Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference "Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It", Copenhagen, May 5-9, 1996 9783110803044, 9783110157185

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Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 1

W G DE

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the S0ren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels j0rgen Cappetarn and Hermann Deuser in cooperation with C. Stephen Evans, Alastair Hannay, and Bruce H. Kirmmse

Monograph Series 1

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · N e w York

1997

Kierkegaard Revisited Proceedings from the Conference »Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It« Copenhagen, May 5—9,1996 Edited by Niels Jorgen Cappelorn and Jon Stewart

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 1997

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the Seren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jargen Cappelern and Hermann Deuser in cooperation with C. Stephen Evans, Alastair Hannay, and Bruce H. Kirmmse Monograph Series Volume 1 Edited by Niels Jorgen Cappelern and Jon Stewart The Seren Kierkegaard Research Centre at Copenhagen University is funded by The Danish National Research Foundation.

® Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kierkegaard revisited : proceedings from the Conference "Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It", Copenhagen, May 5—9, 1996 / ed. by Niels Jargen Cappelern and Jon Stewart.— Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1997 (Kierkegaard studies : Monograph series ; Vol. 1) ISBN 3-11-015718-7

© Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Disk conversion: OLD-Satz digital, Neckarsteinach Printing: Werner Hildebrand, Berlin Binding: Lüderitz 8c Bauer-GmbH, Berlin

Preface The present collection brings together the papers delivered at the conference, »Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It,« which was held in Copenhagen May 5th to 9th, 1996. The conference was part of the larger program »Kierkegaard Days in Copenhagen,« which was one of the many cultural activities that took place in Copenhagen during its official tenure as the Cultural Capital of Europe for the year 1996. The event was arranged by the S0ren Kierkegaard Research Centre, the Department of S0ren Kierkegaard Research and the S0ren Kierkegaard Society. The conference was divided into morning and afternoon sessions. The former consisted of primary speeches which were held in the Ceremonial Hall of the University of Copenhagen and were attended by all the participants as well as a host of interested guests. The conference was honored to have as its main speakers for these morning sessions Ernst Behler, the renowned specialist for German Romanticism and editor of the standard critical edition of the collected works of Friedrich Schlegel, David Lodge, the celebrated British writer who has made use of Kierkegaard in his novel, Therapy, and Howard Hong, the editor and foremost English translator of Kierkegaard and a Nestor among anglophone Kierkegaard scholars. In the afternoon the participants attended a series of seminars of their choice, held at various historical locations throughout the heart of the old city. These afternoon seminars included a main lecture from a keynote speaker, which was followed by a shorter lecture by an official respondent and finally by an open discussion with the public. Due to considerations of length, we have been obliged to confine ourselves to including only the papers of the keynote speakers in this volume, although the authors have been given the opportunity to revise their essays in light of the comments of the respondents and the public. The papers at the conference were presented in Danish, German, English and French. To help the non-Danish reader, papers originally given in Danish have here been translated into either English or German.

VI

Preface

Not since the jubilee conference in 1955, commemorating the hundred year anniversary of Kierkegaard's death, had Copenhagen been host to an international Kierkegaard conference of this kind. It attracted recognized Kierkegaard scholars and interested non-specialists from around the world. The themes for the seminars were chosen to represent as many aspects of Kierkegaard research as possible and included: »Kierkegaard as Philosopher,« »Kierkegaard's Anthropology,« »Kierkegaard's Ethics,« »Kierkegaard and Politics,« »Kierkegaard: Theology and Revelation,« »Kierkegaard: Hermeneutics and Aesthetics,« »Kierkegaard and Textual Strategies,« »Kierkegaard on Gender Studies,« »Kierkegaard in the French Tradition,« »Kierkegaard in the Slavic Tradition,« »Kierkegaard and Danish Romanticism,« »Kierkegaard: Reception in Scandinavia« and »Kierkegaard and Biography.« The diversity of themes treated at the conference and the heterogeneity of the interpretative approaches and methods employed marked out a course for future Kierkegaard research and signaled something of a departure from the earlier tradition of scholarship. While united by their interest in Kierkegaard, the participants at the conference came from a wide range of different disciplines and academic backgrounds, and each was interested in interpreting and making use of Kierkegaard in a different way, in accordance with his or her own research agenda. While there was no shortage of disagreement and lively discussion about particular points of interpretation, there was no attempt to exclude or dismiss as illegitimate any of the research programmes or methods as such. On the contrary, the conference was dominated by a mood of academic tolerance and even a spirit of cordiality, and the participants were animated by a genuine interest in each other's work. While much of the past generation of Kierkegaard scholarship dogmatically insisted upon an immanent reading of Kierkegaard's texts, a number of the papers at the conference demonstrated the richness and variety of Kierkegaard's works by putting them into different and, strictly speaking, external contexts. Similarly, while in the past there has often been a tone of apologia or even hero worship, which led to a sense of a Kierkegaard orthodoxy or dogma, the conference saw a number of highly critical assessments of various points in Kierkegaard's thought, which allowed for a much more differentiated and balanced picture than had been possible previously. The conference thus served the function not only of bringing together the leading Kierkegaard scholars from around the world to exchange ideas but also of creating a new atmos-

Preface

VII

phere of openness and receptivity and thereby demonstrating something of the vast possibilities for future Kierkegaard research. NIELS J0RGEN CAPPEL0RN

Centre Director

December, 1996

JON STEWART

Research Professor

Table of Contents Primary Speeches Sunday, May 5 Howard V. Hong Three Score Years with Kierkegaard's Writings

1

Monday, May 6 Ernst Behler Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Romanticism

13

Tuesday, May 7 David Lodge Kierkegaard for Special Purposes

34

Keynote Speeches Monday, May 6 Gene Fendt The Writ Against Religious Drama: Frater Taciturnus vs. S0ren Kierkegaard

48

Joakim Garff »To produce was my life.« Problems and Perspectives within the Kierkegaardian Biography

75

Per L0nning Kierkegaard: A Stumbling-Block to »Kierkegaardians.« What Theological Orientation Would He Favour Today?

94

Andräs Nagy Kierkegaard in Russia. The Ultimate Paradox: Existentialism at the Crossroads of Religious Philosophy and Bolshevism

107

χ

Table of Contents

Robert Perkins Kierkegaard's Social Thought in the Post Cold War World

139

Roger Poole »My wish, my prayer«: Keeping the Pseudonyms Apart. Preliminary Considerations

156

Michael Theunissen Anthropologie und Theologie bei Kierkegaard

177

Sylvia Walsh Issues that Divide: Interpreting Kierkegaard on Woman and Gender

191

Tuesday, May 7 Jamie Ferreira Moral Blindness and Moral Vision in Kierkegaard's Works of Love

206

Arne Gr0n Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun?

223

Alastair Hannay Why Should Anyone Call Kierkegaard a Philosopher?

238

Bruce H. Kirmmse On Authority and Revolution: Kierkegaard's Road to Politics ..

254

Jacques Lafarge Kierkegaard dans la tradition frangaise: Les conditions de sa reception dans les milieux philosophiques

274

George Pattison If Kierkegaard is Right about Reading, Why Read Kierkegaard? 291 Wednesday, May 8 Pat Bigelow The Brokenness of Philosophic Desire: Edifying Discourses and the Embarrassment of the Philosopher

310

Franqois Bousquet Kierkegaard dans la tradition theologique francophone

339

Radosveta Hofmann Wer die toten Seelen stört. Eine existenzphilosophische Betrachtung von Gogols Werk Die toten Seelen und Tolstojs Novelle Der Tod von Iwan Iljitsch

367

Table of Contents

Klaus-M. Kodalle Diesseits der Logik des Moralismus: Vom »Geist« der Verzeihung bei Kierkegaard, Nietzsche-Scheler, Dostojewski und Camus . . . Finn Hauberg Mortensen Kierkegaard in Scandinavia. A History of Radical Reception . . . Klaus P. Mortensen The Demons of Self-Reflection: Kierkegaard and Danish Romanticism Thomas Pepper Male Midwifery: Maieutics in The Concept of Irony and Repetition

XI

387 410

442

460

Klaus Wolff Die Offenbarungstheologie S0ren Kierkegaards als Theologie der »Gleichzeitigkeit«

481

Abbreviations

502

Three Score Years with Kierkegaard's Writings B y HOWARD V. HONG

The Conference Program Committee has suggested that I speak on »My Life with S0ren Kierkegaard.« Such a title presumes too much, and I cannot use it. It would be more appropriate for Edna Hong. Many years ago we came to Copenhagen four months after our marriage. She went along with me every day to the Royal Library and became involved in the study of a selected text. At the end of the year she told a friend, »I am a bigamist - it turns out that I married two men, Howard and S0ren Kierkegaard.« Furthermore, as a translator I should not be here to speak on any subject. I am somewhat in the position of the customs clerk Kierkegaard wrote about. Others complained that his handwriting was illegible. He replied, »My job is to write; it is your job to read.«1 In this audience and in many countries throughout the world, there are individuals who are engaged in making Kierkegaard's writings known in the languages of their own people. It is a slow, long and difficult task. In the hope that our sixty years with Kierkegaard's Writings may give encouragement to someone who contemplates beginning to translate Kierkegaard or, having begun, is tempted to abandon the work because of the various deterrents and difficulties, I will tell something of our experience, and why we have continued and will continue, if possible, until the task is completed. In a letter to brother Peter, the young Kierkegaard wrote about a new teacher who insisted »that the English language not be neglected as it has been until now, but that it be taught and that there be written translations in this language as well. I really hope that his proposals are not adopted, as it would be extremely unpleasant for me to 1

CUP, in KW XII.l, 191 (SV1 VII, 159 (Pap. VI A 64)).

2

Howard V. Hong

have to tackle the English language in my last year of school.«2 Because of Kierkegaard's penetrating, prophetic thought and engaging writing, the editions of S0ren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers and of Kierkegaard's Writings and the work of the Kierkegaard Library are parts of the rewarding attempt, extremely difficult but not unpleasant, to make the reluctant Kierkegaard, master of Danish, speak English and other languages. When I am asked, »How did you become interested in Kierkegaard?« I usually quote the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: »If I began the study of Danish translating Ibsen's Brand, it has been the works of Kierkegaard, his spiritual father, that have made me especially glad to have learned it.«3 During the summer of 1933,1 read with great appreciation Ibsen's Per Gynt and Brand. Upon reading Halvdan Koht's discussion of the relationship between S0ren Kierkegaard's thought and Ibsen's dramas,4 I concluded that Kierkegaard's writings required investigation. If there was some parallelism of thought, quite apart from any historical question of influence, Kierkegaard was certainly worth reading. An article by David Swenson5 only whetted my appetite for some Kierkegaard texts. Finally I located something of Kierkegaard in English, a little-known University of Texas Bulletin.6 Later as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, I hoped to find a Kierkegaard class taught by David Swenson. He did not offer such a course, but his course »Philosophies of Life« was patterned on Kierkegaard's Stages. Lectures in 1937 by Eduard Geismar7 at the University gave substance to the fantastic idea of studying Kierkegaard in Denmark. With David

2

3

4

5

6

7

Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents, tr. Henrik Rosenmeier, Kierkegaard's Writings, XXV, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978, Letter 2. Miguel de Unamuno, »Ibsen and Kierkegaard,« Perplexities and Paradoxes, tr. Stuart Gross, New York: Philosophical Library 1945, p. 51. Halvdan Koht, Life of Ibsen, I-II, tr. Ruth Lima McMadon and Hanna Astrup Larsen, New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation and W.W. Norton 1931, I, p. 63: »On the whole there was almost certainly no one in his own times to whom Ibsen was so much akin as Kierkegaard.« David Swenson »The Anti-Intellectualism of Kierkegaard« in Philosophical Review, July 1916. S0ren Kierkegaard Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard, tr. Lee M. Hollander, Austin: University of Texas Bulletin 1226, 1912: Introduction, pp. 11-42, »Diapsalmata,« pp. 43-46; Stages on Life's Way, pp. 46-118; Fear and Trembling, pp. 119-152; Practice in Christianity, pp. 152-213; The Moment, pp. 214-239. Eduard Geismar Lectures on the Religious Thought of S0ren Kierkegaard, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1937.

Three Score Years with Kierkegaard's Writings

3

Swenson's help, I received a grant of $1,000 from the American-Scandinavian Foundation for the year 1938-1939 in Denmark. Each day in Copenhagen we bicycled to the Royal Library from Rosenvaengets ΑΙΙέ 22, where we had the special good fortune of living with the Mary Michelsen family, who faithfully kept their promise to speak only Danish. Our work at the Royal Library was the slow translating of Til Selvpr0velse, which Professor Geismar had recommended as suitable in language and representative in thought, a good volume for our initial work on Kierkegaard in Danish. During the year we had the splendid opportunity to converse occasionally with eminent Kierkegaard scholars, Frithjof Brandt, Victor Kühr, H.O. Lange, N.H. S0e, and Eduard Geismar, and to attend some of their lectures. Professor Geismar invited us to attend his Kierkegaard seminar, where we met Gregor Malantschuk, who became a lifelong friend and a co-worker on the translation and annotation of the Papirer and the Vcerker. We participated in his private study circle on Kierkegaard, and there we became acquainted with Grethe Kjaer, who subsequently has been an indispensable tjendende Aand in the work on Kierkegaard's Writings. After many revisions, For Self-Examination was published in 1940, the first English translation of the work. It was not, however, taken as part of the Kierkegaard's Writings edition, because we thought that a new translation was needed. After all, we had learned something about Kierkegaard's thought and writing in the intervening years. The primary criteria in translating are faithfulness to the original and felicity in the second language. Inasmuch as Edna Hong does her own writing with her right hand, she better avoids the most insidious trap in translating - the syntax of the original. Therefore she did the first draft of the translation of our next undertaking, Kjerlighedens Gjerninger. Because of my work with prisoners of war, displaced persons, and refugees during 1943-1949, my part was not finished until 1959. The final copy for the press was typed at Vesterskovhus, Glums0, and was published in 1962 by Collins in England and Harper in the U.S. My task at Glums0 in 1959-1960 was to write, on Kierkegaard's philosophical anthropology, what it means to be human or to become an authentic human person. For this it was necessary to consider not only the Vcerker but also the Papirer, of which only a fraction had been translated. Because of the numerous secondary writings on Kierkegaard that continued to appear in English without adequate reference to the rich, trenchant entries in the Papirer, I realized that

4

Howard V. Hong

accessibility to the Papirer would be a more valuable contribution than another secondary piece. Therefore work was begun on Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, eventually published (1967-1978) in seven volumes by Indiana University Press. Volume I received the National Book Award for translation. While we lived in Vesterskovhus, Princeton University Press requested an amended version of the first (1937) edition of Philosophical Fragments because of various comments and suggested corrections received from scholars. Eventually Princeton Press concluded that a new and complete edition of Kierkegaard's works should be published. The way Kierkegaard came into English, primarily in the 1940s, gives some explanation of that decision. Walter Lowrie observed, »In the space of eight years thirty of S. K.'s books ... have been published in English ... by ten translators.«8 Of his translation of Begrebet Angest, he stated: »In one month I finished the job.«9 The price, however, of that multiplicity and speed was: (1) inconsistency in terminology and (2) errors and infelicities in translations. The arrangement with Princeton University Press, already the primary publisher of Kierkegaard in English, was for a new, complete, coherently translated, scholarly edition, titled Kierkegaard's Writings, under the direction of a General Editor and under the supervision of a revolving International Advisory Board with the task of criticism and approval/disapproval of submitted manuscripts. Nineteen of the twenty-five volumes have been published. Although at times Kierkegaard wrote apologetically of having had »the privilege of being able to live independently,«10 his father's prophecy, »You will never amount to anything as long as you have money,«11 was not fulfilled. Kierkegaard made good use of the time provided by an inheritance, and after the publication of the Postscript he wrote, »If I ... had not had private means, I would never, with all my disposition to depression, have reached the point I have sometimes reached.«12 The final point was a life-work of profoundly rich quality and of astounding quantity achieved in the short span of only seventeen years. Without his inheritance, Kierkegaard would have

8

9 10 11 12

Walter Lowrie »Translator's Preface« in The Concept of Dread, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944, p. v. Ibid., p. vii. JP VI 6153 (Pap. IX A 43). JP V 6131 (Pap. V I I I 1 A 640). JP V 5966 (Pap. V I I 1 A 229).

Three Score Years with Kierkegaard's Writings

5

needed some gainful occupation, and his almost miraculously produced legacy would not have been the same. In the absence of an inheritance, the needed financial support of Journals and Papers and Kierkegaard's Writings has been provided at various times during the past thirty years by generous, dependable Danish and American donors and by co-workers who have continuously contributed time and money to keep the work moving. At one point Journals and Papers was rescued by a publication subvention from the Carlsberg Foundation, which together with the Rask-0rsted Fond, the Hill Family Foundation, and the Fulbright Program supported work on the manuscripts. The primary benefactor of Kierkegaard's Writings has been the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has made direct grants and also matching grants that have been met by the Augustinus Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation, the Danish Ministry of Cultural Affairs, the Dr0nning Margrethe og Prins Henrik Foundation, the Konsul George Jorck og Hustru Emma Jorck Foundation, the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation, the A.P. M0ller og Hustru Chastine McKinney M0ller Foundation, and the Velux Foundation. St. Olaf College has contributed shared costs and quarters for the editorial center. Kierkegaard read widely in many languages. The reflection in his writings of this copious reading required that the editor-translators track down the sources of allusions, paraphrases, and quotations, which are especially numerous in the Papirer. The editor-translators' immense labor of locating sources was fortunately alleviated by Kierkegaard's practice of a principle he once expressed to his brother Peter, »that there was a certain integrity that requires one to give the source of certain thoughts and expositions.«13 In the Papirer there are many hundreds of detailed bibliographical references that make it possible for a reader to go to the source immediately - if one has the same edition! Encouraged by Gregor Malantschuk, who firmly believed that in an uncertain world it was imperative that ample Kierkegaard collections be established outside Europe, we embarked on a reconstruction of Kierkegaard's library. For this purpose a card catalog was made of all the works referred to in the Vcerker and the Papirer. The present reconstruction, although far from complete, is an excellent working collection because initially the search for volumes was based on this catalog of the works Kierkegaard actually used,

13

JP VI 6557 (Pap. X 2 A 280).

6

Howard V. Hong

which included also some titles not listed in the later reprintings of the auction catalog. The very first volumes of the reconstruction of Kierkegaard's collection (although at the time we had no idea of such an attempt) were purchased in 1938-39 because of our immediate interests: Til Selvpr0velse (1851) and Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed (1869), two first editions for seven crowns! Since then the reconstructed library, augmented by other categories of books, has grown to a collection of about ten thousand volumes and other materials. Among the categories outside the reconstruction are: a complete microfilm set of the manuscripts of the Papirer, various editions of the Vcerker and the Papirer and individual works, original copies of contemporary reviews (and Corsarenl), translations in a dozen foreign languages, dissertations in English and other languages, works by writers influenced by Kierkegaard (such as Ibsen, Jaspers, Marcel, Percy, Sartre, Unamuno, et al.), and the burgeoning number of secondary works and articles on Kierkegaard's thought. The Kierkegaard Library is a working library, not a museum (although one can find such rarities as the signed manuscript fragment »Mit Program,given by Peter Christian to Christian Bayer, and Kierkegaard's signed copy of Winther's Haandtegninger15). As a working library it has been the editorial center for the preparation of the manuscripts of Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers and of Kierkegaard's Writings. It has also been used and continues to be used by an increasing number of visiting scholars from fourteen foreign countries and the US. We are often asked, »Don't you get tired of it?« And our reply is yes and no. What is the antecedent of the pronoun »it«? During the long hours of intensive work, we do at times become tired from the labor, but that is true in any substantial enterprise and is to be expected. The task remains, and the work does not proceed unless the worker continues. Therefore at times the reply is yes if »it« means the prolonged demanding work. But the answer is no if »it« means the substance and form of the writings. Because of the richness and depth and evocative power of that »it,« we are drawn forward to enriched understanding and appreciation of the many-faceted substance 14 15

JP VI 6944 {Pap. XI 3 Β 54). Christian Winther Haandtegninger. Digte, Copenhagen 1840. Auktionsprotokol over S0ren Kierkegaards Bogsamling, ed. H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: Royal Library, 1967, no. 1593.

Three Score Years with Kierkegaard's Writings

7

and form and incited to renewed appropriation of what »it« means. Ulis »it« seems inexhaustibly rewarding, and therefore we do not get tired of it. In the simplest form, »it« is a question: »What does it mean to be, to become, a human being?« Selectively and briefly, three angles of meaning may be noted: 1. the nature of knowing, a philosophy of philosophy; 2. the continuance of becoming in the context of a given human nature; and 3. the paradox of becoming. 1. Kierkegaard's view of knowing shares the epistemological positions of the customary theories of coherence and correspondence, but his emphasis is primarily on the relation of the knower to what he knows and on the relation of the reader to what he reads. Therefore the reader Kierkegaard seeks is one »who reads aloud to himself.«16 Hie pseudonymous works are a special instance of the Socratic position of an author, a vanishing factor, in order to leave the reader alone with what he reads. »Thus I am the indifferent, that is, what and how I am are matters of indifference.«17 Kierkegaard distinguishes between disinterested knowledge and interested knowledge. In an entry with the heading »the concepts esse and inter-esse,« he notes that mathematics, in which »thought and being are one« is different from existential knowledge.18 »What is knowing without interest? It has its interest in a third (for example, beauty, truth, etc.) which is not myself, therefore has no continuity.«19 Interested knowing is such that the interested knower is engaged in the appropriation personally of what he knows. Interested knowing entails personal becoming in coherence or in correspondence with what one knows. Kierkegaard does not join in epistemological debate over epistemic claims but shifts the emphasis to the knower's relation to the kind of knowing that intrinsically lays claim upon the knower as a becoming person. »Spirit is the power a person's understanding exercises over his life.«20 »If a person does not become what he understands, then he does not understand it either.«21 As a philosophy of appropriation, it is a philosophy of engagement, of action, with the reflecting individual as the locus of initiative. Wil-

16 17 18 19 20 21

EUD, 53 (SV1 III, 271). CUD, KW XII.l, p. [626] (SV1 VII [546]). JP I 197 (Pap. IV C 100) JP II 2283 (Pap. IV C 99). JP IV 4340 (Pap. X 3 A 736). JP IV 4540 (Pap. VII 1 A 72).

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liam James was one of the first American philosophers to quote Kierkegaard. 22 On the individual as the locus of initiative and sphere of primary action, I believe that Kierkegaard would approvingly quote William James: »I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. And I am for those tiny invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride.«23 The implications for a philosophy of education are clear. Education is not production but evocation, incitement, expectation. Education is the fostering of the growth of a responsible person, the universal singular in the context of his cultural inheritance, whereas training is aimed at the development of a job function. And education is a continuing becoming; actuality is not finished. »Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward.« 24 2. Kierkegaard's ethically-centered, existential view of knowing presupposes an essentialism, the given of the universally human. Sartre asserted that there is no human nature because there is no being that can bestow that nature. 25 Kierkegaard, on the other hand, holds that the human being is teleologically anlagt til Aand,26 intended or structured for spirit, and therein lies the paradoxical mark of the greatness and glory of being human - the possibility of despair 27 Furthermore, »The misrelation of despair is not a simple misrelation but a misrelation in a relation that relates itself to itself and has been established by another, so that the misrelation in that relation which is for itself also reflects itself infinitely in relation to the power that established it.«28 The implications of the givenness of a teleologically oriented human nature are clear. Every human being has the ethical task to fulfill that nature, to become fully human, the universal singular. The tragedy is that »the majority of people actually turn off there where 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

William James Essays in Radical Empiricism, London: Longmans Green 1922, p. 288. Quoted in Paul Lee The Quality of Mercy, Santa Cruz: Plantonic Academy Press 1993, p. 12. JP I 1030 (Pap. IV A 164). Jean Paul Sartre Existentialism, New York: Philosophical Library, p. 18. SUD, 43 (SV1 XI 156). See also pp. 26,33. Ibid., p. 15 (129). Ibid., p. 14 (128).

Three Score Years with Kierkegaard's Writings

9

the higher life should ascend for them, and they become practical people, >husband, father, and champion bird hunter< ...; the majority do not experience becoming spirit at all.«29 If Vaclav Havel were here today, as all had hoped in great anticipation, he perhaps would say something about the loss of individuality, and the pervasive meaninglessness and nothingness, 30 or as he said to Jack Anderson, »the worst pollution is the pollution of spirit.«31 Kierkegaard's radical tragic optimism posits possibility even where only impossibility is seen, hope not only in the midst of despair but out of despair. He would agree with Pascal that the human being is a »deposed King,« »the pride and the refuse of the universe.« »If he exalt himself I humble him; if he humble himself I exalt him.«32 This view of human nature also provides a ground for inalienable human rights and correlative obligations. Without an ontological basis, human rights are like cut flowers and at best have only general legal status that may be granted and also may be abrogated by the political forces in power at a given time in a given country. Empirically rights are when they are observed and are not when not observed. Kierkegaard does not dwell on the phrase »human rights« but emphasizes rather the concrete »neighbor,« every other universal singular. Human rights are an aspect of an ontologically grounded personal and social ethics, radical (rooted) and inclusive. Inseparable from Kierkegaard's theistic, teleological view of human nature is the emphasis on human freedom. In his typically relentless pursuit of an issue he goes beyond the determinism/freedom debate to the seemingly insoluble question of the relation of human freedom and divine omnipotence - does not the one diminish or contradict the other? I will now read a journal entry that Cornelia Fabro called the most important page written in the nineteenth century.33 You most likely will not remember anything I say this hour, but please nail down in your memory this crucial entry. The whole question of the relation of God's omnipotence and goodness to evil (instead of the differentiation that God accomplishes the good and merely permits the evil) is resolved quite simply in the following way. The greatest good, after all, that can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do for it, is to make it free. In order to do just that, omnipotence is required. This seems strange, since it is

2S 30 31 32 33

JP III 3567 {Pap. X 1 A 679). Vaclav Havel De Magtesl0ses Magt, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1992, pp. 155,161-162. Oral report, repeated on CNN October 13,1996. Pascal Pensees, New York: Modern Library 1981, no. 398,434,420, pp. 127,143,132. Lecture at St. Olaf College, April, 1965.

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precisely omnipotence that supposedly would make [a being] dependent. But if one will reflect on omnipotence, one will see that it also must contain the unique qualification of being able to withdraw itself again in a manifestation of omnipotence in such a way that precisely for this reason that which has been originated through omnipotence can be independent. This is why one human being cannot make another person wholly free, because the one who has power is himself captive in having it and therefore continually has a wrong relationship to the one whom he wants to make free. Moreover, there is a finite self-love in all finite power (talent, etc.). Only omnipotence can withdraw itself at the same time it gives itself away, and this relationship is the very independence of the receiver. God's omnipotence is therefore his goodness. For goodness is to give oneself away completely, but in such a way that by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the recipient independent. All finite power makes [a being] dependent; only omnipotence can make [a being] independent, can form from nothing something that has its continuity in itself through the continuous withdrawing of omnipotence. Omnipotence is not ensconced in a relationship to an other, for there is no other to which it is comparable - no, it can give without giving up the least of its power, that is, it can make [a being] independent. It is incomprehensible that omnipotence is able not only to create the most impressive of all things - the whole visible world - but is able to create the most fragile of all things - a being independent of that very omnipotence. Omnipotence, which can handle the world so toughly and with such a heavy hand, can also make itself so light that what it has brought into existence receives independence. Only a wretched and mundane conception of the dialectic power holds that it is greater and greater in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent. No, Socrates had a sounder understanding; he knew that the art of power lies precisely in making another free. But in the relationship between individuals this can never be done, even though it needs to be emphasized again and again that this is the highest; only omnipotence can truly succeed in this. Therefore if a human being had the slightest independent existence over against God (with regard to materia [substance]), then God could not make him free. Creation out of nothing is once again the Omnipotent One's expression for being able to make [a being] independent. He to whom I owe absolutely everything, although he still absolutely controls everything, has in fact made me independent. If in creating man God himself lost a little of his power, then precisely what he could not do would be to make a human being independent. 34

3. The paradox of becoming fully human is that spiritual progress, is in part retrogression, is a downward ascent. The underside of the unreflected esthetic life, the life of immediacy, the life centered in the satisfaction of desires, is a never-ending movement of satisfaction/ boredom and non-fulfillment/frustration. The underside of the ethical life is guilt and despair of fulfilling the ideal. The unreflected life is not worth living. But at times the reflected life may seem not to be livable. As the vision of the highest good becomes clearer in its progressive elevation, the ethical pilgrim is diminished in his self-esteem. The underside of the ethical life is guilt and despair. Faced with universality of guilt, Ivan, in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, declares 34

JP II 1251 CPap. VII 1 A 181).

Three Score Years with Kierkegaard's Writings

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that he wants to »return Him the ticket.«35 Alyosha replies, »Brother, ... there is a Being and He can forgive everything.«36 Whereas the esthetic life is a life of enjoyment and the ethical life one of duty, the religious life is the life of gift, which catches up and transforms the esthetic and the ethical in their bankruptcy. Christianly the emphasis does not fall so much upon to what extent or how far a person succeeds in meeting or fulfilling the requirement, if he actually is striving, as it is upon his getting an impression of the requirement in all its infinitude so that he rightly learns to be humbled and to rely upon grace ... infinite humiliation and grace, and then a striving born of gratitude.17

In the gift of forgiveness and grace, the life-motivation is moved from desire and obligation to gratitude, the imperative ethics to an indicative ethics of grateful response to the gift. In the meaningful life of the gift, the striving is intensified and released in the nonchalance of the unburdened, grateful self that looks upon the utmost striving as a jest, as a gesture pointing to the gift, to the Archimedean fulcrum outside the world of finitude. In a time of dehumanization, disintegration, meaninglessness, and despair, Kierkegaard's writings bring a philosophy of penetrating honesty, radical hope, and transcendent possibility. Kierkegaard believed not only that »there will come a time when a Dane will be proud of me qua author« but also that his thought would get a suitable hearing. »Conditions are still far from being confused enough for proper use to be made of me. But it will all end, as they shall see, with conditions getting so desperate that they must make use of desperate people like me and my kind.«38 Kierkegaard's rediscovered writings clearly speak to our condition in this century and the next. The editions of Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers and Kierkegaard's Writings39 and the work of the Kierkegaard Library40 are a labor of love in appreciation of the worth of Denmark's foremost thinker and

35 36 37 38 39

40

The Brothers Karamazov, New York: Modern Library, n.d., p. 291. Ibid., p. 292. JP I 993 (Pap. X 3 734). JP VI 6709a (Pap. X 3 A 68). James Collins »Annual Review of Philosophy« in Cross Currents, Spring 1979, pp. 40-41: »The face of English-language Kierkegaard studies will be profoundly modified in the wake of two new translation projects ... S0ren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers ... Kierkegaard's Writings.« Flemming Behrendt »Kierkegaard i Nordamerika« in Weekendavisen Berlingske Aften, May 30, 1980: »Efter Det kongelige Bibliotek er der intet sted i verden rigere mulighed for at fordybe sig i studiet af Kierkegaard.«

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writer and are contributions to making his invigorating thought more accessible throughout the world. Similar contributions are being made by many translators in many countries. We trust that our experience will encourage them to persist in the slow, long and difficult task. The substance of Kierkegaard's writings is eminently worth the labor. The translator's private reward is one's own immersion in that substance. The unseen harvest is the penetrating, transforming influence of those writings made accessible to other readers in their own language.

Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Romanticism B y ERNST BEHLER

As the title of my paper already indicates, the subject is Kierkegaard's relationship to romanticism. Irony is to be taken as the tertium comparationis for this study, the means by which this comparison between Kierkegaard and romanticism will be conducted. As it turns out, however, this comparison also affects the concept of irony and shows that in relation to Kierkegaard no subject matter remains the same. In a certain way we can say that romanticism and irony are synonymous for Kierkegaard. He said this best himself when with regard to his early book On the Concept of Irony he mentioned: »Throughout this whole discussion I use the terms >irony< and the >ironistromanticism< and >romanticistreligious drama< is »a form of drama in which the real focus is not the Tragic Hero but the divine background.« This conception may result, he says, in »religious drama in which the gods do not appear, and secular drama in which they do.«16 This view of religious drama is more philosophically adroit - and more religious in a sense which the New Testament, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and even Calvin would recognize - than the positivism that argues that if »no supernatural agent intervenes from a gallery above to compel the action [and so the result] in a particular direction [... this,] I would claim, encour-

16

H.D.F. Kitto Form and Meaning in Drama, London 1956, p. 251.

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ages us to a secular and sceptical reading of the play,« as does Michael Hattaway.17 But if Hattaway's poetic determinism is at least positively unChristian, Kitto's understanding of religion is still metaphysically positivistic. It makes of the gods (the divine background) a substantial thing, which can be found and tested for like other substances, and in whose world the result can be seen. When Christians turn to metaphysics, however, they find that God is beyond substance, since it is by his act that all the substances that are are substances.18 These two versions of religious drama, let us call them the literally and the figuratively religious, fairly well divide the field. 19 We might compare Hattaway to photographic realism and Kitto to cubism in painting. Among the literally religious, then, would be plays like Euripides' Bacchae, in which the god begins the play by announcing what he will do and why, and then proceeds to do it; Goethe's Faust, in which the god sits on high and pulls strings; or various medieval Christmas plays, in which the god appears as a character (the revealed infant in the Second Shepherd's Play) who has been moving, or does in fact move, the action of the play - and all the world - according to his revealed script.20 Such plays Hattaway would have to consider religious, though I wonder if Euripides' play, as Goethe's, is not stridently anti-religious, if not precisely skeptical. In this case al-

17 18

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20

Michael Hattaway Hamlet, Atlantic Highlands, NJ 1987, p. 83, italics original. That God is not a substance, see, for example, Augustine De Doctrina Christiana Prologue VI.6; Aquinas Summa Contra Gentiles 1.25.3. R.M. Frye »Theological and Non-theological Structures in Tragedy« in Shakespeare Studies IV 1968, pp. 132-148 makes a similar division when he claims that »the basic issue is as to how fully the developments of plot and character represent dramatic adaptations of theological doctrine« (p. 146, my italics). This phrasing hints at the kind of artistic continuum between naked metaphysics and thick allegory I will shortly develop, but Frye wishes it to be a more absolute distinction, rather than what it is - a dialectical relation in which the opposites are inseparable. For instance, in his comparison of Macbeth and Dr. Faustus he says that while both are referred to as damned, »Marlowe's development is inherently, insistently and essentially theological in a way that Shakespeare's is not« (p. 134). That there are so many adjectives indicates where the weight of the argument lies - on »way,« for Frye's analysis goes a long way towards showing that Shakespeare is (at least) allegorically or figuratively religious, where Marlowe is more literally so. Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton 1957, called the last of these plays by the name auto: they are themselves like presentations of eternity. As he says, such drama presents »to the audience a myth already familiar« and it is »designed to remind the audience of their communal possession of the myth« (p. 282). It is itself »neither comic nor tragic, being primarily spectacular« (p. 283).

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most nothing in Shakespeare is religious, for even when the gods appear - in As You Like It or the Tempest - they are merely spectacular in Aristotle's sense: the least important element of tragedy, an excuse for special effects, but no prime mover of the play.21 Their appearance is sudden, unexpected, and bends the trajectory of the plot not a fragment of a degree: they are stars without any mass. That there are people who think of God as such an impossibility goes without saying. St. Augustine comes to mind, who spent thirty painful years of his life trying to overcome his carnal imagination's thought of God as some »great shining body« 22 more ethereal than air and brighter: a special effect of the imagination, an empty figment. Perhaps, if Shakespeare is a religious writer, his use of the visible gods in As You Like It and the Tempest is to show us just this fact: a god visible in a body would be mere spectacle - that version of show and tell than which no greater can be conceived. Kitto's figurative understanding of religious drama depends upon the literal; its positivism is hidden by the veil of allegory or symbol or trope, but through or in this veil those with eyes can see »the real focus« on another world. One form of this would be Sr. Miriam Joseph's view of Christian tragedy, which is like Aristotle's in all things except that the incidents which bring about the catharsis must »have Christian significance,« and the hero must bring about the disastrous peripety »through a flaw in his character as a Christian.« 23 A wide variety of drama would fit this category. The allegories, symbols and tropes may not be in a one to one correspondence with gods or events in the other world - the artist may be practicing a kind of cubism avant la lettre - but the figurative religious critic will be able to show each line's real focus, its angle of incidence and refraction on the metaphysical nude descending the staircase. Most religiously oriented criticism follows this allegorical procedure, tracing figures and symbols in the play - sometimes from a wide variety of perspectives - which all together reveal a face beneath or in the texture of the

21

22 23

In fact, only in As You Like It does the goddess appear in person, so to speak. In Tempest there are spirits masquerading as goddesses; in Cymbeline and Pericles the gods appear in dreams. In Pericles the dream Diana makes the king bend his ship to her altar, not to vengeance, but then Pericles, with all its testing of virtue, chorusing, and dumb-show approaches closest to the mystery play and auto. St. Augustine Confessions IV.16.31, V.10.20. Sr. Miriam Joseph »Hamlet: A Christian Tragedy« in Studies in Philology, vol. LXI, no. 2, April 1962, p. 119.

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play.24 This is, quite naturally, one way of reading Kierkegaard also. Among such readers the particularities of the objective correlative to the work of art become the debated question: What emotion, theme, ritual pattern, religious or romantic sacrament is here objectified? Is the face the face of the saved or the damned? the demonic or godly seducer? But that the play (or Kierkegaard's authorship) is the objective correlative to some face and figure and that they are on some metaphysical, passional, thematic or ritual staircase is agreed upon. The simplest version of this figurative kind is what usually goes by the name of allegory - the repentant Magdalene before a mirror, hand on a skull, her perfume bottles empty, her candle burning down, or the hunt for a unicorn around a tapestry at the center of which is a marriage, or Everyman. An allegory of this strict or simplest type is made of very thin cloth; the index of refraction is minimal; it is all but naked metaphysics, or metaphysics of morals. It is Hattaway's photographic realism, with patina. Most drama, certainly Shakespeare, is much more complex than that. We may then refract our reading via a further multitude of critical methods (psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, etc.) which encourage a richer set of perspectives that can be turned against each other, or piled up in a reading of the play (or authorship) in question. It is clear that given a subconscious whose index of refraction is almost infinite, and with free association raised to the level of a method, nearly anything can be interpreted as religious in this figurative manner, though of course the sane will have a tendency to be convinced of some of them more easily and completely than others. Both Shakespeare's plays and Kierkegaard's texts have proven mansion enough for many varieties of such readers. No less than the literal, these figurative ways of reading - for all their different darksome ways of love - still rest on and point to or adumbrate an external substance or set thereof - a positive world behind the veil: where the grass is green, the wine is red, and I have such beautiful long ears upon my head. It is a world where dogma is substantial, demonstration is complete, and passion impossible. Both ways of reading or understanding religious drama share the fact of being representative, and representation implies a gnoseology, even if such a system of correspondence to the world is not explicitly applied - as we generally do not apply one in the case of art. The implied gnoseology reifies a »represented« of the dramatic representation, 24

D.G. James The Dream of Learning, Oxford 1965, pp. 84-89 uses allegory in the broadened sense I am using it here.

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and so where historical critics find Elizabethan fact, or »the residual, dominant and emergent elements which coexist at any cultural moment,« 25 and Freudians uncover the primal scene of sexual neuroses, religious readers discover the foggy embankments and swiftly melting icebergs of dogmatic metaphysics. Similar patterns of reading can be found among readers of Kierkegaard's texts: there is Theodore Adorno, there is Sylviane Agacinski, there is a clutch of dogmatists of various creeds, including the author of The Point of View for My Work as An Author.

III. The Sphere of the Writ: The Problem of Literature as Representation I think, though here I cannot show, that representation and its implied gnoseology is at one with the view that knowledge is power. This view holds particular attractions in a scientistic culture, for science seems to prove that it is true: we understand in order to eat or eat better. The equation between knowledge (representations of the world which are true) and power (ability to move the world in accord with desire thanks to knowledge of the world's connections) leaves literature in an unhappy predicament. For in such a circumstance literature can only be seen as a pre-social-scientific means of knowing other people. It is related to the real knowledge granted by social science as anecdote is to evidence: lends color when used with discretion. That many teachers of literature teach literature as if it were a set of facts about a world (the world of the play) reinforces this idea, and proves to the student that literature really is useless, for the world of the play is not the real world and though the world of the play may be like the real world (or may have been a reflection of a real world in the past) the difficult trick is to know how and in what ways it is like it now (in order to capitalize on them), and knowing that is not something you learn from the play. Summa summarum: literature is an extremely arcane way of learning something that can be got a lot quicker and more exactly elsewhere. But what if the knowledge = power equation is not entirely true? What could this mean? Early in the Republic, Socrates suggests to Thrasymachus that if he - Socrates - is mistaken about justice then 25

Jonathan Dollimore Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Chicago 1984, p. 7, italics original.

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he ought to suffer the appropriate punishment, namely »I should suffer to learn from you« (337d). Now it is clear that Thrasymachus considers knowledge to be power, and that he is more than willing to make Socrates suffer to learn it. But is there not another possibility, a possibility we might see at work in books 2-9 of Augustine's Confessions, for example? We all, as Augustine, like to feel good about ourselves; but what if there is something better than ourselves to which we are, or can be - and so ought to be - related? Then in relation to it how must we feel about ourselves? And if we are to change in order to be more like, more closely related to, that Good, what must we do? Do not some parts of us (about which we feel good) have to die? Is the knowledge of the Good, then, power? Or is it not, rather, the opposite of power: suffering. And the greater the coming into the Good, the greater the coming to know, the greater the suffering. Except of course for those of us who are perfect. »Beauty,« says Rilke, »is nothing/save the beginning of a terror we can just barely endure,/ and we are amazed by it too, for it calmly disdains/to destroy us.«26 Then could it be that literature, the humanities in general - the arts of the muses - are concerned with that form of knowledge which subverts our scientific religion's major premise: that knowledge is power? To learn a foreign language, for example, is to suffer the will and culture and history of another group of people to shape your mind; it is a way of coming to know other subjects as subjects, rather than as objects in the world. That is entirely different from (and much more difficult than) the scientific - including the social scientific - way of knowing, which is always of objects. To say that this process is good is not to say that the culture and language one is learning are good. Some are not. (Dansk er godt.) What is good is the learning to see. Suffering to see. Similarly, what literature accomplishes, if anything, is that in and through it we suffer something other than our own pleasure to draw nearer to us. And in the best cases that other is the good. Would that help to explain the effect of King Learl With Lear we practice feeling what goodness costs. We do not learn (for we already know) what it costs; we practice feeling it. And this is how virtue begins, for knowledge is not virtue.27

26

27

Rainer Maria Rilke »Die Erste Elegie « in Duino Elegies, with an English translation by C.F. Maclntyre, Berkeley 1961.1 have changed the translation slightly. I have no doubt that part of my thought here is due to remembering Iris Murdoch's fine essay, »The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts« in The Sovereignty of Good, London 1970. It should be noted apropos contemporary difficulties about

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What I mean by this is not just that we see Cordelia, for instance, paying for her goodness by being defeated on the battlefield and hanged. Nor do I mean to imply that Lear suffers unjustly or excessively or because of his goodness - some of those things are questionable. Cordelia suffers to be good and by being good; we love the good in her and suffer with that good. The good in us practices suffering with her. Lear is stubborn, self-willed and confused about the difference between being father and being king (an error we hope God will never make); he suffers to learn to be otherwise. And we suffer in his learning too, for there is much in us that is otherwise. If »tragedy is born in the west each time that the pendulum of civilisation is halfway between a sacred society and a society built around man,«28 perhaps it is because only in such a society that the idea of a good beyond oneself - or, other than one's own and our own power, as the children of Thrasymachus define it in Republic - is plausible and effective. On the other hand, when the Good is considered to be entirely relative to custom, social practice, or ideology, tragedy reduces to either neurosis (the opinion of a large number of critics and actors, particularly Freudian ones, about Hamlet) or a paid political announcement for the party of opposition (a screed for the politically, economically, sexually and maybe even militarily oppressed - or at least those who perceive that they are). Similar patterns of reading can be found among Kierkegaard's critics. I will be so bold as to dispose of such materialism in this paragraph. It seems to me in reading historical materialist critics, like Dollimore and Adorno, that the entire project is a very complex response to a false dilemma. The dilemma is either there is an individual with a pre-social essence/nature/identity and therefore autonomy (the bour-

28

sovereignty that Murdoch's use of the phrase is not followed with an ontologicai (or onto-theological) elaboration of that sovereign Good; such elaborations are considered by many (Levinas, Lacan, Derrida) to be both philosophically unjustifiable and profoundly unethical. Murdoch's use of the phrase arises, rather, (as it does in Republic) in an epistemological setting: in particular, the setting in Murdoch is seeing the other for what she is, and in Plato it is seeing the real. We should remember that in Plato the mind, while needing the Good, is perfused, as the eye, with its sovereign light: being finite, a human being could be absolutely sovereign only by virtue of an illusion; but a human being can be entirely sovereign - or not, by allowing herself to be perfused (or not). For some more scholarly thoughts on this subject see Drucilla Cornell »Rethinking the Beyond of the Real« in Cordozo Law Review, vol. 16, no. 3-4, pp. 729-792. Albert Camus Selected Essays and Notebooks, trans, by Philip Thody, Harmondsworth 1970, p. 199.

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geois lackey running dog essentialist humanist positions - boo) or there is a flux of material powers - sex, capital, class, race - the axes of which flow through bodies constituting their particularity (on which radical, avant garde, deconstructivist praxis exerts its own power - yay). The idea of a pre-social essence or identity seems to me to be a peculiar glitch in the history of philosophy; like many other glitches it seems to have become popular in France and the Low Countries in the 1600's. It later migrated to Sweden, where it became immortal. The counter idea, shared by Socrates in the Republic and Aristotle in the Politics - that man is the social animal - is precisely the denial of the first horn without embracing the second as gospel. The classical position - counter to both modern and postmodern - can be put this way: selves come to exist in the world of language, and language never being private means there is no pre-existent essence.29 The historical materialists are right that selves come to be in historically diverse cultures with materially and historically distinct languages; the essentialists are right that the individual which comes to be has autonomy and can judge, creatively shape and reject, and form laws for his own action in that language. I have long been enamoured of the idea that Derrida himself knows this, since the end of »Plato's Pharmacy« has that vision of Plato staring into the glass of his retort and seeing himself there. That image shows that the question whether the subject uses language which he makes, or whether language makes the subject who speaks is an unanswerable one; that it is unanswerable shows the question is a false dilemma.30 In literature it is not our knowledge, in the popular - equals power - sense, that is enriched, but our suffering begins, and is given shape, and works deeper. As this is different from what we consider when we consider drama as representation, let us call this the mimetic effect of literature. The purpose of literature, then, is to purify our suf-

29

30

Even this »none« is perhaps too strong, for how could sex be made to bear the semiotic burden it carries, were sexual difference and desire not a central element of the common human condition? Particular constructions build out of our common earth, and on it. The word is breathed into mud of a particular shape, as an older story has it. Even so, sex is not a private difference, for difference is a term of relation. Even feminist historicist critics are coming around to this point; cf. Lyndal Roper Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, London 1994. I think that Plato's Ion illustrates this point; Ion buys the false dilemma and repeatedly gores himself on either horn. Conclusion: leave the horns alone, grab further down - on the nose.

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fering, to effect our affects, to shape our passions through the form and pressure of the Good. Now the question becomes which passions can literature shape? Pity and fear - certainly; desire, disgust, sympathy - no doubt. Faith?

IV. Released from the Writ: A Third Kind of Religious Drama? The Kierkegaardian understanding of faith as a passion is a means of avoiding such carnal imaginings as troubled Augustine for so long. As was suggested above, to think of faith in God as akin to knowledge we have of created substances, makes us consider the what of faith as something substantial about which we may not have knowledge but can have correct or incorrect belief. We then go about trying to discover what the what is in order to have true belief, or at least a justifiable one. In a word, representation considers religion as dogma, faith an analogy for knowledge. Kierkegaard seems to consider this philosophical approach to the sacred completely wrongheaded and in order to overthrow the issue at one blow regularly uses the rubric of faith as a passion, and religion a work [Kjerlighedsgjerninger].31 A passion is a qualification of substance, an adjective applicable to the noun - or not. Kierkegaard's religious project - if it is a religious project - is to gain this qualification for himself, and to structure his writings in such a way that the reader performs a mimesis of coming up to this qualification. He calls his authorship an indirect communication. He cannot make the reader have the qualification, still less can the qualification be taught as one may teach about substances, for the qualification is not affirming the conclusion of an argument, but the various authors - some having it, others avoiding it, still others circling it - can mimetically bring the reader to face the problem or begin the practices of qualifying her substance religiously - or not. That is how, if at all, Kierkegaard is an »existentialist« or »religious« - his problem is how (quomodo, in what way) do I exist, not whether, or what kinds of, and what (ontological) conditions are necessary for the (ontic) things that exist, and his problem opposes him to that manner of philosophy which is positive and scientific, whether it is openly

31

Hans Urs Von Balthasar Theo-drama, vol. 2, San Francisco 1990, is making this Kierkegaardian point when he says that faith is »not a dry holding-as-true: it means that we allow God's praxis to take effect in us,« p. 68.

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metaphysical or not; that is to say, he is opposed to most of the philosophical tradition since, say, Ockham, including people he is sometimes lumped together with like Sartre or Heidegger. It is more true to say Kierkegaard's is not a philosophical authorship than to say it is a certain kind of philosophical authorship, for his aim is not even to give a science of the hows, but to make something happen. It is a dramatic authorship; one which makes the reader a player.32 To respond to all this with »yes, but there is a God in reference to whom this passion makes sense, isn't there?« is precisely to fall back into the positive philosophical explorations that avoid the task of becoming a substance qualified religiously in favor of discovering the truth value of some representation. But this is precisely to have another passion - a different one from faith, if faith is a passion - and one that casts faith out.33 As in love, so too in faith: to question the existence of a substance and seek for proof is to prove oneself incapable of seeing what is asked about, for one is looking in the wrong way: See Lear; see him look at Cordelia the wrong way; hear him ask the wrong question; and in his world love is no longer visible: madness follows. Watch Othello lose love as one might lose a handkerchief: madness. As there is no such thing as immediate proof of love except that kind of love which is associated with social diseases like goneril and regan - so there is no proof for the existence of God. Nor could you get there from the proof, as you would not get to love through a social disease. Edmund is mistaken when he thinks he has evidence he was beloved.34 Deceiving oneself about how love exists is the most effective way of deceiving oneself out of love. The only thing that one may possibly prove in love is that one is oneself a lover; the only thing one may prove by a lifetime's work is that oneself had faith. But even to speak this way is to speak too much, as Cordelia might teach us; for who would one wish to prove it to? And 32

33

34

This is not a new idea about Kierkegaard. It might have its origin in Constantin Constantius' Repetition, which concludes with a letter addressed to »Mr. X, Esq., The real reader of this book.« See also Louis Mackey Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia 1971, and Chapter 3 of my For What May I Hope? New York 1990. Frater Taciturnus is a good example of this problem. He says »I am not an offended person, far from it, but neither am I religious. The religious interests me as a phenomenon and as the phenomenon that interests me most. Therefore, it is not for the sake of humanity but for my own sake that it distresses me to see religiousness vanish, because I wish to have material for observation« (SL, 463). An adamant atheist is closer to becoming faithful than this. Frater Taciturnus wishes to look the wrong way, therefore he can never approach. King Lear, Act 5, scene 3, line 240.

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then, doesn't every lover know that her own work must be filled out by a love more perfect than her own? And every believer knows a similar truth. Faith without works is dead; but works do not prove, or bring one into, salvation. I would prefer to say the works and the salvation are one. Cordelia, in one sense, proves her love; but she does not seek to prove her love, and she does not prove it as far as she is concerned; she loves. We believe her because we see; Lear should have believed without seeing, then he would have been blessed. That he can only believe by seeing is one indication that he believes the wrong thing - even at the end. The kind of distinction I wish to draw between mimesis and representation is like Kierkegaard's distinction between indirect and direct communication. The purpose of indirect communication is to communicate a capacity, while direct communication communicates knowledge. So far as I remember, Kierkegaard does not say that every direct communication entails some indirect communication or vice versa, but I think that is true: every representational effort is a mimesis of something.35 For example, my telling you about all these things in a scholarly fashion looks like direct communication, but in saying so we are overlooking a capacity which this discussion calls forth, and the passion which it feeds - the capacity and desire for knowledge such as it obtains in scholarship. That is not the same thing as the knowledge. Perhaps most scholarly writing is as boring as it is because most scholars figure that we are already as passionate as we need to get about knowledge. This indicates a tawdry level of passion, for what lover ever has said he loves his beloved enough already? When Kierkegaard mocks the professorial class, it is for just this reason: they are very like lovers, they lack only the song upon their lips and the passion in their hearts [kun havde ikke Qvalerne i Hjertet, ikke Musikken paa Lceberne]. Kitto comes close to the conception explicated by Frater Taciturnus when he says that »the real power of these [religious] plays is revealed only when we see that he was making drama not about individuals but about humanity - humanity torn by contrary passions, or by the conflict between its passions and its reason.«36 But Kitto was really treating the whole play as the being with the dialectical passion, 35

36

For more detail on this topic see my article, »Intentionality and Mimesis: Canonic Variations on an Ancient Grudge, Scored for New Mutinies« in Sub/Stance 75, December 1994, pp. 46-74. H.D.F. Kitto Form and Meaning, p. 214.

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rather than the individual human being. That the individual is not a human being becomes even more clear when Kitto explicates certain characters like Clytemnestra and Antigone as pawns of Dike. Under such an understanding, as in Romeo and Juliet, the dialectic is still external, or as Taciturnus calls it, immediate: Clytemnestra vs. Agamemnon, Antigone vs. Creon. Kitto's definition has the advantage over Hattaway's (and Taciturnus') of allowing that Medieval mystery plays in which God does not appear are religious drama, for there it is clearly the divine background that is made the focus - the greater powers and tasks hidden in life are >constructed< into drama and the characters hardly exist in their own right.37 Taciturnus would say, however, that Professor Kitto's idea of religious drama is too broad. Kitto clearly thinks that in order to be religious the characters must be taken up by something larger than themselves. But according to Taciturnus that is true of every tragic hero or heroine - religious or no. Where the associate professor with his vested retirement plan is a figure only suitable for farce, along with the sausage peddler and the schoolgirl, both Romeo and Juliet are taken up by a power greater than themselves. Taciturnus would clearly not call their tragedy a religious one; Kitto, presumably, would have to. The romantics would agree, Romeo and Juliet being one of the gods of their idolatry. If love and religion involve ontologically (not just ontically) distinct passions, this argument should be enough to make us consider the road which Taciturnus lines out as impossible, for he seems to have something right about religion - its ontological distinctness. We may, however, make a further argument against Kitto's view. Let us call to mind that it is possible to be taken up by any number of passions - Romeo and Juliet are one version of romantic love, but so is Emmeline in Scribe's farce First Love,38 Like Juliet, Emmeline will

37

38

It is interesting that both Kitto and Taciturnus use the same term - construction to point up what the religious dramatist and the religious novelist do. Even more surprising, what Kitto means by the constructive method is, I think, exactly what Taciturnus means. He distinguishes it from »representation«, which seems to him to go along with naturalism (pp. 210-213) and holds that, against the Elizabethans, »the real basis of a classical Greek tragedy is not the story ... Nor is it the people who figure in the story ... The formative and controlling idea in a Greek play ... is some religious or philosophical conception« (p. 209). This is precisely true of Taciturnus' construction - he constructs his story in accord with the dialectical ideal, the philosopher's problem. See the review of this play, »The First Love« in Either/Or Vol. 1, KW III, 231-279.

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not let the world stand in the way of her passion either. We should not, however, wish to call the passion of a girl in a comic farce a religious passion. Taciturnus' definition allows that there is a difference between the passions represented in such a play, and the passion of a religious person. Kitto, on the other hand, must call Emmeline's difficulties with the world religious, for she struggles to live up to a philosophical conception (one she learned from her Aunt Judith's romance novels, to be sure, but an ideal nonetheless); it is a task every bit as difficult as Antigone's. It will turn out that along Taciturnus' road we will find no Greek tragedies, for the heroes and heroines of Greek drama are not dialectical, but grasped by a passion. That is an interesting conclusion, posing problems I shall have to put off, but it saves us from having to put Emmeline, or Juliet, on the same plane as Joan of Arc - the saint, not the tragic heroine of Shaw. In any case, that no Greek tragedy was religious would not disturb the Kierkegaard who tried to introduce Christianity into a paganism which called itself Christendom, and I do not think it would disturb Taciturnus, for he uses the Greeks as examples of the aesthetic, not the religious (5L, 457f.). He says of the Greeks what Kitto says, that they construct according to the idea, and »only when it relates to the idea is [suffering] a matter of concern« (SL, 457). But being taken up by something greater than oneself is not, ipso facto, religious.

V. The Problem of the WritCan There Be Tragedy under Representation's Idea of Religious Drama? Under the ordinary representative (literal and figurative) understandings of religious drama, I suppose the answer to this question depends upon the religion. Clearly, Greek religion, in which the gods are eternal but the human beings are not, would allow for cases of tragedy such as one might think the Oresteia is: Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Orestes have to suffer, but their suffering sets things right up on Olympus - all the gods get their share of blood and so none of them feel unduly shamed. This is, in fact, what Athene's final argument in Orestes comes down to: the divine background of the family's history is made visible and the debts to all the gods are shown paid in full. Perhaps this sets things right on earth as well, but in any case human flaws incite a divine and totalizing punishment: that is tragic. In Christianity this is not possible. Under the

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aforementioned literal and figurative way of reading, it seems either that there can be no such thing as tragedy, since Christianity teaches that death is not the end; or, that the only kind of tragedy there is is loss of one's soul. In that case, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus would be a religious tragedy, and whether Hamlet is so or not depends on whether one sees the nude descending or ascending the staircase. If Hamlet is saved, it becomes hard to see the play as tragic, for from the religious view he wins. I wonder, in fact, if we can call it a religious tragedy if he loses, as Sr. Miriam (among others) think; for if he loses, how can we, who wish to be saved, identify with him and lose? Fear is occasioned by the misfortune of one like ourselves, and pity by undeserved misfortune;39 this latter neither Hamlet nor Dr. Faustus could earn. A.C. Bradley and Sylvan Barnet argued similarly long ago: »The constant presence of Christian beliefs ... would confuse and even destroy the tragic impression.«40 The Christian pattern is comic, since »the heart of Christianity is the resurrection, for if Christ is not risen, faith is a foolish hope, and death is not succeeded by life«41 - there is no tragedy for those dying good. On the other hand, »under the tutelage of Vergil, Dante learned that human pity for the damned is presumptuous and incompatible with Divine Justice.«42 Presumably the fact that Vergil teaches this to Dante means that the natural light of reason can teach the misguided Sister who thinks Hamlet a tragic hero the error of her ways: there is nothing here to pity either way 43 We see the proper response in Albany, more audience than actor to the horrors of Lear: »This judgment of the heavens that makes us tremble, touches us not with pity.«44

39 40

41 42 43

44

Rhetoric 1453a#5-7. Sylvan Barnet »Some Limitations of a Christian Approach to Shakespeare« in English Literary History, vol. 22, p. 85; he is quoting A.C. Bradley Shakespearean Tragedy, London 1919. Sylvan Barnet »Some Limitations,« p. 82. Sylvan Barnet »Some Limitations,« p. 90; he is referring to Inferno XX, 27-30. In Plato's Laws the Athenian stranger says that »it is permissable to pity such [an unjust] man when his illness is curable; ... but against the purely evil, perverted man who cannot be corrected, one must let one's anger have free rein« (731d). This remark takes its place under a discussion of proper awe, and the necessity for reverence if there is to be any moral life at all. (»Thus far the things that have been said describing practices ... concern mainly the divine things« 732e). Here Aristotle and Plato agree: »No good man can be pained by the punishment of parricides or murderers. These are things we are bound to rejoice at, as we must at the prosperity of the deserving; both these things are just« (Rhetoric 1386b 28-30, cf. 1386bl3-15). King Lear, Act 5, scene 3, lines 233f.

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In order to get what we call the tragic effect does not the suffering have to exceed the desert; is this not the only way our pity is rightly raised? In the Greek tragedies what happens to the Trojan women, for example, is entirely exorbitant; so, too, what happens to Oedipus, though, largely, he does it to himself. To the Athenians at war a performance of the Trojan Women will perhaps lead them to moderate their self-pity, and keep them from the excessive fear that led the Greeks at Troy to slaughter all the male children and make all the women slaves. In the experience of the play those Athenians mime pity for the enemy, and fear and disgust for Ulysses, devious and untouchable. So pity drives out pity and fear drives out fear: catharsis.45 It is proper to have such pity and such fear as the play leaves us with; the original self-pity and fear is neither suitable nor good. Hie excesses of the plays do not raise the question of justice except in so far as they raise it about our treatment of our enemies, and our feelings about ourselves. The play succeeds at doing this precisely because there is no other world imagined in the texture of the play, or by the audience suffering it, than this one. In the Christian case, however, if we pity Othello for his eternal and his earthly loss - the suicide and the murder (which was forgiven) - do we not complain against the justice of God? Or, if Macbeth is led to his damnation - and knows it, what is tragic about it? Is it not horrible, horrible, most horrible? For in these plays, though the acts in the play are Macbeth's or Othello's, is not the metaphysical punishment we imagine visited upon them from a far less passionate, less tractable source than Iago's steely hate, or Ulysses' self-protective politicness? There is no shifting of passion. Pity is presumptuous. Against this justice who can stand? It seems perfectly correct, from the point of view of dogma, to agree with Barnet's conclusion that »the rigidly Christian interpretation forces a tragedy to fit ideas which Shakespeare doubtless held but did not dramatize.«46 No

45

46

It will be noted that I here opt for the homeopathic theory of catharsis; see Elizabeth S. Belfiore Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion, Princeton 1992, chapters 8 and 9.1 am not certain that we must choose between allopathic and homeopathic versions of catharsis in a theory of tragedy, since tragedy is not a theory, but a set of individuals - rather like medicinal drugs - which may work rather differently in this regard while yet remaining true to what Aristotle calls the final cause - catharsis of pity and fear. We see the allopathic and then the homeopathic forms of catharsis in the speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony respectively in Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene 2. Sylvan Barnet »Some Limitations,« p. 92.

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doubt Shakespeare realized the problem that stands before even the attempt at such a dramatization, as Taciturnus hinted. A marriage between Christianity and aesthetics is a misalliance. But Barnet's argument - as those he argues against - arises from and draws its conclusions on the basis of Christianity as dogma. The point of view of dogma is the point of view of representation; and drama, while it uses representation, is a mimesis. (This may be what Kierkegaard saw that Taciturnus did not see: there is another point of view.47) Further, if we were to take Barnet's conclusion for granted, we would again have to raise the question of the worth and significance of art. For how, in fact, if Shakespeare - and his audience too held such beliefs as Barnet thinks were doubtless theirs, could dramas of a world which made no representative reference to or mimetic emotional contact with the religion they supposedly held affect his audience at all? If faith is the passion of a life and like the passionate love of marriage pervades one's life how could a work of art which does not fit, or purify, or touch that passion be of any importance at all? A decorative knick-knack or a jig: such plays could never be anything other than titillation, attaching to no real passion. In fact, must they not be seen as absolute evil - as purposed distraction? Drama moved the real passions of the Greeks, not passions they tried on for size at the entrance to the theatre. It does so still. Or is it that Shakespeare's (and his audience's) religion is not a real passion; Shakespeare moves the real passions and leaves the imaginary ones alone? A playwright makes no money moving imaginary passions. Art moves the real passions of real human beings. The possibilities seem to fall in three ways then: Either religion has never been a real passion and so no art - neither Greek nor Christian, nor Haitian nor Jew - has moved that passion or attempted to do so. Or the religious passion is a passion that does no work. (But faith without works is dead.) Or faith is a passion, and like other passions it pervades one's life and cannot not be touched when a man who has the passion is moved, for the acts and passions of a religious person are, like a married man's, the very life of his love.48 But if the last is true, it seems impossible 47

48

See the literary-historical section of this essay. It might help to remember here that Taciturnus is a metaphysician - a representative mind par excellence, but not a passionate one - a kind of ironist, a Cheshire cat, pure - if not absolute - knowing, a smile. There is a fourth logical possibility - art moves no passions at all, i.e., it is powerless. Against this Taciturnus would invoke Aristotle (see section 5, pp. 454-474, of his letter). I second the motion.

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for Barnet's argument to be the correct story; and Taciturnus returns again offering his peculiar (and, he says, impossible) definition of a religious hero: one whose passion is infinitely reflective and so incapable of mimesis in a construction with beginning, middle and end. It seems - to return to the order of our argument - that under such readings as those I have called the literal and the figurative, the Greeks may have their religious tragedy, but the specifically Christian dogmatic metaphysics denies the possibility of the tragic: to die but win salvation is not tragic, since it is the greatest victory, while to lose one's soul does not arouse pity and fear but horror absolute. Any other feeling about the matter raises aesthetic considerations above those of the religion, and while many people may do this, no religious believer can legitimately do so. Hence Augustine's problem with tragedy (Confessions 3.2.2-4). It makes religion a rhapsody of words, uses religious feeling as just another, somewhat deeper, color on the emotional palette. What Taciturnus said of the ethical is absolutely true of Christianity - it must consider any alliance with the aesthetic a misalliance. The question then remains whether or not Frater Taciturnus is correct, that under his more stringent definition religious drama is entirely impossible and whether, ipso facto, Christian tragedy is too.

VI. Released from the Writ: A Third Kind of Religious Drama? On this less travelled road the question about the plausibility of a relation between religion and tragedy changes. We have already seen that under Taciturnus' definition of religious passion no Greek play is religious, nor is Romeo and Juliet, nor is Scribe's First Love. On the face of it, Taciturnus' argument makes sense about Christianity too. For if the religious hero is entirely dialectical in his passion, then nothing he does or says can be evidence for his religiousity, since at the next moment he could say or do something which opposes his previous acts. This is what Frater Taciturnus' own construction »Guilty?/Not Guilty?« shows. For this reason he expects his reader to get bored and stop reading before the end. It would seem, then, that the reason »Guilty?/Not Guilty?« is so short is because Frater Taciturnus got tired of tracing the dialectic. The case is not decidable, for it is not finished; it has merely been cut off. Taciturnus' name is, therefore, not ironic, but simply the literal truth: Taciturnus is the soul of wit.

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Consider the more famous case of Abraham. Abraham and his wife are getting old, but Abraham has a promise from God that he will be father of many nations. Sarah, long over sixty, suggests a slave girl; Abraham agrees; a while later some visitors come and promise that by the time they come back next year Sarah will have a child. She laughs; Abraham believes; it happens as they said. Abraham loves his son as perfectly as any father can love; then one morning he hears God tell him what the next move is. Without hesitation, and with perfect love for his son, he goes to do it. If this does not count as the dialectically opposite act of loving fatherhood, we do not know what dialectical opposition is. God stops him; they come home, and according to all accounts Isaac thinks nothing the worse for the whole ordeal, but considers his father's love to be perfect. That is, of course dramatizable, but it is the three day journey we should consider. What does the fully dialectical hero think about on that journey? What does he do? That journey is life; the finding out afterwards that it was a test, and the impossible resurrection of the son on the hill of sacrifice, is a result. But a result is precisely what Frater Taciturnus does not allow in his story and what does not obtain along the journey (which is life); a result makes the issue one that is no longer dialectical, but positive, whereas the fully dialectical passion has no result to hang on. Or, in other words, »here we live by faith« - a passion. Freudians, feminists, historical materialists, Christians, Jews, and Moslems, as well as various other critics, all have slightly differing accounts of what Abraham is doing on that journey - or Kierkegaard on his. Their answers are not resolvable into a higher synthesis; or I should say that that view is also probably taken by a seventh group. The result is not yet in. And that, according to Taciturnus, is the point: a positive result about the world of spirit is not available. But all this is thinking along representational lines; let us now consider mimesis. As an example let us consider Plato's dialogues like Euthyphro or Ion. These dialogues are built upon a false dilemma. Both points of view that Euthyphro and Ion jump between are demonstrated to be false by the arguments in the text; yet, mirabile dictu, they continue to jump. Such a dialogue is a perpetual motion machine, as the scholarship on them indicates: many scholars are still jumping between the two points of view Euthyphro and Ion had. Meno is similar; there four possible answers are introduced in the first line and Plato develops a fugue on three of them. In thinking through such a dialogue, in which the truth about the issue is not rep-

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resented, something else is engendered. This is clearest in the more complex dialogue, Meno, because there the good reader is humming precisely the missing (non-represented) fugal part. It is as if there were a score by a master composer, with one part missing, but everyone who plays the instrument whose part is missing plays together with the other three as well as if they had the missing score in front of them.49 That's a mimetic effect, an indirect communication. It communicates a capacity, not by telling us we have the capacity, nor even by showing us as Wittgensteinians are fond of saying, but by charming it forth like a song from the lips of the dumb. And Kierkegaard, we should remember, is dumb. Or rather, all of the voices in his authorship speak the same way. »A,« for example, says of the sensuous immediacy which is »the musical« that he will track it through Don Giovonni, »explore it by listening, and when I have brought the reader to the point of being so musically receptive that she seems to hear the music although she hears nothing, then I shall have finished my task, then I shall fall silent, then I shall say to the reader as I say to myself: Listen« (EOl, 86). The seducer accomplishes the same thing in Cordelia Wahl at a later part of the same volume. In fact, »A's« prayer might stand over the entire authorship or be spoken by any of its voices - esthete, seducer, religious writer: You friendly jinn who protect all innocent love, I commit my whole mind to you; guard my labouring thoughts so that they may be found worthy of the subject; form my soul into a euphonious instrument; let the gentle breeze of eloquence hasten over it; send the refreshment and blessing of fruitful moods! You righteous spirits, you who guard the boundaries of the kingdom of beauty, guard me lest I, in confused enthusiasm and blind zeal to make — all in all, do it an injustice, disparage it, make it something other than what it really is, which is the highest! You powerful spirits who know how to grasp men's hearts, stand by me so that I may capture the reader, not in the net of passion or the wiels of eloquence, but in the eternal truth of conviction. ( E O l , 86f.)

Fill in the blank with Don Giovanni, the moral law, Christ. And so to conclude: it does not seem utterly impossible to write a play in which the part engendered or called forth is a religious passion, even though the play does not itself clearly represent such a passion (since that passion is precisely not clearly representable as it is). Taciturnus tried to represent it and failed, so did Johannes de Silentio. The problem is, one would have to have the correct instrument

49

These examples should make clear, as earlier ones might not have, that it is not necessary that the reader or audience passionately or affectively identify with any of the characters or interlocutors in order for the mimetic effect of the work to work.

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in order for the music which is mimetically engendered to sound forth. If you don't have the right instrument, or don't have it well tuned, the sympathetic vibrations will be like sweet bells jangled, or have no effect at all - there are people who cannot be moved by Shakespeare. Now it may be that all human beings are not constructed the same way. Perhaps we are differends 50 to each other. But in literature we suffer the other to draw nearer to us, so in reading literature we must attempt to become attuned. Perhaps we have a duty to learn how to hear, and then to sing. Of course »A« would say this too, and Johannes voices Cordelia in a most expert and exquisite fashion. In many cultures one of the primary religious requirements involves respect paid to ancestors. That is a practice of attunement; it is not learning a representative what - a dogma or doctrine, but becoming a how. Poets practice this, monks of various religions; lovers learn it or fail. It strikes me that Hamlet is just such a play - one for which you must have the proper attunement - and Hamlet, the infinitely dialectical hero, who engenders thoughts beyond the reaches of our more positive souls, as he is likely to do until God comes back to give us the result - or not. And Hamlet is the tutor to our discretion. The play tunes us. There is, then, such a thing as religious drama in Taciturnus' impossible sense, though it must be discovered, if at all, in the affects it effects, not in the representations it constructs. The tragedy would be not to hear it, or learn how not to sing: to have eyes to see with but lack the tongue to praise. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain knowingness ...? There are times in one's life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on thinking and reflecting at all.51

50

51

See Jean-Francois Lyotard The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Minneapolis 1988, p. xi: »a differend would be a case of conflict between (at least) two parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both.« Michel Foucault The Uses of Pleasure, New York 1985, p. 8.

»To produce was my life« Problems and Perspectives within the Kierkegaardian Biography1 B y JOAKIM G A R F F

Translated by

STACEY ELIZABETH A K E

»Oh, how heavy! that which I have just said about myself: like that Princess in the Thousand-and-One Nights, I saved my own life through story-telling, i.e., by producing. To produce was my life. An immense heaviness of mind, inner sufferings of a sympathetic nature, everything, everything, I was equal to whenever I had leave to produce.«·2 »My writings show up to advantage in recollection, in poetic recollection, and the time will come when girls will color with excitement when a poet recounts the whole design of my life.«3

Shortly after Kierkegaard's funeral, a small group of men appeared in the recently deceased's apartment. One, Kierkegaard's secretary Israel Levin, recollected that: »everything in his room was found to be in order, as if he were going to travel, to take a trip to the country. At last a key was found. What was it for?«4 The question is a rather con1

2 3 4

I would like to thank Professor Alastair Hannay and Associate Research Professor Johnny Kondrup for their careful responses to this paper. Kondrup's meticulous delineation of the problems inherent in trying to unify a classical Zfr/rfung-approach with a modern deconstructive interpretation was particularly helpful in sharpening many of the formulations found in this paper which has, however, au fonde, remained unchanged. Pap. X 1 A 442. JP V 5904. Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, ed. by B.H. Kirmmse, trans, by B.H. Kirmmse and V.R. Laursen, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1996, p. 212.

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crete one, but in restrospect it seems endowed with a certain symbolism: where did this key, this interpretive key, really belong? Was it perhaps the case that, once having found this key, one might actually have access to the whole? Yet Levin's recollection is noteworthy for another reason. He goes on to observe that everything had been laid out in the most beautiful order, as if in preparation for a trip. This impression is also shared by H.P. Barfod - the publisher of Kierkegaard's papers - who, in his forward to the first volume in 1865, could impart the following: »At his death, S0ren Kierkegaard left behind a large number of handwritten papers, gathered and collected into groups with such care as gave witness to the author's zealousness in ensuring that they were neither lost nor destroyed. Here, then, is found a hint that he had not merely imagined the possibility of their eventual publication but, at least for a majority of the »Journals,« had actually assumed such a thing (a definite indication of this is that a suggestion for the title: »The Book of the Judge« had been in existence since the Spring of 1849). Besides, in addition to the large and small portfolios, notebooks, loose papers and sheets of various sizes, slips and scraps, rough drafts and aphorisms, the outlines of works read, lists of books which should be read or had been read, etc., etc., besides everything else there was found what seems to be the main thing - a considerably long row of diaries, or as the diarist himself called them, »Journals,« thirty-six in total, starting from March 1846 and continuing until (Spring?) 1855, all bound in quarto, and marked NB., NB.2, NB.3 etc., up to NB.36, containing in all nearly 7600 pages, generally written in a large hand with considerable spaces between the lines. To this collection there was, as a kind of preamble, twelve bigger and smaller - »diaries« they might most readily be called, of the most varying sizes, importance, and significance, which despite large gaps, were kept from approximately 1833, but primarily from July 1835 through February 1846. Some of them were still only notebooks, partly written in pencil, the majority without a date, here and there the guiding reference to a year.«5 Next Barfod outlined the notebooks' organizational system: from AA up to and including KK, at the same time noting that the »alphabetical order« rarely coincided with the »chronological order« - since

5

Af S0ren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer, 1833-1843. Med indledende H.P. Barfod, vol. I-II, p. vii, Copenhagen 1869.

Notiser

ved

»To produce was my life«

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many of the notebooks were obviously »used quite indiscriminately, all simultaneously.«6 He continued: These books, just as the later, richer, and more inwardly connected »journals,« readily show themselves to be something other for the author than mere diaries in the usual sense. They contained - together with some though not many entries about external events, side by side with isolated outbursts of emotion - investigations of subjects which at a given time had occupied the writer, such as plans for treatises and talks, texts for sermons, and finally a large amount of loose ideas, notes, quotations, etc. In short, the »journals« give the impression of having been designed as a main channel, partly connected to the authorship, for the deceased recluse's desire for a spiritual outlet. 7

Despite all its murkiness, Barfod's characterization of Kierkegaard's literary legacy is actually rather illuminating, as anyone who has surveyed even a few of the manuscript packets at the Royal Library in Copenhagen will, without the least bit of hesitation, grant me. The will to persistence which one glimpses behind the stacks and stacks of papers seems almost unnatural. Nonetheless, Barfod views this vast quantity of material from a classical biographical perspective. Barfod quite clearly emphasizes that the »journals« are not »diaries« in the traditional sense, as when he - in contrast to later scholars - points out the differences both in organization as well as in content among the entries before and after 1846. Yet despite this, he treats all the material in a biographical fashion and can, concerning his own publication of it, proclaim that it contains only »the enclosures pertinent to the depiction of his life, which must one day come ... I have ordered and put them together, so that the skilled and loving hand, which will one day draw S0ren Kierkegaard's picture can here get a hint that is not without importance. From this perspective must my work be understood and judged.«8 That the above is not just a casually dropped remark but an editor's normative viewpoint is obvious from Barfod's (unpublished) catalogue of that part of Kierkegaard's effects which Barfod managed to get published. Therein it is stated that everything in the catalogue that is set off by double underlining is what »in the remotest way could be said to concern or maybe even only to suggest the deceased's more personal life or living in the narrowest sense (in a more peculiar and wider sense does the whole of a writer's activity,

6 7 8

Op. cit., p. viii. Op. cit., vol. I, p. viii. Op. cit., pp. viff.

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every single description and every grand treatise, emanate from his life's innermost being, carrying with it knowledge about that life's development, and it is, for that reason, a contribution to his life's history, the inner as much as the outer).«9 Nor did Barfod ever come to doubt whether the collected material ought to be read biographically. Despite this, he managed in a rather short time to create a great deal of chaos within Kierkegaard's literary legacy such that Kierkegaard's future biographers were left facing an almost insurmountable task. This is clearly felt whenever one reads what the later publishers of S0ren Kierkegaard's Papirer, P.A. Heiberg and V. Kühr, report concerning the state in which Barfod had left the material: »With continuously changing ideas about ordering and publication, with cutting, pasting, inscribing, explanatory comments concerning type-setting and much else, deletions and corrections, etc., were the oldest portion of the manuscripts prepared in piecemeal fashion to be sent to the printer's as manuscripts for Barfod's publication.«10 Ordinarily, the actual original manuscripts were sent off to the printer's where, after the final type-setting, they often found their way to the rubbish bin. Barfod did, however, make a few exceptions. Whenever he happened upon one of the more calligraphically successful manuscripts, he would cut it into shape (rather quite neatly, I might add), tack it onto a piece of cardboard and - voiläl he had a little postcard that would delight friends and family alike on special occasions. »The consequence is the following,« continued the new set of publishers, »that a rather substantial part of the manuscript sheets registered in Barfod's catalogue from the oldest right up until 1847 are missing from the University Library's collection.«11 Heiberg and Kühr were trained in a manner distinct from that of Barfod; they were educated as philologists, and they brought a systematic approach to the works. For this reason, Kierkegaard's Papirer were divided into three main groups: A, wherein that which could be conventionally considered as typical diary entries was collected; Β, including preliminary efforts as well as omissions in the manuscripts to both the pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous works whether published or unpublished; and, finally, C, which contained entries relating to Kierkegaard's own reading, including his studies. However laudable in principle such systematizing may seem, in practice, it is 9 10 11

Fortegnelse over de efter S0ren Aabye Kierkegaards D0d forefundne Pap. vol. I, p. ix. Ibid.

Papirer.

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(mildly speaking) unproductive, given that such a pre-determined selection of material readily blurs, readily obscures, the technical and genre-related complexity which characterized Kierkegaard's entries. In this manner, the reader is given a false impression of the homogeneity and consistency of Kierkegaard's texts. Furthermore, Heiberg and Kühr dated many loose sheets and inserted pages into the manuscripts according to principles not only haphazard but impenetrable, thus occasionally giving rise to mistaken conclusions. Henning Fenger, source criticism's answer to Sherlock Holmes, writes in his own peculiarly unpolished academic style, about the classification and sub-classification system which the publishers had employed, that: »By means of these three groupings within three groups the publishers succeeded in bringing about complete and utter chaos ... Heiberg and Kühr conducted their readers, more or less deliberately, on a wild goose chase, so that no mother's child could see precisely how incoherent and problematical Kierkegaard's notes and diary entries really were.«12

Candid Concealments The reason that I have dwelt so particularly upon such publicationrelated topics as these is because I have desired to draw attention to the fact that the primary source for the Kierkegaardian biography has none of the necessary credibility which is usually taken for granted. Where the most basic textual conditions surrounding the entries' times of composition, original continuity, internal connections or the lack thereof, etc., are concerned, we are skating on thin ice. However, given the current re-publication of the Papirer which is in progress, these basic conditions for credibility are now within reach. Yet even in this manner the biographical material's credibility is still far from guaranteed. As a great ironic notabene to any biographer's attempts to bring this material back to its original state, one ought certainly to mention that Kierkegaard himself was the first to edit his own diaries and, in so doing, undercut the biographer's privileged position of having direct access to real primary sources. In effect, Kierkegaard's biographer confronts a figure with a literary selfconsciousness of immense proportions, such as had already resulted

12

Kierkegaard-Myter og Kierkegaard-Kilder, Odense 1976, p. 48.

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in the »resolution« that the young theology student dandy had, in his »study,« committed to paper on July 13, 1837. »I have often wondered how it could be that I have had such great reluctance to write down particular observations,« confessed the 24-year old who had now found an explanation for his own discomfort: Obviously, the reason was that in each instance I thought of the possibility of publication, which perhaps would have required more extensive development, something with which I did not wish to be bothered, and enervated by such an abstract possibility (a kind of literary hiccoughing and squeamishness), the aroma of fancies and mood evaporated. I think, instead, that it would be good through frequent note-writing, to let the thoughts come forth with the umbilical cord of the original mood ... Such practice backstage is certainly necessary for every person who is not so gifted that his development is in some way public. {JP V 5241)

It is not necessary to scratch much on the surface of this apparently humble confession before one encounters Kierkegaard's scarcely humble consciousness of his writing's meaning for the future. Some are born only posthumously, claimed Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard can only state his agreement. Thus he writes in 1847: »And this is why the time will come when not only my writings but my whole life, the intriguing secret of the whole machinery, will be studied and studied« (JP V 6078). Kierkegaard did not leave much to chance. Instead, he did almost everything - anything that was in his power - in order to meet his future biographer from a carefully calculated posture. Almost from the moment he put pen to paper, he made a free, fictionalized style his favorite form. Kierkegaard did not remember, he recollected. In other words, in virtue of this distinction, he could simply consider the formal and the essential together as the unique criterion for all artistic activity. From this angle, perhaps his diary could best be described by those words which the publisher of »The Seducer's Diary« resorted to when he wanted to give a kind of genre-definition to the many papers which fate and mischief had dealt into his hands. »His diary is not historically accurate,« concedes the publisher, »or strictly narrative; it is not indicative but subjunctive.«13 However, Peter Christian, S0ren's elder brother, remembered. His diary is »strictly narrative« and, as far as it goes, »historically accurate.« External events and internal emotions come together in a fairly continuous account whose credibility is not merely assured by

13

KW III, 304.

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the accuracy of references pertaining to time and place but is also supported by an unpretentious matter-of-factness which, while almost appearing naive, can nonetheless expose the many psychological facets and unearth the various unconscious springs within the writer himself - among which the biographer can move around and combine into a truer (or at least into another) narrative in the narration, another tale in the telling. But it is quite another thing with little brother S0ren! His diary is entirely »subjunctive« and perpetually wavers between the event itself and its artistic reproduction, hence giving his entries a fragmentary and discontinuous character. The latter distinguishes itself immediately in the reader's direct encounter with the text. The entries are usually short, loosely or often not at all thematically connected, terse, displaying Kierkegaard's preference for a little paradoxical twist in the final clause, so that without the least contextual relation, the antics of a screaming fishwife may follow immediately upon the dogma of the Incarnation. In response to the writing's fragmentary nature comes Kierkegaard's violent intervention into the text which the publishers released with the melodramatically italicized title A Sheet Removed from the Journal·, but even more straightforward types of erasure such as crossings-out and hatchings-out or whole pages simply blocked out in ink reveal the will to meticulousness by means of which Kierkegaard planned to let himself be reborn posthumously. » A f t e r my death,« as the famous entry goes, »no one will find in my papers the slightest information (this is my consolation) about what has really filled my life; no one will find the inscription in my innermost being that interprets everything and that often turns into events of prodigious importance to me that which the world would call bagatelles and which I regard as insignificant if I remove the secret note that interprets them.« (JΡ V 5645) That secret note in which Kierkegaard wrote down whatever it was that truly filled his life, whatever it was that was written in his innermost being, and which has plunged all research into groping and guesswork, is it to be found? Hardly. Strangely enough, this gap cannot be blamed on Kierkegaard's having removed it; rather, it can perhaps be blamed on his having never actually written it, and that the secret, therefore, was that there was really no note at all. As a coy invitation, the entry involuntarily awakens a desire to root out the secret and fathom whatever it is that is written in the writer's inmost being. And yet the entry about the secret note eludes itself in the same degree as it includes its reader. With its ambiguity it is a piece of art de seduire in

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miniature, because, as one reads in »Hie Seducer's Diary,« there is »nothing that involves so much seduction ... as a secret.«14 The secret note's logic reveals an orientation typical of Kierkegaard's confessional writing and, as such, can be viewed as an aestheticized companion piece to the more theoretical framework of his indirect communication. Entry after entry fully attests that Kierkegaard was a pastmaster of the peculiar genre of candid concealment such that, during his more intimate confidences, he never failed to turn his back demurely towards the reader and, thus, only display a cryptic puzzle of a picture. Kierkegaard has, with a mythomaniac's cunning passion, left the material composed in such a way that one must needs lose the thread that ought to run through the grandiose labyrinth of his writing. »Much trouble lay behind the presentation of the riddles which the future should not be able to solve and the interpretations which the future should preferably accept,«15 wrote Henning Fenger, who acts the part of field agent for the »Great Demythologizing Service.« As such, Fenger naturally enough considers any fiction to be truth's worst enemy and the literary element in Kierkegaard's self-descriptions to be falsity's firmest friend. Fenger would get to the »real« Kierkegaard, and he is so vehement in that endeavour that two substantially important reflections get painted out of the picture completely. The first reflection is that it is not entirely clear what real merit resides in the idea of a »real« Kierkegaard. Would such a Kierkegaard actually bear a resemblance to the man who stood at his desk and wrote every hour of every day of every week, year in and year out? Moreover, one who just happened to amuse himself by playing tricks on his contemporaries as well as putting one over on the future by any number of myths he had up his sleeves? The second: that what one needs to consider in the search for the »real« Kierkegaard is the possibility that myth-making and fiction-writing could be constitutive elements in Kierkegaard's self-description; and, for this reason, they especially reveal the »real« Kierkegaard. Given this, it becomes apparent that one viable alternative to »source critical« nitpicking is a biographical reading which not only demonstrates how but also explains why Kierkegaard devoted himself to fictions, masks, mystifications, and other devices such as these. Devices which are neither pure fiction nor its exact opposite but 14 15

KW III, 310. Fenger, Op. cit., p. 25.

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rather such as occupy a place somewhere in between. In order to describe this place, language has given us a word which pleases as readily as it teases: namely, poetry. Furthermore, one arrives at the following formulation: Kierkegaard's biographer must make it clear that he contends with an already extant self-biographer.

The Implicit

Self-Biography

Despite all these circumstances, it has been a marked tendency, originating in this century's Kierkegaardian tradition, that such biographical interest has been waning. Indeed, it has been criminalized ever since existential philosophy and dialectical theology became the established fashion. The authorship has instead become the main object of existential interpretation, where one concentrates on the conditions necessary for the subject's (re)gaining his (lost) authenticity. Given such an interpretive approach, one of two things must happen to the man Kierkegaard. Either he becomes something akin to the paradigm of existential philosophy, a waxen, transparent subject who distributes his knowledge among a host of pseudonymous authors and their corresponding perspectives of the world. Or, once again disappearing completely, he is reduced to a little, superfluous appendix whom one dubs the »private person Kierkegaard,« a person who is consequently kept completely separate from his writing; mind you, that is only until reaching the punctum finale of the works: the attack upon the church. There one suddenly seizes upon the master's person and straps it onto Procrustes' bed, so that his figure can be satisfactorily made to accomodate whatever are one's own particular theoretical predilections about the authorship. If interpretive success remains elusive, one then places the Kierkegaard figure on a homemade psychoanalytic couch and diagnoses him as a monomaniacal psychopath with clever ideas - clever ideas with a few faults, such as the fact that they are wrong. That the private person Kierkegaard occupies so little space in the secondary literature cannot simply be due to existential philosophy's or dialectical theology's markedly factual propensities; nor can it simply be said that the private person Kierkegaard merely tempted his biographers with his most dramatic material, for a traditionally-inclined Kierkegaard-biography would then become as narratively thin as the master himself was in real life. No, whenever the private person is conspicuously absent from the more recent Kierkegaard schol-

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arship, one first and foremost blames Kierkegaard himself. In a most determined fashion, as much personally as pseudonymously, he will not, in short, let himself be observed, and he threatens any depraved voyeur with a host of evils: »What has been written, then, is mine,« he announces by means of »A First and Last Explanation,« but only insofar as I, by means of audible lines, have placed the life-view of the creating, poetically actual individuality in his mouth, for my relation is even more remote than that of a poet, who poetizes characters and yet in the preface is himself the author. That is, I am impersonally or personally in the third person a souffleur [prompter] who has poetically produced the authors, whose prefaces in turn are their productions, as their names are also. Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me. I have no opinion about them except as a third party, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader.16

A more passionate protest against intentional fallacy can hardly be imagined. The largely unclear hermeneutical implications of the statement I will here, of course, not address, because this statement, smooth despite its prolixity, is simply false. Regine, for example, would have denied that there was not »a single word by me« in the pseudonymous works, had she read »Guilty? Not Guilty?« in which Kierkegaard repeated verbatim the letter he sent to her when their engagement was broken. That letter was such an artistic success that it merited a readership above and beyond that of »hiin Enkelte.« A similar observation can be made about »Diapsalmata« where more than half of the text is lifted directly from Kierkegaard's diary on Either/Or. If, from such scattered clues, one directs one's attention to the works, the self-biographical will be found reappearing on the thematic horizon. For example, that »Fear and Trembling actually reproduced my own life«17 says it all rather clearly in 1849. But could Kierkegaard have not said the same thing about Repetition where his own love life is the story's unmistakable substrate and in whose composition Regine played, literally, a decisive role? Or what about »Guilty? Not Guilty?« which P.L. M0ller, in a review, had already shown was an autobiographical work; a review by which Kierkegaard, who maintained that there were no personal circumstances, absolutely none, to be found in his literary production, in turn became disturbed to such a degree that his rejoinder to M0ller precipitated the disastrous Corsair Affair, which not only exposed Kierkegaard to laughter but also

16 17

KW XII.l, 625-626. JΡ VI 6491.

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exposed him as part and parcel of his own authorship, so that street urchins followed him yelling, »Either/Or.« Moreover, in the work's small narrative niches and in its psycho-typological studies one again finds the self-biographical element. »Here I deviate,«18 writes the Aesthete »A« after a short discussion of Sophocles' »Antigone« in which he, in the pages that follow, lets Kierkegaard's erotic collision become dramatized in the figure of Antigone: »The collision is actually between her love for her father and for herself.«19 The text is so rich in allusions, hidden quotations, and direct references that anyone with even a minimum knowledge of Kierkegaard's biography can readily discern when what is written between the lines describes the author - who has also taken this opportunity to undergo a small, albeit grammatical, sex-change operation. Thus one may, if he so desires, become ever more ready to elucidate the affinity between bios and grafae, but that I will not do. Rather, I will quote from something more directly to the point, a letter from Berlin to Emil Boesen, in which Kierkegaard states that in the main, his pieces of writing were »healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality« (JP V 5665). Later literary births brought little more than heavy-minded natures into the world; so clearly, however, did they bear the marks of their creator that not even the most creative pseudonymous covering could hide it, because the style was the man and the man was Kierkegaard.

Biographical

Animosity

It is as unfortunate as it is typical that the vast majority who approach Kierkegaard's work academically are also those who most often distribute detailed reports about their choice of method. Moreover, they seldom (or almost never) take the opportunity to reflect upon Kierkegaard's singular style, nor upon the style, or perhaps lack thereof, in which the whole Kierkegaardian affair is either rewritten or reproduced. The consequences of such negligence result in the concept becoming dimmed before the image and the paradox pumping itself up so that it can absorb all possible disparities. Furthermore, finer phenomenological existences are slighted such that the unruly 18

19

KW III, 154. KW III, 163.

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and the marginal are driven into the common ranks. To be succinct, it turns out that Kierkegaard either becomes a philosopher a la Descartes or Kant or a theologian ad. modum Barth or Tillich and risks becoming nothing more than a mere footnote. Furthermore, the biographical approach is particularly connected with a genre-specific reflection over the pseudonymous production. Is it philosophy, psychology, theology, anthropology or something else? And is one reading a romance, a novel, an essay, a piece of journalism or something completely different? To characterize such production as confessional literature would hardly be considered an appropriate choice, but one could perhaps consider whether Kierkegaard precisely by choosing a pseudonymous publication style - in certain places - thus made an audacious self-exposure possible. That to which one does not get access to in the journals - because there Kierkegaard is writing in his own name - the pseudonymous works give greater insight, because Kierkegaard can allow a certain frankness, especially since the pseudonyms function as a type of psychological shield. Thus Kierkegaard can also write the following about the function of the pseudonyms: »For many years my depression has prevented me from saying »Du« to myself in the profoundest sense. Between my »Du« and my depression lay a whole world of imagination. This is what I partially discharged in the pseudonyms.«20 Here the pseudonymous authors function not as communicative agents for educative maieutic manoeuverability; rather, the pseudonyms have a compensatory character, as if through them Kierkegaard has willed the conquering of the distance between his depression and his own authentic self-relation, his »Du.« Pseudonymity is, in short, a reaction to the crisis of self-relation. On the other hand, it is evident that Kierkegaard does not traverse a »whole world of imagination« with this »Du« as some kind of set goal, some extra-textual point, which he, unaffected and unchanged by the text, will finally reach. This »Du,« his true »I,« which he reaches for work by work has, in actual fact, received its shape in and through the writing process. If, in this way, Kierkegaard can repeatedly dwell on »an inexplicable something, that seemed to show that I was being helped by an Other, [when] I came to do or say something, whose fuller meaning, I myself at times only first understood afterwards,«21 then the so-called 20

21

JP V 5980, where »Du« indicates «the use of the familiar second-person singular pro noun employed in a family and between close friends,« see JΡ V, note 193, p. 478. Pap. X 5 Β 168, p. 362.

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»inexplicable something« could be read as the subconscious activity of the text. He first understands that inexplicable »something« afterward, because the text has clarified (in the profoundest sense of the word) what was once unclear. Or as it is found in one of the omitted passages of the manuscripts to the Postscript: »The speaking voice came from me, but it was not my voice; the writing hand was mine, but it was not my handwriting.«22 In regard to such divergent statements, one can do one of two things: either accept the religious metaphysics in which even Kierkegaard himself classes the writing process in order to have an explanation of the »inexplicable something« and thus accept the idea of »the share of divine Governance,« or claim that behind Kierkegaard's declared distance to the pseudonyms there lies the concrete experience that, within the process of writing, something can be produced that takes the producer of the writing unawares. If the latter is claimed, one could then say about the authorship that it is not merely a maieutic gesture towards the reader but also that the authorship stood in a maieutic relation to its author. Therefore, it is not for nothing that Kierkegaard in The Point of View for My Work as an Author characterizes writing as a »totality« that had been his own »education« and »development.« It is, he then explains, »Governance that has educated me, and the education is reflected in the process of productivity.«23 Therefore, from the outset, any reading of Kierkegaard is already, although often unwittingly, biased toward the biographical.

Textual Premises, Existential Conclusion Up to and including the Postscript (a more or less symbolic caesura in the authorship's chronology), the pseudonyms have operated as »characters« with a substitutionary function in relation to Kierkegaard. Increasingly, however, Kierkegaard perceives this substitutionary arrangement as an evasion of the demand for existential duplication, which appears much more directly in the »Excuse,« which he offers in the first of the never held 1847 lectures on the dialectic of indirect communication,

22 23

Pap. VII 1 Β 80,2. The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History, ed. B. Nelson and tr. W. Lowrie, New York: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 73.

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I must very well make an excuse for the manner in which I use »I« in these lectures ... In my thought, it is a weakness and imperfection ... that I do not dare use my I courageously. It is just one of modernity's misfortunes to have abolished the »I,« the personal I. Precisely because of this, real ethical-religious communication has disappeared from the world. For an ethical-religious truth relates itself chiefly to personality, one »I« can only communicate with another »I.« As soon as the communication has become objective, truth becomes untruth. But we shall go toward personality. And therefore, it is to my credit that I, having placed poetical personalities who say: »I« in the midst of the reality of life, (my pseudonyms) have attempted whenever possible to accustom my contemporaries to listen once more to an I, a personal I (not a fantastically pure I and its ventriloquist) speak.24

If it is modernity's misfortune that it has disregarded the subjective, then it appears that even Kierkegaard's countermove is a distinctly modern move. This reality in which the pseudonyms show their subjectivity to be valid is not factual; rather, it is just as fictive as the text. Therefore, wanting to return the »I« to its substantial position of privilege with the help of pseudonyms is fundamentally so paradoxical a practice that it necessarily leads to even more »ventriloquism.« One can discuss when Kierkegaard himself became aware of this rather elementary causality, but it is clear that there appears to be a series of reversals beginning in the period of time around or shortly after his skirmish with the Corsair. Such reversal reveals itself in the fact that the pseudonymous authors had become normative or counterfactual instantiations with which Kierkegaard attempted to compare himself and then place himself either higher (sometimes) or lower (sometimes): »Just as the Guadalquibir River ... plunges down somewhere into the earth, so is there also a stretch, the upbuilding, which carries my name. There is something (the esthetic) which is lower and is pseudonymous and something which is higher and is also pseudonymous, because as a person I do not correspond to it« (JΡ VI 6431). Regardless of where one places Kierkegaard in such a ranking, pseudonymity appears to be more personally than maieutically motivated and, as such, concerns not (only) the reader but (also) Kierkegaard himself. That this is true becomes even more apparent when he explicitly formulates the interaction between writing and the writer in the following manner: »In this piece [i.e. Practice in Christianity] the claims of ideality are set up as being so high that therein lies judgement upon my own existence ... Therefore, it is a pseudonym that

24

Pap. VIII 2 Β 88, p. 183.

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speaks and with poetic licence which dares to say everything and everything as it is.«25 It is obvious that such a desire for correspondence between existence and text requires him to revise and justify his own writing in order that his writings might state, with the greatest possible precision, his own position. Moreover, writings that should have been published under his own name, he changed at the last possible moment, occasionally on the page-proofs, to that of a pseudonymous editor. This applies to Training in Christianity, for example, where the original subtitle reads »A Charitable Call to My Contemporaries. By S. Kierkegaard«26 but which eventually wound up with Anti-Climacus on the title page - because Kierkegaard's own »existence« could not equal the work's radical Christian requirements. »N.B. Cannot be used when the book is actually by a pseudonym, and here it is as if I were really the author,«27 he states characteristically, when he goes through the text with publication in mind. Such an intimate connection between the writing and the writer does not merely pertain to the pseudonymous production. Precisely in The Point of View, Kierkegaard states that during the castastrophe of 1848 he was reading page-proofs of a book whose prophetic statements had been fulfilled by the very same tumultous events.28 The book in question was Christian Discourses which consists of four sections. The first two deal, respectively, with the anxieties of the heathen and the joy found in suffering while the next two parts are concerned with, respectively, thoughts which wound from behind and seven discourses at Communion on Fridays. It is a little difficult to see just what it is that links these discourses to the revolutionary chaos which ravaged Europe a few years later. Likewise, it approaches incredulity that Kierkegaard, bursting with joy, could then add that the revolution did not compel him to change so much as a comma but, indeed, would convey a much better understanding of his own writing and, consequently, of Kierkegaard's own affairs. What, pray tell, could possibly be the point of this? The point is that Kierkegaard imagines a reader who combines bios with grafae in his own reading of the Christian Discourses and then also relates them back to Kierkegaard's person. It is this notion 25 26 27 28

Pap. X 5 Β 62, cf. 66; 67. Pap. X 5 Β 42,5. Pap. X 5 Β 70. Cf. SV3 18,117ff.

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which brought about Kierkegaard's triumph and - obviously - his unending worry, since publication now meant passing himself off as a writer, and thus Kierkegaard had also to consider whether he should write »mildly« or »strongly.« At first, he claims that it is his intention »to be as [mild] as possible« (JP V 6111), but that was evidently easier said than done, for already in the next entry he puts forward precisely the opposite viewpoint: »No, no, no, no - I did, however, almost fail to appreciate how in Part Three Governance had added what was needed. But I wanted to be a bit clever and add something myself ... Without the third part Christian Discourses is much too mild, for me not truly in character; they are mild enough« (JΡ V 6112). Three weeks after the book was handed into the printing house and one month before it came out, Kierkegaard wrote the following in an entry which clearly revealed a consciousness laden with worry because it was too late to call back the manuscript: »Once again for a moment I have been concerned about my responsibility in letting Christian Discourses, especially Part Three, be published. It is outright dangerous for me to have something written in a completely different situation be read under the current circumstances. But I cannot do otherwise. It is Governance which has arranged it this way for me« (JP V 6125). Obviously, it was Christian Discourses' third part which had given him cause for worry; in this part, made up of seven talks, all finely tooled works with a still somewhat visible pietistic signature, it was the fifth discourse which worried him most. It is simply called, »It is Blessed Nevertheless - To Suffer Derision in a Good Cause,« and turns out to be a blessing of the »mocked, derided, persecuted, [slain],« emphasizing him who »himself suffered the like.«29 It is readily apparent, should there be any doubt, that this discourse promotes its author from the very first line. Kierkegaard was well-aware of the directness in his communication, and he was fearfully aware that publication might produce catastrophic consequences: »Maybe not even a soul will read my Christian discourses - maybe they will raise an alarm in the camp - and I will be the ill-treated sacrifice. Maybe. Oh, it is difficult to endure such a possibility.«30 Although Kierkegaard's metaphor is markedly militant, the general alarm raised in the camp was not so great. It is obvious that such an idea of the discourse's effect is immensely disproportionate, something which Kierkegaard

29

30

Christian Discourses, etc., tr. W. Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 229. Pap. VIII1 A 617.

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himself saw clearly in his more objective moments. »Perhaps there is considerable hypochondria in my fear,« he wrote shortly before the publication of the discourses, yet he immediately qualified his viewpoint with the almost objective remark »but that makes no difference« {JΡ V 6125). And, in this, he is right. Because it is not the misrelation between Kierkegaard's tragi-comic pathos and his more factual perils but, on the contrary, the relation between the textual premises and Kierkegaard's existential conclusions that is the point: namely, that Kierkegaard has written himself into the role of martyr which the authorship has projected and in which he, therefore, in a double sense has typecast himself. In such a retrospective and completely generous undertaking, the authorship closely resembles the »situation« which Kierkegaard described in 1837 and concerning which he commented: »A person wants to write a novel in which one of the characters goes insane; during the process of composition he himself gradually goes insane and ends it in the first person« (JP V 5249). Whether he himself in this way also went »insane« is here of less importance than the fact that he now - at last - can operate in the first person, singular, present, indicative, active.

The Author as Bildungsroman If the authorship itself can, in this way, be compared to a novel, a lifenovel, then it must be challenging work for any future biographical reading to make perfectly clear how Kierkegaard's life-novel is related to a classic Bildungsroman. To dismiss this task by referring to Kierkegaard's notorious critique of the Bildungsroman is of little use, since none other than Kierkegaard himself has characterized the authorship with two of the Bildungsroman's most emblematic expressions, namely his own »education« and »development.« Given that such a reading focuses on the highways and byways which the subject must cover in his writing in order finally to find himself, it does not shrink from interpreting the pseudonymous writings as integrating elements in Kierkegaard's own self-understanding. Such a reading takes place in complete awareness of the fact that there seems to be a shared, shaping strength of mind in both the works and the person alike, an individuating principle. The writer »becomes« by means of writing; as such, the authorship represents a process of personal formation, »education,« and »development.«

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In contrast to the -ß/Wwng-reading, there is another reading which, for lack of something better, could be called »deconstructive.« It is a reading to which the Kierkegaardian material is not merely amenable but, in certain places, one which its situation clearly seems to require. Let me, by way of conclusion, hint at that perspective by citing an entry, dated October 13th, 1853, in which Kierkegaard, beneath the heading »About Myself« wrote: No doubt some creativity still slipped into what I jotted down about myself in the journals of 1848 and 1849. It is not easy to keep such a thing out when one is as poetically creative as I am. It appears the minute I pick up my pen. Strangely enough, in my inner being, I am much clearer and much more concise about myself. But as soon as I want to put it down in writing, it promptly becomes a creative process. Similarly it is also strange that I have no desire to put down the religious impressions, ideas, and expressions which I myself use; they seem to be too important for that. Of these I have a few - but I have produced quantities of them. But only when such a phrase seems to have been consumed, as it were, can I think of jotting it down or letting it slip into what I write. ( J P V I 6843)

If The Point of View can be said to be something like Kierkegaard's literary self-staging, it seems that in retrospect, this entry resembles an attempt to capture and contain the personal in spite of the text. As can be seen, such an attempt creates an occasion for difficulties, because the inner transparency of self-understanding becomes clouded the moment it is re-presented through text. This Kierkegaard himself explains by saying that in self-presentation one must allow for »some creativity [to be] slipped« in. Before the writing, in his own innermost being, he is himself; yet after writing, he has, on the outside, become an-other. Thanks to such subversive logic, the private person Kierkegaard can, to a certain degree, be delivered up to the author of the same name, so that it gradually becomes doubtful whether a private person even lies somewhere behind the writing. Evidently, here writes an » I « that has never come in contact with its »Du.« A re-reading of his own writing does not even give Kierkegaard an occasion for self-recognition; rather, it leaves an almost inverted feeling of alien(ated)ness. »But here I put an end to these entries», writes Kierkegaard after a somewhat long self-description. Depressed, he then adds that the entries «are too extensive, and yet they do not exhaust what I carry around inside of me, where before God I understand myself far more easily because there I am able to get everything together at one time.« (JP V I 6213) It is symptomatic in this respect that when Kierkegaard at long last resolves to lay The Point of View aside for post-

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humous publication, he intricately justifies his decision by means of the following point, that it would not succeed in making his self-presentation the »full truth« (JP VI 6327). The closer he comes to his self, the less (of his) self he can see. Somewhat paradoxically, yet with a peculiar inner logic which more than suggests that the absence of authenticity and authority finds its compensatory expression in Activity, Kierkegaard deliberated about publishing The Point of View for My Work as an Author in pseudonym Johannes de silentio's name! He himself had perceived that »it is no longer the same book at all. For the point of it was my personal story« (JP VI 6327). In a deconstructive reading, the subject cannot write himself into being. He writes past himself, so to speak, in the very attempt. Writing has no perspective-opening qualities; it does not redeem. Instead, it gets in the writer's way and deflects his self-understanding with a kind of ironic ambiguity. Writing is not the medium of the subject but the opposite. Text and subject, at the deepest level, »magnetically repel« each other, according to From the Papers of One Still Living, wherein Kierkegaard taunts H.C. Andersen for lacking a »live view,« that Alpha and Omega of Bildung. My claim is that the Kierkegaardian text, from differing but equally attractive perspectives, invites the reader to consider one reading as much as the other. Thus, the biographical reader of Kierkegaard must attempt to think these different readings together - if only to realize, eventually, their incompatibility and thus reveal an underlying tension in Kierkegaard's activity as an author: a tension between the autonomy and the heteronomy of the subject. Paradoxically enough, a deconstructive reading which binds the subject to the heteronomous conditions of the writing is, in fact, a more theological reading than one which, by extension of Bildung thought, interprets the activity of writing as the medium in which and by which the autonomous subject creates itself.

Kierkegaard: A Stumbling-Block to »Kierkegaardians« What Theological Orientation Would He Favour Today?

B y PER L 0 N N I N G

1. Two Quotations for Reflection We start by reflecting on two Kierkegaard quotations. In the first, the chief role is played by »my neighbour Christophersen,« in the other, by Martin Luther. I shall substitute them both by »S0ren Kierkegaard« and see what comes out of the experiment. First, from Stages on Life's Way: »It is spirit to ask about two things: (1) Is what is being said possible? (2) Am I able to do it? But it is lack of spirit to ask about two things: (1) Did it actually happen? (2) Has my neighbor Christophersen done it; has he actually done it?« 1 1 take it for granted that this applies not only to physical activities, but also to written and oral expressions, such as writing books, voicing opinions, taking stands on issues of the day. From this it follows that it would show »lack of spirit« for example to ask: (1) Was such and such an opinion actually expressed? (2) Has my hero Kierkegaard done it; has he actually done it? But what would be the corresponding notion of »spirit«? The quotation does not prescribe a general rule: do like some Mr. Christophersen! And certainly not to do something because this neighbor - person of good standing, author of acknowledged judgement - is reputed to have done so. I may reject his example either as wrong in itself or as irrelevant to my situation. I could even say: I am challenged by the example of Mr. Christophersen, I wish I could do

1

SV2 VI, 463; KW XI, 440.

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like him, but I lack strength, courage, ability - I feel ashamed. »Lack of spirit« does not refer to any of these reactions. »Lack of spirit« means the unchallenged attitude of the pure observer, of the unpledged admirer, stuck with some fact as no more, no less than a piece of »factum.« Basically, this is also how the historian, the scientific explorer of facts relates to »neighbor Christophersens« in past and in present. His concern is to distinguish what the person under observation has done, said, written ... sheer uncommitting actuality - objective, alien factuality - which would need to be dissolved into possibility before, eventually being transformed into real actuality: me, here, now. Does this mean that Kierkegaard precludes scholarly interpretation of his own work? This is a question we may keep in mind during our excursion. Suffice it now to observe that he excludes scholarliness as the last word: »Kierkegaard said so - that's it! - what he said must be right, accepted as it is by tens of thousands in posterity. Echoing his words gives my words weight!« The question of possibility, of course, is not: Kierkegaard wrote a book that became reknowned - is it possible for me to write a better one? But Kierkegaard in his writing wrestles existentially with such and such question - dealing with that writing, am I wrestling with him? This is where the border runs between »spirit« and »lack of spirit« [.Aand/Aandl0shed]. Now we turn to our second quotation, a constellation of two entries in Kierkegaard's journal: »Back to the monastery from which Luther broke out!«2 »Luther's true follower will arrive at precisely the opposite result from Luther, because Luther followed after a phantastic exaggeration in the direction of asceticism, whereas he follows after that terrible treason which Lutheranism gave birth to.«3 Is it possible to translate the capital point here as follows: »Back to the ecclesiality from which Kierkegaard broke out!« - »Kierkegaard's true follower will arrive at precisely the opposite result from Kierkegaard, because Kierkegaard followed after a phantastic exaggeration in direction of sociality, whereas he follows after that terrible treason which Kierkegaardianism gave birth to«? I have chosen the word ecclesiality to match with monastery in indicating a social room officially designated in and by its church-relatedness, and at the same time wide enough to echo contemporary civil 2 3

Pap. XI 1 A 198; my translation. Pap. X 3 A 153; my translation.

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culture (Bürgerlichkeit) at large. Establishment [det Bestaaende] might be a Kierkegaardian expression that comes fairly close, but with a smell of officialdom which makes it a little narrow for our actual purpose. »The doctrine in establishment, the institutions are very good. Oh, but the existences, our existences - believe me - they are mediocre.«4 Neither institutionalized church community nor legal civil society is in itself the target of his attack, but - as principle unifying the two of them - Christendom, observed as an omnipresent social sphere. A »true follower« who »will arrive at precisely the opposite conclusion« - what does that mean? First: Does Kierkegaard's existential thought permit »followers«: followers of ... Luther, Kierkegaard, some Mr. Christophersen in the neighboring community? Definitely, not in an unreflected sense: follower to some person of status in order to secure oneself some moral or intellectual alibi. In the case before us, two different readings could both make sense. (1) Authenticity of existence: the Danish church professes to be a »follower« of Luther; consistency between profession and expression being pursued, the consequences would today turn around so and so ... (2) Authenticity of truth: the dealing with Luther confirms some important truth, which, in the contemporary world would have such and such consequences in diametrical opposition to those of old. Without wasting time on an argument, we may assume that Kirkegaard includes both the orientations. A »true follower« must envisage two confrontations: with his author about the challenging truth itself, with his environment about the same truth to be adopted in the situation here and now. Second: The »opposite result.« Doesn't this sound dialectical in a rather Hegelian way: Thesis turning into antithesis? The difference between Kierkegaardian and Hegelian dialectic is obviously that the Hegelian is one of reconciliation, with history itself as the acting dynamic; Kierkegaard's dialectic is one of unbridgeable confrontation, urging subjective response and responsibility. Our suggestion that »Kierkegaard's true follower must today arrive at the opposite result from him« should at this moment be confirmed as a possibility - no more, no less. An assertion or a denial will require a concrete test. In any case, the commonplace assumption: whosoever voices the same »result« as his master, is a true follower - must be definitely excluded.

4

Pap. X 4 A 33; my translation.

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2. Kierkegaardianism: Where Has It Brought Us? Reading Kierkegaard in the light (or in the shadow!) of 150 years of Kierkegaard comments - books and articles, scholarly and/or polemical - is like wandering in a wide wood full of crossing tracks, some more, some less trodden, everywhere and in all directions. You can look for consistence, insistence, resistance, subsistance, assistance, not to speak of alleged »existence.« Someone asked me a good forty years ago, knowing that I was preparing a thesis on Kierkegaard: »But is it possible to write anything new about him, considering the thousands and thousands of pages which are already in print?« In youthful presumption it was not difficult to find an answer: »Sure, the more the writing, the more the mistakes to be brought to jail.« That maxim granted, it follows that another 150 years from now, the need for fortified, accelerated, and expanded Kierkegaard research may be monstrous. Apart from details and single issues, when we look at the perplexing multitude of Kierkegaard portraits - most of them pretending to have drawn Le vrai visage de Kierkegaard [Kierkegaard's true face] (in the words of Pierre Mesnard5) - what can we conclude? Interpreters having to a large extent used their portraits of Kierkegaard as a pretext for drawing their own, is by no means peculiar to K. research. That is the general rule when some great thinker has been made into a hero. So, the greater the hero, the more multiplex the portraits! Those of Kierkegaard stretch - in the nineteenth century from pious devotion preacher (Waldemar Rudin) to precursor of secular humanism tragically unaware of his own identity (Georg Brandes), and in the twentieth, a liberal champion of subjective religiosity (of one brand or of 27 others) to solid supporter of Lutheran orthodoxy or - why not? - to semi-conscious promotor of Roman Catholic authoritarianism. The bulk of interpretations circulate, however, in all their variety, around some concept of »Kierkegaard - the father of existential(-ist) thinking« (be it in philosophy, be it in theology). This can be well understood, when one regards the importance of existentialism as the most spectacular breakthrough in 20th century thought and Kierkegaard's undisputable role as inventor of »existence language« in our time. But even this wide-spread consensus on Kierkegaard the »exis-

5

Le vrai visage de Kierkegaard, Paris 1948.

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tentialist« has tended to favor discrepancy at least as much as a unified profile of the academic Kierkegaard image. For, after all, existentialism - what is that? Now, of course, a variety of interpretations is not discrediting in itself, neither to the victim nor to the executioners. The error is rather the common assumption that an author should possess one - and only one - »true face,« and that portraying one you automatically do away with the others. Any author places his interpreters before the hermeneutical question: you pretend to understand me, but what in the world do you understand by »understanding«? In the case of an author so conscious of hermeneutics as Kierkegaard, this question even rises to the second power. Does understanding just amount to reproducing someone's self-understanding - provided that there is one and just one, uninterrupted, unrivaled self-understanding unambiguously voiced in his work? Or am I, as interpreter, free to ask Kierkegaard's answers to questions of my own choice? - and to synthesize the answers I find, as authentic »Kierkegaard interpretation«? Would I be justified to proclaim: Kierkegaard may have several faces, and they may all be »true,« provided that unmistakable account be kept: which of us - him and me - raises the questions and which gives the answers? Discrepancy can, however, also be discrediting. It may happen that interpreters answer the same question with mutually exclusive answers, or that opinions are ascribed to Kierkegaard which notoriously are not his. But, apart from this, is there any compelling reason why I should think of Kierkegaard precisely as he thinks, or - if living today - he might have thought, of himself? If demanding that kind of a priori congruence, am I not promoting an idea of non-existential communication which, according to Kierkegaard's own understanding of understanding, would be ultimate misunderstanding? In that case: would our disagreement matter? A misunderstanding matters - per definitionem. A disagreement may matter - but certainly not per definitionem. We have entered a dialectical spiral which is sure to keep us moving for awhile. But one confirmation is unshakeable: it is wrong to pretend that I think like Kierkegaard in case I do not - and that includes in case I am not prepared to be drawn by »existential communication« into a confrontation, which is ultimately not one with him, but with myself. »Kierkegaard has no ... doctrine ... only a dialectical method of Christian communication ... Whoever wants to present K's method, must already use it himself for the presentation.«

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This statement by the highly esteemed German Kierkegaardian Hermann Diem in 1929 - the hey-day of theological existentialization - upset me a good deal at the start of my own struggle with Kierkegaard some twenty years later.6 In my response I invoked Torsten Bohlin and other good interpreters in order to show that Kierkegaard really relates to doctrinal substance, and that one violates his existential approach just as much by objectifying method as by objectifying contents. I would, however, be a little more careful in making my point today, although I still believe Diem was logically confused when he spoke of describing (scholarly) an existential method by instrumental use of the same method. You cannot lift yourself by the hair! But in spite of that confusion, Diem has a point, and I should have been more careful at the time to distinguish between my questions to Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard's questions to me. The point is, that in conversation with Kierkegaard one can never finish a doctrinal issue without taking into account one's own treatment of that issue in one's situation here and now. Although that is not what Hermann Diem said, I earnestly hope this is what he actually meant. So I admit that my own first interview with Kierkegaard in that regard was a too dogmatical one. What have the Kierkegaardians in posterity made out of Kierkegaard? Evidently a multiplex, ever more diversified kind of thing, the majority of them more or less overtly making use of him for purposes notoriously their own. Or are we allowed to see it the other way around: his projects have impressed them so deeply that their minds do reflect his - in the way each one of them has earnestly understood him? Knowing human nature, we may probably stick with a compromise of our two opposite theories. Kierkegaard makes his readers think their own thoughts - but, certainly, in posterity they have made him think theirs too! In the midst of the multitude, there is, as we suspect, a fellowship of confusion in fancying what Kierkegaard himself demands of us in our dealing with him. So let me finish this part of our joint journey by stating: above all, he demands (1) that we don't take his words for truth without risking an existential leap of our own, (2) that we don't use his name to secure status, credibility, intellectual leisure to projects of our own, (3) that we don't take his historical situation for 6

For documentation of Diem's thesis and my critical treatment of it, see my: Samtidighedens Situation, Oslo 1954, pp. 13-15.

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ours, except as a reminder of the historical embededness of existence, i.e. as a challenge to face our own situation in genuine contemporaneity. - Which of us never commited the sin of unchastened kierkegaardophila?

3. Kierkegaard/Luther: A Paradigmatic Parallel The following will be a quick reflection on Kierkegaard's treatment of Luther, as a possible paradigm for the »true follower's« dealing with Kierkegaard. We recall once more the plea - in the name of Luther - for a return to the monastery from which the reformer once broke out. Let me additionally recall his numerous exchanges with Luther, particularly in the writings and diaries from the five last years of his life.7 In the foreground stands the dialectical exchange on Law and Gospel, grace and command. Luther is right in his revolutionary emphasis on justification by faith. Luther is wrong in that he has lent himself to interpretation by posterity and in that he is being sold out by his followers today. How much of the blame for this should be put on Luther himself seems a little differently judged from one text to another. By and large, Kierkegaard's emergent animosity against the Reformer grows as time goes, reflecting thus his account with the Danish Folks-Church. Like Kierkegaard, Luther has certainly been pictured differently by his analysts, among friends as among enemies. Hero of the human conscience, of religious liberty, political revolution, civil obedience, German nationalism, theological subjectivism, pietism, orthodoxy there is almost no end to it. Kierkegaard does not present himself as a Luther researcher and is not much interested in distinguishing Luther interpretations. He uses Luther as a typological figure; he deals with the Luther operative in the 19th century. Couldn't we say that dealing with Luther, Kierkegaard has given us a beautiful example of how heroes of the past should be dealt with, fathers and mothers of the Church as well as challengers of human existence in whatever historical context? In order to be critically as7

Kierkegaard's discussion with, and on, Luther: see particularly L0nning 1954, pp. 233-237, and idem »Kierkegaard's >corrective< - a corrective to Kierkegaardians?« in Liber Academice Kierkegaardiensis Annuarius, vol. II-IV, Copenhagen/ Rome 1982, pp. 105-119.

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sessed, their contribution in their own day must be seen in distinction from their general image in the actuality of today. This is obviously no more and no less than Kierkegaard's continuous demand for any existential challenge to be met in »the situation of contemporaneity.«8

4. A »Terrible Treason« of Kierkegaardianism? Reacting to »the terrible treason which Lutheranism gave rise to« that should, as we have seen, be the principal orientation of »Luther's true follower« today, arriving at »the opposite result from Luther.« It should be observed that »Lutheranism« is not a perfect translation of det Lutherske. Especially in the age of world ecumenism it sounds a little too »established.« But the strictly literal rendering »the Lutheran« sounds masculine in English, not neutral as it is in Danish. So I propose, »everyday Lutheranism.« It could be appropriate to propose »everyday Kierkegaardianism« as our corresponding term. That denies a blunt identification with scholarly Kierkegaard research or with declared Kierkegaard fan clubs, although it by no means excludes them from the more comprehensive observation under scrutiny (on the contrary). So far, we are holding the possibility of a treacherous Kierkegaardianism - a question indirectly suggested to us by Kierkegaard himself - open. Three questions must be posed before more precise conclusions can be drawn. 1. In his reflections on the dynamics of historical reversal - a topic particularly dear to him - is Kierkegaard speaking of a possibility, a probability or a necessity? The answer should be clear: the idea of historical necessities is in basic conflict with his vision of human existence. But his many descriptions of deceitful posterity depict an omnipresent law of gravitation which can be successfully resisted only by the utmost mobilization of reflection and resolve. Is there in his authorship one sole example of a challenger who in posterity is left uncorrupted by his heirs? 2. What kind of future is Kierkegaard foreseeing for his own legacy? The answer is well-known, and it is not too polite in the face of a reunion like ours:

8

L0nning 1954, particularly pp. 69-82, pp. 211-243.

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I know who will be my heir, the one so exceedingly disgusting to me, but who has, alas, up to this day inherited everything of worth: the associate professor, the professor. But even this is part of my suffering, to know this, but calmly to continue my endeavor [...] the profit of which the professor in a certain sense will inherit - in a certain sense; for in a different sense I'll take it along. 9

In fine consistency with Kierkegaard's own thinking, then, if his thought in the meantime has been unmistakably corrupted by posterity, with considerable assistance by the »experts«! 3. After all, the essential question will be a third one: we have to observe (precisely as Kierkegaard does it with Luther) to what extent Kierkegaard as a source of contemporary cultural formation, has exercised, and exercises, some clearly distinguishable influence on ruling patterns in church and society, and - eventually - which. This also presupposes awareness of indirect influence exercised by Kierkegaard through authors, many of them influential in themselves, who have been exposed to his charm. Two main waves of Kierkegaard emission are particularly observable: the first in the latter half of the 19th century, comprehending mainly the Scandinavian countries and (to some extent) Germany, the second starting in the years after the First World War and continuing for 3-4-5 decades (the era of existentialism) more or less world-wide. I come from a neighbouring country, where his influence in the period 1850-1900 was deafening - in theology (causing serious afflictions of conscience to young theologians preparing for the church ministry, providing at the same time apologetical material for a pietistic theology of personal faith), but no less in literature and cultural exchange in general, as a flow of uproar against anything smelling of conventionalism, prejudice, institutional allegiance. At least this was the most spectacular impulse to prepare the breakthrough of »modernity« in Norway.10 The same, I think, applies to the other Nordic countries. His most radical influence was channeled to Scandinavian authors by the powerful Danish writer and critic Georg Brandes and his strategically masterful brother Edvard Brandes. Henrik Ibsen in Norway, August Strindberg in Sweden, J.P. Jacobsen and Johannes V. Jensen in Denmark - what would their anti-establishment fanfares have been without that impulse? That impulse which, as an echo of their big slo-

9 10

Pap. X 4 A 628; my translation. See: Valborg Erichsen S0ren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk ändsliv, Oslo 1923; and Harald Beyer S0ren Kierkegaard og Norge, Oslo 1924.

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gan »Be in truth!« shaped the most untruthful pretence of all: namely, that whatever ideal is not practiced with 100 percent consistency, is a lie, and would be better 100 percent abandoned. Can it be denied that in some paradoxical way Kierkegaard's attack on the Folk's Church in the name of individual authenticity in the Nordic countries gave the most powerful support to that attack on folk's culture and folk's ethics which became the very soul of so-called »modernity«? And that the same, allegedly Kierkegaardian, influence gradually started to leak out to other countries? The question is: does this give us occasion to construct (or reconstruct) a confrontative typology similar to that of Kierkegaard's altercation with Luther? A typology which, in his own footpaths, makes it meaningful to conclude: back - back into the socio-cultural space from which Kierkegaard once tore and twisted us out! As a concept indicative of such a space, I have already suggested »ecclesiality,« a vocable intended to signify neither a concrete organised framework (ecclesia) nor an established system (ecclesiasticism) per se, but an attitude ready to define, and to receive, one's identity from authentic social belonging-together, be it in church, be it in structures of human co-existence at large! Or be it, as in the case of Kierkegaard's great contemporary Grundtvig, in a visionary synopsis of the two!11 As elaboration of this point, I might suggest a second term, corresponding with »ecclesiality« but extending the vision more explicitly also in a diachronical direction: conventionality. In a similar way, this word does not emphasize »convention« as some set of inherited agreements, nor does it yield to »conventionalism« (that is, a positivist idea of social convention fancied as ultimate source of normativity); it indicates grateful openness for human society in its concrete expressions, allowing realistic acceptance of human imperfection as the format of any social givenness. Some might call it »compromise.« As I see it, the dialectic of the approach should prohibit that. Existence does not allow a reductionist Either-Or: either absolutism or relativism! As little as it allows a dull, non-committed Both-And as sheer, unreflected coexistence. 11

The slogan from the last generation »Kierkegaard first - then Grundtvig next!« (cfr. H. Toftdahl Kierkegaard f0rst - og Grundtvig saa, Copenhagen 1969) may - as Götz Harbsmeier suggests - be rather misleading if taken as a recipe for an undialectical harmonisation of the two. (Harbsmeier Wer ist der Mensch? Grundtvigs Beitrag zur humanen Existenz - Alternativen zu Kierkegaard, Göttingen 1972, p. 245.) Seen in our (and Kierkegaard's own) dialectical perspective, however, it makes sense in a rather thought-provoking way.

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»The terrible treason which everyday Kierkegaardianism [det kierkegaardske] gave rise to,« could be identified as an unreflected benediction of modern religious and ideological egocentricity in the name of »New Testament Christianity.« I am not discussing now to which extent the historical person S0ren Aabye Kierkegaard - living from 1813 to 1855, and identified by posterity as inventor of beloved slogans like »the Individual« [hiin Enkelte], »Either-Or,« »Subjectivity« and »Existence« - could and should be made responsible for this »treason.« I limit myself to doing to him what he did to Luther: to reshaping the mythological Kierkegaard of the last 140 years and of our own day. This is the immediate challenge we have to meet, in the contemporaneity not of his age, but of ours. This Kierkegaard I blame for having breathed up the secularized radicalism which has tyrannized our culture for more than 100 years - branding, as it did and does, public religion as social hypocrisy. The treason of this radicalism is its refusal to observe honestly and to accept willingly the contradiction inherent in all human aspirations transcending everyday narrowness. So, it condemns to death all social appearance of religious ambition. True religon - to the extent that it exists - is banished to the sphere of sheer privacy. From there the pietist may take over and pull whatever remains into some pious ghetto of the prayer house. This Kierkegaard I even blame as grandfather of the idea so fabuously expressed in our Norwegian idiom »personal Christian,« i.e. one who - as the only thing unquestionable in this world - has a private relationship with God and is thereby authorized to relate to congregation and public worship as it may fit his feelings. This Kierkegaard I, consequently, blame for the entente cordiale which grew up between radicalism and pietism, which - even if for obviously opposite reasons - so wonderfully agreed to reserve religious practice for a tiny minority assuming the role as exemplary followers of Christ: Just look at me! It is time to detect that »terrible treason« to which everyday Kierkegaardianism gave rise! It is time to call not only individuals, but church and society back into that ecclesial conventionality and that conventional ecclesiality from which Kierkegaard once chased them out!

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5. Kierkegaard: The »Corrective« Lutheranism [det Lutherske] is a corrective - but a corrective transformed to normative, to totality, is eo ipso in the second generation (where the matter is lacking to which it was the corrective) confusing. And by each generation thus passing, it must get worse, until this corrective ... produces the very opposite of its original purpose.12 I have only ... presented what one might call an existential corrective in direction of internalisation in »the individual«.13 He who is to present the »corrective,« should study precisely and thoroughly the weak sides of establishment, and then one-sidedly set the opposite, extremely one-sidedly. Precisely here lies the corrective.14

As seen here, the idea of introducing Kierkegaard in the place designed for Luther as existential »corrective« under investigation is by no means an invention of mine. The category of the »corrective« is several times used by himself about himself. We find it in his response to Dr. Rudelbach (1851 - the second of the three quotations above) in A Following Sheet (1850), in his personal reflections about professor Rasmus Nielsen (Papers 1849-50), and in a number of diary entries from 1849 onward.15 How does his observation of himself as »corrective« relate to the formula in On My Activity as an Author, which seems to be his most thoroughly planned and most carefully thought-out definition of own identity: »>Without authority< to make aware of the religious, of the Christian, is the category of my entire writer's activity.«16 This »making aware of« confirms what we have already said about our role as Kierkegaard readers: we are not expected to take his admonitions seriously by virtue of his name and authority, but to face them squarely on our own responsibility. It also confirms that Kierkegaard is not looking for Kierkegaardians, be it intellectual students, be it enthusiast fans. He looks for readers searching matter for the sake of matter, i.e. of existential confrontation, of pledge. Kierkegaard research is, strictly speaking, only permissible when the researcher is clear - and makes his audience crystally clear - that such research is not the thing Kierkegaard himself asks for. The associate professor is not his legitimate heir. If utterly aware of this, maybe the same pro12 13 14 15 16

Pap. SV2 Pap. SV2 SV2

XI 1 A 28; my translation. XIII, 477; cf. Pap. X 3 A 527. X 1 A 640. XIII, 541; Pap. X 6 Β 121, pp. 159f. For further references Pap. XIV, pp. 260f. XIII, 535.

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fessor can - consciously cautious and cautiously conscious - provide insights into the true heirs, insights which might facilitate their own way to their own inheritance? I am not sure whether Kierkegaard would have allowed me this last point, however. But his objection would eventually be psychologically, not logically grounded. With precisely this distinction in mind, I would even suggest that Kierkegaard, as a human being, with all the contradictions inherent to that predicament, might have felt considerable pleasure in foreseeing a sesquicentennial (or more) of a professors' parade, and that, if he had had an opportunity to count his ten thousand supporters in ages to come, the same might have applied to them. What kind of a person would he have been if totally indifferent - or declinatory - to that remarkably unKierkegaardian success of his? In any case, the challenge of reversing the socio-cultural move which he came to cause in his day and which is still lingering on in ours, is one that he - and we - cannot decline to face, without undoing the very basics of his thinking, including his basic vision of Christianity as existential communication.

Kierkegaard in Russia The Ultimate Paradox: Existentialism at the Crossroads of Religious Philosophy and Bolshevism B y ANDRÄS

NAGY

Let me begin with three images. The first is a classroom in Berlin, more than one and half centuries ago. Two foreign students are sitting beside each other, a little apart from the Germans and as such at a significant distance from the lecturer, Prof. Schelling. They understand each other better than the rest, with good reason, they may think. One is a Russian. The other is a Dane. The second picture is from about eighty years later: an interrogation room at the Petersburg headquarters of the Ceka, the much feared secret police of the triumphant Bolsheviks. The interrogation however sounds much like a dialogue on religious philosophy, as the interrogator is an educated theologian, Dzerzinsky, head of the Ceka, of Polish origin. The questions are addressed to the ex-professor of Moscow University, an ex-Marxist, turned religious thinker: Nicolai Berdiaev, soon to be expelled from the country. The third picture is again at a University much later though, in the empire where the building of Communism is going on but where the name »Kierkegaard« still creates some interest and has influence on modern thinking. The student, posing questions about Kierkegaard to the Comrade Professor is referred to a study, published in Voprosi Filosofii - Questions of Philosophy - under the title: »Idiots and Idiocy in Contemporary Bourgeois Philosophy.«1 1

D.I Zaslavskij »Jurodstvo i jurodinje ν sovremenoj burznaznoj filosofi« in Voprosi Filosofii, Moscow, 1954, Oct. pp. 138-151.

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No apologies for the title or for the title of my talk, though excuses may be provided by history, as ideas, paradoxes, »questions of philosophy« on the Eastern side of Europe may easily enter into history nearly as easily as they enter into and influence literary texts. And this could be the only apology not just for the title I chose, but for the whole method I am going to follow. Literature is a writer, even if with a profound nostalgia for clear-cut academic disciples these, however do not really fit into the whole issue I am going to analyze. That seems to be much more a fascinating »amalgam« of history, religion, philosophy, psychology, politics and, even imagination when thinking about Kierkegaard in Russia. In other words, literature. Literature, which Kierkegaard was writing himself. Literature, that expressed the depth and complexity of Russian thinking in the last century, particularly in the works of Dostoevsky: summarizing the »burning issues« of 19th century's Russia, and establishing a whole tradition of religious thinking, that proved to be a major source of the later Russian philosophical renaissance, so influential also on the Western side of the continent, and suppressed at the Eastern side. Literature, that provided the frameworks for philosophers at the turn of the century, being also such excellent writers like Rozanov, Shestov, Solovyov, Ivanov, etc. And literature again: when it became the only, albeit limited territory for introducing ideas and experimenting with them, when »questions of philosophy« were answered either with the help of Marxism (or what Marxism was transformed into), or with the help of the Ceka (or what that was transformed into). The mixture of philosophy and literature, needless to say, can be dangerous for the mind and does not meet with conditions of professional thinkers who set the rules in prestigious academies. When I am ready to admit this, I have just arrived at the heart of the problem: Kierkegaard in Russia. The methodology required, to examine such a complex and defining problem, should include vast philological research, based on published and unpublished sources, together with mapping general trends of Russian theology, philosophy, with special focus on Eastern Orthodoxy, on traditions of Sectarianism and heretics; all these in the particular context of Russian culture, strongly and irregularly influenced by European trends of thinking and occasionally influential for Europe. My methodology however, will focus only on some pieces of the »puzzle.« Often I shall rely on secondary sources and on general trends, on deduction, even on some sort of theoretical imagination.

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Sources are as yet unpublished, fieldwork not totally carried out, general manuals are »recycled« from Communist times and my skepticism of »facts« and of »post-positivist« methods is increasing, particularly when Russia is concerned. Before entering however into the complex problem of the compatibility of Kierkegaard and the Slavic tradition, I want to emphasize my focus on the Eastern Slavs. The Western part of this linguistic and cultural »circle« has also a major importance, regarding the transmission of ideas (in Kierkegaard's case the Czech and Polish interpretation was determinant), but partly due to the Catholic traditions (as in Croatia and Slovakia) and to philosophical culture, also the Western model of interpretation was more influential, for that determined religious thinking. The Eastern Orthodoxy was more linked to the Eastern Slavs, however the historical meeting points of different cultures and religions (i.e. Belorussia, the Ukraine) contain explosive and fascinating contradictions, that are also present in more homogeneous, but less influential centers of religious thinking (i.e. in Bulgaria, Montenegro and Serbia). But even to mention the particularities of these nations would exceed the space and time provided for my study. The paradoxes I am going to construct my thoughts on, are the following: I shall begin with »the role of the unknown Kierkegaard in Russia,« to present the spiritual context so receptive for understanding the Danish thinker. »Kierkegaard's arrival in Russia« will focus on the meeting of two distant traditions, which however still seem to be »shaped« by each other. The next segment will examine »Kierkegaard's role in the 1917 revolution«: how secularized religious thinking, with strong emphasis on existentialism may influence the course of history. The next part will, conclusively, examine the trip of the train upon which Lenin expelled dozens of representatives of Russian religious philosophy, in 1922, dividing the tradition into »Kierkegaard in exile,« separating it from »Kierkegaard and the building of Communism.« I shall conclude my essay with further paradoxes, so as to illustrate present Russian contradictions in this field, contradictions not smaller than before and still »at work.«

1. The Role of the Unknown Kierkegaard in Russia

The conditions for receiving Kierkegaard in Russia, for several and often contradictory reasons, were shaped by a long and not only theoretical process. »Philosophizing« in Russia could never mean the

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tradition of pure, academic speculation, so alien also for Kierkegaard. Even the most abstract philosophical problems became for the »intelligentsia« so-called »accursed questions,«2 a cliche for 19th century Russia, relating to basic and unsolvable dilemmas of life, death, God, reason, etc. - so familiar from the works of Dostoevsky. The personal emphasis on theoretical thinking, the strong passion involved, often concluded in the most surprising way. Heated discussion altered the coldest metaphysical discourses, friendships and family relations were destroyed because of different understanding of Kant, duels were fought over different interpretations of »Transcendental Spirit.«3 Neither professional speculation nor the secularization of philosophy had any roots in Russia. Metaphysical questions easily referred directly to religion and to God himself, and even when an exclusively secular topic was involved, like society, the way of thinking soon turned it into »the sacred cause of the people.«4 This is indicative of the enormous contradictions the Tzarist state contained. However, this question was not possible to answer: an unsuccessful attempt to raise political issues, the failure of the 1825 Decembrist revolt deeply alienated Russian intellectuals from their backward society, and also led to the Tzarist ban of the teaching of philosophy in Russian universities, which lasted until 1863. (From then until 1889 only the lecture-commentaries on selected Platonic and Aristotelian texts were officially permitted.) Though small intellectual circles (»kruzhki«) were established from 1830 to discuss not only »accursed« but from now on also illegal questions, the tradition of systematic theoretical thinking was broken. Influences from Western centers of philosophy became random and largely arbitrary, depending on who visited whom in German universities, what books were smuggled into the country recently (and soon read to shreds), which ideas were interpreted by whom, etc. The most striking characteristic of Russian thinkers, according to Isaiah Berlin was their habit of taking ideas and concepts to their most extreme, even absurd conclusions. As Berlin described: a hypothesis in the West became a dogma in Russia. From that time on, there was a »totalitarian understanding«5 of philosophical problems,

2 3 4 5

See Isaiah Berlin Russian Thinkers, Penguin Books, London, 1994. See Berlin op. cit. and the introduction of Aileen Kelly in the same volume. See Andrej Walicki A History of Russian Thought, Stanford University Press, 1979. See Berdiav Istoki smise russkovo kommunizma, Paris-YMCA Press, 1955. (Aζ orosz kommunizmus ertelme es eredete, Szäzadvdg Kiad6, Budapest, 1989.)

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many of them half-absorbed and as such containing explosive contradictions, which exceeded the capacity of intellect. Something that also laid the path for Kierkegaard. Due to the irregular influence from the West, a strange simultaneity characterized the reception of 19th century European philosophy in Russia: sometimes opposite trends arrived at the same time, like French rationalism and utopism, Hegelianism and the dissolution of Hegel's philosophy, Feuerbach »hand in hand« with Fichte, etc. After the failure of European revolutions in 1848, the French tradition of social thinking was defeated also in Russian minds, and the focus was more and more on German metaphysics, or what it meant for Russian intellectuals, together with a particular sort of Romanticism. However, as in the case of Herzen, the fate of the 1848 revolts »discredited the revolutionary intelligentsia of Europe which had been put down so easily by the forces of law and order, and was followed by a distrust of the very idea of progress,«6 including a distrust of Western liberal and radical ideologies in general. From then on Russia, which had earlier been in danger of becoming an intellectual province of France or of Germany was forced to find her own intellectual identity also (a similar effort as in Scandinavia), to develop a »Weltanschauung« fit to compete with that of Western Europe. There was an increasingly popular idea that the Western world was »rotting.« (This was partly, perhaps the unconscious acceptance of the argumentation of the Roman Catholic counter-revolutionary view that the French revolution was a divine punishment of those, who had strayed from Christian faith7 - according to Berlin.) On the other hand, this idea emphasized the importance of spiritual or, »inner events,« the role of personality opposed to society or history, that are largely neglected, though »that are the most real, the most immediate experience of human beings.«8 Philosophy was strongly connected to religious conviction in Russia. Eastern Orthodoxy, as the foundation of religious experience of Russian thinkers - may sound more than paradoxical, but - expressed something non-alienated, not mediated, direct and powerful about faith that was in its way vital for Kierkegaard. The »inwardness« and the authentically archaic character of Orthodoxy included the idea of immediate redemption, with an eschatological longing, 6 7 8

Berlin op. cit., pp. 18-19. Berlin op. cit., p. 64. Berlin op. cit., p. 33.

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preserving the Church's messianic character. The institutions of »alienated« Catholicism did not exist in Russia, and from their point of view Western Christianity was therefore »deviant« and has been since the 15th century, following Philotheus' judgement that, after the fall of Byzantium (the second Rome), Russia was chosen by God to be the third and last Rome.9 The living tradition of »The Fathers of the Church« was also basic for Russian religious experience. »The main distinctive mark of Patristic theology was its >existential< character. The Fathers theologized, as St. Gregory of Nazianzus put it, >in the manner of the Apostles, and not in the manner of Aristotle< ... The ultimate reference was still to faith, to spiritual comprehension.«10 A familiar claim, from 19th century Copenhagen. In spite of all the severity and often cruelty of the virtually »theocratic« Russian state (even in the 19th century the Holy Synod excommunicated Tolstoy, forbade Solovyov to teach, etc.) from its very beginning Orthodoxy was involved in an ongoing dialogue with »alternative« religious thinking and experience. Patristic theology kept alive many of the features of non-canonized, archaic religious experience, as well as apocryphal texts, etc. and established a critical philosophical dialogue through the ages, often in heated discussions with heresy. Arianism, Gnosticism, Manicheism raised many central questions of religion.11 Problems like the nature of Christ and Trinity were also at the center of the thinking of the Socinians, Nestorians, Arians, Monophysites, etc.12 Many of these reflections seem to be present in Kierkegaard's thinking, in his doubts and reflections.13 These are much more than just questions of philology and Church history (or history in general, as Russian schismatics, »Raskols,« Old Believers, etc. played an eminent historic role also). The heretic tradition was present not only in 19th century Russian thinking about basic topics, like the origination and role of evil in the world, the contradictions of original sin, the nature of creation and redemption, the legacy of the Tree of Knowledge, etc. - but also suggested a new way 9 10

11

12 13

Walicki op. cit., p. 383. Georges Floorovsky Aspects of Church History, vol. 4, Nordland Publishing Co. Belmont, Massachusetts, 1975, p. 17. Czeslav Milosz »Dostoevsky and Swedenborg« in Emperor of the Earth, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1981, pp. 137-138. Walicki op. cit., p. 336. A possible field to study, or an interesting angle to take, regarding the Papers and Journals of Kierkegaard.

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of approaching and interpreting the texts from the Bible, such as the Book of Job, the Books of Genesis, the story of Abraham, or Christ's sufferings. These contain important aspects of archaic theology which were fundamental also for Kierkegaard. Even if there may be some affinity between Kierkegaard's thinking and that of the Byzantine Eastern Orthodoxy - is it possible to find any kind of »reverse« affinity between Russian religious thinking and the Protestant Danish philosopher? »Protestant« was a derogatory term in Russia;14 the Lutheran type of freedom and individuality became a symbol of the extreme of European thinking, religious cul-desacs, so frightening for Slavic believers. But, as is usual in psychology, there is an unwanted influence and »shameful« closeness at the bottom of such hatred. Once the Reformation began infiltrating Russian religious sensitivity through Lithuania and Poland, it could enter into the frames of Orthodoxy.15 But the centralized religious reforms, either from the Tzar Alexander I. or paradigmatically and more cruelly by Peter the Great, and the »theological westernization« of the 18th century meant that the earlier »Romish« orientation was replaced by »Reformation or, more correctly, by the influence of early Protestant scholasticism.«16 All these happened in the »usual Russian way,« involving extremes. Hypatius Pociei, the Uniate Metropolitan wrote to Patriarch Meletius Pigas at the time, that Calvin has replaced Athanasius in Alexandria, Luther rules in Constantinople, and Zwingli in Jerusalem.17 Influential patriarches from the 16th century studied in Switzerland and later, in the second half of the 18th century, in most of the theological seminaries and academies the instruction was based on Western Protestant manuals; meanwhile German was taught as the basic language of theology.18 Even the Greek language teachers were invited from Geneva and Wittenberg, the very essence of the Patristic legacy was not only »westernized« but nearly »lutherized.« The influential figures, such as Theophan Prokopovich, collaborator of Peter the Great, »was simply a Protestant himself« as Florovski wrote.19 And the most significant Russian theologian: Philaret, the

14 15 16 17 18 19

Berlin op. Florovsky Florovsky Florovsky Florovsky Florovsky

dr., p. 3. op. cit., p. 163. op. cit., p. 168. op. cit., p. 163. op. cit., p. 170. op. cit., p. 169.

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Metropolitan of Moscow expresses by his activity »the influence of Protestant doctrines.«20 This way the Kierkegaardian impact could easily find an ongoing tradition in Russian religious thinking. Simultaneously, the role of Pietism was fundamental, particularly in the reform of Russian theological schools by Alexander I., with the most important representative being Simeon Todorovski, who was, in the first half of the 18th century closely connected with Platon Levishon, Metropolitan of Moscow. Mysticism always played an eminent role in Russia (often mixed with the Asian, Buddhist or Hindu inspiration, for example in the case of Tolstoy). Meanwhile the »modern, westernized« mysticism was, most sincerely welcomed. Swedenborg's influence was very significant in Russia, through his own works and through his interpreters. Even Dostoevsky owned three books of his, and the symbolic hero, Father Zosima, the starets in the Karatnazov Brothers, bases his discourses on Swedenborg's ideas.21 It is important to note that Kierkegaard also owned works of Swedenborg, and his influence is significant, albeit indirect. The most important philosopher was Hegel - whose Russian reception was in many ways »overwhelmingly powerful.«22 As Herzen testified: »There is no paragraph in all three parts of the Logic, two parts of the Aesthetics, of the Encyclopaedia ... which was not captured after the most desperate debates, lasting several nights. People who adored each other became estranged for entire weeks because they could not agree on a definition of transcendental spiritabsolute personalitybeing in itselfmechanical