learning and the possibilities and prejudices of the age. Someone who is nevertheless a thinker, a learner of a different sort. Someone who can sting our souls into thinking for ourselves again. Is there such a one? A teacher of unlearning, of agnosis? One who will admit: “How often it will all seem to be—for nothing”?⁴ Perhaps here is a starting point. We are—let us not say “plagiarising,” let us just say: “following the inspiration of”—Magister Kierkegaard, the great pioneer of this form of writing, the upbuilding discourse. Perhaps then, we need the voice of one who is himself steeped in the thought world of that gadfly, one who has decisively shaped our understanding of it. But also one who has shown time and time again that he is not merely an archivist of knowledge, but a practitioner of thinking, whose thought troubles the complacency of our distinctions, which ranges over mysticism, speculative philosophy, existential choice, technology, poetics—and in all this, only ever seeks to think one thought. A thought that may seem to be—for nothing. Well, then, let us begin again. This time—with apologies to Kierkegaard—disrupting the purity and purpose of the discourse with a little academic detachment. We have had a couple of footnotes already; what are a few more if they will build us a bridge over the void?

II Thinking the Unthinkable In his book Agnosis, George Pattison tells the story of nothing. Or at least of the haunting presence of nothing in the history of Western metaphysics and theology. The world of becoming was always, since Plato, seen as infected with nonbeing. Augustine, taking this theme up within the theological conviction that the world was created out of nothing, uses it it to underscore the fragility of created life. Although creation out of nothing seems to imply God’s triumph over nonbeing, nothingness persists. Its trace is woven into the fabric of time and change and mortality and, especially, into the possibility of the fall. In our finite exis-

 George Pattison, Thinking About God in an Age of Technology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, p. 118.

152

Steven Shakespeare

tence, time is the bridge where “the non-being of the creature qua creature (and specifically the willing creature, the human being) is exposed to the non-being of evil.”⁵ Although Augustine and Christian orthodoxy will insist that creation and fall must be kept distinct, in practice the shadow of the void falls over both, nowhere more deeply than in the human heart: “For Augustine the self is not simply a concrete personality seeking the things of God but a trace of nothingness in the midst of the created plenitude of being.”⁶ Augustine breaks with a purely ontological reading of non-being, to place the focus on the human will. In the process, Pattison argues, a new emphasis on time and narration as the milieu of self-understanding becomes possible. However, what looks like a move away from Platonic metaphysics carries within itself the seeds of future metaphysical renewal. The question of being and nothing re-emerges in the salvation drama of grace and nature which preoccupies (in different ways) Luther, Calvin and Pascal. It is biding its time for the idealists and existentialists to refocus ontology on the vertiginous depths of the abyss. The story Pattison tells is about the emergence of story itself as the mode and medium of thought and existence. Non-being becomes part of our story, religiously and philosophically. Nothingness is not a “beyond” of being, but its lived character; when ontology is founded on nothingness, we can wonder if Being passes over wholly into “history, the renarration of what exists only as occurring in time.”⁷ Existence and human subjectivity come to be marked intrinsically with negation and alienation, and non-being is “redefined in dynamic terms.”⁸ Enter: Kierkegaard, for whom the nothingness of freedom is distilled in our experience of anxiety. Anxiety is the vertiginous experience of our confrontation with our own freedom: the queasy, reeling sensation of “being-able,” in which we sense that taking one step forward could send us toppling into the abyss. In anxiety we find, if not the cause of human sin, then at least the essential condition for the human project per se. ⁹ It presents us with the nothingness of possibility as the condition for choosing, without our choosing being in any way determined. And anxiety is distilled in the moment—the moment which is, for Kierkegaard, the interruptive blinking of an eye rather than the container of a plenitude. For Pattison, “[T]he moment, as the exact point of intersection of

    

Pattison, Agnosis, p. 20. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 55.

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

153

being and non-being, is at the same time the exact point of intersection between the thinkable and the unthinkable.”¹⁰ Here is the point where being and non-being cut across one another. Here is where the story of nothing intersects with the nothing that haunts and makes possible every story—including (especially) ours. Something strange is at work in this book, Agnosis. For there cannot be a thinking of nothing without exposing the nothingness in thought. Thinking is most active here where it is also oddly suspended (shall we say: over 70,000 fathoms?). The usual aims of thought—to achieve a result, a conclusion, to fulfil a project—are here radically unsettled. The dancer leaps to a standing point. The story circulates around what cannot be told. All is utter stillness and yet the extremity of tension: an act of becoming binds and shatters the moment. The what and the how become intertwined. Is this true of all of Pattison’s works? They are, of course, very respectable, published by noble publishing houses. There is all the apparatus of scholarship, as befits a professor of long study and experience, who knows many languages. But do they do more? Is there another language at work in and among the citations and arguments? Do these texts—speak in tongues? Do they—build up? They seem like serious books, on serious subjects. To think of God, for example, in an age of technology, seems like a serious business, since “the thought of God does not exist for us otherwise than as a thought freely willed.”¹¹ And yet it is hard, perhaps impossible, for any academic criteria to distinguish this from a merely “useless, unjustifiable, and foolish possibility of thinking.”¹² So this text, and others, become invitations to tarry with a possibly foolish, possibly empty thought. Certainly one without obvious outcome. Notice how so many questions are posed in these works: But is this still not a little bit too “heroic”, even if it is heroism in a minor key? Is it not a little too serious? Masochistic even? Can we…? The question is, how far does that gratitude reach? Could it reach all the way to thanking in the strongest sense of the term, i. e. thanking someone? But thanking whom? We do not yet know God or even if there is a God. We are only just beginning…How could it be that we ever really know that God as God was the matter of our thinking?…If we don’t really know who God is in the ultimate depths of His being, how can we be sure…? Might we not just speak of God by speaking of something else altogether?…Is it merely an idle figure of speech…? Does silence correspond…? How far can the text…? But is it obvious? Is prayer all these things?…Are we doing more than cobbling words together in an ad hoc and aimless way?…And does this mean we are simply lost

 Ibid., p. 57.  Pattison, Thinking About God, p. 101.  Ibid.

154

Steven Shakespeare

in a maze of “words, words, words”…? What then is it to direct our words to God?…But can we be sure that we are not waiting on nothing?…Is our thinking as direction-less as a windsock…? At this point we have to pause and ask whether we have really advanced one single step?¹³

As Kierkegaard’s discourse on patience becomes an exercise in patience; as his discourse on receiving one’s soul teaches us that the “how” of this receiving must be wholly unlike receiving any thing; as his discourse on prayer leads us from the demand for answers and explanation to the transfiguration of the one who prays—so Pattison writes hidden discourses, in which the subject matter and the research are all designed to lure us out along a branch of knowledge which is simultaneously being severed from the trunk of the tree. Or, less dramatically: in which the mirror of reflection turns back on us and we realise that it was always we, the readers, who were at stake, our pretensions to know suspended over the depths. This can all sound very self-involved, but we need to remember that the moment is not something enclosed within our self-understanding or self-image. It is an intersection, and therefore an opening to what is other. As Kierkegaard might put it, it is the “inter-esse” or “between-being” of existence as it touches on the eternal. As much as the invisible God cannot be seen, we are nevertheless called to look. This does not mean to gaze at an object under our control and comprehension. It means to look in wonder, ready to be surprised, revealed, taught, affected, unravelled, caught up in the heaven in front of our eyes. As much as the ineffable God cannot be known, we are nevertheless called to think. This does not mean to comprehend an object and make it reducible to what we think about it—a structure of control. It means to think ecstatically, taken out of ourselves, intuiting a strange reality beyond the borders of our concepts yet intimately, immanently near. Is this not what George Pattison has enabled us to do, for so many years? Has he not led us through the thorns and thickets of scholarship to a thinking that is free, but, beyond that, to an awestruck seeing of nothing but this possible grace? Hence Pattison’s constant attentiveness to the possibilities of art. He knows that art—and our mode of looking at it—can be a machine for making idols. He knows it can all just be distraction and deception, at worst an invitation to sadistic voyeurism.¹⁴ However, he also knows that, if we are oriented rightly, “the  Pattison, Agnosis, passim.  Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, passim.

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

155

visual image makes visible the invisible depth of the God who grounds the darkness, thickness and opacity of our bodily vision (as well, perhaps, as our intellectual ‘lights’).”¹⁵ Unknown as we are to ourselves, our experience of looking is neither objective comprehension nor solipsistic relativism, but “a path on which we may be graced by unsurpassable disclosures of being.”¹⁶ Thus, with Kierkegaard, we are called to look: and to look specifically at the lily and the bird. To look in order to be dispossessed of our self-confidence and to learn. Let us pay attention the bird: what do we learn from it? Not to sow, not to reap, not to gather. Not to sow: not to make a beginning already having anticipated the end, already knowing the law that dictates what the seed will produce and what the harvest will look like. Not to reap: not to determine when the process has ended, when the conclusion has been reached and a new project begun. Not to gather: not to take refuge in thoughts systematised or confirmed by sharing, in the need for recognition and endorsements, in the creation of movements and trends. So many nots; so much nothing to learn!

III Monologue and Dialogue From the kind of looking which Kierkegaard and Pattison invoke, a profound dialogue emerges. It is not the dialogue of public chatter, but one that needs silence as its ground and setting. Such dialogue puts the self on the line while offering the possibility of rescue from its despair. It is a giving of attention that makes space for the other. Pattison is clearly a celebrant of dialogue, offering signs and words on the altar of our reading. He worries that, in modernity, not only is God excluded, but so is any Other, resulting in a one-dimensional universe “articulated in a resoundingly monological voice.”¹⁷ If there is a way out of this echo chamber, it cannot simply be via an increase in communication. Have you ever been in a lift which got stuck between floors? Did it help when everyone in there with you started to talk at once, and cry and shout with anxiety and frustration? Or did you have to press the alarm and speak to someone—outside?

 George Pattison, Art, Modernity and Faith, London: SCM 1998, pp. 148 – 149.  Pattison, Art, Modernity and Faith, p. 76.  Pattison, Agnosis, p. 82.

156

Steven Shakespeare

A lift is one thing, but life is another. How do we get on the outside of our own world, our own language, our own culture, our own age? Pattison’s groundbreaking work on Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses established that these are works which invite us into a space of dialogue.¹⁸ They are not sermons speaking from authority, nor do they provide doctrinal information as such. They do not aim at knowledge, and this is shown by their form: “their characteristic feature of appealing to what the reader already knows or is likely to think – ʻIs it not so, my listener…?ʼ The discourses are not about a ʻwhatʼ but about a ʻhowʼ we are to make our own what, it is assumed, we already know.”¹⁹ In this respect, they are uncannily like Pattison’s own welldisguised discourses. In the discourse, we are not passive recipients of information, but co-creators of meaning, all the while aware that without God, we can do nothing. This is the paradoxical dialectic of communication: setting us free to create, even as our whole being sinks transparently into the abyss of God. Creation, like dialogue, cannot be carried out by a finite, grasping ego. It requires a letting-go; it requires an openness to the first provocation, the Word beyond the world. Commenting on Heidegger, Pattison writes: The interpretation of texts…is always aiming beyond the written word, beyond the external, public record of thought, not, as with Schleiermacher, to the creative mind of the writer, but the hidden aporia, the wonderment, the thaumazein that first provoked the thinker into thinking. The ultimate presupposition of thought is not thought itself, but in what precedes and provokes thought.²⁰

Aha! Here we have him! A thesis! But then, immediately, the questions cascade down: “Does this sound as if what is being talked about here…is some fugitive ineffable object, an unthinkable x? But what would such a thing be?” No, he will not let us evade this provocation, this sting into activity which brings us face to face with what we cannot know. We can become impatient with this. We can ask: will the real Professor Pattison stand up! He will smile and remind us: it is the text which speaks, not him. On the trail of a hermeneutic for Kierkegaard’s discourses, he asks us to notice how the discourse itself appears as a character within their pages. The question “Who is the discourse?” becomes the leading edge of a reading which is also a dialogue with the text.  See, among others: Pattison, “‘Who’ is the Discourse?” and Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses.  Pattison, “‘Who’ is the Discourse?,” p. 28.  George Pattison, A Short Course in the Philosophy of Religion, London: SCM 2001, p. 116.

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

157

Something curious goes on between Pattison’s texts and Kierkegaard’s discourses. It seems that the author is absent, and the reader must give meaning to the text. However, this sits awkwardly with Kierkegaard’s insistence that a person is nothing before God. We are thus caught between two monologues: either meaning is wholly created and imposed on the text by the reader; or it is passively received from God, with the reader able to contribute nothing (because the reader is nothing). Pattison asks: “What, then, is there to stop the meaning from sliding into the one-dimensionality of extreme reader response claims? What sustains the enormous tension involved in the labour of authentically personal, dialogical communication?”²¹ He suggests that the way Kierkegaard personifies the discourse has something to do with this. The discourse becomes a person, addresses us, even though it is not literally a person. It is almost as if personal communication has to be introduced to us slantwise, indirectly—so used are we to the inauthenticity of our programmed social interactions and the “more real than real” seductions they offer. In the face of this evasion of anything truly dialogical, the discourse becomes a personal challenge and provocation. The discourse keeps the reader self-active while always being displaced and ungrounded—and opens an encounter with what is beyond the text and other than the reader: the self is always already constituted as self-and-other. In this structure lies both the possibility of its being-for-others and of its being-for-God…The structuring of the self as always already in relation is, I am arguing, determinative not merely for the content of Kierkegaard’s religious discourses (their WHAT) but also, perhaps more importantly, their form (their HOW).²²

Of course, relationship is all very well and good. We can all agree that it is a fine thing to be “connected.” Although Kierkegaard would, perhaps, not be so welcoming of some of these forms of agreement and connection. Is relationship in itself simply good? We are all aware of relationships which are abusive, oppressive, stifling, shallow, narcissistic, manipulative, masochistic or otherwise an excuse to evade the truth of who we are. What, then, is the ingredient, the magic word or formula which turns the base metal of relationship into gold? Come here, let me whisper it. It is: nothing!

 Pattison, “‘Who’ is the Discourse?,” p. 42.  Ibid.

158

Steven Shakespeare

Yes! That is the secret. A speck of nothing, a gap between self and other, a void in the heart of our self-knowing, a pause in the train of our thinking: that is where the encounter interrupts us. That is where “authentically personal, dialogical communication” takes place: where there is no place; where we are ungrounded and dispossessed! This is what the lily and the bird teach us. Kierkegaard calls us “out there,” to look, to see. This looking is not direct; the question is how we look. The rich pagan “sees only in darkness.” The bird “sees nothing” thanks to its blissful ignorance, and the rich Christian also “sees nothing,” because earthly distinctions lose their validity and definition in the perspective of the eternal.²³ This unseeing answers to the invisibility of God. In “The Care of Lowliness,” Kierkegaard refers to Christ as the prototype. The Christian does not see Christ with their own eyes, but nevertheless “often sees the prototype”—every time poverty and lowliness are forgotten in joy, “then he does see the prototype—and then he himself looks more or less like the prototype.”²⁴ Christ, then, is not seen directly, but expressed in the joy that forgets distinctions. The virtues—of patience, faith, humility, love—are intrinsic to the quality of the look, a looking which does not see directly. This relates to Pattison’s question, his hope: can the void “become the space wherein, for the first time, another voice is heard?”²⁵ Otherwise, the subject alone determines what anything is to mean, and it is only our own monologue which endlessly reflects back at us. In order to disturb this monologue, Pattison turns to an “experience of nothingness” which “befalls [the subject] in its foundational moment, as given to it— indeed, the purest of all givens, givenness itself, experience of nothing but just experience; in a word, grace.”²⁶ This is a primordial receptivity, “an experience of ourselves as subject to the experience of nothingness,” as constitutive of the self.²⁷ What could an experience of nothingness be? In an age in which, increasingly, “experiences” are advertised for sale, it is hard to imagine this one flying off the shelves. It is neither a special religious experience, nor an event by which the self produces itself. It seems to lack the intentionality or focus which would define any experience. However, for Pattison it resonates with the religious concern of Kierkegaard’s discourses, in which prayer empties us. We find that “it is in this     

SKS 10, 46 / CD, 35. SKS 10, 54 / CD, 43. Pattison, Agnosis, pp. 83. Ibid., pp. 83 – 84. Ibid., p. 85.

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

159

very nothingness that the one who prays is said to resemble God,” because “in knowing itself ‘as nothing’ before God, the self understands itself as being unconditionally derivative, absolutely dependent and owing itself entirely and utterly to this Other, to whom the disclosure of this truth is also owed.”²⁸ Thus, an experience of nothingness becomes “a hinge between being and non-being that is humanly unthinkable.” Humanly unthinkable: but perhaps at home “out there,” in the inhuman interruption of our self-inclosed obsessions. For Pattison, “we come to ourselves, in actuality and in representation, only in and through the grace of the other.”²⁹ Consider Kierkegaard’s 1849 discourses on the lily and the bird, which focus on the qualities of silence, obedience and joy. In being silent, the bird is not literally noiseless, but devoid of human chatter and distraction. And when it is objected that this is easy for the lily and bird, since they cannot speak, the discourse responds: “You are not to say that,” but you must exist before God and so “fold up all your plans into less space than a full-stop.”³⁰ There is silence in nature even “when the day vibrates with a thousand strings and everything is like a sea of sound.”³¹ Of the sea itself, we read that it would be an injustice to say it roared—we would be listening in the wrong way: “If however, you take time and listen more carefully, you hear—how amazing!—you hear silence.” In this paradox of hearing, the bird says “everything will take place in due season;” but Kierkegaard adds “yet, no, the bird does not say this; it is silent, but its silence is expressive [talende], and its silence says that it believes it.”³² In this silence it knows when the moment comes. The bird says by not saying. This is not a learned ignorance, not an overcoming of the distractions of reflection—but it is nevertheless an expression, a saying which interrupts our language and ruptures our world. In this expressive silence, there is “something divine.” Something unsaid, something—of nothing.

IV In an Uncertain Mood What must we do? Surely a discourse which upbuilds must leave us with a practical task? Or at least a direction of travel? Where does Pattison take us? To the

    

Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 138. SKS 11, 23 / WA, 17. SKS 11, 19 / WA, 13. Ibid.

160

Steven Shakespeare

deep forest, to the wild heath, or to the desert: a place “out there” lacking any human waymarkers or co-ordinates? To questions, endless questions? I remember when Pattison wrote a big book called God and Being. I recall the anticipation, because here, surely, we would find out where he stood and what he had to say about what there is. This was a book that would stand in the tradition of those great tomes of philosophy which centred upon Being. I settled down in a favourite chair, a glass of darkest red at my side. I felt the weight of the book in my hands as my heart raced. For some reason, I missed the subtitle: An Enquiry. I should have guessed. As I raced through the Introduction, the doubts began to cluster. I arrived at its end, only to find this: “I have given some time to thinking about the genre of this work. In what follows I shall most frequently refer to it as an enquiry. This is because it is first and foremost an attempt to pursue a question….”³³ The book and my wine glass sailed across the room, to hit the wall with simultaneous explosions. I went to bed and spent a restless night. I was awoken by a shaft of sunlight piercing a gap in the curtains. Like a ghost surprised by dawn, I stumbled back to the scene of the crime. I picked my way around shards of glass, ignored the stains which would never be removed, and picked up the book. This time, I did not stop reading: “…even if it doesn’t issue in a clear-cut result or even proceed in a definite and uniform direction I hope that the constancy with which the guiding question is kept in view will give it sufficient consistency and purpose to sustain the reader’s attention.”³⁴ Why was I reminded of the journey on which Kierkegaard sends his own discourses? One which demands patience and resolution, even where rational answers fail? Attention seems to be the key: the quality of waiting upon the other, but in a way which is neither merely passive nor assertively active. As Pattison explores the nature of Being in relation to God, he is inevitably drawn to that space of nothingness which evokes this quality of waiting: “In a sense, nothing is said, nothing is revealed in the bare possibility of such openness. It is empty—not as ‘deterioration’ or ‘nihilation,’ or not as these only, but as readiness, waiting, attention.”³⁵ In this waiting on God, the language of aesthetic irony fails and the language of dogmatic assertion yields —and both are transformed into the subjunctive, the language of the possible. As Pattison writes elsewhere, “In thus thinking of God subjunctively we think of a possibility of which we cannot say

 George Pattison, God and Being: An Enquiry, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, p. 15.  Ibid., p. 15  Ibid., p. 101.

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

161

that it is or is not, that it must or must not be, but only that it may be.”³⁶ God and Being ends in this possibility —and therefore in nothingness. Can we hear the nothingness that echoes in Pattison’s grammatical mood here? There is then, nothing in the sheer activity of the human condition that renders it impossible for us to experience our existence as God’s gift…Evidently, “experience” does not in this case mean the purely passive imprint of a pre-existing state of affairs but an event of the understanding in which we ourselves are freely and creatively active.³⁷

There is nothing in this text. This is another hidden discourse: a work for upbuilding, presented as a discursive philosophical text. Wending its way, wounding from behind, it reveals our unthinking preoccupations to be insubstantial veils over the void. In calling us—without authority—to face that void in freedom, to let it be the very medium of our freedom, it also invites us to see in it the possibility of grace. This is the work of a spy in higher service. The day was ending again when I found myself at the end of the book. And instead of the conclusion of a system, I found something else: a telegraphic hint that all this was indeed for upbuilding: The greatest of gifts is not our capacity for knowledge, but the freedom to seek one whom we might thank for the immeasurable joy of being in a world inhabited by creatures it gladdens our hearts to love. And if this sounds sermonical, then we might also remember…that the task of the sermon is not so much to instil dogmatic truths or issue moral imperatives but more fundamentally to move its auditors to recognize how and how much they want God. To this end it will not naturally find expression in indicatives or imperatives. Instead, as it poses questions, offers hypotheses, and opens new ways of looking at its subject matter, it will speak in a mode that is better described as subjunctive or optative. Only so can it preserve the speaker’s awe at the possibility of God’s nearness and the freedom of the listener in relation to what is being said.³⁸

What is the mood…out there? There, where the lily and the bird live silently? It seems they simply are what they are, so unlike us in our questioning and restless seeking. We might be tempted to think they are so easy to understand and grasp. Ah, you think you will understand nothingness? Know it? But there are the lily and the bird, gently laughing, swaying and rising on the currents of the Void.

 Ibid., p. 132.  Ibid., p. 318 (emphasis added).  Ibid., pp. 320 – 321.

162

Steven Shakespeare

Yet, still, they teach us; they express, they know, they believe, they follow the gospel imperative with which we began, in ways unlike our own: “The bird is silent and waits. It knows, or rather, it fully and firmly believes, that everything takes place in its time. But it knows that it is not entitled to know the time or the day; therefore it is silent.”³⁹ “It knows:” everything and yet nothing. It knows by silence, by waiting—by agnosis. It does not expect anything of us, and so we are free, free to turn away or to attend and to learn.

V A Kierkegaardian Postscript While I can claim no authoritative basis to decide the meaning and outcome of this venture, let me end with a modest point of view. In his own act of authorial mimicry, Pattison offers a “third letter” purportedly written by Assessor Vilhelm, whose first two letters appear in Either/Or Part Two. Having presented his “translation,” Pattison seeks to take seriously Vilhelm’s tentative religiosity. The Assessor is not simply dismissed as an ethical stage to be surmounted on the way to a genuine Kierkegaardian religious content. Rather, we are asked to give serious attention to the possibility that Vilhelm’s contribution has serious merit for its own sake, even though he “seems to profess a kind of agnosticism regarding the ontological foundations of his new faith, and his God is scarcely the sovereign, all-commanding God we encounter in Kierkegaard’s religious writings.”⁴⁰ Pattison goes onto ask whether “Kierkegaardian faith” can survive such a weakening of its robust claims? His response should give us pause. If, he argues, the “Kierkegaardian religiousness” cannot be read and assimilated in this weakened mode, its viability is under threat. The “Kierkegaardian heritage” is faced with one of two options: a robustly realist and doctrinaire reading on the one hand, or a secularist interpretation which leaves no room for religiosity of any kind. Such a narrow set of hermeneutical lenses ceases to allow the texts to do any work—or the reader to become self-active—in an age where easy reliance on religious or secular norms should itself be a matter of serious, attentive and critical consideration. To be Kierkegaardian, then, is not merely to be the conduit of an unchanging content, nor to let preconceived interpretative frames do all the work of reading the text—or the world. Rather, it is a work of serious attention, commitment and

 SKS 11, 19 / WA, 13.  Pattison, “Remaining True to the Ethical,” p. 192.

From the Lily and the Bird, Let us Learn: Nothing

163

love, one which continually approaches the limits of the thinkable in order to encounter and be encountered by a God who defies categorisation in terms of being, power and sovereignty, and yet who demands our all. It is thus formed by the pattern of the incarnation in a way that eludes doctrinal finality. To work out what it is to walk, live, suffer and tell of that paradoxical path, with all its pitfalls and joys, is to live faithfully as a Kierkegaardian.

Christopher B. Barnett

Melancholy and Modernity

One of the hallmarks of Western culture in the digital age is what sociologist Jean Twenge calls “relentless positivity.”¹ Social media platforms allow people to communicate at will about any number of topics, from the mundane (weather, traffic, the latest seasonal macchiato at Starbucks) to the metaphysical (God, the Church, a particularly enlightening yoga session). Prima facie, one might suppose that these communicative media are “neutral,” insofar as they do not formally promote one type of content over against another. But research undercuts this assumption. In 2013, Facebook conducted a survey of its news feed and, through linguistic software, determined that “positive” posts boost Facebook activity, while “negative” ones encourage users to disengage.² Marketing guru Dan Zarrella identifies a similar phenomenon on Twitter, arguing that it is “scientifically proven” that pessimistic or sullen posts deter Twitter followers: “Accounts with lots of followers don’t tend to make many negative remarks. If you want more followers, cheer up!”³ One might wonder, of course, if such findings have more to do with human nature than with social media per se. Yet there is little doubt that social media both extends and magnifies the human desire for affirmation. The positivity of online platforms, in which people “highlight the happy moments but rarely the sad ones,” belongs to a long line of postwar societal trends, starting with “the Boomers, refined by Generation X, and brought to full force by the Millennials.”⁴ Over the last decade, however, something curious has happened. The most recent generation—dubbed “iGen” by Twenge, since its cohort was born after the arrival of the Internet and social media—is already exhibiting a marked decline of “psychological well-being.”⁵ Twenge contends that “smartphones are

 Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us, New York: Atria 2017, p. 94.  Kevan Lee, “Want to Improve Your Social Media Sharing? Harness the Power of Positivity in Social Media,” Buffer, posted October 16, 2014, (https://blog.bufferapp.com/positivity-socialmedia) (6/22/21).  Dan Zarrella, “5 Scientifically Proven Ways to Get More Followers,” Dan Zarrella, posted April 21, 2011, (http://danzarrella.com/infographic-5-scientifically-proven-ways-to-get-more-followers/) (6/22/21).  Twenge, iGen, p. 94.  Ibid., p. 95. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-014

166

Christopher B. Barnett

the most likely culprits,”⁶ since increased smartphone usage correlates to less person-to-person interaction. In turn, depression among young people has “skyrocketed in a very short period of time,” so much so that in 2016 the majority of college freshmen “described their mental health as below average.”⁷ One college student put it this way: “Many of my friends have a better life than me [and] many of my friends are happier than me.”⁸ These and other related reactions to social media are not just idle emotions either. With more depression comes more self-harm and suicide. In fact, the number of young persons admitted to hospitals for thoughts of self-harm and suicide has more than doubled since 2007, and suicide is now “the third leading cause of death in young people between the ages of 10 and 24.”⁹ There are a number of ways to analyze this situation, and questions continue to multiply. Still, it seems clear that the human desire for diversion, novelty, and positivity—a desire that is perhaps most intense in the young and, in any case, is promoted in and by smartphone and social media use¹⁰—is paradoxically a source of danger to human well-being. Is the alternative, then, to protest this culture of faux positivity? In 1997, just as the Internet was going mainstream, Radiohead released OK Computer—an album now ranked among the best in the history of rock music. It was meant to be a departure for the group. Previously Radiohead had mined the emotionally intimate ethos of grunge music, but with OK Computer they turned outward, seeking to capture the vicissitudes of life in an era of computers, globalization, and mass transport. No song captures this propensity better than the postmodern dirge “Fitter Happier.” Featuring a monotone digitalized voice over a funereal piano, the song catalogs a series of advertising slogans and new-age mantras:  Ibid., p. 98.  Ibid., p. 100 and p. 104.  Quoted in Twenge, iGen, p. 101.  Ashley Welch, “What’s Behind the Rise in Youth Suicides?”, CBS News, posted November 21, 2017 (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/suicide-youth-teens-whats-behind-rise/) (6/22/21). It is striking—indeed, almost staggering—that the first iPhone was released in June 2007.  Such promotion is hardly accidental. To cite but one example, in a 2016 ad campaign for Apple’s newly released line of watches, the use of the Apple Watch is associated with athleticism and physical attractiveness, not to mention other emblems of modern chic (cosmopolitan environment, a soundtrack repeating “Get higher, baby!”, plus a seemingly unavoidable plug for apps supporting stress relief). See “Apple Watch Series 2—Official Trailer,” posted by LoveApple, January 20, 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2bxEPShX3o) (6/22/21). As one marketing commentator remarks, “[The figures in the ad] do make me feel bad and anxious about myself, as any good ad does. Why am I not in shape? Why is my life not that exciting? How come I haven’t been in an infinity pool yet? I already bought the $60 athleisure sweatpants. Now I gotta buy this?!” (Lynn La and Patrick Holland, “Our 9 Favorite Apple Ad Campaigns, Ranked,” CNET, posted June 3, 2017 (https://www.cnet.com/news/famous-apple-ad-campaigns/) (6/22/21).

Melancholy and Modernity

167

Fitter, happier / More productive / Comfortable / Not drinking too much / Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week / Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries / At ease / Eating well, no more microwave dinners and saturated fats / A patient, better driver / A safer car, baby smiling in back seat / Sleeping well, no bad dreams.

The upshot is a caricature of the commercialism and superficiality of the internet era—a portrait that looks eerily prescient as the clunky, dial-up web access of the 1990s has yielded to the seemingly ubiquitous wi-fi of the 2010s. As one commentator puts it, “Today, the song’s alienation still feels entirely relevant. If anything, it’s more relevant today, in an age where social media fosters both connection and detachment—and dystopian vibes feel stronger every day.”¹¹At the same time, “Fitter Happier” raises a troubling philosophical question: would it be better to be unfit, unhappy, unproductive? In other words, is there something good or even principled about being melancholy, so much so that one ought to reject modernity’s narrative of positivity and progress? This is a slippery issue. To critique the “relentless positivity” highlighted by Twenge is one thing, but to suggest that depression—a medical disorder that can lead to suicide—is a virtue would be naïve at best, disrespectful at worst. Philosophical analysis is needed, and no thinker seems more suited to this task than Søren Kierkegaard, the so-called “melancholy Dane.”¹² Whether or not Kierkegaard merits this moniker, he certainly takes melancholy seriously as a philosophical-cum-theological subject. This essay will examine the concept of melancholy in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. On the one hand, to be a Kierkegaardian is never to be comfortable or satisfied. On the other hand, this sense of melancholic dissatisfaction is not an end in itself. Kierkegaard treats melancholy as critical for spiritual upbuilding, and thus it is an important marker on the path to genuine happiness—a point worth keeping in mind as the social and psychological challenges of the digital age continue to surface.

 Annie Zaleski, “OK Computer: The Story Behind Every Song: “Fitter Happier”,” Diffuser, posted May 15, 2017 (http://diffuser.fm/radiohead-fitter-happier/) (6/22/21).  The phrase is taken from one of the first major works on Kierkegaard in English: Harold V. Martin, Kierkegaard: The Melancholy Dane, London: Epworth Press 1950. Later, the great poet and essayist Wystan H. Auden cemented Kierkegaard’s reputation as a thinker attracted to the darker side of life: see Wystan H. Auden, “A Knight of Doleful Countenance,” The New Yorker, May 25 1968.

168

Christopher B. Barnett

I The Melancholy Dane? The Danish term melankoli, like its English cognate, can be traced at least as far back as Hippocrates of Kos. The Hippocratic text Airs, Waters, Places (c. 400 BCE) was the first to attest melancholiê, deriving the term from the adjective melancholos: “of black or dark bile”.¹³ Strictly speaking, then, melancholy bears an implicit connection to “humoralism,” an ancient system of medicine in which the human personality is understood in relation to the four major fluids (or “humors”) present in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.¹⁴ It was the last of these four humors—whether innate in the patient or resulting from the degradation and transformation of other types of bile—that was said to cause melancholy.¹⁵ No matter how melancholiê was acquired, its symptoms were generally agreed upon. A “prolonged fear or despondency”¹⁶ was considered typical of the disease, followed by secondary traits such as psychical confusion and even corporeal paralysis. Theories about the provenance of and treatment for melancholy would continue to evolve in antiquity, both within the Hippocratic tradition and in the Roman period under the leadership of Galen (129 – c. 210 CE). Moreover, melancholy continued to fascinate and to perplex thinkers throughout the medieval and early modern periods, with contributions ranging from Avicenna to Teresa of Ávila to Cotton Mather. Such variety provoked confusion—the English polymath Robert Burton once compared opinions on melancholy to the Tower of Babel¹⁷— but a number of “themes” remained consistent in the literature on the subject, including fear, sadness, creative genius, and boredom.¹⁸ Still, as modern psychiatry and psychology developed, melancholic dispositions-cum-moods were increasingly distinguished from melancholy as a mental disease, which eventually yielded to the contemporary term “depression.”¹⁹

 Jacques Jouanna, Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers, trans. by Neil Allies, Leiden: Brill 2012, p. 232.  Ibid., p. 229.  Ibid., p. 233. Physicians tended to attribute this degradation to excessive “dryness,” perhaps brought on by a poor diet.  Ibid., p. 235.  Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, with All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It, 8th edition, Philadelphia: J.W. Moore 1857, p. 240.  Jennifer Radden, “Introduction: From Melancholic States to Clinical Depression,” in The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, ed. by Jennifer Radden, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, p. 18.  Radden, “Introduction,” p. 21.

Melancholy and Modernity

169

It was not until the work of Emil Kraepelin—a German psychiatrist born a year after Kierkegaard’s death—that “depression” emerged as the dominant term in the field of psychopathology. Consequently, there is no clear distinction between “melancholy” and “depression” in Kierkegaard’s writings, though terminological nuance remains: “in English translations of Kierkegaard, ʻmelancholyʼ answers to two closely related Danish words: Melancholi and Tungsind.”²⁰ While Melancholi is clearly linked to the Hippocratic medical term, Tungsind resembles the German word Schwermut, suggesting a burdened spirit or “heavy mind” (tung + sind). In this sense, Tungsind does call to mind the term “depression,” which literally means “the state of being pressed or weighed down” (nedtrykthed in contemporary Danish). And yet Tungsind can also be translated as “melancholy,” meaning that Melancholi and Tungsind are, at bottom, “etymologically distinct terms with overlapping meanings.”²¹ This ambiguity is somewhat alleviated by a “discernible pattern”²² evident in Kierkegaard’s own utilization of these terms. As Steven M. Emmanuel has recently argued, Kierkegaard frequently uses “Tungsind in descriptions of his own psychological and religious development,” at times “describing something closer to clinical depression.”²³ On the other hand, Kierkegaard prefers to employ Melancholi “in discussions of music and in poetic descriptions of mood and atmosphere,” for example, in relation to the “deeply reflective mood” typical of “Romantic longing.”²⁴ Even these tendencies, however, are slippery enough to cause problems for translators. Emmanuel observes that English translators have offered different renderings of the same word, as in the first part of Either/Or, when Kierkegaard’s aesthetically-minded pseudonym confesses: “My Tungsind is the most faithful mistress I have known.”²⁵ In this case, Howard and Edna Hong translate Tungsind as “depression,” whereas other translators have opted for “melancholy.”²⁶ Linguistic equivocality looms in any discussion of “melancholy” in Kierkegaard’s life and authorship. Are we talking about Melancholi or Tungsind? And how are we to understand these terms—as passing moods, as aesthetic affectations, as clinical disorders?

 Steven M. Emmanuel, “Melancholy,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome IV: Individual to Novel, ed. by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Farnham: Ashgate 2014 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15), p. 137.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid., pp. 137– 138.  See SKS 2, 29 / EO1, 20.  Emmanuel, “Melancholy,” p. 138.

170

Christopher B. Barnett

In a poignant 1848 journal entry Kierkegaard gives thanks to God “for having done and for doing so indescribably much more for me than I had ever anticipated.”²⁷ Though all human beings are “nothing, less than nothing” before God, Kierkegaard sees himself as particularly wretched, since his life has been “embittered by the black spot [sorte Punkt] which spoiled everything.”²⁸ This description calls to mind melancholy’s traditional link to black bile, but, in the same passage, Kierkegaard speaks of his melancholy as an enduring state of depression: “My life began…with a frightful melancholy [rædsomt Tungsind], basically disturbed from earliest childhood, a melancholy which plunged me into sin and dissipation for a time.”²⁹ Later, in the same entry, he adds that his broken engagement to Regine Olsen made things even worse, plunging him into “the abyss of my melancholy” [mit Tungsinds Afgrund]. For Kierkegaard had once hoped that God would deliver him from his “almost deranged melancholy” [naesten afsindige Tungsind] so that he could enter into marriage.³⁰ When this deliverance failed to happen, he came to understand that Tungsind is “the elemental misery of my being” [mit Væsens Grund-Elendighed].³¹ These passages display a salacious element—a sad childhood, a failed romance—that fascinates biographers and armchair psychologists alike. To be fair, Kierkegaard himself lends credence to this approach. As he explains in an 1850 journal entry, he was “in the power of a congenital mental depression” for as long as he could remember—a subject that turns up in some his most memorable writings.³² In Stages on Life’s Way (1845), Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Frater Taciturnus poetically constructs the journal of a melancholic figure known only as Quidam (Latin for “someone”). In the throes of a failed relationship, Quidam ruminates (and ruminates!) on a variety of topics, many of which circle back to his own depression and how it has accompanied him throughout life: Once upon a time there were a father and a son…Only a few times did it happen that the father stopped, faced the son with a sorrowful countenance, looked at him, and said: Poor child, you are in a quiet despair [Fortvivlelse]. Nothing more was ever said about it, how it was to be understood, how true it was. And the father believed that he was responsible for his son’s depression [Tungsind], and the son believed that it was he who caused the father sorrow—but never a word was exchanged about this.³³

      

SKS 20, NB4:159 / JP 5, 6135. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 23, NB 17:45 / JP 6, 6603. SKS 6, 187 / SLW, 199 – 200.

Melancholy and Modernity

171

This tale is taken almost verbatim from an 1844 journal entry. Thus it seems that, in the story of father and son, Kierkegaard was looking into the mirror of his own life. Tungsind “was the secret pain Kierkegaard shared with his father.”³⁴ When Kierkegaard later broke off his engagement with Regine, he cited his lifelong melancholy as a reason.³⁵ More specifically, he came to see melancholy as a kind of “cross to bear,”³⁶ as “the thorn in the flesh” [Pælen i Kjødet]³⁷ that would indeed stay with him for the remainder of his life: “Familiar as I was in the very beginning with the Christian concept of the thorn in the flesh, that such things are part and parcel of being Christian—I discovered that there was nothing to be done, and in any case my depression [Tungsind] found acceptance in this entire outlook.”³⁸ Thus melancholy was bound up with Kierkegaard’s decision to follow the solitary life of an author, rather than to seek more conventional pursuits such as marriage and an established position. In turn, Kierkegaard had opportunities to “take refuge in a world of imagination”³⁹ and to entertain an abundance of existential possibilities, thereby giving him a singular philosophical perspective: “I have looked upon [my melancholy] as the high price at which God in heaven sold me a mental-spirituality capacity unequalled among my contemporaries.”⁴⁰ But this was no cause for arrogance, since Kierkegaard possessed his ability “in weakness and frailty.”⁴¹ The pain of melancholy “was meant to serve, on the one hand, as a check to [Kierkegaard’s] ego, and on

 Emmanuel, “Melancholy,” p. 139.  See, e. g., SKS 18, JJ:115 / JP 5, 5664 and SKS 19, Not8:15 / JP 5, 5517.  Emmanuel, “Melancholy,” p. 139.  SKS 23, NB 17:45 / JP 6, 6603. Kierkegaard took this phrase from St. Paul: “And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it should leave me, but he said to me, ’My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’” (2 Cor 12:7– 9, RSV). Paul’s skolops tē sarki has been the subject of much debate among biblical exegetes, who have linked it to everything from failing eyesight (cf. Gal 4:13 – 15; 6:11) to interpersonal hostility. What is clear that Paul understood his “thorn” as permitted by God for the sake of tempering his religious pride. This Pauline view obviously influenced Kierkegaard, though it is notable, and perhaps characteristic, that Kierkegaard associates his thorn with melancholy.  SKS 23, NB17:45 / JP 6, 6603. That is not to suggest, however, that Kierkegaard thought that Christianity caused melancholy: “Christianity certainly is not melancholy [Tungsind]—on the contrary, it is the glad news for those who are melancholy” (SKS 20, NB2:219 / JP 3, 2689).  Emmanuel, “Melancholy,” p. 140.  SKS 20, NB:34 / JP 5, 5913.  Ibid.

172

Christopher B. Barnett

the other, as a motivation to devote himself, in the manner of a religious penitent, to serving the truth of Christianity.”⁴² Nevertheless, Kierkegaard never stopped hoping that he would be delivered from melancholy. In 1846 he began discussing his condition with Ole Bang, one of Copenhagen’s most prominent medical doctors and Kierkegaard’s personal physician.⁴³ Bang warned him that the will alone cannot overcome “the structural misrelation between the physical and the psychical.”⁴⁴ And yet, on April 19, 1848, the day before Maundy Thursday, Kierkegaard’s journals register a kind of conversion: “My whole nature is changed. My concealment and inclosing reserve are broken—I am free to speak. Great God, grant me grace!”⁴⁵ In the margin of this entry, Kierkegaard reiterates that his melancholy had resulted in a pattern of self-alienation and self-torment. Suddenly, however, he felt that he could reorient his life: “Now, by the help of God, I shall become myself. I now believe that Christ will help me to triumph over my melancholy [Tungsind].”⁴⁶ Alas, as things turned out, this passage did not mark a change in Kierkegaard’s disposition. On the contrary, just days later (Easter Monday), he retracted the claim that his Tungsind had been broken.⁴⁷ According to Emil Boesen, Kierkegaard spoke of his melancholy even in his final days: “I am depressed,” Kierkegaard confessed from his bed at Frederiks Hospital, “I have my thorn in the flesh, as did St. Paul, so I was unable to enter into ordinary relationships.”⁴⁸ In retrospect, what is especially noteworthy about Kierkegaard’s wrestling with his own melancholy is not so much personal as conceptual. He understood his thorn in the flesh to consist of a psychosomatic imbalance, and thus the cure he sought (yet seemingly failed to attain) was psychosomatic balance and, finally, self-integration. This approach to melancholy would find its way into his theoretical writings and may serve as an important resource as we grapple with the problem of depression today.

 Emmanuel, “Melancholy,” pp. 138 – 139.  SKS 20, NB:34 / JP 5, 5913.  Ibid. Also see SKS 20, NB2:73 / JP 5, 6021.  SKS 20, NB4:152 / JP 5, 6131.  Ibid., emphasis added.  SKS 20, NB4:155 / JP 5, 6133.  Bruce H. Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 121.

Melancholy and Modernity

173

II Kierkegaard’s Concept of Melancholy Kierkegaard’s concept of melancholy is underpinned by a certain conception of the human being, which preoccupied him for much of authorship—so much so that in 1849 he issued a treatise dedicated to analyzing and thereby “upbuilding and awakening” the human self.⁴⁹ He called this treatise The Sickness unto Death, and it has subsequently been called Kierkegaard’s “most mature work, his masterpiece.”⁵⁰ The premise of this deep and complex book is basic enough to shed light on Kierkegaard’s diagnosis and treatment of melancholy. Ascribed to the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death contains one of the most notorious openings in modern philosophy: “What is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”⁵¹ The repetitiveness of this passage may seem almost ironic, yet it anticipates the text’s foundational claim: while the human self is constituted as a combination of contrasting elements—namely, infinitude and finitude, eternality and temporality, freedom and necessity—it is only a self to the extent that it self-reflexively associates these elements. But to say what the self is does not yet say what it must do. A kind of Eudaemonist, Anti-Climacus presupposes that happiness is the appropriate end of the self, though this happiness is nullified whenever the self expresses its constitution in an unbalanced way. The self must strive to bring its contraries into equilibrium and tranquillity. Caught up in a world of pressing limitations and alluring possibilities, the self’s “selfing” is a never-ending challenge, and so AntiClimacus maintains that authentic self-integration can only happen when the self “in relating itself to itself relates to another.”⁵² In the highest sense, this “other” is God, to whom the self owes its existence and must one day return. Thus a balanced and happy self—that is, a self not afflicted by “despair”—is one that “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself…rests transparently in the power that established it.”⁵³

 These terms are taken from the book’s subtitle: “A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding [Opbyggelse] and Awakening [Opvækkelse]”, see SKS 11, 116 / SUD, 1.  Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1995, p. xxi.  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 13 – 14.  SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.

174

Christopher B. Barnett

In light of this anthropological structure, Kierkegaard’s understanding of melancholy comes into focus. Following Anti-Climacus, who provides a taxonomy of different forms of despair, melancholy would be best categorized as a lack of necessity. That is to say, insofar as the self possesses “the medium of imagination,” it has “infinite possibility,” but this capacity becomes problematic when “possibility outruns necessity so that the self runs away from itself in possibility.”⁵⁴ When this happens, “everything seems possible,” and “this is exactly the point at which the abyss swallows up the self,” for what “is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one’s life, to what may be called one’s limitations.”⁵⁵ Too much possibility means that the self “has become unreal,” but this disorientation can assume a number of forms, including that “of the depressed-fantastical [tungsindig-phantastiske].”⁵⁶ The one lost in this state is not so much chasing what he wants as what he is anxious about, and “melancholically enamored” in this way, he ultimately is led “away from himself so that the is a victim of anxiety or a victim about which he was anxious.”⁵⁷ Kierkegaard had been teasing out this conception of melancholy since the beginning of his authorship. Either/Or, his first major publication, is divided into an aesthetic first section and an ethico-religious second one. The principal figure of Part I is a libertine referred to as “A,” whose thematically diverse yet tonally related writings explore a life devoted to creative stimulation, whereby “sensuous pleasure is the highest goal” and “boredom and routine are to be avoided at all costs.”⁵⁸ In contrast, Part II presents the viewpoint of a figure known as “Judge William,” a married man and civil servant whose essays seek to convince A that self-fulfillment depends on rooting aesthetic pleasure in social responsibility. As the Judge sees it, A’s creative energy, no matter how sensuously pleasing, is bound to terminate in melancholy, because A is using it to avoid, rather than to express, who he really is. The core of the Judge’s case is found in “The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality,” the second and most extensive of his two writings in Either/Or. ⁵⁹ In his evaluation of various “life-views” [Livs-Anskuelser], the Judge turns to the perspective that “teaches “Enjoy life”

 SKS 11, 151 / SUD, 35 – 36.  SKS 11, 152 / SUD, 36.  SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 37, my translation.  SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 37.  Emmanuel, “Melancholy,” p. 140.  Either/Or, Part II, actually contains three treatises, but the Judge attributes the third one to an old friend, a pastor from Denmark’s rural Jutland area.

Melancholy and Modernity

175

and interprets it as “Live for your desire [Lyst].”⁶⁰ Such an outlook, he observes, is limited to those of means and thus is fairly uncommon in practice. Nevertheless, its seductiveness persists, and many “feel that they surely would have attained the joy and happiness they craved in life if only the conditions had been at their disposal.”⁶¹ But is this assumption true? With this question in mind, the Judge analyzes Roman emperor Nero, whose desires were satisfied at will, and argues that though Nero was known for his brutality and extravagance, his “nature was depression [Tungsind].”⁶² Unable to perceive or to realize “a higher form of existence,” Nero constantly presses “all the ingenuity of the world [to] devise new pleasures for him, because only in the moment of pleasure does he find rest, and when that is over, he yawns in sluggishness.”⁶³ The upshot is a brooding sense of anxiety, an obscure feeling that he “does not possess himself” and thus must possess others: Nero “burns up half of Rome, but his agony is the same. After a while, such things do not give him pleasure any more. There is still greater pleasure; he will make people anxious. He is a riddle to himself, and anxiety is his nature; now he will be a riddle to everybody and rejoice over their anxiety”.⁶⁴ Perhaps most terrifying, the Judge adds, is that Nero’s oppression is carried out with childlike impulsivity. Oscillating between boredom and amusement, the emperor is a threat to anyone who catches his fleeting attention.⁶⁵ The Judge’s portrait of Nero resonates with the man himself, but the upshot is not historical but philosophical-psychological. Since Nero is “flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone,”⁶⁶ he is a salient example of a particular disposition. Tungsind is, according to the Judge, essentially “hysteria of the spirit.”⁶⁷ This reference to Hysteri is awkwardly du jour: the term crested in popularity during the nineteenth century and, due to its misogynistic connotations, has since fallen out of favor.⁶⁸ But the Judge’s chief point is that Tungsind is a spiritual disturb-

 SKS 3, 178 / EO2, 183.  SKS 3, 179 / EO2, 184.  SKS 3, 180 / EO2, 185.  SKS 3, 181 / EO2, 186.  SKS 3, 181 / EO2, 187.  SKS 3, 182 / EO2, 188.  Ibid.  SKS 3, 183 / EO2, 188.  The word “hysteria” is etymologically derived from the Greek word for “uterus” [hystera] and was often associated with mental disorders in women. However, as medical knowledge evolved, it became clear that “hysteria” was being utilized as a kind of psychopathological “catchall”— one, moreover, that was freighted with suspect (and nonmedical) undertones. Thus, the Amer-

176

Christopher B. Barnett

ance: depression emerges when the individual fails to “become conscious in its eternal validity”⁶⁹ and instead remains “bound up with all the earthly.”⁷⁰ It is a kind of immersion in that which is fleeting and diverting, so much so that “willing deeply and inwardly” is “halted” or “repressed.”⁷¹ Such repression weighs on the person, precisely because it has no particularly identifiable cause. One cannot “cure” depression like one can cure a toothache or a bad hip. It is a spiritual sickness, as boundless as the immanent possibilities that inundate the self and hinder its maturation. Ultimately, then, the Judge does not think that A’s Tungsind can be alleviated by a “quick fix,” whether a nugget of proverbial wisdom or a specific medical treatment. Rather, he argues, one must come to realize that “only the spirit can eliminate [depression], for it inheres in the spirit, and when it finds itself all the little afflictions vanish.”⁷² By “little afflictions” the Judge means a general malaise, which is manifested “as not feeling at home in the world, coming too early or too late into the world, not finding one’s place in life.”⁷³ One tormented by such thoughts may even feel that life is meaningless, but “the person who possesses himself eternally comes into the world neither too early nor too late, and the person who possesses himself in his eternal validity certainly does find his meaning in this life.”⁷⁴ Put differently, if depression “is a manifestation of the sin of not willing to be a true self,”⁷⁵ then it is “essentially canceled” precisely when one becomes transparent to oneself by simultaneously accepting one’s failings and bowing “in true humility before the eternal power.”⁷⁶ In sum, according to Kierkegaard’s dialectical model of the self, the human being is always susceptible to melancholy. The confluence of physiological desire and imaginative withdrawal continually threatens to disorient the self, suppressing its highest and most authentic expression—namely, to find equanimity by harmonizing its contrasting elements in and through the God-relationship. The human inclination toward sin makes this is a lifelong task.⁷⁷ At the same time, however, the very fact that the self can fall into depression is a ican Psychiatric Association abandoned the term “hysteria” in the mid-twentieth century, though it has remained common in popular culture.  SKS 3, 183 / EO2, 189.  Ibid.  Ibid.  SKS 3, 184 / EO2, 190.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Emmanuel, “Melancholy,” p. 141.  SKS 3, 183 / EO2, 189.  See, e. g., SKS 3, 184 / EO2, 190.

Melancholy and Modernity

177

sign of its eminence. To draw on the language of Kierkegaard’s 1844 discourse “To Need God Is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection,” melancholy only appears because there is a “deeper self” that beckons the immediate “first self” to relate to itself and to the world in truth.⁷⁸ When this “deeper self” is stifled, the “first self” is not liberated but, on the contrary, fixed in an infantile and desperate relation to existence: it “snuggles at the breast of temporality in the cradle of finitude,” placated by “probability [which] sits by the cradle and sings.”⁷⁹ Acknowledging the deeper self brings anguish—and, with it, Tungsind—but also the possibility of reconciliation and growth. Thus the self’s complexity is the condition for both its despair and its blessedness. The challenge, then, is not to run from the task of self-knowledge and selfgrowth but to confront it head-on, recognising, with ever deepening sincerity, that one cannot finally master external affairs nor internal trials. The more one realizes this fact, the more one comes to depend on God; and the more one comes to depend on God, the more one “views life according to its perfection” and thereby meets “the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God’s assistance and according to his intention.”⁸⁰ Kierkegaard was aware that this paradox—namely, that human beatitude stems not from taking control but from letting go, not from how much one has but from how much one needs—might appear gloomy, even melancholy. “My listener,” he writes, “you certainly do not believe that these are somber thoughts of a ʻthick-bloodedʼ [tungblodet] man; you do not thank God that you are not ravaged by depression [Tungsindighed] such as this, do you?”⁸¹ Here it is notable that Kierkegaard invokes the Galenic theory of melancholy (“thick-blooded”), only to turn it on its head. What seems like melancholy is actually the human being’s “highest perfection,”⁸² just as what the world understands by “perfection” (material luxury, spiritual flattery, etc.) is actually a counsel of despair. As Kierkegaard concludes, “You, my listener, surely will not call [one who truly understands such things] depressed, since, on the contrary, he alone is happy, because someone who is happy in and over God rejoices, and again I say—he rejoices.”⁸³

 SKS 5, 306 / EUD, 314.  SKS 5, 307 / EUD, 316.  SKS 5, 312 / EUD, 325; SKS 5, 316 / EUD, 325.  SKS 5, 311 / EUD, 320.  SKS 5, 316 / EUD, 326.  SKS 5, 312 / EUD, 321. Here Kierkegaard is paraphrasing St. Paul’s famous declaration: “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice” (Phil 4:4, KJV).

178

Christopher B. Barnett

How can Kierkegaard speak to the problem of depression today, particularly as it is found among iGen? As Kierkegaard’s thought predates the advent of modern psychiatry and makes cultural-cum-theological assumptions that are no longer normative in Western society, one might question the benefit of pondering “the sickness unto death” instead of having a few sessions of psychotherapy or taking a course of Prozac. At the same time, however, the dire circumstances of iGen urge us to leave all reasonable options on the table. Scientific research has shown that the pharmacological treatment of depression may actually increase violent tendencies, leading the FDA to include “suicidal thinking” as one of the risks of taking antidepressant medication.⁸⁴ Moreover, non-pharmacological psycho-social interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy overlap with religious practice and spirituality in a number of ways,⁸⁵ suggesting that Kierkegaard’s philosophical-cum-spiritual exploration of the nature of the self and its relation to matters of ultimate concern has genuine therapeutic potential. With this in mind, it is worth returning to the fact that as social media platforms have become practically ubiquitous in Western society, rates of depression and suicide have skyrocketed, particularly among the young. As social media is inclined toward positive images and messages, this suggests the uncomfortable and ostensibly incongruous conclusion that rampant positivity is disturbing, even dangerous. Since this issue was flagged by Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” it has found expression in other artistic media over the last two decades. In 2011 the British science-fiction television series Black Mirror was launched, its successive seasons probing the impact (or potential impact) of various technologies. In “Nosedive” (2016), an episode from Black Mirror’s third season, social media applications have become accessible through eye implants; as a result, interpersonal relationships are easily and almost ineludibly linked to a rating scale, and one’s social status and upward mobility depend on how one is “seen” (both literally and figuratively) by others. Bryce Dallas Howard stars as Lacie Pound, an unfailingly cheerful and convivial young woman, who nevertheless falls into despair when her rating plateaus at 4.2/5. Counseled to spend more time around highly-rated individuals, Lacie reaches out to her old friend Naomi (Alice Eve), who has a 4.8/5 rating. At first it appears that the two will rekindle their friendship, thereby bringing Lacie into Naomi’s influential circle of friends, but a succession of misfortunes serves to alienate Lacie. Exhausted, frantic, and  See, e. g., U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Depression,” (https://www.fda.gov/consum ers/consumer-updates/depression-fda-approved-medications-may-help) (6/23/21).  See, e. g., David H. Rosmarin, Spirituality, Religion, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: A Guide for Clinicians, New York: The Guilford Press 2018.

Melancholy and Modernity

179

resentful, she causes a scandal at a party hosted by Naomi. Lacie’s rating plummets, and she is arrested. The police take her to jail, where she is stripped of her eye filter and locked in a cell opposite a man. Here, ostensibly at rock-bottom, Lacie experiences a kind of liberation. No longer trying to improve her rating, she disregards her shabby appearance and gazes in wonder at the mystery of her surroundings, including the dust particles illuminated by slanting windowlight. In the episode’s dénouement Lacie and her fellow prisoner joyfully shout insults at one another from their respective cells, finally freed from the oppression of social media and its faux positivity. “Fitter Happier” and “Nosedive” arrive at a similar conclusion: the comfortable and convivial veneer of modern society is actually a dehumanizing trap. But why? What is so wrong with pretending to be happy and successful, with “faking it”? Could one not argue that at least one virtue of social media is that it makes the basic human desire for gratification, inchoate and slippery as it may be, somehow more attainable—that, to use mundane examples, dates or parties do not really have to be exciting or jubilant as long as one can convince others via Facebook or Instagram that they are? Perhaps, one might conclude, Radiohead and Black Mirror are guilty of hyperbole, drinking deep from a well of technological pessimism while ignoring the fact that social media would not exist if people did not demand it. As the proverb puts it: Mater artium necessitas. But precisely here Kierkegaard proves insightful. As one who both lived with and theorized about melancholy, he can help us understand why the digital age might be uniquely vulnerable to the condition. In The Sickness unto Death, AntiClimacus warns that Tungsind emerges when the self is insufficiently attentive to the necessary features of existence—for example, the unique limitations of space and time experienced by each person. This vacuum is filled, as it were, by possibility, and a twofold danger thereby emerges. First, the self can begin to see itself as its own invention—an illusion that it can engineer and manipulate at will. For a time, the self might find this possibility titillating; yet it will enslave itself to caprice, fashion, and instinct, oblivious to its own concrete reality and eternal validity. Second, a self so disposed will tend to become anxious, pursuing evanescent desires and objects, and constantly worrying about losing them. The weight of this burden—of wanting and of being told to want what can never actually be achieved or possessed—results in Tungsind. In Either/Or, Judge William identifies this type of depression with Nero, but the power of the digital age is precisely that the emperor’s lifestyle has become democratized. Just as Nero darts from pleasure to pleasure, ever chasing the possibility of a new and better experience, so now everyone can seemingly do the same online, using aptly-named “search engines” to explore a range of alluring encounters and objects, from the mundane (shopping) to the bizarre (sadomas-

180

Christopher B. Barnett

ochistic behavior). Such quests, according to the Judge, have a centrifugal influence, orienting the self to ephemera and, in turn, repressing the spiritual maturation needed to become a true self. What begins as diversion thus terminates in despair—a haunting sense that, if life is reducible to stalking a gratification that the self cannot finally possess, then existence is dismal, even meaningless. For Nero, who does not answer to a higher temporal authority, this feeling of malignant ennui leads to brutality toward other people. For the citizen of the modern West, the situation is more complex. While interpersonal violence can and does erupt, the rise of an increasingly vigilant police state serves as a strong deterrent. Violent acts are far more frequently turned toward oneself. A report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that that in 2017 there were more than twice as many suicides (47,173) as homicides (19,510) in the United States.⁸⁶ Doubtless these statistics would not astonish Kierkegaard. As he sees it, the onus—or, better yet, Tungsind—of excessive possibility must terminate in despair, because it destabilizes the self and sets it on a path toward self-alienation. That is not to say, of course, that the oscillation between mania (as new possibilities materialize) and depression (as they disappoint) will lead willy-nilly to suicide. However, those who consciously perceive the vacuity of this pattern will ultimately confront a profound decision: a krisis in which the very meaning of life must be called into question. This is, in fact, the picture that Kierkegaard paints in “To Need God Is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection,” in which the deeper self tries to deprive the first self of its confidence in worldly possibilities. This tension is harrowing, and the more one is aware of it, the more harrowing it becomes. On the other hand, one cannot overcome the self’s internal conflict if one fails to attend to it. As Anti-Climacus insists, despair is a disease [Sygdom], and many will succumb to its ravages. But the cure begins with seeing it for what it is, rather than ignoring it. One must pass through the crucible of Tungsind before one can leave it behind. As a forerunner of depth psychology, Kierkegaard’s analyses of melancholy and despair were innovative, particularly in that they were framed against the background of technological modernity.⁸⁷ Now his insights have filtered into popular culture. Radiohead’s OK Computer, famed for capturing the angst and suspicion of life in the postmodern West, closes with “The Tourist,” which, alter National Institute of Mental Health, “Suicide,” (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/ suicide.shtml) (6/23/21).  I have recently written on this topic: see Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology, New York: Bloomsbury Academic 2019.

Melancholy and Modernity

181

nating between dreamy jazz tempos and bursts of searing guitar rock, describes someone whose frantic lifestyle has led to a sense of self-alienation: “Sometimes I get overcharged That’s when you See sparks They ask me where the hell I’m going? At a thousand feet per second Hey man, slow down Slow down Idiot, slow down Slow down.”⁸⁸

Lyricist and singer Thom Yorke has remarked that the song is not only a form of social critique but also “something he was directing inward.”⁸⁹ For him the answer to the psycho-spiritual burdens of modernity does not lie primarily in political measures but in the individual’s decision to “look inside,” to find an internal space where the cascading possibilities of cosmopolitan life are blocked out, so that the self can actually and truly come to know itself. “Idiot slow down / Slow down.” This would not be a bad summary of how Kierkegaard would remedy Tungsind, and it is acutely pertinent to the digital age. The near ubiquity of smartphone usage and internet access has made the self vulnerable to a kind of imaginative overheating, whereby a surfeit of images and information jeopardize its stability. Inasmuch as using the internet entails participating in this excessive economy, there is no way to conquer it from within. Instead, one must find a way to detach from it, to turn it off, to slow down. For Kierkegaard, this detachment is the sine qua non of self-unity and spiritual peace. As he explains in “An Occasional Discourse” (more popularly known as “Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing”), someone who seeks to reorient her life must first attain a sense of “quiet” [Stilhed].⁹⁰ This silence encompasses external and internal transformation. One must take “off everything that is noisy since it is empty, in order, hidden in quietness, to become disclosed. This quietness is the simple solemnity of the holy act.”⁹¹

 Radiohead, “The Tourist,” OK Computer, Parlophone 1997.  Bryan Wawzenek, “Radiohead Slows Down on ‘The Tourist’: The Story Behind Every ‘OK Computer’ Song,” Diffuser, posted May 20, 2017, (https://diffuser.fm/radiohead-tourist/) (6/23/ 21).  SKS 8, 134 / UDVS, 20.  SKS 8, 134– 135 / UDVS, 20.

182

Christopher B. Barnett

Before there can be any of question of “resting in God,” of unio mystica— which is where Kierkegaard’s thought ultimately takes the reader—this preliminary move is required. Neither the importance nor the difficulty of this first step should be underestimated, and Kierkegaard’s analysis of melancholy shows why. The self must calm possibility by renouncing “multiplicity” [det Mangfoldige], which is “a dispersion, a sport of changeableness and prey of corruptibility!”⁹² Much as a contemporary internet user toggles back and forth between countless (and often unrelated) links and tabs, the one who wills multiplicity ultimately craves novelty, variation. As Kierkegaard puts it, “Change was what he called for when pleasure served him—change, change; and change was what he called for when he arrived at the limits of pleasure…change, change!”⁹³ In contrast, the one who “slows down” and achieves quiet not only resists multiplicity but creates the condition by which the good may be willed singularly and truly. For Kierkegaard, this is the starting point of the self’s renewal—a renewal that includes the healing of possibility’s despair, melancholy.⁹⁴ To be a Kierkegaardian is never to be comfortable or satisfied, but it is also to insist that melancholic dissatisfaction is not an end in itself. This twofold emphasis is particularly important in the Digital Age, in which the ubiquitousness of the Internet coupled with rampant smartphone usage threaten the self with a surfeit of possibilities. And yet, from the perspective of a Kierkegaardian, the cure begins with seeing the problem for what it is. One cannot simply ignore the challenges of the present age but, instead, must pass through the crucible of depression before leaving it behind. In fact, from a Kierkegaardian perspective, this self-reflexive capacity to identify and to work through despair is not a defect. It is, finally, a sign of blessedness.

 SKS 8, 141 / UDVS, 27.  Ibid.  Kierkegaard adds that the turn from multiplicity to self-integration need not begin with religion: “It may sometimes be that a person begins by willing one thing that yet in the deepest sense is not the good…and then little by little is transformed into willing one thing in truth by willing the good” (SKS 8, 147– 148 / UDVS, 35). Intriguingly, perhaps even surprisingly, he cites “an honest erotic love” [oprigtig Elskov] as a “formative educator” that could lead one to willing the good in truth (SKS 8, 148 / UDVS, 35). Though not extensively developed, this concession suggests that, on a Kierkegaardian reading, resistance to digital multiplicity can originate in ordinary activities—say, spending time with family and friends—inasmuch as such activities are willed sincerely and unselfishly. Here one is reminded of what the philosopher Albert Borgmann calls “focal things and practices,” or nontechnological phenomena that, as ends in themselves, order our lives toward excellence and virtue. For Borgmann, cooking, music, and sport are examples of focal things and practices. See his Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984.

Joakim Garff

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks 1 To the degree it’s possible to compare an author with his authorship, it’s probably not unreasonable to assume that the man Kierkegaard was just as complex as the Gesamtwerk he left behind. It seems just as clear that the categorical either/or for which he became world-famous should have been a both/and, because ambivalence and duplicity were much closer to his dialectical nature. That is why he became both the theologian of despair and the master of irony, both edifying author and merciless prophet, both rhetorical artist and critic of the aesthetic, both thinker of paradox and spokesman for simplicity, both urbane millionaire and martyr of modernity, both the image of anxiety and the fearless polemicist, both humbly repentant and monumentally self-centered, both refined aristocrat and generous man of the streets, both consummate classical thinker and bedeviling deconstructionist, both pietistic monk and cavalier connoisseur, both unconditionally unmarried and eternally wedded to the early love of his life.

2 “What did I find? Not my I,”¹ Kierkegaard wrote in 1835 in his green-marbled journal. He had just spent a couple of months of summer vacation in Gilleleje trying to find himself and an idea for which he was willing to live and die. This formulation, which could pass for a paradox, is implicitly based on two premises, one negative and one positive. The negative premise is that a person is not composed or built in such a way that, in advance and from the outset, he is the person he is to become. He can thus stray from himself, err in his vocation, and end up as someone other than himself. The positive premise is that, in one way or another, an “I” is found within the individual and he is charged with appropriating it. Only in this way can the relation to self be brought into alignment and realized. This persistent interest in the proper relation to self is

 SKS 17, 27 / KJN 1, 21. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-015

184

Joakim Garff

the dynamic element in the odyssey toward selfhood that Kierkegaard pursued until his dying day. He left us a corpus so extensive and so deep that it borders on the unnatural. That young student in Gilleleje in 1835 could hardly have known that, in some sense, the corpus itself was the idea for which he would live and die.

3 Kierkegaard began and ended as an ironist. But fortunately he was a humorist during the stretch in between. Any genuine irony aimed at himself is absent in his works. He was presumably too polemical, too fragile, and already amply exposed.

4 Kierkegaard loved cigars and long coach drives. But he couldn’t live without coffee. According to his secretary Israel Levin, he consumed it in his own unique way. With great care, he poured sugar into his coffee until it reached just the right level above the rim of the cup. He then placed it at the center of the table and watched in delighted, silent concentration as the white pyramid gradually sank down into the pitch-black sludge. The concoction then quickly disappeared into Kierkegaard’s stomach. Not infrequently, his coffee accompanied a fine glass of sherry, which meant that even more energy flooded up to the fizzling, bubbling brain—and thus created the ideal conditions for composing yet another edifying discourse.

5 A troubling byproduct of the subjectivity that Kierkegaard coaxes forth from his reader is a sense of ownership: Everyone who engages with Kierkegaard considers his own Kierkegaard to be the authentic Kierkegaard and considers everyone else’s Kierkegaard to be correspondingly inauthentic. Kierkegaard would find that comical. My Kierkegaard would, at any rate.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

185

6 K. E. Løgstrup claims that Kierkegaard doesn’t ascribe any importance to sovereign expressions of life such as trust, compassion, and sincere communication. But Løgstrup is wrong about this. The pseudonym Constantin Constantius, for example, reports an episode that almost archetypically captures a sovereign expression of life. Constantin Constantius is sitting in a countryside inn where he has just finished an excellent meal. As he’s enjoying a steaming cup of coffee, he spies through the window a young woman on her way into the courtyard of the inn. He draws the “conclusion” that she’s on her way out to the garden. “I’m still young, so I swallowed my coffee, lit a cigar, and was about to follow the call of destiny—and follow the girl’s path—when there was a knock at the door. And in she walked.”² When she bows politely and asks unobtrusively if she might ride with him to Copenhagen, the spontaneous trust with which she makes her request surprises Constantin Constantius to such a degree that he completely forgets his preoccupation with “the interesting and the piquant”³ and, without any ulterior motives, ensures that the girl can travel back the city. He’s convinced that even a “more libertine” man than him would have forgotten all his devious desires: “The trust she exhibited by placing herself at my mercy was a better safeguard than any girl’s ingenuity and cunning.”⁴ His own seduction strategy was exposed to a sudden show of trust, which caused him to forget his original manipulative motives. The girl was not Constantin Constantius’s victim. On the contrary, he became the “victim” of her trust. Løgstrup, who so often illustrates sovereign expressions of life with examples from the world of literature, would have found a perfect example in this episode.

7 Without question, Repetition twists around than any other book of the Danish Golden Age. It is equal part compositional catastrophe and broken Bildungsroman. And oddly enough, each time one picks it up in the vain hope that this time it will make perfect sense, it is strikingly different. Kierkegaard himself said it was full of twists, and that’s exactly right. It twists—like a top does.

 SKS 4, 24 / R, 147, translation modified.  Ibid.  Ibid.

186

Joakim Garff

8 “After my death,” Kierkegaard writes in 1843, “no one will find even the least bit of information in my papers (this is my consolation) about what really filled my life; no one will find that which is written in the core of my being that explains everything, and which often makes what the world would call trifles into exceedingly important events to me, and which I, too, view as insignificance, if I remove the secret note that explains it.”⁵ Kierkegaard let the “secret note” remain a secret and thus managed to keep his biographers eternally occupied. This note, which describes what was really most important in his life, has never been found. But the reason it’s never been found is not because he burned it or destroyed it in some other way. It’s because it was never written. And perhaps the real secret was that there was no secret at all—and therefore that it must be invented, literarily. If this is the case, the entry on the secret note is an act of seduction en miniature. For as one reads in The Seducer’s Diary, there is “nothing as seductive as a secret.”⁶

9 Kierkegaard manages to deliver his witticisms with perfect timing. One example among countless others: In his piece titled “Crop Rotation” in the first part of Either/Or, the aesthetic author A advises his reader on how best to avoid boredom. One ought to abstain from friendship and, even more obviously, from marriage. For as he explains: “If you have a wife, it’s difficult. If you have a wife and might perhaps have children, it’s formidable. If you have a wife and children, it’s impossible.” Immediately afterwards, in a slight modification that leads to his ingenious use of the dash, he writes: “There are reports of Gypsy women who have carried their husbands on their backs throughout their whole lives. But not only is this rare; in the long run, it is also tiring—for the husband.”⁷

 SKS 18, 170 / KJN 2, 157, translation modified.  SKS 2, 300 / EO1, 10.  SKS 2, 286 / EO1, 297.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

187

10 In the search for the authentic Kierkegaard, it’s rare that readers are sensitive to the idea that mystification, concealment, and fiction are constitutive characteristics of his self-presentation and that they thus contribute to understanding the authentic Kierkegaard.

11 Kierkegaard bristled when Frederikke Bremer called him a “women’s author”⁸ because he had a number of female readers. But in fact the feminine element goes far beyond his empirical readership and unintentionally helps characterize Kierkegaard’s discourse as androgynous. Sometimes his text is bashfully evasive and resists any attempt to take it literally. Sometimes the text is enticingly coquettish before last-minute misgivings arise and, in a kind of textus interruptus, the whole glorious affair comes to an end, confining it all to the sphere of bewildering allurement. Sometimes the text again rises to the occasion and, with no fooling around, finishes the job with manly authority. If one were to try to articulate the feminine aspect of Kierkegaard’s discourse, it might be best to go with a term Kierkegaard himself often uses to describe something archetypically feminine: it’s coy.

12 Kierkegaard’s text often anachronistically whispers the Wittgensteinian words of wisdom: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”⁹ At the same time, his text also strongly suggests that whereof one cannot remain silent, thereof one must…improvise!

 SKS 22, 209 / KJN 6, 209.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C. K. Ogden, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922, p. 90 (§ 7).

188

Joakim Garff

13 Unlike Hans Christian Andersen, who, with a tiring tirelessness at times, invites his reader to take part in the meals he’s eaten, accompany him to the manor houses and capital cities he’s visited, to suffer through his toothaches, broken hearts, and ungovernable genitals, Kierkegaard imparts almost nothing to posterity about material and practical conditions, which are, nonetheless, essential conditions for any flight of spirit. If he had known about all the conjectures his silence would give rise to in the imagination of a prying, prurient posterity —the brothel visits, the self-stimulation, the syphilitic infections—he might have been more forthcoming while he still had time.

14 The Concept of Anxiety is the best place not to begin reading Kierkegaard.

15 Sometime in 1847 Kierkegaard notes that “for many years, my melancholia has prevented me from being able to greet myself informally as a ʻyou,ʼ an intimate acquaintance. Between my melancholia and myself lies a whole world of fantasy. In part, it is this world that I’ve emptied into my pseudonyms.”¹⁰ The authorship is the medium through which he works out his traumatic experiences, and in that sense it serves a therapeutic function. When he travels through “an entire world of fantasy” with his “you” in the back of his mind, this “you” is not a “you” outside the text, which, unaffected and unchanged by the text, he can later meet. No, this “you” takes form in and with the writing process. Over time and via the writing, this “you” becomes his real “I.”

16 Kierkegaard is a lyricist though he never authored a single strophe. The majority of his texts have something in common with poetry: they can never be paraphrased without significant loss of meaning. They can only be quoted. If it is a  SKS 20, 97 / KJN 4, 96, translation modified.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

189

hallmark of Hegel’s thought that it is often so abstract that imagination and flights of fancy must rescue the reader when he’s about to suffocate in the thin air of pure concepts, it’s almost the opposite with Kierkegaard. Immediately after the reader finds himself on the operating table undergoing a complicated dialectical procedure, he is sent out to recuperate in a text that opens up in light and airy expressions. Dense conceptual material is transformed into images, unfolding allegorically, or it takes on the down-to-earth form of the fable. Kierkegaard writes euphorically in The Point of View for My Work as an Author: “What hasn’t this pen managed to produce with regard to audacity, intensity, and fervor to the point of madness?”¹¹ It wasn’t the paradoxes that swept him off his feet. It wasn’t the indecipherability of the pale, bloodless concepts floating in the philosophical ether that impressed him. It was rather the pen’s artistic appeal to the senses. And it is not least because of his extreme use of the rhetorical register that Kierkegaard became Kierkegaard.

17 Regardless of how much edification Kierkegaard pours into his texts, there is always an abyss nearby.

18 Kierkegaard’s relationship to Regine is described only in bits and pieces in his journals at the time of the engagement. The details about the situation aren’t added until August 1849, when he gives a fuller account in his prosaically titled “Relationship to ‘Her.’”¹² But the fact that this isn’t an empirical report is clear from the subtitle: “Somewhat Poetical.”¹³ Kierkegaard’s violently ambivalent relationship to his demonically well-meaning father is likewise tempered by the passage of time, while his relationship to his mother is conspicuous in its utter simplicity: she isn’t named at all!

 SKS 16, 52 / POV, 72, translation modified.  SKS 19, 431 / KJN 3, 429.  Ibid.

190

Joakim Garff

19 Kierkegaard’s discourse looks like an electrocardiogram, while Kant’s reminds one of a parallelogram.

20 While the artists of the time journeyed south to Italy, Turkey, and Greece, and the intellectuals made pilgrimages to Germany, England, and France, Kierkegaard spent more or less his entire life within the walls of Copenhagen. Here, as he carried out investigations in the self-appointed role of private detective, he collected the names of streets, lanes, and alleys and took them into his authorship. A bit coquettishly, but not entirely unjustifiably, he calls himself (alias Nicolaus Notabene) “a slacker, who’s seen nothing of the world and has journeyed only domestically within his own consciousness.”¹⁴ But this coquettishness was later joined by a posthumous irony: it was precisely because of this “domestic journey” that Kierkegaard could gloat about his global status. Nevertheless, one could still wish—for his sake as well as his readers’—that he had taken the grand tour through Europe that he had so often considered taking.

21 When reading Works of Love, one finds oneself in the company of grey-haired wise men who have lived diverse lives, criss-crossed the globe’s many latitudes, plumbed the depths of human hearts, and deciphered the most intimate words of wisdom scrawled on the walls of temples in dark tropical forests, home to countless bright-eyed bats. And then one discovers that that book was written by a thirty-four-year-old bachelor, whose southernmost destination was Berlin, who was briefly engaged to a young woman from Copenhagen, and lived most of his life standing at a writing desk. Knowing this, who could then find it meaningful to write this man’s biography?

 SKS 4, 505 / P, 44, translation modified.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

191

22 “My image, my portrait, etc., like the question about whether I wore a hat or a cap, will be of interest only to those for whom the trivial has become what’s important. Perhaps it’s compensation for the fact that, for them, what’s important has become trivial.”¹⁵ Kierkegaard’s anti-biographical motifs are unmistakable. Fortunately, he’s inconsistent. Other places he suggests to posterity, without a hint of dialectical adornment, that his “existence” is the most “interesting existence ever led by any Danish author” and that this is the reason he’ll be “read and studied by posterity.”¹⁶ It is, then, by virtue of the person Kierkegaard that coming generations will take an interest in the author of the same name. Or as he writes in his journals with glittering self-awareness: “And that’s why not only my writings will be studied and studied, but also my life, the scheming secret of the great machinery.”¹⁷ The study of this scheming machinery and its alleged secrets was meticulously prepared by Kierkegaard himself. From very early on, he began to edit his papers and to write with an awareness that future readers were seemingly already there reading over his shoulder. The various editors of the mountain of papers he left behind after his death have also had frequent occasion to note that he was forced to pull out the knife to remove a page or two from his journals when, presumably, they exposed the man Kierkegaard rather than the genius of the same name. The way he crossed out words and lines and the way entire pages were covered with carefully placed ink loops reveals the tireless meticulousness with which Kierkegaard planned his posthumous rebirth.

23 If you find yourself suffering from something as Kierkegaardian as insomnia, perhaps you could pass the time ruminating about which wish you’d like fulfilled: would you like to stumble upon five photographs of Kierkegaard, or would you rather hear him read aloud from a selection of his own works? The choice really isn’t so difficult after all and, in that sense, not really a choice. Imagine if one could hear Kierkegaard read the first pages of Fear and Trembling, selections from Works of Love, and one of his three discourses about the lilies of the

 SKS 7, 570 / CUP1, 626, translation modified.  SKS 20, 168 / KJN 4, 167, translation modified.  SKS 20, 256 / KJN 4, 256, translation modified.

192

Joakim Garff

field and the birds of the air. The auditory aspects of the text alone—the repetitions, rhythm, rests, emphases, stresses, tempo, pulse, pauses—would make the reading captivating, but the most striking element would be the clear, slightly trebled voice, which at times would be interrupted by the sound of a hand gently turning the pages of the book, one by one, and by quiet breaths.

24 It was a relief to read Kierkegaard in high school, but when I asked my Danish teacher for permission to continue a bit longer, he glared out at the group and said: “Whatever you do, never read Kierkegaard!” That same day I walked to the local library and borrowed The Sickness unto Death and a collection of his late anti-clerical essays that were leaning up against each other on the shelf. Thus began my relationship with Kierkegaard. I wonder if the teacher deceived me into the truth. Was the warning against Kierkegaard more Kierkegaardian that I knew? One can deceive another about the truth, which is inexcusable, but one can also deceive another into the truth, which, according to his own pronouncement, is what Kierkegaard does. I wonder if my Danish teacher tried to do the former, but unintentionally did the latter?

25 That which one is denied access to in Kierkegaard’s journals because he writes in his own name is granted much more straightforwardly in the pseudonymous authorship. Thanks to the pseudonymous signatures, Kierkegaard could distance himself from what he wrote, allowing himself to be especially forthright. A work like Repetition, which divides the conflicts of the engagement between Constantin Constantius and the Young Man, can thus be characterized as pseudonymously-signed confessional literature.

26 Kierkegaard ought to be read against Kierkegaard. It can’t get more Kierkegaardian.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

193

27 Once at the theatre, an esteemed actor read parts of Kierkegaard’s attack on the church. As soon as the piece about “theology graduate Ludvig From”¹⁸ was read aloud, the audience burst into laughter. But when the actor got to Kierkegaard’s comments about the church as a junk heap that ought to be torn down as quickly as possible, baptism as a splash of municipal water, confirmation as an awkward farce, and marriage as a sleazy burlesque, the roars wouldn’t end. That’s just how I imagine Kierkegaard’s entire project will come to an end: with general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.

28 Jean Baudrillard calls seduction “dramaturgy without a subject”. ¹⁹ He interprets it as a game where the game itself plays with the players. Traditional notions about subject and object, master and slave, masculine and feminine are thereby abolished. Seduction, in other words, is a highly complex domain of events in which tactics, manipulations, and pretenses are unquestionable realities, but in which agents are submitted to the game as play. In that sense, agents are subjugated to a trans-subjective power whose will to self-realization they more or less perform. This same power manifests itself as an inversion of the traditional codes for the performance of gender. It is thus entirely appropriate, but often overlooked, that it is Cordelia and not Johannes who initiates the epic development of the Seducer’s diary. On the ninth of April, while Johannes swaggers down Langelinie, his attention is captured by a woman who, like a goddess, dazzles him so completely that he temporarily loses his sight (as is archetypical when a being from another world suddenly appears) and thus cannot retain the vision: “Have I gone blind? Has the inner eye of my soul lost its power? I’ve seen her, but it’s as if I’ve seen a divine revelation, so completely has her image disappeared from my memory. In vain do I summon all the powers of my soul trying to conjure up her image.”²⁰ The religious imagery reveals that this episode, or rather epiphany, on Langelinie had the character of event, of gift, of aesthetic grace. Cordelia was instantaneously seductive, which never hap-

 SKS 13, 290 / TM, 233.  Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, Montreal: CTheory Books 1979, p. 100.  SKS 2, 313 / EO1, 323, translation modified.

194

Joakim Garff

pens for Johannes, who, with his belated seduction, must thus try to compensate purely intellectually for this frightful deficit.

29 It leaves one “disgusted, repulsed, and shocked,”²¹ J. L. Heiberg remarks in his review of “The Seducer’s Diary” and thus passes a moral judgment that is accepted without further reflection, even if the author of the diary is hardly an all-consuming Don Juan and, on many occasions, seems to have traded genders with Cordelia. In the little letter Cordelia sent to the nameless publisher, she tells the following of Johannes: “Sometimes I was like a stranger to him; sometimes he let himself show great affection. When I placed my arm around him, sometimes everything changed and I embraced a cloud.”²² With this image, Cordelia reveals that she’s a well-read woman who understands how to formulate herself symbolically. When she writes that she embraced “a cloud” at the crucial moment, she alludes to the Greek myth about king Ixion, who was invited to feast with the gods. Regrettably, he felt so exalted that he tried to rape the hostess Hera. The tactful host, Zeus, saved Ixion from this situation by creating a cloud that looked just like Hera, which Ixion availed for undisturbed sexual gratification. By alluding to this unique sublimating scenario, this redirected satisfaction of desire, Cordelia manages to show that when she threw her arms around Johannes, it wasn’t a real body she was interacting with. It was a cloud, an abstract spirit rather than concrete, determined flesh.

30 Just as demonic closedness is described in The Concept of Anxiety as “the suddenly revealed,”²³ so also can a metaphor or symbol betoken a completely different or deeply suppressed meaning. Toward the end of his relationship with Cordelia, for example, Johannes recounts how one summer day the two of them visited a family and passed the time playing a game of ring-toss along with other guests. The object was to use a stick to catch a couple of rings that were tossed back and forth between the players. “Naturally, the game itself was of

 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Intelligensblade, no. 24, København 1843, p. 285 f.  SKS 2, 299 / EO1, 309, translation modified.  SKS 4, 430 / CA, 129, translation modified.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

195

special interest to me but Cordelia didn’t seem to notice,” notes Johannes, who then takes advantage of the occasion: “When I remarked to one of the guests what a beautiful tradition it is to exchange rings, it struck her soul like a bolt of lightning.”²⁴ The ring-toss is suddenly no longer a casual summer game, but an exchange of symbolic actions. Cordelia, too, knows how to make full use of the situation. “I had both the rings on my stick,” Johannes continues in his diary. “I tossed the rings to her and just like that, she had both of them on her stick.”²⁵ The actions signal the reality of the engagement. Cordelia makes the next move. “She tossed both of them somewhat haphazardly straight up in the air so that it was impossible to catch them. The toss was accompanied by a look full of unbridled boldness.”²⁶ Johannes interprets the dropped rings to signify the end of the engagement. At the same time, the text takes Johannes by surprise with a completely different kind of symbolism: the failed gesture with the stick, which can’t catch the rings, is an expression of physical powerlessness, of impotence.

31 As far as I’m aware, no one has speculated about why Johannes the Seducer’s servant is named Johan, though the similarity is so striking that it can’t be a coincidence. Johan shows up for the first time in some of the last pages of the diary. There, Johannes assures his reader that he has unconditional faith in Johan and thus entrusts him to accompany Cordelia to the destination in North Sjælland where the affair is to take place. “Aside from myself, I know of no one better suited for this than Johan.”²⁷ The comparison is significant and it seems obvious to conclude that Johan is an abbreviated clone of Johannes. It’s as if the hyper-intellectual part of Johannes has been removed from the name and only the physical resolve remains. In other words, it’s Johan who takes care of the consummation, which is why the text is so careful to point out that Johan arrives at the destination before Johannes.

   

SKS 2, 420 / EO1, 433, translation modified. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 2, 426 / EO1, 439, translation modified.

196

Joakim Garff

32 Kierkegaard’s maritime metaphors include not only the now famous “70,000 fathoms”²⁸ that a person of faith must trustingly navigate, but also the supremely formulated images of agitated waters that imitate the sublime or images of a completely still ocean that deeply reflect the heavens. But one finds more subdued images taken from the vicinity of Copenhagen, where they seem to be waiting on an invisible easel as Kierkegaard passes by them. It’s quite often a bagatelle that Kierkegaard preserves for posterity in the form of an unobtrusive sketch, like the one from a Sunday in 1845, where this hint of a world of silent winds glides into his journals: “The splendidly dressed lady, who sailed around the canal in one of Eskildsen’s boats, Sunday afternoon, alone.”²⁹

33 It’s odd that aside from one single episode, Kierkegaard never describes his dreams. The exception is a complicated dream about whether to publish in his own name or not. Here, a reflexive pronoun plays a central role. He’s no doubt an author—even when he sleeps.

34 In his university dissertation On the Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard manages in one and the same passage to anticipate narrative theology and to modify the so-called stage theory: “It is one thing to author oneself, it’s another thing to allow oneself to be authored. The Christian allows himself to be authored and, in this sense, the simple Christian lives far more poetically than many an intellectual mind.”³⁰ Though the authorship has not yet officially begun, the lines can be read as indicating the basic categories in his course on the formation of self that Kierkegaard unfurls in his collected works. Kierkegaard’s chiasm is made up of three modalities or modes of relating: 1) to author oneself 2) to allow oneself to be authored 3) to allow oneself to be authored as a Christian. These could supplement or, better yet, replace the traditional theory of stages. To the aesthetic

 SKS 6, 433 f / SLW, 444 f.  SKS 18, 264 / KJN 2, 243.  SKS 1, 316 / CI, 280, translation modified.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

197

stage corresponds “authoring oneself.” To the ethical stage corresponds “allowing oneself to be authored.” To the religious stage corresponds “allowing oneself to be authored—as a Christian.” The difference between the aesthetic and the ethical is receptivity, which, at the same time unites the ethical and the religious. These two, in turn, are differentiated by their respective relationships to the authority from which the subject receives its vocation. The third modality is defined by its relation to Christianity, which gives the subject a narrative identity and thus makes possible a poetic or counterfactual way of life centered in “another world,” different from the given prosaic one. It’s hardly necessary to point out that this table of modalities, to coin a phrase, not only functions descriptively, but also has a normative function that establishes the receptive modality as the necessary condition for Christianity.

35 Kierkegaard’s iconoclasm culminates in the Philosophical Fragments, where the god in time is described as an absolute paradox. A paradox is not only that which resists conceptualization, the un-graspable; a paradox is also that which resists our gaze, the in-visible, the non-sensical. A paradox can therefore neither be grasped nor seen. It is the negation of sensation, the implosion of visualization. People often overlook the latter.

36 Kierkegaard offers the reader glimpses of his scheming textual machinery on several occasions, not least in A Point of View for My Work as an Author. Here he wants to document the claim that his overarching aim in the grandiose work of his authorship was a religious goal all along, and that the aesthetic element was foreordained, so to speak, to serve such a goal. To demonstrate this, Kierkegaard initiates his reader into some of the strategies that he had used over time in order to bring it about that “with the momentum of being engrossed in the aesthetic, [his readers could] come face-to-face with the religious.”³¹ Yet by means of such revelations, Kierkegaard not only flouts the open and anti-authoritarian character of the pseudonymous works; he also weakens the tension of the deception, just as a seducer who admits openly to his untoward intentions ruins

 SKS 16, 26 / PV, 44, translation modified.

198

Joakim Garff

his seduction. Had Johannes informed Cordelia of his manipulative motives, the pages of “A Seducer’s Diary” would have remained unwritten.

37 On October 12, 1841, a few weeks prior to his final break with Regine, Kierkegaard sent her a bottle of “Extrait double de Muguet,”³² her favorite fragrance. This package was accompanied by a letter. After reflecting on the supposed blessings of recollection, Kierkegaard’s letter dwells with arresting detail on the way in which the bottle was wrapped: “I send you then a bottle of it enveloped in an abundance of leafy wrappings. But these wrappings are not the kind one tears off hastily or throws aside with annoyance in order to get to the contents. On the contrary, they are precisely of that kind that gives pleasure, and I see with how much care and solicitude you will unfold every single leaf and thereby recollect that I recollect you, my Regine, and you will yourself recollect / Your / S.K.”³³ We don’t know precisely what “leafy wrappings” were used as wrapping-paper here. Yet the possibility remains that the “leafy wrappings” mentioned here, and which Regine had to make it through handfuls of before reaching the fine bottle at the very center, consisted of…her own letters!

38 A typical Bildungsroman [coming-of-age novel, lit. “novel of formation”] portrays how the protagonist—normally an intellectual young man—brings his inborn talents to fruition, and arrives at a measured relationship to himself and his environment. This takes place as he moves through the novel’s compositional scheme, which usually fits the phases at home—homelessness—back home. The nadir of the epic is found in the formative homelessness phase, where the protagonist (and the reader!) is presented with a comprehensive gallery of psychological types: artists, acrobats, magicians, freaks, and sensuous women. These types form a Potemkin village of sorts to accompany the main character’s story; their literary role is to intensify the interchange between individuation and socialization upon which the protagonist’s identity is based. When the reader bids farewell to the young man on the novel’s final pages, the young man has finally re-

 SKS 28, 216 / LD, 64.  SKS 28, 243 / LD, 86.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

199

turned home as a clarified version of himself, and has thereby acquired the gravitas necessary to be able to say I. The journey Abraham undertakes from his dwelling in Beersheba to Mount Moriah corresponds to the disquieting phase of homelessness. As is known, this tale has a happy ending; but in his meditations on what happened to Abraham, Johannes de silentio indicates strongly that Abraham never managed to return home mentally, that his eyes were darkened, that he never again beheld joy. With this, Kierkegaard did not merely deprive the Bildungsroman of its the third phase, back home, but unwittingly introduced the Entwicklungsroman [“novel of development”], which came to be nearly ubiquitous during the final third of his own century and far into the next. In the Entwicklungsroman, homelessness is no longer regarded as a temporary phase, but instead becomes a permanent state of affairs. Whereas the Bildungsroman operated with a utopia that could determine the protagonist’s actions counterfactually, in the Entwicklungsroman the protagonist precisely no longer has a home in the world, but has become a kind of non-place and thereby himself a utopia [ou topos, “no place”]. In Kierkegaard’s later productions one often encounters miniature Entwicklungsromanen. This is because the Christian cannot return home in this world, but remains homeless, partly because the Christian’s home is not of this world, and partly because the Christian can manifest Christianity’s distinctiveness from the world in the world only by means of his homelessness. The authentic actualization of this manifestation is—martyrdom.

39 Fear and trembling are not synonyms. Fear is an emotion, while trembling is the physical expression of that emotion; or rather, if you prefer, trembling is the commensurability of inwardness. Accordingly, when Isaac sees how Abraham’s hand trembles at the decisive moment, he becomes horrified: he understands that Abraham does not rest trustingly in God, but is gripped by fear, a fear that lies beyond the faith and obedience that are the raison d’être for his action.

40 Kierkegaard did not go so far as to claim that prayer is a religious instinct. But he did regard it as a natural expression of life. In an 1848 diary entry, Kierkegaard writes that “to pray is to breathe,” and adds that for this reason it is “stupid” to ask why one prays. “For why do I breathe? Because I would otherwise die—so

200

Joakim Garff

it is with praying.”³⁴ Kierkegaard also compares prayer with weeping, as praying can provide the one who prays with the same relief that weeping produces when one has wept long enough that one has cried it all out, or cried oneself out, as Kierkegaard puts it emphatically. Today we know that tears release so-called endorphins, which calm and cheer the weeping one. Comfort, then, also comes from within: God has arranged it so cleverly!

41 To pray is to pray for something. One prays for one’s daily bread—much as one asks another person to pass the salt, or to speak nicely. Like a request, a prayer concerns something specific and is motivated by something specific, whether it be powerlessness, desires, worries, hopes; in principle, it could be anything. Yet to pray to God is not the same as to ask for something, let alone asking for more than what one already has been given. As long as a prayer is regarded as a means by which the supplicant expects to be able to wheedle compliance out of God, God uses the privilege of selective listening—and lends the prayer a deaf ear. Under the evocative title “One who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and is Victorious—In That God is Victorious” in the last of the Four Upbuilding Discourses of 1844, Kierkegaard takes up the question of how the supplicant, in his prayer, precisely should not pray for this or that, but instead should learn to pray for a change in himself or in his prayer, that is, learn to transform or trans-pose both his praying and his prayer. The struggle that takes place in prayer is the praying person’s struggle with himself over who and what he is in relation to God, which is approximately the same as who or what he is relation to himself. The prayer thereby becomes a kind of trans-formation of the person who prays, whose self-understanding is first shattered and displaced, then reconstituted in God as a prism of unchangeableness. It is thus not the praying one who changes God with his prayer; rather, it is the prayer that changes the praying one. The fact that God is unchangeable does not mean that God is impassive or immovable; instead, it means that God remains unchanging love.

 SKS 21, 181 / KJN 5, 189.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

201

42 “To pray is, of course, a very simple matter; one would think it to be as easy as buttoning one’s trousers,”³⁵ Climacus remarks wittily in his Postscript, following which he establishes, in a dialectical cadence, how difficult it actually is to pray. But perhaps there is more to the image of trousers than immediately meets the eye. The purpose of trousers is to conceal; unbuttoned trousers are associated with shame—and the same goes for prayer. Whereas sexuality has long since lost its innocence in the public sphere, remarks about the life of prayer seem almost obscene, one feels that someone has crossed into the forbidden zone—inwardly. Prayer is the final taboo of our age, because it is associated with powerlessness and submission: it is a threat to the autonomous human being’s selfunderstanding.

43 When reading Kierkegaard, one understands quite quickly that the human being’s conception of the good life does not correspond to God’s thoughts about the true life.

44 During his spat with the satirical paper The Corsair, Kierkegaard got caught on the wrong foot: he was portrayed in a series of humiliating caricatures that led street urchins to point fingers at him and intellectuals to snicker at him discreetly in their sitting-rooms. What began as a rebuke to a slightly annoying humorous broadsheet escalated wildly and violently. For Kierkegaard, it became an episode that redefined his identity: he experienced Christianity firsthand on the sidewalks of Copenhagen, and came to understand personally what it means to be scorned, persecuted, and mocked. Kierkegaard realized that the violence was no less malevolent than it had been in earlier times, but had merely become civilized and acquired a more symbolic form of expression. “Indeed, I would never have been able to illuminate Christianity in the way granted me had all this not happened to me,”³⁶ Kierkegaard remarks in an 1848 journal entry, in which his  SKS 7, 150 / CUP1, 162.  SKS 20, 317 / KJN 4, 317.

202

Joakim Garff

self-understanding as a martyr of modernity is being unfolded to the fullest. The Corsair episode more than confirms that Kierkegaard is an empirical theologian focused on himself in the first person singular present active indicative—or rather, if one prefers, that he connects the bios of experience with the graphae of reflection.

45 Whereas for the early Kierkegaard, prayer consists of praying oneself out of suffering, for the later Kierkegaard it becomes praying oneself into suffering, because the suffering proved to be equivalent to the imitatio Christi that presented itself ever more clearly as his category. Correspondingly, in the later Kierkegaard the non-humanity of God has been transformed into God’s in-humanity. According to Kierkegaard, God no longer punishes the world by hurling plagues and curses onto human beings. Instead, God disciplines the modern, self-sufficient world by ignoring it, by not letting himself be heard, with the result that it can seem as if he does not exist at all, as if God is—dead.

46 Whenever he left the house, Kierkegaard took his eyes with him. Periodically, his diaries would fill with phenomenological findings from his excursions: the sounds, the light, the life outdoors. The most divine of these emerged when fortune and a certain artistic necessity conspired to conjure up a scene together, a situation, in Kierkegaard’s immediate vicinity. At one point in 1845, Kierkegaard recorded the following observations in his journal: “It is a peculiarly pitiful sight to see a poor old nag standing in harness before the wagon, with the nosebag on but still unable to eat. Or when an unfortunate horse like this has got its nosebag on wrong, and cannot manage to eat, and no one thinks of helping it.”³⁷ This scene with a sensitive philosopher feeling sorry for a helpless horse with a wrongly attached nosebag is reminiscent of another scene involving another philosopher whose almost sickly sensitivity not only contributed to the development of his philosophy, but presumably also led to his mental breakdown: Friedrich Nietzsche. During a convalescence in Turin, Nietzsche witnessed a coachman abusing his horse on the Piazza Carlo Alberto. This episode, which took place

 SKS 18, 276 / KJN 2, 255.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

203

on January 3, 1889, made such a strong impression on Nietzsche that, although he otherwise regarded pity as a decadent Christian phenomenon, he fell around the neck of the mistreated horse, whimpering like a child. Soon afterwards he was transferred to a mental hospital in Basel. It is difficult to forgive the World Spirit for failing to permit Nietzsche to read the later Kierkegaard. Among other things, his polemic against the clergy, contempt for the professoriate, critique of institutions, and intellectual anti-intellectualism, would have been embraced by Nietzsche in a kind of sympathetic delight.

47 “If there is anything we in these times have forgotten,” Kierkegaard writes in Christian Discourses, “it is to wonder, and therefore also to believe and to hope and to love.”³⁸ The upbuilding discourse has the character of a reminder of the meaning given to what one could call the indispensableness of useless things, i.e., of such phenomena as trust, devotion, consolation, hope, faith, and care, each of which is just as useless as it is indispensable in every human life, and which one neither can nor should use for a purpose in the same sense as one would use a hammer, a compass, or a gun.

48 Unlike the proletarian Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote himself upward socially, Kierkegaard, the son of a rich man, writes down to the common man. And whereas Kierkegaard ended up quite literally with only enough money for his funeral, Andersen, who arrived in Copenhagen with only a few rix-dollars to his name, succeeded in going to his grave a millionaire.

49 Kierkegaard was a street preacher before the word was invented, and a democrat before democracy was introduced.

 SKS 10, 118 / CD, 107.

204

Joakim Garff

50 The fact that a significant swath of Kierkegaard researchers has undertaken a systematic banishment of the man from the work, making the portrayal of the author into a somewhat remote appendix to his august authorship, can be explained by a worry that is partly justified: namely, that a biographical approach would lead to a kind of Freudian oversimplification of the issues which Kierkegaard investigates in his writings. What is more, the banishment of the author from the authorship can also be attributed to the aggravating circumstance that Kierkegaard, both in his own name and through his pseudonyms, denied that his lowly person was of any interest, and threatened all those who showed any signs of an inclination to biography with misfortunes of all kinds. Ironically enough, much anti-biographical Kierkegaard interpretation has been justified precisely by appeal to citations from Kierkegaard, thereby invoking an autobiographical dictum in order to ward off a biographical reading: “Kierkegaard said himself that he does not want to be read biographically!”

51 In his diaries, Kierkegaard doesn’t follow a linear, chronological course; his preferred gait is a characteristic zigzag. Frequently he communicates with posterity only in the form of fragments, scattered afterthoughts, rough drafts, and other forms of artistic experimentation. Kierkegaard writes not only to reveal, but also to conceal and among what he reveals and conceals is Kierkegaard himself. Even when imparting his more intimate confidences, he turns his back on the reader as it were out of modesty, shifts poetically into the third person, or teasingly leaves the reader with a cryptic rebus. Accordingly, to write Kierkegaard’s biography is to comb through a preexisting autobiography, and can only be done by deconstructing it.

52 Kierkegaard, who did not desire disciples, is best served by (as Adorno writes in another context) being defended against his devotees. At times, however, it can also become necessary to defend Kierkegaard against Kierkegaard.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

205

53 Why is it precisely “roast lamb’s head with vegetables”³⁹ that awaits the tax collector (that good-natured caricature of the Knight of Faith) when he returns home to his wife? My best guess is that the dish is a pastiche of the ram that Abraham sacrificed in place of Isaac, and that the greens that accompany the dish represent, consequently, the thicket in which the ram entangled his horns. But periodically I can get disproportionately caught up in this matter.

54 If you like paradoxes, you can cut to the chase and conclude with the proposition that to become oneself is to become a person, who is different from the person one was before one began to become oneself.

55 “God bless your incoming, Herr Prof. Heiberg! As for your outgoing, I shall take care of that adequately.”⁴⁰ Thus Kierkegaard wrote in his diary as a bitter reaction to Heiberg’s patronizing review of Either/Or. What seems like audaciousness on Kierkegaard’s part has, however, been realized to an excessive degree. No one reads Heiberg anymore. One hardly dares to carry the horrifying, contrafactual thought to its conclusion that, had Heiberg praised Kierkegaard to the skies, Kierkegaard would have felt obligated to remain within the Heibergian paradigm and live up to its demands. If that had happened, Kierkegaard would never have become the Kierkegaard that Kierkegaard became.

56 While the authorship’s appetite for a happy medium seems already to have faded by the time Judge William makes his exit, Kierkegaard’s adieu to the eccentric aesthetician, by contrast, is drawn out to great length. The critique of the prudence of the age and the pervasive philistinization of the human life-world,  SKS 4, 134 / FT, 39.  Pap. IV B 56; translated at EO2, 407.

206

Joakim Garff

the unhappy consciousness of modernity’s loss of substantive categories, the emphasis on passion, the choice between tragic heroism and religious redemption, the conflict between poetry and actuality, the need for narrative identity, a sense of the sublime, mystification, deception, irony, and manipulation—all this is represented by “the aesthetician,” who thus becomes a frequently recurring but not always welcome guest in the authorship. Whether or not the same “aesthetician” undergoes a religious metamorphosis that transforms him into the martyr whom the authorship, in its final stages, identifies with the true Christian (and with whom Kierkegaard periodically identifies himself), I cannot presume, of course, to determine.

57 It’s hardly a trivial observation that the three men of the Danish Golden Age who exerted the greatest influence on Danish spiritual life—Kierkegaard, Andersen, and Grundtvig—never truly made it into the established circles, but remained outsiders for their entire lives.

58 To read Kierkegaard is to find oneself in a continuous existential dialogue with a person whom one has never met—but who at times knows me better than I know myself, and who has been in my situation long before I found myself in it.

59 In his late journals, Kierkegaard frequently thanks God for granting him infinitely much: far, far more than he had ever imagined. Just as it would be gauche to suspect Kierkegaard of mistaking his God-relation for his artistic ecstasy, so too it would be naïve to deny any connection between the two.

60 With his remark that Christianity does not exist at all, Kierkegaard anticipates Nietzsche’s dictum that God is dead, and thereby designates Nietzsche as his theological heir.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

207

61 The Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope is said to have walked about with a lit lantern in broad daylight, crying: “I seek human beings.”⁴¹ Kierkegaard repeats this tale in his upbuilding discourse “Think of Your Creator in the Days of Your Youth,” describing Diogenes as a “pagan wise man” who “walked about by day with a lighted lantern looking for a true human being.” ⁴² In aphorism 215 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche tells the story of the madman who seeks God: “Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’” When those gathered there who did not believe in God offered a number of patronizing suggestions about where God might be found, the madman cried out: “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers!” Kierkegaard was searching for the true human being, the authentic human being, but found it harder and harder to detect him. Nietzsche’s madman was seeking God, but he had to admit that God was dead, killed by modernity. What is it, then, that we are seeking when we at times walk about in broad daylight with our little lamps? P.S.: “Think of Your Creator in the Days of Your Youth” was published in 1844, the year of Nietzsche’s birth.

62 In 1837, in a distinctively synesthetic edifying tone, Kierkegaard notes: “The distant baying of a dog, calling one to far-off, friendly, familiar places—constitutes the most beautiful proof of the immortality of the soul.”⁴³ The evidentiary power of this proof is unimpressive, perhaps; but its persuasive power is impressive indeed.

 Cf. SKS K5, 248.  SKS 5, 244 / EUD, 245.  SKS 18, 90 / KJN 2, 83.

208

Joakim Garff

63 With his distinctive discursive mode, Kierkegaard was interdisciplinary before the word was invented—and so afforded himself relevance to every academic discipline and timeliness in every age.

64 Kierkegaard’s discourses are among the most literary texts he ever wrote. Take, for example, “The Woman Who Was a Sinner” from 1849. This offers a refined movement of speech that brings the reader to move, through the text, toward the confessional and to absolution at the altar, abetted by a surfeit of verbs of motion: “thrust herself forward,”⁴⁴ “she sits down,”⁴⁵ “stepped forward,”⁴⁶ and especially by the refrain-like “She went in to the Holy One….”⁴⁷ The repetitions, sometimes almost literal, guide the reader into a contemplative state, and have at times a kind of hypnotic effect, supported by alliteration, chiasmus, dashes, deliberate anacoluthon, frequent rhyming, indeed even repeated regular rhymes, such as: “There once was a woman [Qvinde]; she was a sinner [Synderinde].”⁴⁸ The text’s self-awareness is expressed in a number of homonyms that resemble an aesthetic play on words—“she, the lost woman, who is now lost in her Savior”—or this sublime subtlety: “perfectly calm [stille], or is calmed [stillet], like the sick baby that is calmed [stillet] at its mother’s breast.”⁴⁹ Most fascinating to trace, however, is the transformation that the Woman Who Was a Sinner undergoes from a harlot who loved many to a paradigm-figure who loved much. At the start of the discourse, she is merely a woman who disturbs the Pharisees with her alabaster jar; next, by her devoted silence, she becomes “the symbol”⁵⁰ [Betegnelsen], and the moment after (“almost”) becomes an “image”⁵¹ [Billede]; then (“almost”) a “parable”⁵² [Parabel], and subsequently a

        

SKS 11, 274 / WA, 138. SKS 11, 275 / WA, 139. Ibid. SKS 11, 274 / WA, 138 et passim. SKS 11, 277 / WA, 141. SKS 11, 276 / WA, 140. SKS 11, 277 / WA, 141. Ibid, translation modified. SKS 11, 277 / WA, 142.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

209

“story”⁵³ [Fortælling]; finally, she becomes an “exemplar”⁵⁴ [Forbillede]. With this her transformation from image [Billede] to exemplar [Forbillede] is complete, so that the Woman Who Was a Sinner can lead the congregation from the confessional up to the altar and to absolution: “…because she walks there in the lead, she who loved much.”⁵⁵ Thanks to the finely calibrated functions of its rhetoric, the discourse has elevated a disgraceful harlot into an “eternal image”⁵⁶ [evigt Billede] of the contrition of every repentant human being.

65 On some days, one ought to content oneself with contemplating the wisdom in the words that one should content oneself with being a human being.

66 Chiasmus is Kierkegaard’s favourite stylistic device because it both reflects and produces the text’s dialectic.

67 When Kierkegaard recommended that his reader read his texts aloud, this was not only so that the reader could enjoy their rhetoric and rhythm, but also in order to transport the reader into another time, the slow time of reading. Repetitions, digressions, and footnotes of exaggerated length contribute to this as well. On the countless occasions when Kierkegaard ironizes about the attempt to go beyond Hegel, what provokes him is not merely skepticism with regard to the philosophy of existence; at least as often, it is unease at an inability to stand still and change on the spot, to be transformed, to become a temporary tableau.

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

11, 11, 11, 11,

278 / WA, 142. 279 / WA, 143, translation modified. 280 / WA, 144. 279 / WA, 143, translation modified.

210

Joakim Garff

68 In the diaries that Kierkegaard kept around the period of the composition of The Point of View for My Work as an Author, he touches frequently on the special circumstance that his “authorship” has been his own “upbringing” and “development.” It is not one or another specific work that has had particular significance for his self-understanding, nor is it the poetical treatments of personal life that he emphasizes. Rather, it is the entire production, the authorship regarded as a “totality,” that stands out to him in retrospect as a continuous text that has brought up and developed its writer—oddly enough, unnoticed by the writer himself. Upon closer reflection, Kierkegaard grows alarmed at this surfeit of meaning, for it undermines his self-determination, threatens his authority as a writer, indeed, diminishes him almost to the status of co-author, and thereby deprives him of the right to comment on the full meaning of the authorship—“and yet I certainly am the one who has done it and with reflection has taken every step.”⁵⁷ This experience is one that Kierkegaard shares with other writers, who have also realized that their material contained forces that wanted something different from what the author intended; that there were artistic possibilities in the text that stubbornly found ways of bringing themselves to actuality during the course of the writing process. Such an excess of meaning may perhaps derive from language itself, which, in some fundamental sense, is always larger than the one who writes in it. The power of (deep) grammar is already sufficient to restrict the writer to particular paths and perhaps even to direct what is written in a certain direction. Equally plausibly, of course, the writing process may activate unconscious and to that extent alien powers in the writer, who thus ends up writing something different from and something more than he or she had immediately been aware of. In his journals, Kierkegaard certainly noted “an inexplicable something that indicates that it is as if I had been helped by another, so that I got to bring to effect and say something the full meaning of which I myself sometimes only understood afterwards”⁵⁸—and such an “inexplicable something” is well-suited to being interpreted in terms of the activity of the unconscious in the text. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard did not interpret this experience in either text-theoretical or psychological terms, but inscribes it in a theological perspective, characterizing the alien contribution to the authorship as “the part played by Governance.”⁵⁹ What may appear at first glance to be boundless meg-

 SKS 16, 56 / PV, 77.  Pap. X 5 B 168, p. 362; translated at PV, 292.  SKS 16, 50 / PV, 71, translation modified.

Why Kierkegaard? Seventy Theses, Declarations, and Expressions of Thanks

211

alomania on Kierkegaard’s part is in fact, seen aright, an acknowledgment of his own limited autonomy: Kierkegaard has realized that an author does not merely do something with his work, but that powers in the work also affect its author, or —if one prefers—that a writer does not merely write, but is also written himself. As Kierkegaard explains, it is “as categorically determined as possible”: it is “governance that has brought me up, an upbringing reflected in the process of productivity.”⁶⁰ The circumstance that Kierkegaard was not only the origin of his authorship, but that this authorship is also the origin of Kierkegaard, contributed to his finally putting The Point of View to one side to await posthumous publication. As he writes in a somewhat later marginal note: “The difficulty in publishing what I have written about the authorship is and remains that I have never really been used without myself properly knowing or entirely knowing it; and now, for the first time, I understand and have an overview of the whole—but then I cannot say: I.”⁶¹ Thus, in addition to its many other riches, the authorship became a personal process of coming into existence, a kind of Entwicklungsroman [novel of development] or Bildungsroman [novel of formation] in which the writing itself has a fructifying and liberating, maieutic, relation to its writer, whose autonomy is simultaneously limited. If one wishes to apply the concept of deconstruction to this reconstitution of the subject, I would find it difficult to protest meaningfully against it.

69 The apartment and house metaphors of The Sickness unto Death seem to have gone strikingly unnoticed. For example, Anti-Climacus notes how the self in the despair “becomes a kind of false door with nothing behind it in the background of his soul.”⁶² Similarly, he mentions a “carefully closed door” behind which there “sits the self, so to speak, watching itself, preoccupied or filling time with not willing to be itself.”⁶³ More attention has been drawn to the fact that Anti-Climacus also compares the human being to a brick house consisting of a basement, four to five stories, and a couple of attic rooms at the very top. What is sad and ridiculous, he notes, is that the “psychical-physical” human being does not merely prefer to live in the basement, “no, he loves it

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

16, 56 / PV, 77, translation modified. 22, 285 / KJN 6, 287. 11, 171 / SUD, 56. 11, 177 / SUD, 63.

212

Joakim Garff

so much that he is indignant if anyone suggests that he move to the superb main floor that stands vacant and at his disposal, for he is, after all, living in his own house.”⁶⁴ A human being is an I-house divided against itself. The occupant does not wish to occupy the attractive main floor—which, by the way, is where the wealthy Kierkegaard usually lived himself—but crawls down into the basement and sits down there in a kind of freely chosen indignation, screaming like Dostoyevsky’s underground man, who self-tormentingly enjoys being cut off from the world. Kierkegaard’s strength as a psychologist is due not least to his keen sense of this drive downward in the human being, of how people cling demonically to forms of unfreedom, or their pronounced penchant for staying in their own (and in others’!) basement regions, and for leaving the piano nobile, the noble main floor uninhabited. However, metaphors are rarely used arbitrarily; residential metaphors like these inadvertently link The Sickness unto Death with increasing urbanization, with the squeezing of the population into less and less space within buildings being built higher and higher. These metaphors suggest that the despair portrayed by Anti-Climacus as a purely spiritual phenomenon also has alienation as its material precondition—thereby anticipating indirectly the diagnosis of modernity that was set forth with such bold apocalypticism by later writers of the century (Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire).

70 —Did the author Kierkegaard ever hold an official position? —No, Kierkegaard never held an official position. —Well then—did he earn a lot of money in some other way? —No, he never earned any money at all. —Did he at least get married? —No, he never married. —But then Kierkegaard isn’t a serious man! —No, Kierkegaard isn’t a serious man. Translated by Brian Söderquist and David Possen

 SKS 11, 158 / SUD, 43.

About the Authors Ingolf Dalferth is Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion Emeritus at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of several books in both German and English, including Theology and Philosophy (Wipf and Stock 2001), Radical Theology: An Essay on Faith and Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Fortress Press 2016), and Transcendence and the Secular World: Life in Orientation to the Ultimate Presence (Mohr Siebeck 2018). Clare Carlisle is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London and the author of six books on philosophy and philosophers: most recently, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (Allen Lane / Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 2019) and Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics (Princeton University Press 2021). Daniel Whistler is Reader in Modern European Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language (Oxford University Press, 2013) and editor of The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Christian Theology (2017) and The Schelling Reader (Bloomsbury 2020). Stephen Mulhall is Professor of Philosophy and Russell H. Carpenter Fellow at New College, Oxford. He is the author of sixteen books, including Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press 2001), Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton University Press 2005), The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford University Press 2015), and The Ascetic Ideal: Genealogies of Life-Denial in Religion, Morality, Art, Science and Philosophy (OUP, 2021). Noreen Khawaja is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, where she teaches on the Religion and Modernity program. She is the author of a prize-winning book The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre (University of Chicago Press 2016). Hugh Pyper is Emeritus Professor of Biblical Interpretation at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of several books including The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a Biblical Reader (Routledge 2011) and The Unchained Bible: Cultural Appropriations of Biblical Texts (Bloomsbury 2014). Iben Damgaard is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Mulighedens Spejl. Forestilling, fortælling og selvforhold hos Kierkegaard og Ricoeur (Ph.d.-dissertation, Københavns Universitet 2005), At lege fremmed med det kendte: Kierkegaards gendigtninger af bibelske figurer (Eksistensen 2008) and the co-editor of Subjectivity and Transcendence (Mohr Siebeck 2007) and In-visibility. Reflections upon Visibility and Transcendence in Theology, Philosophy and the Arts (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2020). Joel Rasmussen is Professor of Historical and Philosophical Theology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. He is an editor of several volumes of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, and the author of Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-016

214

About the Authors

Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love (T & T Clark 2005). His book Christianity and the Cultures of Modernity is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Matthew Kirkpatrick is Lecturer in Ethics and Doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. He is an expert on the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the author of several books, including Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age: Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and the question of “Religionless Christianity” (Pickwick 2011), How to Live a Good Death (Grove Press 2016), and, as editor, Engaging Bonhoeffer: The Impact and Influence of Bonhoeffer’s Life and Thought (Fortress Press 2016). Gordon Marino is Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College, Minnesota and Curator of the Hong Kierkegaard Library. He is the author of Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Marquette University Press 2001) and The Existentialist’s Survival Guide (Harper Collins 2017) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. He has also published numerous articles in The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, and American Poetry Review, among many other periodicals. Claudia Welz is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Aarhus. She has authored the following books: Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy (Mohr Siebeck 2008), Vertrauen und Versuchung (Mohr Siebeck 2010), Humanity in God’s Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Oxford University Press 2016), SinnSang: Poesie und Theologie (NordPark 2019), and Gehör für das Unsichtbare: Die Stimme der Stille und die Sprache des Gebets (K&N forthcoming). Steven Shakespeare is Professor of Continental Philosophy of Religion at Liverpool Hope University. His books include Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God (Routledge 2019; originally Ashgate 2001); Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and Derrida and Theology (T & T Clark 2009). Christopher B. Barnett is Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He is the author of Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Ashgate 2011), From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard (Fortress Press 2014), and Kierkegaard and The Question Concerning Technology (Bloomsbury 2019), as well as the editor and translator of Søren Kierkegaard: Discourses and Writings on Spirituality (Paulist Press 2019). Joakim Garff is the author of numerous books and essays, most notably the award-winning biography SAK, translated into English as Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton University Press 2005), and Kierkegaard’s Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen (Princeton University Press 2018). He is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, where he directs the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center.

Index Abraham 24, 199, 205 Acampora, Christa Davis 119 Adorno, Theodor W. 204 Ames, William 138 Andersen, Hans Christian 73 f., 78 f., 188, 203, 206 Anderson, Michael 120 Anselm, Saint 54 – 56 Anti-Climacus 29, 44, 51, 58, 173 f., 179 f., 211 f. anxiety 16, 71 f., 91, 99, 116 f., 138, 152, 155, 174 f., 183 Apollinaire, Guillaume 212 Aristotle 2, 11, 168 Augustine, Saint 52, 105 – 109, 112 f., 117 f., 120 – 123, 151 f. – Confessions 107 f., 117, 120 – On Christian Doctrine 106 – 109, 112 Avicenna 168 Bang, Ole 172 Barth, Karl 136 f. – Einführung in die evangelische Theologie 137 Baudrillard, Jean 193 Becker, Ernst – Denial of Death 127 Beethoven 26 Bettelheim, Bruno 72, 74 Bible 56, 67, 69, 74, 87, 97, 99, 104, 131, 134, 141 Binetti, Maria 32 biography 19 f., 22, 73, 190, 204 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne 81 f. Black Mirror 178 f. Boesen, Emil 172 Böhme, Jakob 31 boredom 68, 122, 168, 174 f., 186 Borges, Jorges Luis 119 Boyce, Frank Cottrell 74 Brand, Matthias 119 Brassier, Ray 35, 38 – Nihil Unbound 35 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110742480-017

Bremer, Frederikke 187 Brøchner, Hans 21 Brown, Jonathan 120 Brunton, Tara Isabella X Butler, Joseph 138 Călinescu, Matei 68 Calvin, Jean 152 Calvino, Italo 68 Camus, Albert 33 – 36 – The Myth of Sisyphus 33 – 35 Carlisle, Clare 15, 22, 24, 51 f., 56, 130 Cavell, Stanley 51 – 53 Cervantes 85 Christ 45, 58 f., 71, 76, 81, 85 – 87, 91, 94 f., 100, 102, 104, 107 f., 113, 118, 131 f., 141, 146, 148 – 150, 158, 172 Christendom 51 f., 83, 116, 131, 137 Christianity 5, 21, 23, 44 – 46, 51 f., 56, 81, 83 – 86, 88 f., 116, 131, 136 f., 171 f., 197, 199, 201, 206 communication 5, 32, 34, 58, 69, 110 f., 113, 115, 117 f., 122, 134, 140, 147, 155 – 158, 185 Conant, James 43 f., 47 conscience 131, 133, 135 f., 138 – 145 Constantin Constantius 185, 192 contradiction 32 – 38, 58 f., 64, 94, 99, 115 Corsair affair VIII, 22, 201 – 202 Cudworth, Ralph 138 Dante 26 death 8, 24, 31, 35, 38 f., 51, 62, 69, 72, 82, 91, 125, 127 f., 130, 166, 169, 173, 178 f., 186, 191 f., 211 f. Della Salla, Sergio 119 f. depression 77, 120, 128 f., 166 – 172, 175 – 180, 182 Descartes, René 45 f. despair 15 f., 77 f., 86, 155, 170, 173 f., 177 f., 180, 182 f., 211 f. Diamond, Cora 54 f., 58 Diogenes of Sinope 207

216

Index

Diogenes the Cynic 1 Don Quixote 84 f. Dostoevsky, Fyodor X–XI Dreyer, Carl 81 – 88, 90 f. earnestness 16, 24, 26, 84, 86, 90 f., 126 – 128, 132 Ebeling, Gerhard 140 f., 145 education 70, 72, 76 Eliot, George 28 f. Eliot, T. S. 15 Emmanuel, Steven M. 169, 171 f., 174, 176 eternity 145, 149 existence 25 f., 28 f., 52, 138, 147, 152 Faden-Babin, Line 77 – 79 faith 10, 12, 17 f., 20, 31, 46 f., 49, 51, 57, 64, 75, 79, 81 – 83, 86 – 89, 91, 93 f., 109, 112 f., 116, 123, 125 f., 131, 138, 155, 158, 162, 195 f., 199, 203, 205 finitude 5 – 9, 13 f., 32, 173, 177 forgiveness 103, 140 Francke, A. H. IX freedom 8, 17, 27, 96, 111, 123, 135, 152, 161, 173 Garff, Joakim 22, 24, 73, 183 God 2, 8, 10 – 14, 17 – 21, 24 f., 27 f., 31, 36 f., 39 – 41, 45, 51 f., 56 – 58, 76, 78 f., 81, 85 – 88, 93 – 97, 102 – 104, 106 – 108, 112 f., 115 – 118, 120, 122 f., 126 – 128, 130 – 138, 140 f., 143 – 146, 148, 151 – 163, 165, 170 – 173, 176 f., 180, 182, 199 – 202, 205 – 207 Goethe 27, 146 – The Sorrows of Young Werther 27 Greene, Graham 68 f. Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, Thomasine 113 – Two Ages 113, 116, 118 Hart, James G. 79, 133 – 136, 144 Hegel, G. W. F. 4, 32, 93, 189, 209 Heiberg, J. L. 21 f., 194, 205 Heidegger, Martin 9, 16, 93, 127, 140 – 142, 156 – Being and Time 16 Hippocrates of Kos 168

Hong, Edna H. 69, 129, 169 Hong, Howard V. 69, 129, 169 Howard, Bryce Dallas 169, 178 Hume, David 138 humour 23 Husserl, Edmund 31 Hutcheson, Francis 138 Imago Dei 2, 12, 136 Imitatio Christi 84 – 85, 100, 202 indirect communication 32, 41 f., 86, 112, 147 inwardness 51 f., 58 f., 85, 114, 116, 118, 129, 199 irony 16 f., 23 f., 30, 43, 48 – 52, 56 f., 73, 102, 112, 160, 183 f., 190, 196, 206 Jansson, Tove VI, 74 – 80 Jensen, Helle Møller X Jesus 81, 85 – 88, 91, 94 f., 97, 101 – 104, 126, 146 Johnson, Mark 94 f. Judaism 136, 139 Kant, Immanuel 3 f., 31, 106, 142 f., 145, 190 – Metaphysics of Morals 106, 142, 145 Kazim, Emre 143 Khawaja, Noreen 61, 137 f. Kierkegaard. S. – “At A Graveside” 126 – 127 – Christian Discourses 90, 141, 203 – Concluding Unscientific Postscript 43, 82, 84 f., 125 – Either/Or 17, 21, 63, 95, 122, 162, 169, 174, 179, 186, 205 – Fear and Trembling 17 f., 24, 26 – 28, 73, 191 – Four Upbuilding Discourses (1843) 95, 200 – Four Upbuilding Discourses (1844). 95, 200 – Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est 43 – 45 – Philosophical Fragments 33, 38 – 41, 43, 45, 84 f., 113, 118, 136, 197 – Practice in Christianity 26, 44, 58, 75, 116, 122

Index

– Repetition 27 f., 185, 192, 209 – Spiritual Writings, ed. George Pattison 96, 102 – Stages on Life’s Way 22 f., 170 “The Changelessness of God” 19 The Concept of Anxiety 15, 39, 83, 112, 188, 194 The Concept of Irony With Continual Reference to Socrates 16 – 17, 112, 196 – “The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress” 22 – The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses 15 – The Moment 23, 85, 89 – The Point of View For My Work as An Author 21 – 22, 28, 189, 197, 210 – 211 – The Sickness Unto Death 15 “The Woman Who Was a Sinner” 208 – Three Upbuilding Discourses (1843) 95 – Two Ages: A Literary Review 113, 116, 118 “Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays” 84 – Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843) 95 – Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits 118 – Works of Love 82, 87, 90, 94, 125, 190 f. Kjær, Grete 69, 72, 74 Koldtoft, Lone 73 Korsgaard, Christine 49 Kraepelin, Emil 169 Lakoff, George 94 f. Lear, Jonathan 17, 49 – 51, 147 learning 15 f., 22, 48, 52, 57, 71, 88, 150 f. levelling 99, 114 f. Levin, Israel 73, 184 Levinas, Emmanuel 135 f., 139 f., 142 Løgstrup, K. E. 136, 139 f., 185 love 8, 13, 17 f., 26 f., 33 f., 43, 45, 61 f., 68, 78 – 82, 87, 89 – 91, 95 – 109, 111, 115 – 118, 123, 125 – 127, 129, 142, 150, 158, 161, 163, 182 f., 200, 203, 211 Luther, Martin 37, 131, 135, 140 f., 145, 152 Mare, Walter da la 72, 87 Markowitsch, Hans 119 marriage 77, 79, 89 f., 170 f., 186, 193

217

Martensen, Hans Lassen 23 melancholy 67, 165, 167 – 174, 176 f., 179 f., 182 Møller, Peder Ludvig 22 f., 69 f., 72, 82 Møller, Poul Martin 22 f., 69 f., 72, 82 Moses 103 Munk, Kai 81 f., 86 f. Mynster, Jakob Peder 23 Napoleon 37 – 40, 75 Nero 37, 175, 179 f. New Testament 18, 36, 84 – 86, 88 f., 97 f., 141 Nietzsche, Friedrich 100, 119, 121, 128, 202 f., 206 f. Nørby, Simon 119 – 121 nothingness 148 f., 151 – 153, 158 – 161 Oedipus 58 Olsen, Regine

21, 27, 170

paradox 38, 47 f., 51, 53, 57, 75, 102, 148, 159, 177, 183, 189, 197, 205 Pascal, Blaise 152 passivity 6, 9 – 14, 109 Pattison, George 31 f., 42, 44, 69, 83, 89, 93 f., 96, 102, 104, 125 f., 128, 131 – 143, 145 – 148, 151 – 162 – A Rhetorics of the Word 131, 133 – 138, 140 – 143, 145 – Agnosis: Theology in the Void 148, 151 – 158 – Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism 31 – God and Being: An Enquiry 160 – Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious 147, 154 – Kierkegaard: The Quest for the Unambiguous Life X, 147 – Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century X – Kierkegaard’s Pastoral Dialogues X – Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, Theology 104 “Poor Paris!” Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Spectacular City X

218

Index

– Thinking About God in an Age of Technology 151 Paul, Saint 36, 59, 107, 132, 171 f., 177, 187 Perkins, Robert 67, 69, 89 phenomenology 93 f., 134 Plato 1, 43, 48, 51 f., 151 – Meno 48 – 53, 57 Porphyry 2 possibility 3 f., 9 – 12, 49 – 52, 55 f., 61, 64, 89, 103, 127, 131, 141, 143, 145, 149, 151 – 153, 155, 157, 160 – 162, 174, 177, 179 f., 182, 198 potentiality 11 f. prayer 18, 95, 107, 122, 126, 133, 137, 145, 148, 153 f., 158, 199 – 202 Rackmanski, Jakob 77 Radiohead 166, 178 – 181 – OK Computer 166 f., 180 f. rationality 2 – 5, 72 Rembrandt 26 repetition 32, 43, 62 – 65, 86, 101 – 103, 122, 192, 208 – 209 resignation 17 ressentiment 100, 128 Ricoeur, Paul 86, 140 Rimbaud, Arthur 212 Roberts, Adam 56 f. satire 43, 86 Schelling, F.W.J. 31 f., 39 – 41 Schlegel, Friedrich 16 f. Schleiermacher 10, 105, 109 – 113, 116 – 119, 121 – 123, 156 – On Religion 109, 112, 117 f. Schnee, Jordan Lee 77 self, the 6, 10, 22, 29, 31, 34 f., 38, 45 – 48, 51 f., 56 – 59, 62, 67 f., 71, 75, 84 f., 112, 116, 118, 120, 125, 128 – 130, 133, 135 – 138, 141 – 144, 152, 154 f., 157 – 159, 162, 166, 172 – 174, 176 – 183, 187 f., 190 f., 193, 196, 200 – 202, 208, 210 – 212

Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 138 silence 15, 105, 139, 153, 155, 159, 162, 181, 188, 208 sin 8, 95 – 104, 112, 126, 140, 152, 170, 176, 181 Socrates 17, 43, 47 – 54, 57, 85, 113 Souriau, Étienne 16, 25 – 29 Stichele, Caroline Vander 87, 91 Stimpson, Catharine 68 Strindberg, August 33, 36 – 38 – To Damascus 33, 36 Stump, Eleonore 19 f. subjectivity 4, 20, 33, 39, 135, 141 f., 152, 184 suffering 4, 19, 34, 36, 59, 102, 129, 131, 191, 202 Taylor, Shelley 98, 120, 147 teaching 48 – 51, 57, 67, 72, 100, 102, 105, 107 – 109, 113 technology 5, 8, 13, 94, 151, 153, 180, 182 Teresa of Avila 168 Tieck, Ludwig 72 Tillich, Paul 7, 31 Time 23, 82 f., 89, 127 Tolstoy, Leo 127 – Death of Ivan Ilyich 127 transcendence 31 – 33, 36, 38, 41, 57, 149 Twenge, Jean 165 – 167 Updike, John

63 f.

Waller, Alison 67 – 69 Whichcote, Benjamin 138 William Tell 75 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 44, 51 – 55, 58, 187 Yampolskaya, Anna 135 Yorke, Thom 62, 167, 181 Zarrella, Dan 165 Ziolkowski, Eric 82 – 85 Zižek, Slavoj 32